We understand that working for an evil client must be frustrating. If it’s not, that’s only temporary. Repressing such frustration will only cause it to rise to the surface more dramatically later. One of the reasons we are teaching this studio is that architects have not developed a theoretical toolbox for dealing with evil. It’s the task of the studio members to develop such a toolbox this term. Social psychologists—for example, Stanley Milgram, who we have already mentioned here—have spent a great deal of time thinking about such matters.
To start the process of building the toolbox, every student should suggest an addition to it via Tumblr in the next week (most of you have been very good about posting to Tumblr… which is important since it is part of your grade).
I’ll start off with this post, a link to the wikipedia entry on Cognitive Dissonance, a disorder which is common to situations where people work for others that they don’t agree with. Cognitive Dissonance is the result of trying to hold two contradictory beliefs simultanously. Now, cognitive dissonance is clearly not a successful strategy as given, yet it is the most common way of dealing with the conditions we are facing in studio (in our studio, for example, it is easy to rationalize that the condition is not real so you can do anything you want, but that would be a mistake). What might a direct consequence of cognitive dissonace be in architecture?
This notion of a ‘toolbox’ for dealing with evil is a really interesting one. It confuses me in the sense that the a ‘toolbox’ denotes something positive, something productive - but in reality we’re often talking about coping mechanisms and not ways to morally resolve our situation. Which is what cognitive dissonance is an example of. I wanted to add another option to this theoretical toolbox.
Has anyone in studio watched “Waltz with Bashir?” It’s a movie that came out last year and documents an Israeli ex-soldier’s attempt to figure out where he was and what he did in Lebanon during the first Lebanese War (in the early 1980s). He can’t remember anything from the time leading up to the Sabra and Shatila massacre (one of the worst atrocities in any recent war). He knows that he likely had something to do with the massacre of thousands of Palestinians that night, but he can’t remember anything. So, the idea is that he tracks down people he knew he was with in the army, and their commanders, to try to piece together a picture of where he was during the Massacre. At one point in the film, he interviews a Post-Trauma specialist psychologist who recounts another soldier’s method of coping to him. She says:
“I asked him in 1983, ‘How did you survive through that grueling war?’
He replied, ‘It was quite easy. I regarded it as a long day trip.’
He told himself, ‘Wow, what great scenes: Shooting, artillery, wounded people, screaming…’ He looked at everything as if through an imaginary camera.
Then something happened: His camera broke.
He saw a huge number of carcasses of slaughtered Arabian horses. ‘It broke my heart,’ he said. ‘What had those horses done to deserve such suffering?’ He couldn’t handle those dead and wounded horses.
He had used a mechanism to remain outside of events, as if watching the war on film instead of participating. This protected him. Once pulled into the events, he could no longer deny reality. Horror surrounded him and he freaked out.”
So, the ideas is that it’s easy to distance yourself from events using a “mechanism,” I’m thinking specifically of cynicism and irony. I think for architects in particular, we’re able to stay relatively far away from the realities of daily life for the people we build for. Designing CCTV (or the highways, or whatever), it’s an easy thing to see the users as operators in a deeply ironic system that, to us, as trivial and ever-changing (I.e. Sloterdijk’s “A critic of cynical reason”). At least for me, I’m constantly in danger of using cynicism and irony as a mechanism to distance myself from the realities of the situations we’re looking at. I don’t know specifically what I would call this element of denial and distance, but I wanted to add it in the mix and mention that “Waltz with Bashir” is an incredible study in the issues we’re dealing with (denial, memory, participation in evil, and so on). I can lend it to anyone who wants to see it!
