Albania celebrates | The Culture of Independence and the Unmaking (i.e. Redesigning) of Skanderbeg’s legacy

MVRV design proposals in Tirana, screenshots via

A state-run institution whose disposition is composed of half-truths, and whose sensibility and form is in the habit of wearing — thus bearing — only two masks: its own take on (tacky) kitsch, a mannerism not to be confused with vernacular, and its public ‘at work’ image that depicts the same short-sightedness of any social media ad campaign, hence an interfaciality laced with insecurities and conceit — which it then promotes as CULTURE — can be very telling, namely in revealing its agency as the inability to grasp and accept the shared reality it imposes its ‘legitimacy’ on, thus pretending to educate those living in it so to ‘cultivate’ it; when, in fact, it is this legitimacy that gets cultivated to become its main legacy — CULTURE.
The answer to the question What does CULTURE (have to) celebrate, then? is quite simple: self-preservation, namely its ability to suspend a shared reality in favor of a hegemonic one that hangs suspended over it as to cast the deepest shadow with the blindest of lights (i.e. half-truths), so to render people’s perception and consciousness obsolete, namely their bearings of and in any reality.

 

MVRV design proposals in Tirana, screenshots via

Cultural Hegemony deceives people into ceding their faculties, thus freedom, in favor of a universal reality hinged on this exact cognitive disorientation, which it then proceeds to stabilize — i.e. manipulate into acceptance — through erasure (of their shared past) and abstraction (of its continued imposition on them), thus normalizing specter as a totality where a potent panoptic gaze blinds lives into spectrality. Such a celebration then becomes nothing more than an omnipresent surveillance, better known as CULTURAL NORM.

The survival instinct from the loss of one reality persists as consumption of and over-indulgence in the other, with neither realities being fully grasped. Such a living, at the edge of two unknowns, might as well be resignified as a life in and of unknown unknowns — though the edge itself marks a duration that is persistently historical. Hegemony limits the chances and choices of an intelligible reality by reducing this duration — i.e. mental health — to a coping mechanism. So power becomes the only intelligence able to draw a(ny) distinction — devising the line, the edge, the limit, and even the history of the reality it forcefully offers. A reality that starts as discrimination is then cultivated into a stability, thus becoming the only way of life. As it appears and it is perceived as a ‘stable’ reality, it assumes autonomy, hence responsibility to secure its own duration — i.e. self-preservation and legacy.

via

As a powerful device (e.g. tool, weapon, mechanism) of enunciation, CULTURE regulated as such works to increase the hegemonic choices of articulation. Hence, the responsibility of CULTURE is indeed to celebrate this stability in order to guard (i.e. surveil) its legacy. In fact, such a celebration seems to be its only agency — i.e. its ethical capability and aesthetic capacity. So, in this year of Skanderbeg, 500 years after his death, it’s not at all shocking, probably even fitting, for the state-run institution of CULTURE to celebrate itself instead.

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Masterplanning for the short run | In search of missing pieces

Is anyone else bothered by the increasingly common phenomena of adding the word ‘luxury’ to new developments or newly renovated architecture: luxury apartments, luxury stores, high-end galleries, etc.? Luxury then becomes a program all on its own, no matter the secondary use it is added to it. Luxury is the program of capital, and if we were to map all the places and spaces that are considered and promoted as such, we would have to think of the city as becoming-luxurious — a luxury to be afforded — thus increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible. Cities are not being diversified at all then, they are just being redeveloped into economic exclusion zones, unified around a sole stimuli, money. As a consequence, the city is increasingly dehumanized. 

Cultural assets have fallen prey to capital. Historical neighborhoods are turning into high-end commercial and financial centers. Private money is surely proving to be a better incentive than the polyphonic wellbeing of public heritage. If we were to ask how much a city is worth, we would have to also ask, how little is its past valued? We’re just starting to see the  quantification of such unfathomable equation (equity/equality) — its value — but it will take a long while to grasp its qualification (quality+fiction) — its weight. How much will it weigh on us? How much will we weigh in it?

As master of a regulatory plan that pretends to decentralize (much of what it takes away), the state-capital system works to internalize the flow of capital — thus normalizing the inequality it is based on and legitimizing the design of a new luxurious class. 

Masterplanning, then, as a blueprint and rendered image of redevelopment, becomes a way to reduce and streamline the city’s public heritage (both, its public + heritage) — abstracting the time and material history of a hundred(s) year old city — into this flow of capital, which in turn emerges as the manifest of (its) “quantification of power”, where “each member profits in his own way.” (1)

As it materializes in the city, capital’s influence is revealed to be greater than the city’s historical, natural, judicial and cultural resources — therein lies its undisputed (yet unchallenged) thus absolute power. Because of this unprecedented acceleration of dominance, capital may in fact be the only (if not truly) autonomous organism (species) of man’s progress.

Masterplanning in the age of capital is a strategy of isolation and restriction, which deepens class segregation by isolating access and opportunity as it takes over and deplets shared assets and resources. The masterplan is capital’s masterpiece. It is how capital metamorphoses in real space — colonizing bodies, spaces, and psyches, a total embodiment by design instituted by self-serving systems of governance, whose political rigidity reduces governing to policing in order to maintain the hegemony of the status-quo — to ensure their dictatorial genealogy lasts; and, whose aesthetic guard-ism manifests an image of uniformity under the “luxury” moniker. 

