Empire on Trial

This is the introduction to my review essay of Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (2014, Sternberg Press, Berlin), by Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary team directed by Eyal Weizman. The whole essay (which examines in more detail the issues of truth, evidence, detectability, fetishism, and disregard for destruction raised by Forensis) is here, published as "Empire on Trial: The Forensic Appearance of Truth"Society and Space: Environment and Planning D 33(2):382-388 (2015). 

               The publication of Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth marks a formidable intellectual and political intervention in the analysis of the ways in which traces of destruction and violence are built into the geographies of our imperial present. The book is a collective effort of staggering scope, depth, and ambition and with one clear goal: to level a forensic gaze on state and corporate crimes. This is a gaze finely attuned to the negativity of matter, sensitive to the many ways in which rubble, buildings, scars, chemicals, bones, sounds, algorithms, videos, or photographs can become the evidence of crimes committed by the powerful forces that continuously ravage the world.

This extraordinary volume is the collective work of Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary team based in the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London, which since 2011 has been engaged in collaborative work with partner organizations and activists from all over the world. The intellectual leader of this international effort is the noted architect and activist Eyal Weizman, the author of the widely acclaimed books HollowLand: The Architecture of Israeli Occupation (2007) and The Least of All Possible Evils:Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (2012). Forensis draws from Weizman’s previous work on many levels, particularly in its emphasis on the materiality of violence and domination and the political power of an architectural, spatial, and forensic lens. In Hollow Land, Weizman had demonstrated how the Israeli state controls Palestinians through the manipulation of the materiality and architectural forms of the terrain (walls, checkpoints, roads, tunnels) and the control of vertical fields of vision (through hilltops, drones, and satellites). The Least of All Possible Evils, in turn, examined the logic of “the lesser evil” used by imperial actors to justify their allegedly humanitarian violence; it also dissects the evidence that reveals the terrorist nature of this violence, such as the rubble and corpses created by Israel in Gaza. Forensis develops this sensibility in much more depth, and captures an outstanding diversity of traces of destruction from the world over; in doing so, it not only reveals the evidence of state and capitalist crimes but also proposes a novel political and conceptual sensibility. This is a disposition that resonates with what I have called in Rubble —based on my own ethnographic study of ruins— an object-oriented negativity: that is, a gaze oriented toward objects marked by traces of rupture and dislocation.

Forensic investigations have recently gained enormous appeal in popular culture through TV shows like CSI. But this is a forensic gaze that only seeks to solve crimes recognized as such by the state, thereby celebrating state power and its apparatuses of surveillance. Weizman and his colleagues, in contrast, propose to reverse the forensic gaze and turn it into “a counter-hegemonic practice able to invert the relation between individuals and states, to challenge and resist state and corporate violence and the tyranny of their truth” (11). Forensis reveals that this tyranny is built on “well-constructed lies” (29) and draws on a “forensic architecture” to expose them, understanding architecture not in a narrow disciplinary sense but as a “mode of interpretation” sensitive, as Weizman put it, to “the ever-changing relations between people and things, mediated by spaces and structures across multiple scales” (13).

This volume brings together an innovative collective of talented scholars, artists, theorists, activists, and partner organizations analyzing evidence of imperial crimes on all continents and in all sorts of terrains, including the ocean, the sky, and the underground. The book’s chapters take the reader on a gripping journey to a global constellation of traces of dislocation, from Guatemala to Pakistan, the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Mexico, or sub-Saharan Africa (among many other places).

What sets this forensic lens apart from state-run forensics it not only its more radical negativity but also its goal to recover the original meaning of the Latin word forensis, “pertaining to the forum.” As Weizman argues in the introduction, Forensis interrogates the relationship between the fields where the evidence is collected —actual geographies that he views as elastic and contested force fields— and the forum as the space “where the results of an investigation are presented and contested” (9). This forum is a dynamic triangulation between the contested object (the trace of violence and destruction), the forensic interpreter, and “the assembly of a public gathering.” More crucially, this triangulation is not limited to legal courts. Forensis does, indeed, cover evidence that Forensic Architecture presented in court, for instance in the trial for genocide against the Guatemalan general Ríos-Montt and in the petition submitted to Israel’s High Court to ban the use of white phosphorous in urban environments by the Israel military. Yet the book’s contributors are keenly aware that political struggles are not decided in legal battles, where the global elites have the upper hand. Forensis is primarily a political, rather than legalistic, intervention that seeks to empower global struggles against those crimes that states and corporations refuse to name as such, from targeted assassinations by drones to the environmental dislocation created by the fossil-fuel industries and climate change.

