The Savage Outside of White Argentina

This is an excerpt (the first few pages) of my essay in the forthcoming book Shades of the Nation: Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2015), edited by Eduardo Elena and Paulina Alberto. I'm particularly proud to be part of this interdisciplinary collection, which includes work by very talented scholars on what has been for too long a taboo topic in Argentina: race.

In early December 2013, several urban centers in Argentina went through a wave of turmoil that brought to light the sensibilities that have long racialized the national geography as harbouring a threatening, non-white abyss. In the province of Córdoba, thousands of police officers demanded a salary increase by withdrawing from the streets and remaining in their quarters, while undercover officers instigated the looting of stores in order to create a public demand for their presence. The news of the lack of police repression quickly spread and thousands of men and women from poor neighborhoods began storming stores and supermarkets to grab anything they could, from food to TV sets. The unrest spread to other provinces, most notably Tucumán. There, the same pattern unfolded: police forces withdrew from the streets to demand a salary increase and simultaneously organized the sacking of stores, rapidly prompting more widespread looting. With several cities shaken by riots, a significant portion of the population felt that the streets were dissolving amid a vortex formed by the expansiveness of los negros, “the blacks” —the racialized term used in Argentina to name the poor and people with indigenous or mestizo (mixed) completion.

On the streets, the social media, and the online forums of Argentine newspapers, thousands of people called for the violent extermination of “esos negros de mierda,” “those fucking blacks.” Armed vigilantes promptly began shooting at “los negros” as if the latter were savage hordes determined to overrun settlers circling the wagons on a hostile frontier. When La Nación informed that “a young man” (un joven) was shot dead in Córdoba, marking the first deadly victim of the violence, most readers posting comments celebrated his death as an act of civilizing justice. Many objected to the use of the phrase “a young man” to name what was just un negro. A reader added to this explicit dehumanization of the victim, “Too bad it’s only one. I wish there were two hundred negros dead.” Similar comments flooded Tweeter under the hashtag #Negros de mierda. When the violence subdued two days later —once the federal government sent forces to Córdoba and the provincial governments abided by police demands— over ten people were dead and hundreds were wounded. In those days, many compared the looters with the Indians that in the nineteenth century threatened the boundaries of Argentine civilized space. Conservative writer Abel Posse wrote in La Nación that in Tucumán a relative borrowed a shotgun, formed a vigilante patrol, and locked up his wife and children. He felt as if “un malón” was about to raid their home, evoking the parties of indigenous combatants on horseback who once controlled much of the national geography.

             The way that this unrest was experienced and racialized by a significant portion of the population is notable because Argentina has long stood out in Latin America as a nation that claimed to be white and racially homogeneous, due to the salience of European immigration at the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, Argentine political and cultural elites have long insisted in public that one of the merits of the nation is that “we don’t have problems of racism.” I personally heard center-left presidential candidate Raúl Alfonsín repeat this line with conviction at several speeches during the 1983 campaign, and almost two decades later conservative writer Marcos Aguinis began his book on the Argentine condition making exactly the same claim. Yet in Argentina this self-congratulatory narrative about a racism-free society has long coexisted with the everyday use of a heavily racialized language to name, with disdain, esos negros de mierda: the millions of Argentines who are explicitly marked as the despised non-white part of the nation. This racialization is part of a hierarchical class formation, for “los negros” also names the poor. Yet that the poor are called “los negros” (and not something else) reveals how racial sensibilities inform class perceptions in Argentina. And when “the blacks” appear as a menacing presence on the streets, as in late 2013, it is common to hear passionate calls —entangled with openly racist slurs— for their extermination, on the grounds that “los negros” are dangerous and not fully human.

             Several scholars have noted this contradiction in Argentina between claims to racial homogeneity and tolerance and the everyday reality of a profoundly racialized and racist society. As Alejandro Grimson aptly put it, in Argentina the same person can claim to live in a white nation without racism and add, shortly thereafter, that half of the population is made up of “negros de mierda.” This tense oscillation is certainly at the core of the specific configuration of whiteness in Argentina, but its affective and spatial dimensions have been overlooked. Grimson and other authors have tackled this paradox by arguing that whiteness in Argentina is a myth or an ideology: a discourse that misrecognizes the existence of millions of Argentines of indigenous and mestizo background and seeks to make invisible, and therefore legitimize, racialized forms of hierarchy. Whiteness in Argentina does, indeed, have mythical and ideological dimensions, but I hereby examine it as an affective and geographic formation that is in denial of its existence because it is not reducible to a conscious ideology and operates at a pre-discursive, emotional level.

