“You work in banking?”, asks the manager when I turn up there with six kilos of dirty clothes compressed into a bag advertising the country’s main financial institutions. “I don’t recognise your accent, where are you from?” With every transaction, he subjects me to a short interrogation. A year later he knows my address, telephone number and credit card number; my working times, my profession, the company I work for; my underwear, nationality, type of visa and my love life. Sometimes I discover myself dreaming about having my own washing machine. The other day, as I waited for him to return a couple of shirts to me, I looked at the framed certificates hung up behind the counter. “NYPD Operation Nexus” I read, “This business is a recognized participant in the counterterrorism program named Operation Nexus.” The manager, now back with the hangers, discovers me as I try to note it down. “So, you said you were an architect, didn’t you?”.

In 2012, as a consequence of 09/11, the New York Police Department established Operation Nexus, a nationwide network of businesses and enterprises, including everyday local businesses such as car parks, laundromats and stores, joining together with a common aim: the prevention of a new terrorist attack in the country. Since the launch of Operation Nexus, the police have visited over 30,000 establishments to encourage their owners and employees to use their professional experience to contribute to counterterrorism. For this, they are provided with a list of personalised protocols with which to identify “purchases, meetings or activities that may have connections with terrorism and to inform the authorities of them.[1] In exchange, they receive a framed certificate (like the one in my neighbourhood laundromat) and they become the first alert mechanism to protect the city of New York against another terrorist attack.

Back at home, while I do a quick search online for Operation Nexus, I think that perhaps, I ought to take my dirty washing elsewhere; I also think about how “security architecture” affects our relationship with the public space. In the last century, and especially in the present one, we have been witnesses to what Giorgio Agamben mentions in his book State of Exception as the “unprecedented generalisation of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government”.[2] For the authorities, and equally for the manager at Bubbleworks, we are all a threat to the country, until proven otherwise. Observed online, at airports and also at laundromats, the security measures established to prevent terrorist attacks have converted the presumption of innocence into the presumption of guilt. Like many of the counterterrorism initiatives established since the start of the so-called War on Terror, Operation Nexus and its general framework known as Urban Shield make us all (and especially immigrants) suspects and, also, vigilantes –“Stay alert, and have a safe day”, reminds the voice on the New York subway in every journey.

The terrorist, according to the police, may be anyone who portrays themselves as “legitimate customers in order to buy or lease certain materials or equipment, or to undergo certain formalized training to acquire important skills or licences” which subsequently could be used to facilitate an attack.[3] In this process, as we are reminded by philosopher Étienne Balibar, the stranger is transformed into an enemy and is, all too often, subject to violent repression and institutional discrimination or, simply. to continued surveillance that is a threat to privacy and freedom of expression.[4] No, I don’t have anything to hide, but for months now I have been taking to Bubbleworks only what I cannot diligently wash by hand at the weekends. I understand the importance of protecting national security, but I prefer to feel like I’m under suspicion when collecting my underwear or when seeing what could be a friendly neighbourhood chat becomes a police mechanism for the extraction of information about citizens.

The laundromat example is, probably, the most banal example of how current unrestricted surveillance practices, the result of alliances between the public and private sectors and the economic and political goals that they serve, violate fundamental rights and undermine democracy. Compiling data does not necessarily have to be harmful, but we must pay attention to the power techniques at play, something that reminds us of the declaration signed by academics from all over the world against mass surveillance. spying. Through this letter they request that states effectively protect fundamental rights and freedoms and, in particular, our privacy. “It is protected by international treaties, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights”, they remind us, “without privacy, people cannot freely express their opinions or seek and receive information”.[5] And the fact is that counterterrorism tactics adopted by governments and the military place in evidence the violence inherent to the exercising of power and its capacity to undertake actions designed as much for our protection as the destruction of what makes possible our life in common, including our freedom and our political capacity.

