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Eyal Weizman

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Eyal Weizman Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums / Forensische Architektur: Notizen von Feldern und Foren

Eyal Weizman Forensic

Architecture: Notes from Fields

and Forums / Forensische Architektur: Notizen von

Feldern und Foren

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Eyal Weizman Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums

The Pyramids of Gaza

The pyramids of Gaza, so a Forensic Architect once told me, proliferate throughout the Strip, but are most commonly seen in the camps and neighborhoods that ring Gaza City and along the short border to Egypt. They are the result, he said, of an encounter between two familiar elements in the area—a three-story residential building, of the kind that provides a home for refugees, and an armored Caterpillar D9 bull- dozer. While the bulldozer circles the building, its short shovel can reach and topple only the peripheral columns. The internal columns are left intact, forming the peak of the pyramid. The !oor slabs break at their approximate center,

around the crest, then fold down and outward to form the faces of the structure. The geometry of the pyramids of Gaza is less ideal than that of the Pyramids of Giza. Their irregularities regis- ter differences in the process of construction— the uneven spread of concrete, for example— or in the process of destruction—the inability (or reluctance) of the bulldozer operator to go completely around the building. Sometimes, the irregularity is a result of a previous "re"ght or a tank shell, shot at a corner of the building to hasten the departure of its inhabitants. Near the border, one can sometimes see a fallen pyramid that has sunk into a collapsed tunnel. Partially exposed under the "ne sands of Rafah, the scene resembles that of a colonial-era archaeo- logical expedition.

The Era of Forensics

Within the "eld of war-crime investigation, a methodological shift has recently led to a certain blurring. The primacy accorded to the witness and to the subjective and linguistic dimension of testimony, trauma, and memory—a primacy that has had such an enormous cultural, aesthet- ic, and political in!uence that it has reframed the end of the twentieth century as “the era of the witness”—is gradually being supplemented

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(not to say bypassed) by an emergent forensic sensibility, an object-oriented juridical culture immersed in matter and materialities, in code and form, and in the presentation of scienti"c investigations by experts.

The Surface of the Earth

With the urbanization of con!ict, architecture has become the pathology of this era. Geospa- tial data, maps and models of cities and territo- ries, the “enhanced vision” of remote sensing, 3-D scans, air and ground sampling, and high- resolution satellite imagery redraw the surface of the earth in variable resolutions from the bot- tom of the seabed to the remnants of bombed- out buildings.

The surface of the earth—now increasingly called upon to perform as evidence/witness in political negotiations, international tribunals, and fact-"nding missions—has a certain thick- ness, but it could not be considered a volume. It is not an isolated, distinct, stand-alone object, and nor did it ever “replace” the subject; rather, it is a thick fabric of complex relations, associa- tions, and chains of actions between people, en- vironments, and arti"ces. It inevitably over!ows any map that tries to frame it, because there are always more connections to be made.

Surface Pathology

In this context, architecture is both sensor and agent.

Sensor, in what way? We think of architecture as a static thing,

but physical structures and built environments are elastic and responsive. Architecture, I once proposed, is “political plastic”—social forces slowing into form.1 This is true on the scale of a building and also on that of larger territories.

Buildings undergo constant deformations: structures are said to “behave” in response to forces, and buildings are said to “perform” (or mis-perform) in relation to program.

It takes years for trapped air bubbles to make their way between paint layers and structure; the path and rate of their crawl depending on larger environmental conditions and their con- stant !uctuations; walls gradually bend and ceilings sag. Deterioration and erosion continue the builders’ processes of form-making. Cracks make their way from geologic formations across city surfaces to buildings and architectural de- tails. Moving within and across inert matter and built structures, they connect mineral forma- tions and arti"cial constructions. They appear and disappear, continuously translating force contradictions into their lines of least resis- tance. The structural pathology of a building is

1 | Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occu- pation (London: Verso, 2007).

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a diagram that records the in!uence of an en- tangled and potentially in"nite political/natural environment, registering year-on-year tempera- ture changes, almost imperceptible !uctuations in humidity and pollution, which are themselves indications of political transformations, pat- terns, and tendencies.

A blast, however, marks a limit to the respon- sive elasticity of built structures. An explosion causes a rapid release of energy in the form of sound, heat, and shock waves. The shock wave travels across the structure, increasing pressure on the walls and !oor slabs. External walls bend inward, reaching their point of no return, and snap, initiating a progressive collapse. Floors pancake onto one another. Air is sucked in to "ll the vacuum, carrying !ying glass, steel, and stone. In today’s wars, people die when bits of their homes come !ying at them at high speed. Later, when these fragments settle across larger areas, the way in which they do so might be in- terpreted as evidence.