In this essay, I propose to name this racialized disposition toward space as La Argentina Blanca, White Argentina. I do not conceive of this term, it is important to note, as a bounded entity made up of Argentines of white skin. Many of the fiercest critics of La Argentina Blanca are light-skinned Argentines with blue eyes (such as writer Osvaldo Bayer) and some of its staunchest defenders have indigenous ancestry (like the former governor of the province of Salta, Juan Carlos Romero). I conceive of White Argentina, first and foremost, as a geographical project and an affective disposition defined by the not always conscious desire to create, define, and feel through the bodily navigation of space that the national geography is largely European. But this is a haunted and ever-incomplete project, a whiteness that feels under siege, for it permanently confronts that millions of Argentine citizens bear in their bodies the traces of the non-European substratum of the nation. White Argentina, in this regard, is an affect in the relational, inter-subjective, and material sense that Spinoza gives to this concept: the capacity to affect and to be affected by other bodies. And few things affect White Argentina more profoundly than the appearance in public space of spatially expansive multitudes of “negros.”

The affective nature of White Argentina is apparent in its visceral reaction to events like those of December 2013. While riots create anxiety and fear in any social setting, in Argentina these fears usually trigger widespread calls for the mass murder of “los negros,” embodied in the cry “a esos negros de mierda hay que matarlos a todos” (“those fucking blacks should all get killed”). These calls for civilizing and genocidal violence (i.e. this desire to kill all negros) are rationalized as condemnation of criminality; but they primarily express rage at the evidence that Argentina is not a white nation. The appearance of dark-skinned multitudes affects White Argentina as if it were a spatially dissolving force that that opens up, from within the nation, a huge, terrifying outside: an abyss that resurrects el malón that the founding fathers of White Argentina thought they had exterminated in the late 1800s, and that Abel Posse’s relative in Tucumán felt had reappeared in 2013.

El malón is one of the most extraordinary figures in Argentine history; it alludes to the indigenous cavalries that for centuries launched stealth, high-speed attacks on frontier settlements in the pampas of central Argentina and in the tropical lowlands of the Gran Chaco, reaching the gates of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Santa Fe and eroding the boundaries of state territoriality. As a historically-specific configuration, el malón was destroyed by the Argentine state in the 1870s and 1880s. But el malón can also be examined as a spatial, bodily, and affective formation that has outlived its original historical conditions. Indigenous cavalries no longer exist, but the assertive and expansive spatiality they once represented is still regularly evoked in Argentina. When in the twenty-first century the term malón is used to name looters or simply the poor taking to the streets, it evokes to White Argentina the bodily, tangible return of the barbarisms of the past.

Jacques Derrida argued that the ghost is something that seemed to have disappeared but always returns, reappearing again and again. To speak of specters, he wrote, is to speak of their return. It is in this sense that el malón can be said to be a ghostly figure in Argentine history: as a force that had allegedly been destroyed but that continues returning to haunt those who dream of a White Argentina.

The Oceanic Void

This is an excerpt (the first few pages) of my essay "The Oceanic Void: The Eternal Becoming of Liquid Space." This is my most Deleuzian piece yet, and a future chapter in my book in progress (tentatively entitled) Terrain: An Affective Geometry of Planet Earth. 

The main protagonist in the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines plane has been the elusive and intensely mobile oceanic space that satellites, planes, and ships have been meticulously scrutinizing in search for the plane’s debris, thus far to no avail. For four weeks, the surveillance technology that is often very precise in locating objects anywhere on the planet has been struggling to pierce through the opacity of this huge mass of water that, in permanently moving, recurrently makes itself unreadable. This is a vast liquid space whose ambient thickness and intensity are in a permanent state of becoming: folding, shifting, arching, twisting; always in motion, always displacing its volume across vast distances, always indifferent to the life forms enveloped by its mobile flows. Ten days after the plane's disappearance, satellites pinpointed on the oceanic surface relatively large objects, over twenty meters long, that looked like debris from the plane. One day, however, the debris seemed to be here; the next day, it seems to be five hundred kilometers away. Always on the move, the ocean carries anything floating on it elsewhere, particularly in the turbulent waters of the southern Indian ocean. A few days later, satellites and planes detected hundreds of smaller objects scattered over wide areas. But when finally reached by ships, these objects turned out to be part of the vast amounts of ordinary debris drifting in oceanic space, the surplus of the imperial forms of connectivity that thousands of ships loaded with commodities leave behind in the oceanic void, turned into the most decisive channel of global capitalism. The global panopticum has been disoriented by this mobile, textured, multi-layered spatiality of the ocean, which makes itself even more opaque by getting entangled with the detritus of globalization. So many transnational and imperial resources have been put in the search that debris from the plane may eventually be found. Had the plane fallen on firm land, however, the global panopticum of satelites and drones that control the atmosphere, and therefore look at the planet from high above, would have already located the debris. But the plane fell into a liquid vortex that swallows up most of the heavy objects that fall into it. This is liquid matter that, because of its physical properties, lets the force of gravity pull those objects down toward a dark abyss that the naked human body confronts as a physical environment devoid of solid ground and breathable air: the oceanic void.