Architecture participates in these processes. One could argue that the situation with respect to Bubbleworks would be resolved by having a washing machine at home. But in New York, their installation is often prohibited by contract and there are people who end up installing one illegally and emptying it via the bathtub. The question goes much deeper and the solution is not to change laundromat, but political action capable of articulating from legislation that regulates domestic architecture to technologies and “security architectures” that built the global “smart” city. The territory drawn up by the War on Terror is located at the intersection between physical and legal spaces, and it is characterised by the growing use of war technology and protocols in the civic space. Its “public security” apparatus tends to be managed by private interests.6 Within this context, sometimes I might forget that everyday I walk under the watchful eye of security cameras and urban surveillance systems, even interiorize the choreography drawn by my body – jacket and shoes off, hands behind my head – like the security checkpoints at airports. When talking on the phone, sending messages and using the social networks, my preferences and movements are stored in the cloud, where I share them with family and friends, and, i passing, with espionage programmes and data compilation companies. My habits are analysed by algorithms that classify me and by laundromat managers converted into police informers. Through a discursive operation, the institutions of power normalise this space of limbo between legality and illegality, law and violence, presenting it as an effective instrument in the fight against terrorism. Emergency becomes the rule and the city, a battlefield.

But if from the institutions of power legal and social hierarchies are being suspended to guarantee security, these measures are contested by opposing civic movements that employ technological innovations to construct spaces of freedom and political action: international networks of anonymous sources for the filtration of classified information; home-made drones that scrutinize the actions of the police; encryption systems for activists, journalists and humanitarian organizations; architectural designs with Faraday-type shields, or simply actions that range from covering the computer camera with a post-it, to refusing to pass through body scanners. This is the space in which our collective coexistence develops, the city as a great celebration of anomie.

In fact, as Agamben reminds us, the term iustitium – the technical designation of the state of exception – constructed like solstitium, means literally suspending the ius, the legal order, which connects the state of emergency with festival practices such as Carnival and other charivaric traditions.[7] “Anomic feasts dramatize this irreducible ambiguity of juridical systems and, at the same time, show that what is at stake in the dialectic between these two forces is the very relation between law and life.”[8] The anomic festival is, following this argument, the space in which we have a licence to suspend legal and social hierarchies and establish new orders, and in which it is possible to undertake “truly political” action, that which, as Agamben proposes, are capable of severing “the nexus between violence and law”.

I didn’t change laundromats. In a city like New York, you are grateful when people take an interest in you, call you by your name, ask you about your friends and family. When they miss you because you are on holiday. With every question, the Bubbleworks manager, in representation of the Administration, was protecting me against the dangers of terrorism while subjecting me to a legalised and standardised violence, structured by the logic of economic neoliberalism and masked behind an informal chat. Hours before leaving the city – and the country – I decided to make my last visit to the laundromat, this time to declare my right to privacy and the danger of surveillance programmes. And, deep down, to prove myself not guilty. When I entered I found my neighbour talking about how he had spent the weekend. I paid for the washing of the dirty laundry, took a photograph of the diploma, and said goodbye with a “see you soon”.

My next house will have a washing machine. Even if it has to be installed illegally.

—Marina Otero Verzier. Head of Research and Development, HNI. Chief Curator with the After Belonging Agency, OAT’16

—–
[1] Operation Nexus, Police Department City Of New York (NYPD), official website of the City of New York, [Consulted: 12-11-2014]. Available at: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/crime_prevention/counterterrorism.shtml
[2] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trad. Kevin Attell (Chicago y Londres: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 12.
[3] Operation Nexus, Police Department City Of New York (NYPD), official website of the City of New York.
[4] See Étienne Balibar, “Strangers as Enemies, Walls All over the World, and How to Tear them Down”, lecture at Columbia University, 3 November 2011. Available at: https://www.francoangeli.it/Riviste/Scheda_Rivista.aspx?idArticolo=45634
[5] “Academics Against Mass Surveillance” [consultation: 4-1-2014]. Available at: http://www.academicsagainstsurveillance.net
[6] Judith Butler offers a reflection on the consequences of the militarization of the police force in the United States and the Urban Shield counterterrorism programme in her lecture “Human Shield”, given at the London School of Economics on 4 February 2015. Available at:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2859
[7] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 41, 71.
[8] Ibid., 73.