The majority of the crimes documented in Forensis respond, directly or indirectly, to the capitalist system of globalized sovereignty that dominates the world as a whole, and that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called “Empire.” This is why I interpret these crimes as imperial in nature —even if the contributors of Forensis do not necessarily use this concept. Hardt and Negri have been criticized for presenting Empire as a disembodied, totalizing abstraction and for giving the misleading image that the globe has been politically homogenized by transnational flows. But the existence of a multi-centered and planetary Empire does not contradict the fact that this globalized formation creates localized and extremely diverse patterns of destruction, shaped by the affective fields of particular nation-states. Most of the crimes covered in Forensis —from the killing of civilians by drones in Yemen to the impact of climate change— involve states and corporations defending the imperial hierarchies of the global order. And these actors are permanently surveilling the totality of the planet with multiple technologies in search for signs of resistance and anti-systemic disruption. And this is where Forensis’ brilliance lies: in reversing the direction of the inquisitive gaze to expose the overwhelming evidence of the destructive nature of this globalized system of sovereignty. In doing so, the book puts Empire on trial in the political forum of world public opinion and makes the case, through the truth exuded by the evidence, that this global order is guilty of crimes against humanity and life on Earth.

The Tallest Ruin in the World

In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord argued that capitalism neutralizes critical dispositions through the hypnotic power of its spectacle of commodities, mass advertising, light, films, color, and excess. What Debord doesn't analyze is that this spectacularity requires the production of spectacular space: that is, space made to look imposing and dazzling. If there is one architectural form that embodies the spectacular nature of capitalist space, it's the skyscraper: the monument that most national elites seek to emulate and make taller, from Shanghai to Dubai. Skyscrapers are, as Henri Lefebvre long noted, phallic and arrogant structures whose verticality seeks to induce a state of disarming awe at the prowess, wealth, and creativity of the rich. This is the disposition that Walter Benjamin discovered in the bourgeois architecture of nineteenth-century Paris, where arcades, boulevards, and world fairs created a state of complacent daydreaming. In the early twenty-first century, this daydreaming emanates from the verticality of the skyscrapers that define the skyline of New York City, Dubai, and Hong Kong. In the words of David Nye, skyscrapers have come to embody "the geometrical sublime." But like all human-made objects, these sublime fetishes of global capitalism are haunted by their future ruination. After all, as Žižek put i, the fetish is “an object that conceals the void.” 
            If the interruption and voiding of the spectacular spatiality of global capitalism has a planetary core, it is probably Venezuela. As Sujatha Fernandes and George Ciccariello-Maher have shown, the empowerment of the Venezuelan poor under Chávez has been a territorial force that controls and disputes spaces and that asserts local forms of grassroots autonomy from the old elites and the Chavista state bureaucracy. This appropriation has involved one of the most notable ruins in the world, La Torre de David: The Tower of David. This is an unfinished forty-five-story skyscraper, one of the tallest in South America, which was abandoned when its owner David Brillembourg died and his company went bankrupt because of the profound financial crisis that hit Venezuela in 1994. In 1998, the anti-elite sentiments created by the massacre of protesters in Caracas in 1989 led to the election of Hugo Chávez as president. This was the birth of the Bolivarian Revolution and the beginning of the turn to the Left in South America. By 2007, The Tower of David had been abandoned for ever a decade when hundreds of people began moving in and colonizing its solid yet empty structure of concrete, glass, and steel. Today, close to 3,000 men, women, and children have turned the Tower of David into their home.