We know that the ocean covers two thirds of the planet’s surface. But what type of space is the ocean? One way to begin answering this question is to look at those areas where the spatiality of the ocean meets that of islands and continents. The material counterpoint between both types of spaces is apparent and seemingly self-evident. On the one hand, the beaches, mountains, or human-made buildings that define the coastline and emerge from above the oceanic surface constitute the type of spaces where the vast majority of humans are born, live, and die. These geographies are defined by a multiplicity of textures and forms but share the solid spatiality that has sustained humans as land creatures adapted over millions of years to breath, eat, move, and reproduce on firm land in direct contact with the atmosphere. On the other hand, beyond the coastline, the body confronts a qualitatively different space: fluid, mobile, liquid. This is a space whose multiplicity is subsumed to the physical properties of water: an incompressible fluid that is permanently in motion because its molecules can move relative to each other, adapting to the shape of its container, the Earth’s surface, and to the forces of the atmosphere. Shorelines, in short, are among the most dramatic thresholds in human experiences of space: the point where the consistency and materiality of space abruptly changes and the body faces the beginning of a liquid world with flows, rhythms, and properties that are not those of land. Coastlines are those areas where space folds to reveal the edge of a immense liquid space, planetary in nature. In The Clamor of Being, Badiou mentions, based on their personal correspondence, that Deleuze viewed "the edge of the void" as "the intersection between the territory and the process of deterritorialization, the dissolution of the territory in the event." On the edge of the oceanic void, the type of human spatiality that defines the territoriality of land faces the event of the ungrounding created by a liquid world.   

Humans have long navigated and used oceanic space with high degrees of expertise and sophistication. Many feel at home there, at ease in that liquid, untameable world. But they do so as land creatures whose anatomy and physiology have evolved to move and breathe on firm ground. The liquid space of the ocean can very quickly envelop and asphyxiate the human bodies that venture in it without flotation devices. It is in this precise physical sense that the human body confronts the ocean as a void: as liquid matter that does not halt the pull of gravity toward the heart of the planet the way firm land does and that, in sinking the body in a fluid devoid of breathable air, negates and interrupts land-based forms of mobility and territoriality. This liquid space, in short, imposes on humans a challenging spatiality that can be socially used but cannot be fully controlled, for it follows its own, powerful rhythms. These rhythms are created by forces mobilized by a planet in motion: by the rotation of the Earth around its axis and around the sun, by the cyclical exposure of the ocean and the atmosphere to the heat of the sun, by the gravity of the moon, as well as by the friction between tectonic plates, which occasionally shake the depths of the ocean to create tsunamis. This vortex is far from being empty: it is inhabited by a pure multiplicity of intensities in motion and by a large biomass. But the ocean is a void in the physical sense of the term, simply because alone in the ocean we drown in an instant, bringing to light what we tend two take for granted: our bodily ontology as land creatures who breath air. 

In this essay, I argue that Deleuze provides us concepts that are particularly important to examine the liquid spatiality of oceanic space, such as becoming, fold, multiplicity, intensity, singularity, difference, repetition, eternal return, virtual, actual, and smooth and striated space. It is especially in the analysis of the repetitive, rhythmical, and ever-fluid spatiality of the ocean that Deleuze’s philosophy reveals its power to illuminate our understanding of space in its immanence, independently of human appropriations but also in relation to them. My analysis is in dialogue with authors like John Protevi and Levi Bryant, who also draw on Deleuze to think the material becoming and gravitational forces of non-human made objects and forces. And as Protevi argues, the becoming of water is particularly amenable to Deleuze's philosophy (Life, War, Earth, p. 45). Yet my analysis also goes beyond Deleuze because it puts him in dialogue with Alain Badiou by subsuming the becoming of oceanic space to a figure of negativity such as the void. This may seem like a counterintuitive move, given Deleuze’s well-known hostility toward the negative and his public disagreements with Badiou. Yet I see their thinking as creatively entangled in multiple ways, and for starters I understand the void not as a figure of spatial emptiness but rather, drawing from Badiou, as a figure of pure multiplicity: that is, a multiplicity that is non-representable. The ocean’s spatiality forms an immense void not because it is empty but, on the contrary, because it is a positive presence that is a productive and disruptive multiplicity of intensities, singularities, and rhythms: a vortex that voids (interrupts, negates, disrupts) the spatiality of human mobility on firm land.