Greek architect Aristide Antonas has contributed to our last issue [Quaderns #265 'House and Contradiction'] with a visual of his project Population of Fragments or the Warehouse Man. This project and its accompanying series of images are a representation of a system of independent users that substitute a community, inspired somehow by Tyqqun’s Bloom Theory. While developing this project, some of the questions that emerged are: How can we transform this reality to a political condition? How can we think about the Internet as a conscious space for another type of legislations now that both the state and the market withdraw?

What follows are some fragments and thoughts by Aristide Antonas about this project:

Magic exotic island. Interface version. Antonas Office

“I will be making a contrived description concerning the contemporary Internet Man. In this description of him, the Internet Man is organized as the hero of withdrawal. His place of reference is a warehouse. It is through here that my hero strolls, in his own special way. The description of the hero and the situation is not without a certain manufacturing practice of my own: I therefore name the character of the short narrative that follows: the Warehouse Man. The hero of the warehouse is interesting in that he is unable to structure himself. And yet this inability already characterizes him. He is conceived as a character precisely because of this inability; this inability is realized thanks to an organized system of shared, specific characteristics that are adopted by the Warehouse Man and which, at the same time, structure him as a character.

In terms of the Warehouse Man, there are three pairs of concepts that concern me. Through them I will describe the man and the situation: the hero lives in the peculiar, contemporary city. The first pair of concepts that concerns him is Material and Immaterial Homelessness. The second: Somnambulism and Insomnia. And, finally: Control panel and Warehouse [...] Even more so, as will become evident, the Warehouse Hero interprets the contemporary inhabitant of the Internet. The three pairs I introduced are intertwined. At the same moment the concepts are described (as if they make up a glossary or a small dictionary), I attempt to demonstrate their relationships. Material – Immaterial Homelessness, Somnambulism – Insomnia, Control Panel – Warehouse.”

“Before anything else” the Warehouse Man is manufactured by a disturbance of the condition of time and space. At once I ask myself: Can we imagine or can we already see the distortions of time and space which occur from contemporary man residing in the Internet? Does the technically described continuous on-line life have noteworthy consequences on the ethical aspect or the political experience of the society which will ensue? Or is the Warehouse Man nothing new but a mere transformation of an older character?

Nodes techniques. Antonas Office

Regarding the pair of concepts mentioned above, Antonas started with Homelessness, that has taken on a transcendental power in contemporary thought. Focusing on this concept, he pointed that since 1920, in his Theory of the Novel, György Lukács uses the term “transcendental homelessness” to describe man’s urgent, impatient expectation to be “at home” wherever he may find himself. He adds:

“Homelessness was linked to a certain modern concept of “the power to reside anywhere”. Thus, contemporary homelessness is related to the detachment from specific familiar places, as well as to a certain abstract familiarity that is uninterested in the peculiarity of any place. Therefore, the Material – Immaterial Homelessness points to the specific chasm between the literalness and metaphor of homeless residency: between literalness and metaphor, we are asked to talk about homelessness in the modern-day city [...] Buildings, streets, sidewalks, plants, parks and lights were all systematically organized as the material equipment of cities. They were also organized – primarily – as abstract representations. The distribution of space is always at work in modern cities. The apartment actualizes the concept of the urban allotment. Even though it usually remains uninstituted, it describes the law of the urban cell: the right to housing may or may not be constitutionally guaranteed but, in any case, the cell of the apartment embodies the abstract right of participating in a certain apportionment. The inhabitant of the city resides in the apartment. The apartment, as an urban cell which proceeds to multiply (as it finds its place in the urban fabric), builds the city: the city thus emerges as a system for the distribution of housing or as a peculiar archival machine.”

The Warehouse Man. Prison version. Antonas Office.

“Two human characters of the city abstain today from possessing an apartment. For different reasons and in radically different ways, two heroes in the contemporary metropolis make us wonder, immediately after we announce them, whether they belong to what we have, hitherto, termed the “city” [...] Their profile is defined by global characteristics: they are not the protagonists of a local play. The inhabitant of the Internet and the city’s Homeless Person are certainly both homeless. The former is living the metaphorical experience of transcendental homelessness, while the latter has been thrown into the literalness of homelessness on the stage of the city. The metaphor of homelessness is experienced as the condition of an infinite interface.