The masterdesign may promise a one-of-a-kind relationship with capital, though what it actually produces is an endless desire to (over) consume. Meaning: it doesn’t matter how luxurious the relationship with capital may be, it still produces a commodity, which makes capital quite a high-maintenance partner. The more access one is given to “consume” another, the more unrequited and all-consuming this relationship becomes. The masterdesign assures an almost immediate consumption of luxury, thus enabling an addiction that needs to be kept up just so one can function. In the end, this addiction is how the human species consumes itself. It reduces life to a basic existence that requires nonsensical constructs of unprecedented realities that the city (and environment in general) simply cannot capacitate and won’t ever be able to support if it continues to be looted by the intensity of the addiction to capital. Hence, the uniformity of luxury can be understood as a double-headed form of violence: first, as an exponentially multiplying unity (i.e. colonization) of cannibalistic consumption of (it)self as well as the city’s (and all it encompasses); and second, as a guardism (i.e. addiction) that “only reproduces itself when it is reproducing something new”. (2)

Luxury is a product of power. It designates how power is seized, distributed and enforced. It is the incentive to re-categorize what at one time or another, but for a long time, was shared by many publics. It is a remastering of the human, its environment, and the master[ed]pieces it has created (as well as its not yet fulfilled potentialities) in a way that maximizes or mastermizes profit. As evidenced thus far, suc
h remastering or reduction is a total (planetary) redesign toward extinction of life as we perceive it, as we understand it, as we live it. We don’t have to know it anymore, as long as we consume it and as long as it becomes easily digested and digestible.

What’s even more curious is the coupling of the ‘luxury’ program with pedestrian activity and green spaces, such as these areas are the first to have biking and pedestrian lanes, greenery, maybe a water feature or two, street lights, and so on. It is curious because when do we see a rich person walking? In developing countries, and especially in Albania, they tend to drive some of the most luxurious cars, that is, if they’re not chauffeured around. Walking is a practice of the masses; it is how the public processes its independence and individuality in and through the ever-changing city. What, then, does it mean to luxurize the space of walking, if not to transform the individual, the public, the masses into spectral beings? (3) 

Such is the dogma of masterplanning for the short run. Short, implies an extinction — while run, implies a blur. It’s no secret that I am not a fan of the word “masterplan” and what it currently consists of. I would rather ask how a regulatory plan is and can be mastered. What is it to plan and what does it mean to designate? What is it to design and what does it mean to master the self and the other? I would rather mine a masterplan than interpret it, but it is hard to ask questions when so little is made available prior to (the decision of its) execution. 

I read somewhere — can’t exactly remember where at this moment, but it said something to this effect — that, we might’ve sold our souls or even want to do so, but who’s buying?

With everything that’s happening in the world, I wonder how much (and for how long) we would weigh without one; and if our road to extinction would be heavier or lighter as result. I don’t mean soul in a romantic or religious way, but soul as a force of life, essential to its being its essence, or rather what makes human life possible: mind, heart, will, integrity, intelligence, empathy, consciousness, health, language, politics, shared space, etc.

As far as Tirana (or any other such developing city in Albania) is concerned, I cannot imagine what would its architects and urbanists talk about in local or international conferences and seminars on history and preservation. If until now there was a preserved and protected architectural district or building to talk about, from this moment on it would be hypocritical to assert any historical standing. I guess there’s always nostalgia to fall back on.

(1) Deleuze & Guattari, On the Line, 1983, Semiotext(e)

(2) ibid.

(3) Arjun Appadurai, Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai

Gentle Manifest | We’ve Never Been Public

The Paradox of Public (&) Design: Public Space and Nuances of Freedom

In order to reflect on or provide an answer to the question in the photo, let’s consider reframing it by breaking it down further: Does Public imply a liberation of sorts; a freeing from one’s own fascism; a release of it even? Does it promise a community — (of) shared values and struggles? Is it a shared reality? Is there a correlation between the freedom of a society and the one its public space enables? What can the spatiality of a public (space) — its planning and design in the city — tell us about the (nuanced) freedom of its society? Has the public in Albania ever been free to organize and protest — to not just be organized to celebrate something, but to question, to dissent it — without being subjected to various (political, social, economic) repercussions?

Public is a word that defies definition — said differently — any definition it takes on, in one way or another, constricts the freedom it might imply, thus revealing the impossibility of its totality — its absolute materializon. Hence, any effort to outline or plan it is in fact the designer’s own construction of reality, how s/he perceives and imagines the reality s/he shares with others, a constructed — be it constructive or constrictive — commons. There exist forces beyond the designer’s control of course, and that needs to be taken into account — but, as the public (space) becomes a kind of commons that shapes and organizes — and to a certain degree predetermines — a kind of (freedom for the) community, then the responsibilities for its nuanced freedom (or lack thereof) should be shared among those who take on such a difficult task. If designers (whoever they might be: independent and individual members of the public, the state or private enterprises) take on such a (consciously) difficult task, then they take on both the privilege — the right to design a public — as well as the responsibility to ensure the rights of those they design for — their designated freedom — in it. Hence, public space can be thought of as a social contract way before it becomes a spatial one.