            My analysis of oceanic space draws from recent efforts in the humanities to examine geo-physical forces in terms of their own materiality and rhythms, without reducing them to their social appropriations by human societies. The literature on “the social construction of nature” played an important role in undermining the dualism between society and nature and in showing that society is not external to “nature.” Yet this perspective often reduces “nature” to the passive, malleable background upon which active, human-centered forces operate. Phillip Steinberg’s The Social Construction of the Ocean is the best book devoted to analyzing the geography of the oceans. Steinberg shows with great detail and sophistication how human societies have made use of and conceptualized the ocean in different historical periods and in different parts of the world. He demonstrates that far from being a space “empty” of sociality, the ocean has been socialized at multiple levels and is a crucial component of global currents of trade and relations of territorial power. And while the book does not examine how the liquid nature of oceanic space escapes human coding, Steinberg leaves the door open for a non-constructivist view of the ocean when he writes, at the end of his book, that this remains an important and pending question: that in being “a space of nature,” some crucial dimensions of oceanic space are not reducible to their social uses, most notably the fact that “the sea never stops moving” (p. 210)

           In his essay, I take this ever-mobile nature of oceanic space as my starting point. This is also a dimension that Steinberg's most recent work on oceanic spatiality is exploring (as the conversation we have in the comments below make clear). But I prefer to view the ocean not as a space of nature but as a spatial set within the terrain of planet Earth. As several authors have noted, the notion of nature is too loaded with transcendental connotations to be salvaged as a useful analytic concept, even if we add the usual disclaimers about the need to overcome the society-nature dualism. This problem is clear in the very idea that the ocean is a “natural space,” for this implies that places made by humans are not natural, thereby reintroducing the distinction between society and nature that is publicly disavowed. Terrain is the absolute temporal materialization of what we abstract as "nature." Seas, mountains, roads, rivers, cities, farms, bridges, forests: they are the type of singularities that envelope our ever-fleeting bodies as part of the terrain of planet Earth. As I have argued here, I see terrain as involving all existing, three-dimensional material forms (human made or not) that are constitutive of space as we know it: that is, the tangible space of this world. 
           This analysis of the ocean as a spatial set within the terrain implies a materialist, object-oriented, and affective lens but more importantly a geometric eye and perception. This is why a theory of terrain demands a Spinozian sensibility built in critical dialogue with the two last philosophical titans of the world: Deleuze and Badiou. The starting principle of a theory of terrain is that of its pure material multiplicity. This means that the materiality of the terrain is not homogenous, but the opposite. Spinoza argued that the body is made up of hard, soft, and liquid elements: bones, flesh, and blood. Likewise, the planetary terrain is defined by a multiplicity of physical densities and textures, involving hard, soft, gaseous, and liquid elements engaging in different degrees of temperature. The ocean is certainly the largest expression of liquid space on Earth. Comprising over two-thirds of the surface of the planet, the oceanic void has been one of the most powerful and determining spatial forces in human history. Its most defining feature is that, for the human body, it creates the generalized ungrounding we call drowning. The history of imperial and capitalist expansion into the totality of the planet has revolved, to a great extent, around technological efforts to counter this ungrounding created by the eternal, ever-mobile becoming of liquid space. 

Nazi Architecture as Affective Weapon

I wrote this essay as a guest writer for one of my favourite blogs, The Funambulist by Léopold Lambert. Thanks to Léopold for the invitation to contribute to his series The Funambulist Papers.   

One of Adolf Hitler’s most cherished dreams was to build the largest monument ever created. With the guidance of “the chief architect of the Reich” Albert Speer, he planned to remake Berlin around what he saw as the future core of the Germanic empire: the People’s Hall (Volkshalle), a dome that was to be 290 meters (950 feet) high and able to accommodate 180,000 people. Hitler was so “obsessed” with his gigantic dome, Speer wrote, that he was “deeply irked” when he learned that the Soviet Union had begun constructing an even larger building in Moscow: The Palace of the Soviets. This palace was to be 495 meters (1,624 feet) high and was to be crowned with a huge statue of Lenin. Hitler was furious, for he felt “cheated of the glory of building the tallest monumental structure in the world.” When Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Speer realized that “Moscow’s rival building” had preyed on Hitler’s mind “more than he had been willing to admit.” As the German armies advanced toward Moscow, Hitler said: “Now this will be the end of their building once and for all” (155).

