René Girard - Violence and the Sacred

Interesting fragments  about circles of violence, from René Girards influential book Violence and the Sacred (1972).

“The fear generated by the kill-or-be-killed syndrome, the tendency to “anticipate” violence by lashing the first (akin to our contemporary concept of “preventative war”) cannot be explained in purely psychological terms. The notion of a sacrificial crisis is designed to dissipate the psychological illusion; even in those instances when Henry borrows the language of psychology, it is clear that he does not share the illusion. In a universe both deprived of any transcendental code of justice and exposed to violence, everybody has reason to fear the worst. The difference between a projection of one’s own paranoia and an objective evaluation of circumstances has been worn away.” (p. 54.)

“The mechanism of reciprocal violence can be described as a vicious circle. Once a community enters the circle, it is unable to extricate itself. We can define this circle in terms of vengeance and reprisals, and we can offer diverse psychological descriptions of the reactions. As long as a working capital of accumulated hatred and suspicion exists at the center of the community, it will continue to increase no matter what men do. Each person prepares himself for the probable aggression of his neighbors and interprets his neighbor’s preparations as confirmations of the latter’s aggressiveness. In more general terms, the mimetic character of violence is so intense that once violence is installed in a community, it cannot burn itself out.

To escape from the circle it is first necessary to remove from the scene all those forms of violence that tend to become self-propagating and to spawn new, imitative forms.

When a community succeeds in convincing itself that one alone of its numbers is responsible for the violent mimesis besetting it; when it is able to view this member as the single “polluted” enemy who is contaminating the rest; and when the citizens are truly unanimous in this conviction – then the belief becomes reality, for there will no longer exist elsewhere in the community a form of violence to be followed or opposed, which is to say, imitated and propagated. In destroying the surrogate victim, men believe that they are ridding themselves of some present ill. And indeed they are, for they are effectively doing away with those forms of violence that beguile the imagination and provoke emulation.” (p. 81, 82)

Girard, R. (1977) Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Oscar Niemeyer

Uit: Close up: Oscar Niemeyer – het leven is een ademtocht

"Zo besloten we in Brasilia eens ’s avonds laat naar ’t Alvorada te gaan kijken, toen dat net klaar was. We kwamen aan en waren verrast hoe mooi het was. Het leek net een beeld, zonder enig doel, behalve z’n eigen pracht. Ik zei: ‘Dit is zo’n moment dat architectuur wordt geboren.’ Architectuur is een nieuwe, andere vorm, die dient te verrassen.

Het gaat om vrijheid in de breedste zin van het woord. Er moet sprake zijn van verbeelding, andere oplossingen. Dat is wat belangrijk is in architectuur. Wat er overblijft zijn niet de keurig onderhouden huisjes. Dat zijn de kathedralen, de koepels, het grote evenwicht. Schoonheid is belangrijk, neem de piramides. Die zijn zo mooi en monumentaal dat je de eigenlijke functie vergeet. Je bewonderd ze alleen maar. Als je alleen maar aan de functie van iets denkt, wordt het niets. (…) Als ik openbare gebouwen ontwerp, zoals die drie in Brasilia probeer ik iets moois, anders en verrassends te maken. Ik weet dat arme mensen er niets aan zullen hebben. Maar ze kunnen wel kijken en ervan  genieten, verrast zijn door het nieuwe. Op die manier kan architectuur zin hebben. Ze kan haar doel alleen bereiken via een humaan, sociaal beleid. Architectuur is voor lui met geld. In de favela’s blijven ze de pineut. Hier staat mijn motto. [Wijst naar een sculptuur op zijn bureau. JvB] Zie je dat figuurtje daar bovenin? Dat rode ding? Daar staat: Als je de klos bent kun je het wel vergeten."

"Voor mij was de belangrijkste uitspraak van Le Corbusier: ‘Architectuur is uitvinden’. Dat begreep ik pas later, na een aantal boeken. Zoals die Franse dichter, ik weet zijn naam even niet meer. Die zij dat uitvinden, je verbazen het voornaamste kenmerk van de kunst is. Bij wat ik doe gaat het me bovenal om oorspronkelijkheid. Dat mensen stilstaan en verrast worden door iets nieuws. Baudelaire."

http://cultuurgids.avro.nl/front/detailkunst.html?item=f0e29a80377d1bbd2b809e6a278767e3

Hannah Arendt about the Polis

Hannah Arendt explains her concept of the polis departing from an ancient Greek (Heraclitus, Aristotle) understanding of this term. In The Human Condition (1958) she argues:

"The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.

This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world—do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being," and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality." [1]

And about the public realm and the space of appearance:

"Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance,and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d'etre. Without being talked about by men andwithout housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object; without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be as floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes." [2]

[1 ]Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, (1958) 1998, p. 198, 199.

[2] Ibid, p. 204.

Definition of Architecture

Today I found a very nice definition of architecture by David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000):

"The architect has been most deeply enmeshed throughout history in the production and pursuit of utopian ideals (particularly through not solely those spatial form). The architect shapes spaces so as to give them social utility as well as human and aesthetic/symbolic meanings. The architect shapes and preserves long-term social memories and strives to give material form to the longings and desires of individuals and collectivities. The architect struggles to open spaces for new possibilities, for future forms of social lives."

Harvey, David, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 200.

The favela as a image of counter-modernity?