The hero of the warehouse, on whom I have been focusing from the outset, is an inhabitant of the Internet and an important figure of communal life to whom we refer when we think about the immaterial aspect of homelessness. The place of homelessness (immaterial and tortuously material) will direct every urban compilation of future societies. The difficulty of the homeless person to find a place defines the fact that yesterday’s city will not resemble tomorrow’s. The city no longer seeks simple positions for its homes, but different institutions of homelessness. Moreover: the increase in the number of possible positions for the Warehouse Man does not illustrate only Lukács’s argument for easy nomadic residency, but also the particular inability to reside in a world which is made up as a “population of fragments”. Communities that already form (in an invisible way) the contemporary city are composed of inhabitants of the Internet.

[...]

Accumulation transforms the resident of the Internet into a particular Warehouse Man. At the same time, faced with the voraciousness for stored things, the Warehouse Hero shapes the particular warehouse in which he lives.”

“Anything can be a thing of the Warehouse as long as it is already represented or is declared representable. We claim that in the Warehouse what takes place is not merely the consolidation of objects that were outside it through their classification and representation. The Warehouse contains only representations of objects, without the need to ever present the “objects themselves” [...] The search in the Warehouse is already a compilation of incongruous answers, it does not open the path to an open, unanswered question: it does not show the possible construction of a world organized by the inability to organize.

[...]

The collection of answers which each user receives in the Warehouse will become increasingly difficult to be explored at once as a whole: each answer separately inaugurates other questions and new manifold, fragmentary levels of answers.”

/// The Bloom’s Room, the Island Interface and the City Interface are images prepared at the Antonas office by Aristide Antonas and Katerina Koutsogianni.
/// Population of Fragments or the Warehouse Man is an essay by Aristide Antonas, translated by Mary Kitroef. The complete essay will be published soon both in Greek and English. More info: Antonas web-site.

The complete article can be read at The Architectural Record

Perhaps the scarcity of remains accelerated the urgency of its reconstruction. As early as 1957, Oriol Bohigas wrote to Mies to commission him to build the pavilion once more. The German architect accepted immediately, but the project never came to fruition, inaugurating a series of failed attempts that continued after his death: 1964, 1974, 1978, 1980, 1981…

Its material disappearance was not the only stumbling block. The pavilion existed as a series of images that had circulated in architectural publications, but most of the original plans were lost in the haste of Mies’s move from Germany to the United States. Furthermore, it was impossible to talk of any definitive documentation, given that the design and construction process had undergone numerous last-minute changes. In short, the few remaining original documents did not coincide with the photographs. Its reconstruction would require a twofold operation: reconstructing the materiality of the Repräsentationspavillon originally commissioned to Mies, and selecting those documents that would validate the decisions taken, in other words, constructing the pavilion’s history.

This was the case for the three reconstructions completed in 1986 in Barcelona (Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos), Madrid (Josep Quetglas) and Milan (OMA/Rem Koolhaas), to coincide with the centenary of Mies’s birth. Each of them led to a materialisation and was based on a selection of documents that was radically different, illustrating three histories of the Modern Movement that use the pavilion as a historiographic argument.

[…]

Keep on reading: Three replications of the German pavilion PDF

But what does it mean to say that an infrastructural system is efficiently managing its environment? Consider two instances within a discrete category of infrastructural concerns: the problem of human effluence, or bodily waste.

In the early years of its growth, Chicago sat on a completely flat expanse of bedrock. At that time, the population dealt with its problem of effluence with a simple system of open drainage ditches. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, these ditches had become open channels of stagnant wastewater, which by mid-century came to be seen as a threat to human health. The city addressed this problem by way of a two-step, ten-year, ‘modernization’ project.