            Speer’s memoirs Inside the Third Reich, published in 1969 after he served a twenty-year sentence for his role in the Nazi hierarchy, often reads like a self-critical, melancholic confession haunted by guilt. This self-criticism should be taken with a grain of salt, for Speer is notably silent about the genocide of the European Jews (which he claimed he was unaware of at his trial in Nuremberg) and about his own use of slave labor as Minister of Armaments (a topic he touches upon only in passing). The text is nonetheless an extraordinary document about the core of the Nazi machinery and about Hitler’s bodily, spatial, and architectural sensibilities. The book reveals, in particular, that Hitler viewed in monumental architecture a way of creating in the body a disarming state of awe. Hitler was convinced that monumental buildings were powerful weapons, and assumed that political supremacy depended (as his desire to crush the Palace of the Soviets illustrates) on erecting structures that would dazzle and intimidate multitudes, inhibiting their bodily disposition to act critically and assertively. Efforts to cultivate reverence through monumental buildings have certainly existed for millennia. But Speer’s account reveals the political intricacies of the affective dimensions of monumentality, and the fact that these live on in one of the most distinctive affective weapons of capitalism: skyscrapers.

Speer shows that architecture was not only central to the Nazi project but also, and perhaps most notably, Hitler’s true passion in life, the only topic that made him joyful and exuberant. Hitler would regularly exclaim, “How much I would have loved to be an architect!” Hitler’s architectural projects went back to the 1920s, when he drew sketches of the Berlin he would rebuild as the capital of a Germanic empire so powerful that its monuments would eclipse in size and splendor those of Rome. In Mein Kampf, he in fact complained that the architecture of German cities lacked monumentality and grandeur. When Hitler met Speer, he was dazzled by how the latter proposed to give material form to his spatial megalomania. The son of a respected architect, Speer became not only “the chief architect” of the Reich but also one of the most trusted members of Hitler’s inner circle, and eventually the Minister of Armaments of the Reich until the fall of Berlin. Hitler expressed a quasi-religious devotion for Speer, whom he admired as the most brilliant architect who had ever lived. As an aide to Hitler once told Speer, “Do you know who you are? You’re Hitler’s unrequited love!” (133).

For Hitler and Speer, architecture was not simply the art of giving form to space; it was the art of creating power through monumental spatial forms. Critical architects such as Eyal Weizman and Leópold Lambert have shown how the manipulation of spatial forms has profound political implications in the control of mobility and visibility and in the deployment of violence. The Wall of Separation and the myriad checkpoints built by Israel on Palestinian land (brilliantly examined by Weizman and Lambert) are primary examples of this militarization of architecture. This is why Lambert argues that these are weaponized forms of architecture. Walls and other architectural striations are nonetheless weaponized in a distinctive way, as apparatuses of kinetic capture: that is, as material assemblages that control and channel the movement of bodies in space. The control of mobility via the architectural capture of mobility was certainly central to the spatiality of Nazi Germany, as the confinement of the European Jews within walled ghettos and death camps illustrates. Hitler and Speer, however, were intellectually disinterested in this type of weaponized architecture, which they relegated to lesser functionaries. They were interested, rather, in an architecture weaponized as an apparatus of affective capture designed to create what geographer Ben Anderson calls affective atmospheres: spatial environments that exert pre-discursive, not-fully conscious pressures on the body. All architectural forms create affective atmospheres in addition to organizing movement and my distinction between apparatuses of kinetic and affective capture is purely heuristic, and not meant to create a dichotomy or typology. Yet what Speer reveals in Inside the Third Reich is that the main purpose of Hitler’s monumental architecture was to inculcate affective intensities on the bodies contemplating it, capturing their gaze and attention.   

           The key principle of this affective atmosphere was sheer size. Under the motto “always the biggest,” Hitler wanted to build at a scale previously unseen in the history of empires. As Hitler put it to Speer’s wife, “Your husband is going to erect buildings for me such as have not been created for four thousand years” (58). Speer admitted that this challenge of messianic proportions “intoxicated” him. In 1936, he published a piece entitled The Führer’s Buildings in which he hailed Hitler’s “brilliance” for conceiving buildings of such a scale that they would last “for eternity.” Taking this principle to heart, Speer engaged on a race to surpass the monumental architecture of prior and rival empires. “I found Hitler’s excitement rising whenever I could show him that at least in size we had ‘beaten’ the other great buildings of history” (69).