Since the freedom implied by the word public is just as elusive, the task of designing a(ny) public space can then be thought of as one of designating freedom, mobilizing it, giving it form. As a middleman of sort, or better yet as a translator that is able to materialize, to mold all those other (faceless or not) forces and idea(l)s into a public (space), the designer is in a position to read between the lines, to leverage one toward the freedom of the other, or for that matter to collude with one’s power against the other. Design can be a genuine or ingenious process of metamorphosis, no doubt. Though, more often than not, unfolding such a becoming — or design as an act of unfolding design as an image of becoming (a process of becoming in itself) — has revealed the latter as a Machiavellian scheme, in which invisible powers take on a public embodiment — hence its integrity — so to normalize their abstraction, hegemony, violence, and to further integrate — or make integral — their yet unforeseen ends. In this case, embodiment is not synonymous with empowerment, because a seemingly proportionate give-take exchange becomes in fact monopolized, a perpetual take(over) masked as a general and generous giving. As such, design becomes a closed loop, a vicious cycle. It doesn’t enable transformation nor a transition, but it assures the rebirth or recolonization of an already established hegemony.

Ethics is truly the substance and privilege of the designer.

Thus when I talk about a public, I am referring not only to the freedom it embodies, but the one it releases — the freedom it empowers. When I ask about the freedom of creativity and discovery, of resisting and becoming, I am not questioning it (them) in the designer, but i am inquiring about the freedom of those he designs for. How does the designer enable and share the same freedom(s) to the designee publics?

If public projects are described as open through the shapes of their form, their uninterrupted circulatory flow, their multi-program flexibility, their material transparency, and their environment sustainability — among others — then I want to know how these attributes enable the public in return. How do they designate bodies to access and discover their own, as well as their shared freedom in such a place? How does form, flow, flexibility, transparency, sustainability extend similar dimensions of tolerance to the public?

I take open here to imply a given degree of freedom. If we think of architecture as a framing of sorts, then the drawing, the plan, the building become both a device, a witness, a documentation — an artifact of the impossibility to capture or enclose all space — and a mechanism of unfolding it, to (both) discover its human(e) dimension(s) and to test its own (aesthetic and ethic) tolerance toward these dimensions. Why, then, in renderings or any visual documentation, public space is shown as a place of enchantment through recreational activities enabled by service-base programs (such as cafés, concerts, vendors, etc.), and not as a place that allows disenchantment too — where it is safe to protest — that accommodates different types of learning — that is bare from imposed propaganda — thus allowing a leisure of a different kind, an immersion in another sensory experience, that of trees, minerals, textures, sounds that are often drowned out by the spectacle of the images and artificial colors of the city? Why can’t I see or envision the flow, flexibility, transparency or sustainability of the public dimension(s) as tolerated by the enchanted image? Why am I not convinced by the community it portrays?

Because I know a few of its people and I am aware of the socio-economic context they inhabit. Their true shared values and struggles cannot be erased by the image — the opportunities to ameliorate should not be dictated by it either. The enchanted image doesn’t capture, distribute, nor encourage the disenchanted public it represents. It is interested in only redesigning its (designer + bigger forces) dimension of reality, because what good is a designer if s/he doesn’t design. It’s what separates them from their public. It is also the wrong way to go about the privilege and the responsibility given to one as a (public) designer. One should not forget nor dismiss the fact that the public, too, can be an ingenious co-designer. It is why every year, when the city shuts down for various mass-celebrations, I ask myself, it wouldn’t be that different to organize mass-resistances instead. Why is it so difficult to do though? This swelling of the public through planned distractions, why can’t it also become a way to somber it up — to lay it, the city and its institutions bare?

It might indeed be a privilege to be bumped up from a designated public to a designer, but a designer mustn’t forget that s/he will always be part of a community that shares a common reality, no matter how constrictive or constructive s/he designs it to be. The designer’s involvement then can be more than just privilege, it can become a choice to extend this freedom to their community — an invitation to design their livelihood together.

The question thus becomes, a two-parter: first, Which power (ethic) does the designer follow? and then, Which power (force or regime) does public form and livelihood follow?

In Albania, public space has always been designed through oppressive means, be they political or economic. Public livelihood has always been designed as a perpetual struggle to ensure continued dependence — not to encourage or allow independent thriving. It has always been a space that has enabled only the freedoms sanctioned by hegemony, as evident by its increasingly repressive public. The nuances of freedom its society has been subjected to for decades, if not centuries, hasn’t varied much, it has only deepened and normalized the shadows of its public. Bottom-up transgressions of these sanctions have always been harshly punished. But, enforced political mass-gatherings and state propaganda activities, which can also be considered (scaled-up) transgressions, are revered as the right to (practice) free-speech, as democracy at work.