First, the entire downtown—which until then had sat on perfectly flat bedrock—was raised by several meters, in order to provide it a slope adequate to ensure proper rates of flow. Next, the first underground sewerage system in the United States was buried within the newly created slope. The project was completed in 1870, and in terms of relative expenditure and effort was far more radical than anything being proposed by infrastructural advocates today. Was the project a solution to the problem of Chicago’s effluent? We can return to that question. In any case, it certainly ensured that the effluent would efficiently flow away from the downtown.

Now take a more recent example, the Hyperion treatment plant, which is Los Angeles’ largest wastewater treatment facility—one of the largest in the world, in fact. Initially built in 1894 as a raw sewage discharge point into the Santa Monica Bay, it was “upgraded” during the 1970’s through a series of modernization efforts. It now “processes and treats 360 million-gallons per day,” and is generally regarded as one of the great American environmental achievements of the 20th Century.

Though spaced nearly one hundred years from one another, we find in each case, I think, two ways of understanding this very modern notion of ‘functionally efficient’ infrastructures. The first is through the lens of the kind of managerial discourse just quoted; that is, through the lens of a specific kind of language in which life is regarded first and foremost as a set of problems that can be managed through proper techniques of maintenance, monitoring, etc. This is a discourse that replaces the older, normative, deductive concept of ‘solution’ with the far more expansive, flexible and inductive concept of ‘management.’ It is a psychological orientation to the world that has expanded in tandem with the emergence and maturation of the modern bureaucracy, and the adiaphorization that typifies its subjects. Under the suzerainty of this logic, problems—which, in other words, are no longer solved-solved, but instead managed-solved—are rendered as sets of statistical monitoring data whose extents are actively confined to a certain range through processes of parameterization and regulation. This is ‘environmental management’ today.

But there is a second possibility, a second view onto these conditions, in which infrastructural elements like Hyperion function as remarkably convincing images of functionality. If we admit, for example, that Hyperion belongs to a system encompassing some 6500 miles of sewage lines, which during this decade alone has averaged roughly 600 Category 1 “sewage events” each year, and which itself sits within an even larger territorial system that, according to biologists, released some 28 million gallons of raw sewage into California waterways during 2008 alone…

Only when certain undeniable realities are made to illuminate the dark space beneath the rhetoric of managerial discourse—where systemic realities lurk unabashedly; where modernity is shown its own bowels—can we recognize that facilities like Hyperion are playing an active and highly visible role in the grand myth of manageability that we confer upon our infrastructures. Put differently: since their radical extension during the nineteenth century modern infrastructures have carried out their assigned tasks by ensuring the ‘proper’ distribution of the contents of modernity—cleanliness, comfort, convenience—by continually externalizing its discontents.

This strategy of negative externality has taken place simultaneously across two registers: conceptually and substantially. Conceptually, through ordinary words such as ‘byproduct,’ ‘waste,’ and ‘side-effects,’ the discontents of infrastructures are continually re-inscribed within a language of systemic functionality. And yet, at the very same time, the substantial material effluence of modernization is continually dispensed along infrastructures to an outside that is simultaneously abstract and real. That outside is simply any designated repository of continually externalized exponential accumulations: the inner city or its territorialized hinterlands; the Global South or the upper atmosphere; the inner lung or the adipose tissue …more or less anywhere beyond the ordinary perceptual grasp of the population specific to an infrastructural intervention.

These accumulations are themselves far more substantial than the pleasures they provide. The infrastructure of human effluent in the name of hygiene; the infrastructure of the commodity in the name of capital; the infrastructure of animal ‘processing’ in the name of appetite. In each case the managed accumulations outpace the pleasures, such that the functional language of infrastructures has, in a sense, always perfectly misrepresented, or precisely reversed, their material reality.

This has always been the case. The Chicago project instantly and exponentially intensified the amount of human effluent being released at a single point in the Chicago River. It also prepared the ground for a population explosion of staggering proportions, unrivaled in the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the project so quickly and drastically altered the composition of the river that in 1906 Upton Sinclair named its central section “Bubbly Creek,” in reference to the tremendous off-gassing that resulted from the decomposition of human effluent and swine entrails.
Today, at places like Hyperion—that is, at discrete but evident nodes in territorial systems—the concept of management centers on the treatment of effluent, through various processes, until it is ‘safe:’ that is, until its composition has achieved certain statistical-compositional parameters. At that point the liquid effluent is “clean enough to be discharged out at sea, through a 5-mile underwater pipeline.” In other words: everything is externalized, removed from our perceptual frame, substituted with the imagery of managerial prowess.