For Hitler and Speer, Nazi Germany’s main architectonic competitors were the Roman, French, and U.S. empires. The People’s Hall (“the greatest assembly hall in the world ever conceived up to that time” and defined by “dimensions of an inflationary sort”) was intended to surpass not only the Roman Pantheon (its inspiration) but also the capitol in Washington DC, which “would have been contained many times in such a mass.” The Nuremberg stadium was to surpass the Circus Maximus in Rome and be able to accommodate 400,000 spectators (68). In Hamburg, a massive skyscraper would compete with the Empire State Building in New York. The new railroad station of Berlin was designed to surpass New York’s Grand Central Station and Berlin’s Arch of Triumph would have been much bigger than the one commissioned by Napoleon in Paris. Berlin’s main boulevard was to be longer and grander than the Parisian boulevards. Speer explains that “the idea” behind his architecture was straightforward: that people “would be overwhelmed, or rather stunned, by the urban scene and thus the power of the Reich” (134-135). The idea, in short, was to inculcate in the body what Spinoza called negative affects: that is, affects that decrease the body’s capacity for action by overwhelming it, stunning it, numbing it, making it malleable and, in short, politically passive.

This principle was embodied in one of Speer’s first major projects: the Nuremberg parade grounds built for the 1934 Nazi Party Congress, immortalized by Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The monumentality of the classicist architecture of the stadium designed by Speer was inseparable from the militarized discipline of the thousands of troops and Nazi cadres portrayed in the film, forming a solid, geometrical bodily assemblage united in its allegiance to The Fuhrer. If there’s a political ontology inculcated by the affective atmosphere of this architectonic setting it is that of Being-as-One: one people, one nation, one Reich, which Hitler highlighted in his speech in that place, appealing to the “unity” and “obedience” of the German people.

Hitler’s and Speer’s attempt to reach transcendence through monumentality reached such levels that they sought to numb the body even if those buildings were in ruins. The ruins of the Roman empire, which Hitler admired as “imperishable symbols of power,” became the inspiration of what Speer articulated as his “theory of ruins.” His “theory” was that the buildings of the new Berlin should be made of stone and brick (rather than steel and concrete) so that “in a thousand years” their ruins would look imposing, like those of Rome. Hitler, in particular, assumed that Nazi power would endure in those ruins because of their fetish power to continue being an apparatus of affective capture. “Hitler liked to say that the purpose of his building was to transmit its time and its spirit to posterity. Ultimately, all that remained to remind men of the great epochs of history was their monumental architecture, he would philosophize” (55).

            These architectonic fantasies had a notable spatial core: a thirty-meter long, three-dimensional model of the new, monumentalized Berlin that was represented in extreme detail and was dominated by The People’s Hall, the boulevard, and the Arch of Triumph. This miniature “model city” was “Hitler’s favorite project.” Hitler would spend hours observing the details of the model from many different angles, bowing down “to take measure of the different effect.” He wanted to feel how those buildings would affect, for instance, “a traveler emerging from the south station.” He was trying to feel in his own body, in sum, the affective atmosphere that would be created by his architecture once it was built. “These were the rare times when he relinquished his usual stiffness. In no other situation, did I see him so lively, so spontaneous, so relaxed” (133). Obsessed with architecture as an affective weapon, Hitler was oblivious to urban spatiality. “His passion for building for eternity left him without a spark of interest in traffic arrangement, residential areas, and parks” (77-79). Speer was also blind to living spaces, he admitted in retrospect, and noted that his designs were “lifeless and regimented” and lacked “a sense of proportion” (134). When he showed the model city to his father, he was taken aback when the latter (also an architect) simply said, “You’ve all gone completely crazy” (133).

          The works for the radical refashioning of Berlin began in 1937 but were halted when the war began in September 1939. When in June 1940 Nazi Germany defeated France, Hitler and Speer promptly visited Paris, which together with Rome was the other city they sought to surpass. Hitler admired Haussmann and his aggressive remaking of Paris in the mid-1800s, which had created the city as a bourgeois spectacle (“He regarded Haussmann as the greatest city planner in history, but hoped that I would surpass him,” 75). They stayed in Paris for only three hours, but visited most of its famous monuments. Hitler wanted to immerse himself in the atmosphere created by Paris’ architecture, and he said, visibly moved, “It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris. I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled today.” Paris affected Hitler at a deeper level; it reawakened his passion for a monumentalized Berlin. The same evening he told Speer, “Draw up a decree in my name ordering full-scale resumption of work on the Berlin buildings. … Wasn’t Paris beautiful? But Berlin must be made far more beautiful.” His order was to proceed with the construction plans “with maximum urgency” (173).