So, who does public space and its public belong to, if not all? Has the public been deterritorialized from the impossibility of its enclosure, the openness and freedom inherent in it, only to be reterritorialized as a belonging to someone? And if its openness — to be shared by all without the fear of prosecution, to use it to speak up — has always been such an impossibility, can we (for sure) say that Albania has ever been truly public? Was it ever given the freedom to discover its own nuances of it? Is there such a freedom left anymore?

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Gentle Manifest | Diçka (për) rreth (nesh)

About Us (II)

Një nga qëllimet e kësaj faqeje është të çmitizojë:

(dmth)

Ajo mundohet të hedh poshtë mitet totale, ata që vendosen nga lart-poshtë dhe që pranohen nga të gjithë si të vërteta të plota — paçka se janë të rreme. E bën këtë thjesht duke vënë në pyetje padiskutueshmërinë e tyre, tashmë të normalizuar. Pyetjet që shtron mund të jenë të shumta, por aspak të tepërta. Ashtu siç një vepër mund të ketë disa përkthime, faqja i sheh këto pyetje si përkthime të ndryshme të kryeveprës së mitit — (dmth) më tepër si metodë përkthimi sesa interpretimi, apo një lloj interpretimi nëpërmjet përkthimit (if you will). Pyetjet si përkthim(e) duan të kuptojnë dhe të komunikojnë realitetin apo racionalizimin e mitit, sa më objektivisht, (dmth) pa ofruar përgjigje që s’i di, por duke patur (gjithmonë) parasysh se një farë subjektiviteti është i pashmangshëm (innate). Pra, ato mundësojnë (disa) realitete të ndryshme që mund të jenë ndrydhur apo dhe shuar nga gllabërimi formal i mitit, i realitetit që ai përcakton dhe projekton (design(ate)s) — që ai i jep formë. 

E di që mbase tingullon çuditshmëm, por këto janë realitetet reale, vërtetësia e të cilave qëndron në vetë faktin që ato vazhdojnë të mbijetojnë, edhe pse shpesh herë vetëm si fragmente të pangjashme. Ky është çmitizimi për të cilin flas — vënia në dyshim, nxitja, sfidimi, apo dhe kundërshtimi — nëpërmjet pyetjeve — i realitetit të vetëm (total) të mitit, i formës së autorizuar të tij, nga krerë — ndaj, dhe emërtimi i tij kryevepër. 

Nëse e shohim mitin si një largim apo izolim nga realiteti, një tjetërsim të realitetit që përjetojmë vetë dhe jo atij që na thonë se po e jetojmë (alienation) — atëherë, çmitizimi mund të kuptohet si një mënyrë çfamiljarizimi (estrangement) me realitetin despotik mitologjik. Prandaj dhe ngadonjëherë pyetjet apo pikëpamjet e faqes mund të duken pak uncanny, por i njëjti argument mund të bëhet dhe për çuditshmëritë që dëgjojmë në mitet e rradhës sot apo për ata që kemi besuar deri më sot. 

Nuk janë mite vetëm ata 5000, 500 apo dhe 50 vjeçarë, por dhe ata 5 vjeçarë, 5 mujorë apo dhe javorë. Fjala është për ata mite që vijnë nga lart-poshtë — ose më mirë, pyetjet janë për ata mite që pasi frymëzohen (pse jo, dhe që mund të shfrytëzohen) jashtë apo lart, zbresin — apo bien si stuhia që s’ke ç’i bën; apo mos hidhen fare si rrufe, nejse s’ka rëndësi si vijnë, por si formohen dhe si materializohen nga hiçi në një trup dhe hapësirë gjithpërfshirës(e). Mbase s’ka rëndësi nga vijnë, ashtu siç nuk kemi ç’ti bëjmë Nënës Natyrë kur materializohet, kur na përmbyt shiu në dimër dhe djersa në vapë. Mbase dhe kemi ç’ti bëjmë, dhe madje shumë — por dhe mund të jetë tepër vonë — s’i dihet — s’e dimë akoma. 

Po nuk mësuam si të bashkëjetojmë me të pa e zaptuar, dhe pa rrafshuar ekologjitë që ajo mundëson, atëherë po, që s’do kemi ç’ti bëjmë. Një mënyrë e të mësuari është çmësimi i jetesës imponuese që kemi ndërtuar në të, ashtu si dhe qëndrimit mbizotërues apo sjelljes sunduese ndaj saj. Ky çmësim është një mënyrë rimësimi, proper. Ashtu si dhe çmitizimi është një riparim realitetiti dhe racionaliteti — edhe pse nëpërmjet mënyrave jo aq racionale (si uncanny). “Ç” (un-) është një rezistencë e vazhdueshme ndaj mitizimit të përhershëm dhe realiteteve tona tashmë të brishta. Të paktën, Nënën Natyrë e shohim, e presim, e ndjekim, e ndjejmë, e vuajmë (në kohë reale), por miteve (“Babë(zi)ve Krye”) që formohen në një hapësirë abstrakte, në një vertikalitet midis resë dhe territorit — në një distancë virtuale që duket sa e lirë aq dhe e pafund, që s’duket, s’pritet dhe s’ndiqet hiç, por ama ndihet dhe vuhet akoma më shumë — kudo dhe kurdo — si t’ia bëjmë atyre?!