And here we confront a rather remarkable feature of this perceptual ruse: that even the so-called failures associated with these systems have come to reify and reinforce the grand theater of modern functionalism. The assertion that something has temporarily failed is of course a logical correlate to the assumption that it is usually functioning properly.

Take for example a recent failure that, while larger than average in size, is far from atypical. In 2006, 2 million gallons of raw sewage were released onto a Los Angeles beach in a single spill, when a pumping station immediately south of Hyperion failed. The spill lasted for 14 hours before being reported, and it was later remarked how surprising it was that even the fail-safe back-up alarm system had failed. The accident led authorities to quickly close off the beach while emergency crews tried to repair the pumping station and siphon away the sewage.

Like similar spills, it of course summoned a diverse mixture of elements though which ‘infrastructural events’ are produced—bureaucratically, discursively, sociopsychologically: cinematically. “Real time” mass media; the practices of scenario modeling and accident investigation; the managerial discourses of prevention, monitoring and response; public relations and engineering bravado as a politics of sanitation; the whole, sad spectacle unfolding as an urban dramaturgy of excrement. Hopeful and sincere, surrounding the event on all sides, these elements set the relations of cause and effect. They perform and form a kind of perceptual apparatus in which infrastructural processes are represented first and foremost as localized, brief spectacles; as discrete, fleeting failures within otherwise benign networks; tragic happenings that visit us for short time periods in specific places. This, too, is environmental management: a continual, exaggerated histrionics of functional-infrastructural salvation.

Apart from its many political ramifications (aren’t the most efficient infrastructures also the most effective forms of population control?), one of the disquieting qualities of this generic event-formula is its near total exclusion of the most pressing realities facing the world today. So many of our unfolding catastrophes are simply not amenable to the kinds of spectacular productions to which we have grown accustomed. In most cases they are slow processes, unfolding across months, years, decades, and centuries. Often the scale of their incidence renders them invisible to our methods of documentation: microscopic phenomena comprising accumulations that are, paradoxically, imperceptibly large.

We are presented with two distinct time signatures, one of which actively conceals the other. The first—the managerial time of infrastructures—is the time of statistical reasoning and the calculus of variations. Up-tempo and staccato, it is punctuated by regular crescendos, which we call accidents or malfunctions, and which are immediately attributed to either temporary failures or resolvable localized inefficiencies. Managerial time renders systemic failures un-visible. The second time—the historical time of infrastructures, or the time of accumulations—is a slowly unfolding, long-wave threnody, in which the full extents of modernization are evident.

In the first signature, where the concept of efficiency has been fashioned so as to exclude its own externalizations, our managerial rhetoric makes sense. In the second, that same language appears utterly absurd, contradictory even.

The widespread inability to recognize or acknowledge the historical time of accumulations is the most pronounced and obvious symptom of an entrenched infrastructuralism. Particularly acute today among urbanists and bureaucrats—for whom efficiency is an almost erotic obsession—infrastructuralism is a modern pathology in which the rhetoric and imagery of managerial discourse serve to erase any differentiation between primary and reflexive modernization. Infrastructuralism is marked by the self-veiling of a truth—a terrible truth, unendurable for The Moderns—that the most efficient methods of environmental management are also in fact the most destructive and wasteful. It is a lie we tell ourselves in place of truths that would change us if we were made to face them, and the primary material-moral alibi for the supposed superiority of our limitless, ‘civilized’ lives.

Are we now completely unable to dream of antiinfrastructure? Of urbanisms that do not exists solely at the behest of efficient dispersal, distribution, and externalization? Of populations that are not victims of their own cynical machinery? For now, we simply play out this drama, willingly blinded to the circuitry of its staging.