Speer was perplexed by the order, given its huge cost amid an ongoing war on multiple fronts. Hitler dismissed these concerns; he was only worried about the potentially negative impact on German public opinion, so the decree was to be kept secret and the works were to be “camouflaged” under other rubrics. Why Hitler’s “urgency”? The way he worded the decree is revealing. Hitler wrote: “I regard the accomplishment of these supremely vital constructive tasks for the Reich as the greatest step in the preservation of our victory.” Accordingly, the decree was officially named: “Decree for the preservation of our victory” (173). For Hitler, in other words, the main way to safeguard the military victories of 1939-1940 was through the construction of imposing buildings. Monumental architecture was for him the most powerful and decisive of all weapons, supremely vital, in fact, to military victory. This is also why Hitler sought to destroy the monumental architecture of his enemies: not only the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow but also the skyscrapers of New York City. As Speer reveals in his second memoires, Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976), Hitler ordered the development of long-range bombers that could reach New York and destroy its famed skyscrapers, which he saw as key to the global power and prestige of the United States. The program to build these bombers was eventually cancelled, but Speer noted that Hitler fantasized about turning the skyscrapers of New York “into gigantic, burning torches” (87).

            When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin interrupted the construction of the Palace of the Soviets and ordered that its steel frames were used to build fortifications and other defenses (construction never resumed). Hitler, in contrast, insisted on continuing with the works in Berlin, which by then employed 35,000 workers. In July 1941, a month into the Russian campaign, Speer failed to convince Hitler to stop construction. “He would not hear of any restrictions and refused to divert the material and labor for his private buildings to war industries anymore.” In September 1941, when the advance in Russia was stalling, “Hitler ordered sizable increases in our contracts for granite purchases from Sweden, Norway, and Finland for my big Berlin and Nuremberg buildings.” On November 29, 1941, Hitler dismissed once again Speer’s concerns, and said bluntly, “I am not going to let the war keep me from accomplishing my plans.” By early December, the German army was facing a catastrophe in Russia due to the winter weather and the destruction of railroad lines. Speer told Hitler that most of the workers employed in Berlin should be urgently assigned to repair railroads in Russia. “Incredibly, it was two weeks before Hitler could bring himself to authorize this. On December 27, 1941, he at last issued the order” (185). Hitler’s prolonged refusal to divert manpower and resources from the massive buildings in Berlin confirms that he indeed saw them as the powerful fetishes that would “preserve” his early victories. Ironically, this obsession undermined German military might in the early months of the Russian campaign and may have contributed to its long-term defeat. If there was a body enthralled by the atmospheres created by monumental architecture it was that of Hitler himself. By May 1945, Berlin and Nazi Germany had been reduced to rubble.

The affective weaponization of monumental architecture by Nazi Germany is an extreme example of a spatial paradigm that is as old as empires. Speer’s and Hitler’s monumentality certainly has historically specific and distinctively fascist elements, such as its imitation of Roman and Greek classicism, its explicit celebration of state power, and its particularly delusional, fetishized megalomania. Yet many of its core architectural and affective principles live on in the present. This surfaces in one notable passage in which Speer sought to whitewash Nazi monumentality by referring to the monumentality of the present. After admitting the “chronic megalomania” of his architecture, he wrote that his designs “are not so excessive by present-day standards when skyscrapers and public buildings all over the world have reached similar proportions. Perhaps it was less their size than the way they violated the human scale that made them abnormal” (138, my emphasis). Speer appealed to a western audience’s familiarity with skyscrapers as normalized features of the modern world to retroactively present fascist megalomania as “not so excessive.” But in doing so, he actually brought to light that fascist megalomania is comparable to corporate forms of monumentality, and that both can be seen as equally “excessive” apparatuses of affective capture. When Speer argued that the “abnormality” of Nazi architecture was not its “size” but the way it “violated the human scale,” one can easily turn his play of words around and show that current monumentality is equally “abnormal” in its “violation” of “the human scale.” Isn’t the defining goal of monumentality to dwarf “the human scale” and present the body as miniscule? Haven’t skyscrapers surpassed in scale and “excess” anything Speer ever dreamed of?