Daniela Fabricius in: Resisting Representation - The informal Geographies of Rio de Janeiro.

"Even though they are very much a product of modern economies and social transformations, favelas are still associated with an abject, primitive. or regressive form of urban life. Even if Rio's favelas were once visited and celebrated by figures like Le Corbusier and Marintetti, they remained an image of counter-modernity, particular in a country like Brazil, which developed a strong Modernist ethos. Favelas are frequently misunderstood as a transitional urbanism, a phase of urban form as it evolves from a premodern to a modern civilization. The slums that appeared in European cities in the 19th century and gave way to today's modern metropolises are often used as examples to argue this point. But there is no evidence or reason to believe that the informal settlements in the Third World will or should develop as European cities do. Brazilian favelas are over 100 years old and don't necessary become more urbanized with time; sometimes, in fact, "favelization," a planned and newly constructed portion of the city eventually (sometimes in just a few years) becomes a favela."

Slavoj Žižek - Violence

“Violence is usually the arm of the impotent.”

For Slavoj Žižek we have to make a distinction between subjected violence and objected violence.
Objective violence is violence where there is a clear agent – a mobster, a criminal, a terrorizing parent – who did the act of violence. You know the agent of violence. This kind of violence is in the media all the time.
Subjective violence is more invisible and systemic and we do not notice it as violence. This subjected violence is present in the capitalist system, and it is a ‘anonymous violence,’ where there is no clear agent to blame. For example during a economic crisis; it just happens and nobody is responsible.

“I think – that’s the underlying thesis of the book – that, too put it in somewhat bombastic terms, if humanity is to survive, confronting all the crisis we have today, the threat of ecological crisis, the threat of social violence, provoked by new forms of apartheid. One the one hand gated communities, on the other hand people living in excluded areas; slums, favelas and so on. Our next ethical step is to learn, to except to be responsible, even for this objective violence. We say: ‘Sorry, it is objective what can I do [about it]. We are responsible for it.”

Žižek argues that we ‘live in a era where violence is the big taboo.’ Thinks that were seen as tasteless fifteen years ago are now seen as a form of violence. The last decades there has grown a higher sensitivity towards subjected violence. The interesting point is that this sentivity goes hand in hand with  a increase of objected violence and social violence. Žižek states: ‘The paradox for me is that this extreme sensitivity to subjected violence is a very dangerous ideological phenomenon, something which goes hand in hand with social violence.’

Proposal Graduation Project

Sao Paulo grow during the twentieth century into one of the larges metropolises of the world. High-rise buildings shoot up like mushrooms, Sao Paulo became an ‘urban jungle’. However, beside this intensive urban city emerged also an expansive periphery more poorly developed. This periphery mainly came into being through a process of autoconstruction (autoconstrução), the working classes build their own houses because they were not able to participate the formal market. Nowadays almost all the house have sewage system, electricity and water, a significant part of the roads are asphalted. Interesting is that the architect in this process only operates somewhere in the margins.

Exceptional is the building system CEU (Centros Educacionais Unificados), in this project design is deployed in a very strategic and pragmatic way in order to add public services to the periphery. More than forty of these centre’s have been build, all with the same repeating building objects. The centre’s contain among other things: different schools, a cultural centre, a theater, sporting facilities and swimming pools municipal services. The strength of this project is that it within a short period of time, and for a large amount of people, offered access to services that where lacking before. What interests me professionally is that fact that architecture can play a role on the metropolitan scale. An elementary architectonic intervention – sometimes called ‘urban acupuncture’ – can till a certain extent improve the daily life of many people. Standardization makes it possible to create a generic type of architecture; quick to build, cheap and accessible for many. In my graduation project I want to investigate this topic further. So my research questions is as follows:

                Is it possible to develop a typological public space, that is less uniform as the CEU’s and more                 is integrated in the context, without giving up its repetitive and adaptable characteristics.

In relation to this research question I want to examine the following topics:

1. Theoretical Framework: Public space in a city characterized by segregation and fear.
The Brazilian anthropologist Teresa Caldeira writes about Sao Paulo as a ‘City of Walls’; a city where the public space is ‘imploded’. Many inhabitants of Sao Paulo feel imprisoned because of strong fear for violent crime, resulting in an increasing ‘fortification’ of the public space. This causes on the one side of the spectrum the rise of the so called ‘gated community’ or ‘fortified enclave’, while the poor live in favela’s, a contemporary version of the ghetto. However, we have to realize that these two are the extremes, the majority of the people live in between these conditions. I want to examine want the possiblities of public space are in these urban conditions. Is public space – by Hannah Arendt defined as ‘a space of appearance’ – still a realistic in a segregated society? Or do we need to change our strategies as designers?

2. Historical Inspiration: The potentials of the Roman system for the contemporary informal city.
The architecture of the Roman city had a strong typological character. In every city there were comparable public buildings, build with an ‘urban toolbox’. Roman architecture balanced between specific and generic. The different urban components repeated themselves in various places: the enclosed square, the theater, (public space), triumphal arc (monumentality), the arcade (binding element), the basilica (commercial space), the temple (religious space), bathhouses (hygiene and leisure). In many cases these different – more or less standardized - functions where brought together around the forum and resulted in a multifunctional public space. I want if it is possible to design a contemporary toolbox; one that is adaptable to the specific context, but remains generic.