            In a piece in The New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson called The Tower of David “the tallest slum in the world.” Replicating U.S.-centered, neoconservative narratives of “failed states,” he wrote, “Caracas is a failed city, and the Tower of David is perhaps the ultimate symbol of that failure.” The Venezuelan elites couldn't agree more; they see this appropriated skyscraper as everything that is wrong with the Bolivarian Revolution: a feared source of “crime” and “anarchy.” The hundreds of families who live there have long rebutted this demonization. Many admit that the Tower of David is not an ideal home, as it is difficult to navigate because of its verticality and the lack of elevators. Many also criticize the Chavista bureaucracy in its failure to provide proper housing. But all who live there agree they are better off in the Tower of David than where they were before. They are proud of the homes they have made with their bare hands, building walls and setting up an electric grid and water hoses to make twenty-eight stories livable. They have, in short, appropriated a vertical node of rubble and turned it into something else: a home they feel attached to. More important, they run the tower along collective principles and feel in control (see accounts by residents of the Torre de David here, here, and here). As Léopold Lambert aptly notes, the occupation of this skyscraper is “a proletarian reclaim of territory.” This is no ordinary territorial reclaim: it is the expropriation by the poor of one of the most revered material totems of global capitalism. 

              Ruins are potentially disruptive of dominant forms of spatiality because they turn what used to be private or state property into part of the commons. Rubble is matter that belongs to no one and to everyone and that radiates around it a collective spatiality. As I analyze in detail in Rubble, ruins can for this reason create a gravitational force that attracts bodies toward them. In 2007, hundreds of families empowered by the changes created by the Bolivarian Revolution were drawn to the tallest ruin created by neoliberalism in the Caracas of the 1990s. And this spatial expansiveness has become particularly unsettling to people like Anderson because it shatters the phantasmagoria of the skyscraper as a fetish that is supposed to dazzle and impress. 

The Tower of David is the only skyscraper in the world that fell into ruins only to be physically appropriated by the poor and turned into part of the commons. In a world in which the commons are being subjected to an unrelenting onslaught of privatizations and physical destruction and degradation, this is not without spatial and political significance. The fact that anywhere else a similar occupation of corporate architecture would have been immediately repressed by riot police speaks of the favorable political context in which it took place. While critics dismiss this subaltern appropriation of the Tower of David for betraying their abstract ideals of “progress” and “decent housing,” this dismissal reveals a visceral, class-based discomfort at the colonization of an abandoned skyscraper by those who allegedly do not belong there. This colonization is spatially subversive because of its affective power to dissolve the phantasmagoria of spectacular space.

Not surprisingly, many of those who demonize the Venezuelan Revolution idealize the corporate dictatorship that rules Dubai from the height of the most spectacular skyscrapers in the world. Further, the world elites admire those dazzling skyscrapers as their dreamlike class utopia, where the poor are kept in their place (and at the ground level). Shortly after President Chávez died in March 2013, the Associated Press business reporter Pamela Sampson wrote that Chávez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth “into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs.” “But,” she added, those gains are “meager” compared “with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai.” This is a transparent admission of the priorities that guide neoliberalism as a system in which the construction of spectacular buildings is seen as more important than the improvement of the living conditions of millions. It also shows how the fetishization of skyscrapers built to attract the gaze encourages a topographic disregard for the world’s poor, who are seen as so devoid of value that any alleviation of their suffering is dismissed as wasteful.

This disregard also reveals the planetary constellations that entangle the skyscrapers of Dubai and the socialized skyscraper of Caracas. The fear of “the tallest slum in the world” is the fear of an unsettling, ominous ruin: an unfinished skyscraper appropriated by a radicalized, nonwhite multitude that is unafraid of rubble and is organized around egalitarian sentiments. In being the tallest ruin in the world, The Tower of David indexes a rupture and a potentiality: the possibility that the crack may expand, multiply, and shatter a space that seemed spectacular.

This essay is a revised excerpt from the conclusions of my forthcoming book Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Duke University Press, August 2014)