Violence from Aestheticiztion

Aesthetics as a form of (mental) violence

“Violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality – force, assault, or the infliction of pain – alone. Violence also includes assaults on the person hood, dignity, sense of worth or value of the victim. The social and cultural dimensions of the violence are what gives violence its power and meaning.”
Nancy Scheper-Hughes & Philippe I. Bourgois ,Violence in War and Peace

Aesthetics has a violent nature embedded. It is built-in with personal feeling and taste by definition, which are both highly objective. Maybe that is the reason why aesthetics have been frequently used as a tool to manipulate, even distort or diminish human interpretation and values on things for political purpose.

When aesthetics is used to dress-up an agenda, images are carefully pieced together to create a new reality. In the past, it has been successfully done by political parties, to replace judgement of people with obscene fascination with excess and achieved mesmerizing, to hold a person’s attention to the exclusion of all else.

Example: Cathedral of Light, Albert Speer

Aesthetics can also neutralize or even diminish critical awareness of its audience. As suggested by Fredric Jameson, meaning of an image s tightly related to its context, use and association. So when there are so many images (information) occurs side-by-side, it is impossible to tell the meaning of an image. In that sense, images(informatio    n) devours meaning and that is another type of violence by aesthetics.

Bombing at the night sky over Baghdad, Iraq, January 16, 1991. Grazia Neri.

Example: aesthetization of violence in contemporary culture
i.e. movie/ newspaper
metropolitan acc. to Charles Baudegaire

Therefor, aesthetics can be read as a finely articulated experience, a codified system of signification that can lead to perpetual intoxication to one’s mind.

Architectue as a glamourous murderer of awareness

Architecture has always been stylized excessively for purpose mentioned. As a medium to shape experience and tool for ordering sense data, it has the ability to create a world with signs and images that cause sensory distraction of its audience. In another word, it kills the awareness of the audience towards a certain social/ political aspect.

Assume that human will replicate, reflex and response to match the external environment. There are few operations that can be the possible ways to such seduction in spatial manipulation: by juxtaposition ( collages and montages) and by repetition. The suggested architectural types to be investigated are:

Labyrinth: as an intricate network which have a hidden logic to not allow the user to look beyond a certain point of view and opposing the action of choosing, its a perfect stage to articulate stimulus at different point of the journey along the maze. The current network/ infrastructure of the cities can also be read in the same language for setting up a possible scenario for design.

Examples: New Babylon, Constant Nieuwenhuys
Carceri D’Invenzione Giovanni Battista Piranesi
The Oblique Function, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio

Theater/ Stage: to further understand the mechanism in setting up a desired atmosphere/ situation. Temples and pulic plaza can also be considered as stage.

Though the proposed study, it is hoped to understand the scripting of violence in architecture and hence induce the next stage of design.

Related readings:
Leach, Neil. 1999. The anaesthetics of architecture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Kenzari, Bechir. 2011. Architecture and violence. Barcelona: Actar.
George Simmel. 1976. The Metropolis of Modern Life. New York. Free Press.

Planned readings:
Richard Coyne. Derrida for Architects.
Virilio, Paul, and Julie Rose. 2000. A landscape of events. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Bachelard, Gaston, and M. Jolas. 1994. The poetics of space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Antonin Artaud. The Theatre of Cruelty.