Forum

Derived from the Latin forensis, the word “fo- rensics” refers at root to “forum.” Forensics is thus the art of the forum—the practice and skill of presenting an argument before a professional,

political, or legal gathering. Forensics is in this sense part of rhetoric, which concerns speech. However, it includes not only human speech but also that of things.

Because objects cannot actually speak, there is a need for a “translator” or an “interpreter”— a person or a set of technologies to mediate between the thing and the forum. This was once the role of the rhetoricians who used a technique that the Greeks and Romans called prosopopoeia—a mode of speaking on behalf of inanimate objects—and is now the role of the scientist as expert witness. In discussing “giving a voice to things to which nature has not given a voice,” the rhetorician Quintilian writes of the power of prosopopoeia not only to “evoke the dead”—as forensic pathologists do in international tribunals today—but of “giv- ing voices to cities and states”2—the thick sur- faces of Forensic Architecture.

Forensics thus organizes the relation among three constituents: a thing, an “interpreter,” and a forum. Because the thing and its “inter- preter” make up an entangled rhetorical tech- nology, in order to refute a forensic statement it is necessary to dismantle its mechanisms of articulation, which means to show either that the object is inauthentic, that its interpreter is biased, or that the communication between them is short-circuited.

2 | Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, bk. 9, ch. 2.

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Forensic Aesthetics

Forensics thus includes both !eldwork and fo- rum work. It is not only about science as a tool of investigation—the !eld—but about science as a means of persuasion—the forum.

It is crucially about conviction—not that of other scientists (as in a regulated process of peer review) but that of judges, juries, or publics. Forensic Aesthetics is the mode of appearance of things in forums—the gestures, techniques, and technologies of demonstration; methods of the- atricality, narrative, and dramatization; image enhancement and technologies of projection; the creation and demolition of reputation, cred- ibility, and competence.3

Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture refers to the work of ex- pert witnesses who present structural analysis in a legal context. Their practice combines the principles of property surveying, structural engineering, the physics of blast forces, and the chemistry of composite materials. In that sense, Forensic Architecture is the archaeology of the very recent past, but it must also be a form of assembling for the future. The latter is a

projective practice engaged with inventing and constructing the forums yet to come.

In war-crime investigations, the evidence most often precedes the forum. It is around found evidence—the thick surfaces of mass graves in Rwanda, Guatemala, or Bosnia, for example—that new forums assemble. The fo- rum will emerge around the building that is destroyed. But the forum is not a given space; rather, it is produced through a series of entan- gled performances.

Each of its expansions is also a transforma- tion. When the forum already exists, the entry into it of new types of objects, technologies of interpretation, or new types of representation will not simply expand but also transform it. The protocols and languages of the forum will be reorganized around new aesthetic, material, and systemic demands. Forums are immanent, contingent, diffused, and networked; they ap- pear and disappear; they expand and contract, or simply burst like soap bubbles and disappear.

Sub/Ob-jective Probability

In a recent international trial, a controversy surrounding the causes for the destruction of a particular building erupted. The scenario described by the defense and the prosecution

3 | This was the title of a series of seminars that I taught with Thomas Keenan and Nikolaus Hirsch at the Städelschule in Frankfurt /Main in the academic year 2010–11, www. staedelschule.de/ forensic_aesthetics_d. html (accessed October 2011).

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varied considerably. An expert witness was asked to study the particular disposition of the rubble, now scattered throughout a large area, in order to determine which of the scenarios was correct or closest. The threshold of prob- ability requested was 85 percent.

Probability measures the likelihood that an event will have occurred. Probability could thus be understood as the way in which doubt exists in relation to objects. Debates, disagreements, and cross investigations are about reducing or increasing the balance of probabilities.

Philosopher Ian Hacking has explained that probability has both subjective and objective meanings. “Subjective probability,” he claims, has to do with evaluating the authority of wit- nesses—traditionally in terms of social status, nobility, or wealth. In this sense the term “prob- able” meant something like credible or approv- able, and appealed to authority and consensus; thus, as the eighteenth century was about to close, Edward Gibbon could still write in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- pire that “such a fact is probable but undoubt- edly false,” without feeling any contradiction. “Objective probability,” on the other hand, re- lates to the properties of the object or phenom- enon under analysis.4 In the mid-seventeenth century, the second meaning of probability started shifting the "rst. But the two continu- ously intertwine and entangle; forensics is about

the probability of the expert to decipher the probability of the events as marked on the sur- face of the earth.