Speer admits that Nazi monumentality was a “nouveau rich architecture of prestige” based on “pure spectacle” and “the urge to demonstrate one’s strength” (136, 69). He could as well be referring to the skyscrapers that currently define the skyline of New York, Shanghai, or Dubai. Hitler’s obsession to build “bigger” than other empires is easy to pathologize as the delusions of a “madman.” But the competitive zeal to build “bigger” has become a planetary phenomenon. That the tallest skyscrapers in the world are currently in the Persian Gulf and Asia simply replicates what the United States did in the early 1900s when it emerged as an imperial power: “the urge to demonstrate one’s strength.” The architectural face of the authoritarian capitalism of the twenty-first century is embodied in skyscrapers like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which at 830 meters (2,722 feet) high seeks to dazzle the bodies contemplating it from the ground while, at the same time, erasing that its phallic structure was built by a quasi-enslaved labor force.

Bruno Latour and other object-oriented ontologists would probably explain the power of monumental buildings to affect the body as resulting from their existence as huge objects (or, in Latour’s words, as actants with agency). But affective atmospheres are not the outcome of objects alone; they are also a function of the disposition of bodies to be affected by them in a particular way. Not all human bodies, needless to say, are dazzled by monumental architecture and affectively captured by its presence. Huge buildings are certainly more readily noticed, but throughout history many people have disregarded the mandate to be intimidated by their scale. Hitler’s veneration of Roman ruins as transcendental emblems of power, for instance, overlooked that for over a thousand years people in Rome disregarded those ruins as unimpressive piles of rubble, to be readily recycled as construction materials or used as pasture fields.

            A notable example of the subversion of the awe-inducing atmosphere cultivated by monumentality took place in the Paris World Fair of 1937. It was there that the monumental architecture of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union competed with each other at close range, for their pavilions faced each other. The Soviet design consisted of two huge human figures standing on a pedestal and charging ahead, as if about to overran the Nazi building. Speer designed the German pavilion, and wrote that he was able to see in Paris a secret sketch of the Soviet monument “striding triumphantly toward the German pavilion.” He decided to erect an enormous counter-monument: a solid, cubic mass “which seemed to be checking this onslaught.” The monument was crowned with an eagle with a swastika in its claws looking on the Soviet sculpture from above, therefore asserting its superiority. Both buildings won the fair’s “gold medal” (81). This “tie” symbolized that Nazi and Soviet architects were committed to similar forms of monumentality, designed to impress. The fact that the bourgeois monumentality of the Eiffel Tower stood a few hundred meters behind, as an equally assertive emblem of power, also reveals that despite their ideological differences all these different monuments were designed as affective weapons intended to create a bodily state of respect.

This is why the true spatial confrontation at the Paris World Fair lay elsewhere, opposing these monuments to the small pavilion of the Spanish Republic, which was then going through a dramatic revolution and civil war. The Spanish pavilion was made up of a modest, two-story building that housed a painting whose affective power was to outlive that of the German and Soviet monuments: the Guernica by Pablo Picasso, which was commissioned for the fair. Capturing the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German warplanes fighting for Franco against the Spanish Republic, Picasso’s painting drew multitudes as an emblem of the destruction and suffering created by war and fascism. The atmosphere of fragmentation, multiplicity, bodily rupture, and negativity created by Picasso stood in opposition to the fantasy of wholeness and totality embodied by the Nazi and Soviet monuments. Whereas the German and Soviet pavilions exuded transcendence, the pavilion of the Spanish Republic exuded the immanence of rubble.

As I argue in Rubble, those who cherish monumentality are inherently hostile to rubble, for they are terrified of rubble’s voiding of positive space. Hitler’s and Speer’s celebration of grand “ruins,” it is worth noting, made them feel contempt for (and fear of) “mere rubble.” If monumental architecture stands for Being-as-One (The People’s Hall, The Palace of the Soviets, The Empire State Building, the Burj Khalifa), rubble stands for the opposite: the pure multiplicity of being and therefore, following Badiou’s ontology, the figure of the void. The Guernica’s affective power during the 1937 World Fair was its capacity to immerse the observer in a visual void that was as unsettling as it was generative. Its generative negativity revealed that the huge structures standing nearby were modern-day totems, monuments to hubris built to deflect the destruction that was constitutive of their materiality and that the destiny of all buildings, irrespective of their size, is to be reduced to the assertive nothingness of rubble.