On language, PPPs and wrestling | In search of missing perspectives

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.” 

— Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse (1977)

While the world of politics and corporations, or the game which defines their culture, is often described as competitive, masterminded, as chess, and maybe even as a kind of media-centric theater, the life of the public realm has always been characterized as one of spectatorship and representation. Using this kind of language to organize and categorize the social — (as) they who do (in terms of gestures/moves) and they who receive (in terms of spectacle/spectator) — is one of power; one that constructs power/lessness and asserts its longevity. It is a language of inequality. Just like history is written by the winners, it seems to me that language has been deployed to preserve the legacy of masters. Hence, we need to find new ways to resist and subvert this language. What if we do not only refer to, but actually talk of politicians and corporations as they who take, who corrupt, and of publics as they who give, who are taken for? What if we approach and speak of spectatorship as resistance, and the public ‘lifestyle’ as struggle? What if we stop calling politic(ian)s and conglomerates leader(ship)s and start addressing them as dictator(ship)s? These questions might be too big or complex to take on, but not impossible to ask, especially when we realize that the master’s house will never be dismantled with the master’s tools. 

I bring this up because we often talk about politics, private interest, and public space from a position that ultimately separates them, at the juncture of their intersections. What if instead we approached them from a place within, from amidst their thickly entangled ecology — one that we would need to work our fingers through knots and to the bone, to decipher and make sense of its diverging threads? Hence, a transversal or sectional investigation of language as a construct of power might reveal a fuller spectrum of how these power relations are established. 

For example, let’s consider the Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in Albania. As the name suggests, PPPs are modeled in the form of a partnership where both parties have an equal standing and mutual benefits. Though, even with Public taking top billing, we can argue until we run out of breath about which P is what and which P gets what P(iece), but that’s beside the point here. The point is that, as an ecology of all three, PPP gives us a clear model through which to analyze, sort, and understand the Power relations between Public realm and Private interests, maybe in the same way we try understand the difference and dependency of the host/parasite couplings or a lovers’ discourse. The fact that such a model, a Partnership legally exists, on paper, doesn’t necessarily mean it is mutually fair, and it shouldn’t automatically legitimate its in situ practices. Bear with me here. 

If the public-private coupling continues to be described as a partnership in the already established language of masters, of power, on paper anyway, then it is important to understand that it will translate as one of inequality in deeds. 

It is not the position of the public nor that of the private that we need to watch closely, but that of the partnership (hence from within) which constitutes the construct of power and constraint of freedom, thus (the many degrees of) fairness. The parameters of the partnership fall under the tutelage or tyranny of the state, at least for now, which is in a position to leverage one against the other or both against the middle. Or maybe I’m giving it too much credit, too many sides. As a middleman of sorts, the state acts as both referee and judge, jury, executioner. The P of Partnership stands for Politic(ian)s. They administer public assets and resources. They sell said public assets and resources to the private. After enough such transactions, the state might eventually lose its leverage because it will have nothing else to sell. In a final act of despair, it may even give away its constituents’ data. So, the three P-s will not have the same capacity to P(lay) P(ower) anymore, nor will it ever be a multitude of P-s. They will be devoured into one — a kind of becoming P(anopticon). But still, the specter of the Public will haunt the partnership, lingering over its name. In its afterlife, the public becomes a myth. But what’s in a name, right?! I digress only to make the point that what might be a morose description of events here, thus unpopular opinion, it is in fact the reality of how language designs power and how it is designed  by it in return, in the language of masters.   

   

With the Public Private Politics (PPP) as the social model/medium/media for the 21st century Albania, it becomes all the more important to be able to find a new language, at least a different one, to deduce, describe, and deploy the P-s involved: Public, Private, Politics, Partnership, Play, Power. Seen from a different POV, the PPP model provides us with a language of struggle too, one that can dismantle that of power. So, for once, instead of seeing it through the eyes of competitive sports, the masterminding of chess or the melodrama of the theater, let’s look at it through the lens of something else — wrestling (for example) — which provides us with a much needed tactility of action and symbols, of gesture and exaggeration.

Below, I’ve shared a few excerpts from Barthes’ essay on wrestling, taken from his Mythologies book. He uses wrestling as a theoretical framework to critique the language of the so called mass-culture, which might be useful to us too, to understand that of the PPP. Keep in mind that the essay was written in the ‘50s and the book was published in the ‘70s, hence much has changed since then. Nonetheless, I found bits of it helpful in grasping the construct of power. It is even more interesting if you read it a second time (for our purpose here) without knowing which P is in the ring and which P is outside cheering or booing. We always assume the latter is the public, but what if that wasn’t the case?

(As it is taken out of the context, time and space of the writing, I recommend you read the entire essay to draw your own conclusions.)  

The World of Wrestling 

The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky […], it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid […] halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve. 

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.* […] True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest. [I]t abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees. 

[W]restling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result. 

Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him. […] Wrestling […] offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning. [A] man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness. 

This function of grandiloquence is indeed the same as that of ancient theatre, whose principle, language and props (masks and buskins) concurred in the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity. The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle. […]

Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot. As soon as the adversaries are in the ring, the public is overwhelmed with the obviousness of the roles. As in the theatre, each physical type expresses to excess the part which has been assigned to the contestant.