Schrödinger’s House

If, as quantum mechanics has it, all options within the spectrum of probability exist simul- taneously until an act of observation forces one option into exclusive existence, then Schröding- er’s cat is indeed both living and dead, and the wartime ruin, the house where she might have lived, has been twice destroyed, once by each of the scenarios proposed in the above trial.5

Science and law measure truth as a position on a variable scale of probability. Terms such as the “balance of probability” and “beyond a reasonable doubt” reveal the constant ticking of probability calculations. Scienti"c literature simply notes the measure of uncertainty and the margin of error; but law—like politics— must render decisions, even if those decisions are based on a fuzzy forensics of probabilities. Decision, if the word is to merit its name, is to be taken in excess of calculations. It will, most often, kill the cat.

Aesthetics, as the judgment of the senses, is what rearranges the "eld of options and their perceived likelihood and cuts through

4 | Ian Hacking, “The Unity and Diver- sity of Probability: Comment: In Praise of the Diversity of Probabilities,” Statisti- cal Science 5, no. 4 (November 1990), pp. 450–54. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philoso- phical Study of Early Ideas about Probabil- ity, Induction and Statistical Inference, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [orig. 1975]).

5 | “Schrödinger’s Cat” was a thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, which he described as follows in the journal Natur- wissenschaften: “A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probabil- ity, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shat- ters a small !ask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi- function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the

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probability’s economy of calculation. The word “conviction” could thus draw a line between the legal verdict of “guilty” and the subjective sen- sation of constructed belief.

If law and politics are based on ruptural decisions, must the practice of history follow suit? Could it rather remain faithful to the non- mutually exclusive nature of probability? Should there be two or rather several memorials to acts of destruction built side by side? If so, how does one avoid this practice falling into the hands of historical revisionists?

Material Proportionality

If probability measures the correct balance be- tween con"rmation and refutation, the inter- national law principle of proportionality comes to determine the correct balance between rights and wrongs, common goods and necessary evils. The principle of proportionality operates by conjuring an economy in which good and bad things could be measured, balanced, transferred, and traded. The question of violence comes to resemble a mathematical-minimum problem in the economy of variations. It is in its attempt to reduce violence to its lowest level possible that proportionality becomes the contemporary manif estation of Pangloss’ Leibnizian principle

(or is it Leibniz’s Panglossian principle?) of “the best of all possible worlds.”

If proportionality is about the “too much,” then we must ask how much is too much?

In the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon instructed its bombers to try to limit to twenty-nine the number of civilians killed in attacks aimed at political leaders. The thirtieth civilian marked the threshold between sacri"ce and crime. An attempt was then made to apply this necro-economy to the precise destruc- tion of building parts—an art of “design by de- struction” that translated projected casualties to removing building parts. Material proportionality should be the name for the process by which the economy of violence intersects with the science of engineering and the shaping of ruins.

If sovereignty is best understood as the power to calculate on behalf of others, then the evasion of its power is best exercised in making one’s actions incalculable or immeasurable.

Trials of Things

Buildings are agents in what way? Built environments are composite assem-

blies of structures, spaces, infrastructure, ser- vices, and technologies with a certain capac- ity to act and interact with their surroundings.

expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts. In other words, while it is in the closed box Schrödinger’s cat is in an indeterminate state. After an hour this state is described by the sum of two waves in equal proportions— one for the ‘alive’ state of the cat and the other for its ‘dead’ state.” www.tcd.ie/Physics/ Schools/what/atoms/ quantum/cat.html (ac- cessed October 2011).

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They structure rather than simply frame events, although never perfectly so.

The attribution of liability to material things is almost as old as law itself. It can be traced to the origins of ancient Greece, where a class of Athenian judges presided over a spe- cial court in charge of cases brought against unknown agents and inanimate objects. Miguel Tamen, who discussed this capacity of things, described a curious incident in which a statue of Theagenes made after the athlete’s death was beaten by one of his rivals by way of revenge, until the statue fell and killed him. The statue was put on trial for murder, judged guilty, and thrown into the sea, only to be reinstated years later.6

The proportionality principle of internatio- nal humanitarian law offers a contemporary method of passing judgment on things.