[…]

It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest. […] Wrestlers therefore have a physique as peremptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes and attitudes, the future contents of their parts [.]

The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight. But this seed proliferates, for it is at every turn during the fight, in each new situation, that the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment of a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture. The different strata of meaning throw light on each other, and form the most intelligible of spectacles. Wrestling is like a diacritic writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious. Sometimes the wrestler triumphs with a repulsive sneer while kneeling on the good sportsman; sometimes he gives the crowd a conceited smile which forebodes an early revenge; sometimes, pinned to the ground, he hits the floor ostentatiously to make evident to all the intolerable nature of his situation; and sometimes he erects a complicated set of signs meant to make the public understand that he legitimately personifies the ever-entertaining image of the grumbler, endlessly confabulating about his displeasure.  

We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of 'paying one's debts') always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall. It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art. Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler's gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true. 

Each moment in wrestling is therefore like an algebra which instantaneously unveils the relationship between a cause and its represented effect. Wrestling fans certainly experience a kind of intellectual pleasure in seeing the moral mechanism function so perfectly. […]

What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man's suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks. The wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm-lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction. It is obvious, of course, that in wrestling reserve would be out of place, since it is opposed to the voluntary ostentation of the spectacle, to this Exhibition of Suffering which is the very aim of the fight. This is why all the actions which produce suffering are particularly spectacular, like the gesture of a conjuror who holds out his cards clearly to the public. Suffering which appeared without intelligible cause would not be understood; a concealed action that was actually cruel would transgress the unwritten rules of wrestling and would have no more sociological efficacy than a mad or parasitic gesture. On the contrary suffering appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction, for everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers. What wrestlers call a hold, that is, any figure which allows one to immobilize the adversary indefinitely and to have him at one's mercy, has precisely the function of preparing in a conventional, therefore intelligible, fashion the spectacle of suffering, of methodically establishing the conditions of suffering. The inertia of the vanquished allows the (temporary) victor to settle in his cruelty and to convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer who is certain about the outcome of his actions; to grind the face of one's powerless adversary or to scrape his spine with one's fist with a deep and regular movement, or at least to produce the superficial appearance of such gestures: wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture. But here again, only the image is involved in the game, and the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle. 

There is another figure, more spectacular still than a hold; it is the forearm smash, this loud slap of the forearm, this embryonic punch with which one clouts the chest of one's adversary, and which is accompanied by a dull noise and the exaggerated sagging of a vanquished body. In the forearm smash, catastrophe is brought to the point of maximum obviousness, so much so that ultimately the gesture appears as no more than a symbol; this is going too far, this is transgressing the moral rules of wrestling, where all signs must be excessively clear, but must not let the intention of clarity be seen. The public then shouts 'He's laying it on!', not because it regrets the absence of real suffering, but because it condemns artifice: as in the theatre, one fails to put the part across as much by an excess of sincerity as by an excess of formalism. 

We have already seen to what extent wrestlers exploit the resources of a given physical style, developed and put to use in order to unfold before the eyes of the public a total image of Defeat. […] In wrestling, unlike judo, Defeat is not a conventional sign, abandoned as soon as it is understood; it is not an outcome, but quite the contrary, it is a duration, a display, it takes up the ancient myths of public Suffering and Humiliation: the cross and the pillory. It is as if the wrestler is crucified in broad daylight and in the sight of all. I have heard it said of a wrestler stretched on the ground 'He is dead, little Jesus, there, on the cross,' and these ironic words revealed the hidden roots of a spectacle which enacts the exact gestures of the most ancient purifications.

But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice. The idea of 'paying' is essential to wrestling, and the crowd's 'Give it to him' means above all else 'Make him pay'. This is therefore, needless to say, an immanent justice. [T]he crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of a deserved punishment. Wrestlers know very well how to play up to the capacity for indignation of the public by presenting the very limit of the concept of justice, this outermost zone of confrontation where it is enough to infringe the rules a little more to open the gates of a world without restraints. For a wrestling-fan, nothing is finer than the revengeful fury of a betrayed fighter who throws himself vehemently not on a successful opponent but on the smarting image of foul play. Naturally, it is the pattern of Justice which matters here, much more than its content: wrestling is above all a quantitative sequence of compensations (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth). […] Justice is therefore the embodiment of a possible transgression; it is from the fact that there is a Law that the spectacle of the passions which infringe it derives its value.

It is therefore easy to understand why out of five wrestling- matches, only about one is fair. One must realize, let it be repeated, that 'fairness' here is a role or a genre, as in the theatre the rules do not at all constitute a real constraint; they are the conventional appearance of fairness. So that in actual fact a fair fight is nothing but an exaggeratedly polite one [.] 

Conversely, foul play exists only in its excessive signs [.] Since Evil is the natural climate of wrestling, a fair fight has chiefly the value of being an exception. […]

Extrapolated, fair wrestling could lead only to boxing or judo, whereas true wrestling derives its originality from all the excesses which make it a spectacle and not a sport. The ending of a boxing- match or a judo-contest is abrupt, like the full-stop which closes a demonstration. The rhythm of wrestling is quite different, for its natural meaning is that of rhetorical amplification: the emotional magniloquence, the repeated paroxysms, the exasperation of the retorts can only find their natural outcome in the most baroque confusion. Some fights, among the most successful kind, are crowned by a final charivari, a sort of unrestrained fantasia where the rules, the laws of the genre, the referee's censuring and the limits of the ring are abolished, swept away by a triumphant disorder which overflows into the hall and carries off pell-mell wrestlers, seconds, referee and spectators. 

[…] What the public is looking for here is the gradual construction of a highly moral image: that of the perfect 'bastard'. One comes to wrestling in order to attend the continuing adventures of a single major leading character, permanent and multiform like Punch or Scapino, inventive in unexpected figures and yet always faithful to his role. The 'bastard' is here revealed as a Molière character or a 'portrait' by La Bruyère, that is to say as a classical entity, an essence, whose acts are only significant epiphenomena arranged in time. This stylized character does not belong to any particular nation or party […] the aficionado does not attribute to him any country except 'fairness' - observing the rules. 

What then is a 'bastard' for this audience composed in part, we are told, of people who are themselves outside the rules of society? Essentially someone unstable, who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes. He is unpredictable, therefore asocial. He takes refuge behind the law when he considers that it is in his favour, and breaks it when he finds it useful to do so. Sometimes he rejects the formal boundaries of the ring and goes on hitting an adversary legally protected by the ropes, sometimes he re-establishes these boundaries and claims the protection of what he did not respect a few minutes earlier. This inconsistency, far more than treachery or cruelty, sends the audience beside itself with rage: offended not in its morality but in its logic, it considers the contradiction of arguments as the basest of crimes. The forbidden move becomes dirty only when it destroys a quantitative equilibrium and disturbs the rigorous reckoning of compensations; what is condemned by the audience is not at all the transgression of insipid official rules, it is the lack of revenge, the absence of a punishment. So that there is nothing more exciting for a crowd than the grandiloquent kick given to a vanquished 'bastard'; the joy of punishing is at its climax when it is supported by a mathematical justification; contempt is then unrestrained. One is no longer dealing with a salaud but with a salope - the verbal gesture of the ultimate degradation. 

Such a precise finality demands that wrestling should be exactly what the public expects of it. Wrestlers, who are very experienced, know perfectly how to direct the spontaneous episodes of the fight so as to make them conform to the image which the public has of the great legendary themes of its mythology. A wrestler can irritate or disgust, he never disappoints, for he always accomplishes completely, by a progressive solidification of signs, what the public expects of him. […] What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.

When the hero or the villain of the drama, the man who was seen a few minutes earlier possessed by moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical sign, leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship. In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a justice which is at last intelligible.

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Gentle Manifest | A few words about us

As I revisit and rewrite parts of the manifest, the about us profile, for this site, I keep thinking about why the blog has lasted for as long as it has and why I continue to post and write bits (however fragmented, cryptic or undigested they might be). The quick answer is because the questions never end, but the truth is that the task of learning how to ask better questions hasn’t been that simple. The facts and fictions, the assertions and answers given to the public (myself being part of it) have been seldom clear, and at times contextually senseless. Hence, the persistence of the question why every time I succumb to the mental and physical exhaustion of keeping the blog/ facebook page up and running, voluntarily. It may or may not be a labor of love, unlike the trendy and unruffled pages that populate the ether, but it certainly is labor. It certainly is a struggle (especially for an introvert as myself): a struggle to think out loud, to write; a struggle to cope with a number of designers and projects that have grown numb to social problems, choosing to be intoxicated by a culture of consumption instead; a struggle to find peers, friends, and mentors to think independently and polemically with; a struggle to find the time and energy to be available to this space and the people and conversations in it, because whoever comes to it is the space, it wouldn’t exist otherwise. 

At the beginning, it was the struggle of not finding a space or community, an online forum (an architectural/urban one) to be a part of, outside of grad school and work. Now, I’d say, it is not so much out of love, although it is there, but out of the necessity for such a place — which occupies only a tiny and obscure thread really — that ups my determination to continue it. I am grateful too, for all the people I’ve found along the way, and with whom I share my thoughts and this space. [Feel free to tell me to get off my high horse.]

I understand that each why can be answered with a why not or a so what, thus I want to expand on it a bit more. The longer version might read at times like the work of Nietzsche’s undigested stones of history, or as a struggle in/of form, where windmills and labyrinths of the mind battle for sense, but such is the matter of an unfinished self, the us part of the blog, which, at this point in time, is positioned in the midst of and can be described only through the distance of setting aspirations for itself and not quite reaching them yet. [Hence, feedback is much appreciated.]

Initially, PERfACT(s) was meant as a virtual channel to communicate and express voices in formation, starting with mine, as a way to assemble and often dismantle myself, my position toward life, the world and how being a designer (we’re all designers really) might steer it a certain way or might not have any use in/for it. 