The trials of the West Bank Separation Wall in Jerusalem, for example, were not trials of people but rather trials of an apparatus. Instead of witnesses, maps and territorial models were called in. Proportionality was used as the legal measure to judge and moderate the behavior of the wall. The wall was found to disproportion- ately violate an entire territory that included people, "elds, houses, roads, military bases, colonies. The verdict demanded that the appa- ratus should change its route—into what was later argued to be “the best of all possible walls”;

and so aggressive acts of colonization and dis- possession were presented as a tragic necessity administered with care and responsibility.

Forensic Fetishism

In the wake of the war-crime investigations fol- lowing Israel’s 2008/9 attack on Gaza, one of the world’s foremost Forensic Architects, as- sembling evidence against the military, was sus- pended when it was publicly revealed—to great media fanfare—that he was a collector of Nazi- era fetish items, and thus allegedly unsuited to investigating the Israeli military impartially. I thought that, if true, the fact that he had such a collection should, to the contrary, increase his credibility (or shall we say his probability?).

If fetishism is the attribution of an inher- ent power and a certain agency to inanimate objects, then what do we expect those experts who speak to buildings and cities (and expect- ing them to speak back) to be?

Beyond its manifestation in commodity or sexual form, it is in forensics that the fetish is most commonly manifested today. Here, the fetish is not the mystifying and obfus- cating veil that masks the true way in which objects are made in the world—a feature of capitalism that Marx identi"ed in commodity

6 | Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 2004), pp. 79–80.

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fetishism— or the part that stands for the lack of the whole. On the contrary: under the micro- physical lens of methodological fetishism, it is in the part that we can "nd folded into the fab- ric of complex social relations, imprinted polit- ical forces, inscribed events; conjunctions of actors and logics of practice are not crushed on the object but rather traverse it, sometimes held together by it.

This conjunction of forensics and fetish is a rather comical reference to what—in a polemic against iconoclastic critique—Bruno Latour called the “factish,” a term that merges the objectivity of facts with the mysterious at- traction and autonomous power of fetishes.7

The Destruction of Destruction

If fetishes are to be destroyed by their mod- ern enemies, what fate should be reserved for a fetish that is already a ruin? How to destroy the destruction?

In the spring of 2009, the Gaza-based and Hamas-run Ministry of Public Works and Housing compiled an astounding archive con- taining thousands of entries, each documenting a single building that was completely or partially

destroyed, from cracked walls to houses reduced to rubble. Each entry in this book of destruction included a single, frontal-view photograph displaying a catalogue number spray-painted onto the ruin itself.

Each "le also recorded how the damage to the building was in!icted: “destroyed by armored D9 bulldozers,” “bombed from the air,” “shelled from the ground,” “directly tar- geted,” “indirectly struck,” or subject to “con- trolled demolition by explosives”; the state of the building: “reduced to rubble,” “partially destroyed,” or “still standing but dangerous and requiring demolition.” In reconstructing histo- ries of violence from the trash and rubble left behind, this archive is another instance of Foren- sic Architecture. Both practical and political, its forensics escapes, however, the limited frame of international law.

The destruction of refugee camps is often understood as “the destruction of destruc- tion”—the destruction of the destruction of Palestine. The camp is not a home; it is a tem- porary arrangement. Its rubble is the last itera- tion in an ongoing process of destruction that connects the destroyed village of 1948 to the destroyed camp of 2009, but the destruction of the latter is also interpreted as possessing a re- storative potential.

What could the forensics of the “destruction of destruction” be?

7 | Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, N. Car.: Duke University Press, 2010).

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The twelfth-century Andalusian scholar ibn-Rushd (Averroes) penned a treatise of this very name—Tahafut al-Tahafut—in which he refuted the refutation of classical philosophy proposed by Su" ascetic Ghazali in his eleventh century Tahafut al-Falasifa.

So is it the refutation of the displacement, a proto-Hegelian negation of the negation, here applied to the realm of political domesticity? Should we be packing up for return, when all we can do is to clear up the mess and rubble, destroy the fetish of the pyramids, recycle their components, and start rebuilding the camp all over again, and better this time?

Rebuilding the camp does not stand in con- tradiction to return; rather, it is its precondi- tion.8

London, October 2011

The author’s gratitude goes to Anselm Franke, Thomas Keenan, Francesco Sebregondi, Hito Steyerl, Susan Schuppli, and Ines Weizman.

Eyal Weizman (b. 1970) is an architect based in London; he runs “Forensic Architecture”, a European Research Council project, at Goldsmiths, University of London.

8 | Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal Weizman, Book of Return, Decolonizing Archi- tecture Art Residency, September 2009, www.decolonizing.ps (accessed October 2011).