Throughout the years, it has become a process of discovering the self within and without a community that has been as familiar as it has been estranged to me (as an immigrant driven by a certain need to demystify some of the nostalgia that comes with longing). It has become a learning of and with the characters that have populated the posts, be they people, buildings, design concepts, cities or media — characters that have inhabited the space or were imagined in it and of it. It has become a growing with, through and along the distance of these relations, through a simultaneous curiosity and spectatorship, as much as growing weary of it too at times. 

The aim has always been to ask better questions, for a clearer and more in depth understanding of the context and the issues Albania faces — which might be specific to the country, but are not isolated from the rest of the world’s — as one way ofcontributing to the agency needed for a possible social and spatial change there. Another aim is to understand the role of design and designers in shaping such change. That is why I post ‘stuff’. 

I do think that our everyday life has been already and totally designed through an aesthetic that desensitizes courage, as it accelerates an extravagant and unrestrained fantasy (fetishizing hope in a way). I am not against imagination whatsoever, but I remain sceptic of how this source of creativity has been used by those in power, charged against those that are not. It has been deployed as a weapon to widen the gap of inequality, a gap that has been fantasized, imagined and now implemented at full speed. So, the intent has always been to unstuff the ‘stuff’, knowing all along that I’d fall short of properly unpacking most of it — which is the true or ideal aim of this endeavor.

The position taken here is one of simply showing how shockingly unfree design is today, how unfreely and repressively society has been designed. 

Even though, ours is not a direct approach of ‘boots on the ground’ activity, we are determined to contribute — at least to try to, within our limits, even if indirectly — to unravel this design as an anaesthetic tool and strategy (per N. Leach) through different latencies: efficiencies, possibilities, leverages, critiques, etc. — to speak for what the initial shock of design anaesthetics,  its ‘beauty‘ and ‘innovation’, render invisible and insignificant. 

We have always operated on a minor and often off key, a stammering of sorts (per D&G’s work on Kafka), always considering the and any creative act of design as one of resistance; as a process of demystification and stripping bare the stuffed progress too often mistaken as an even more ‘sustainable’ or ‘beneficial’ way toward democratization. 

So, yes, the page is political in that it is public and open to a multifaceted public, but it stands politically independent in regard to the already established party lines. We are political because the questions we ask are political. 

If everything is done by design, then how can we redesign our freedom? How do we redesign ourselves to unlearn the freedom we’ve been designated (assigned) by each passing or staying regime (be it political or economic)? If we predict a future through a design done today, driven by the aneasthetics of today, then would it be free at all? 

What we see happening in Albania and elsewhere is a redesign of hope, not freedom, with nothing left to chance other than the consequences of such a shortsighted design. 

The prospect of a future is the fundamental aspect of human life. It is the promise of freedom that everyone wants; many of us imagine this promise as hope, something to hope for, but only few take it on as life itself, as the courage to actually live freely day in and day out. For them, life itself is at stake. So, to pursue social and spatial change, we need to rethink the promise of freedom, to undesign it as hope and redesign it as courage, within ourselves but also and most importantly within the community we’re a part of and share our lives with, online and offline. 

As I write this, I realize that I am indeed speaking to myself first, as a way to understand my growth or what does it mean to change, but also, and as my personal and professional motto is Whitman’s famous verse “I contain multitudes”, I realize that each individual contains a public within, hence is political in the sense (to fully utilize the greek origin of the word pertaining to sense perception, perceptible, sensitive; aesthetics) of the distances (relationships) we construct (design) between thinking and doing, feeling and knowing, thus to change is to extend oneself outward (from without) toward other characters that make (but don’t necessarily define) us. This is courage. 

And this is what I and this page strive for, at the very least our endeavor has been many a lesson on (growth through) vulnerability and resilience. Said otherwise: PERfACT(s) has been and continues to be a stammering, an enunciation of vulnerable but persistent experiences of experimenting with form as/of formation. Hence, it approaches (it wants to, it tries to) design as the distance between form and formation. It approaches courage as a form of designing the self and the other (body politic, social body). It approaches critique as an inquiry into (1) the desensitization and perceptual stagnation of design; and (2) the legitimacy of known regimes of ‘freedom’. It also approaches critique as an assemblage of graspings and (s)crypts, which is not interested in the average of their multitude, but in the strength of the plurality that comes from their differences (per Bakhtin). And, ultimately, it approaches critique as another form of design(ing)/designation.

We agree with Hannah Arendt that freedom is something fundamentally strange, and to design it, or for design to achieve it, we can utilize its estrangement, our estrangement from it, not only as a creative device (per Shklovsky) but as a craft of resistance (per Brecht), which synthesizes political rigor (i.e. reality, i.e. act) and aesthetic freedom (i.e. ideology, i.e. myth or image) with a revolutionary (high historical) consciousness. 

Ultimately, we understand design as an organism (act+image) of survival and practice of freedom.

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Notes:

I use us and we to note that even though at the moment I am the only one that manages the page, there have been more than a few collaborations with others, as well as many contributors to the blog over the years. Another reason why, is the fact that the blog / page is more than just an extension of myself or my life; it has become a fluid organism (through commentary, discussions and troll messages) with an existence all its own, and to deny it as such is to pretend that I have it all under control.