Anarchitects
by Arlyn Culwick
Somewhere, in a Jo’burg more aesthetically and politically conscious than the one we currently imagine to exist, lurks a radical collective of public space architects…
Confronted with consumerist urban sprawl of pandemic proportions, the Collective plots a dramatic redress of post-Apartheid architectural evils. Tuscan facades, vast cookie-cutter property developments, class-oriented security paranoia, golf-estate-cum-English-manor fantasies: all must go.
The undulating spaces between Sandton and Centurion, known to some as the Filthy North, is a repository for the spoils of a vast consumerist empire. The Powers That Be create an army of middle-class drones, depleted of cultural richness and hungry to display newfound material wealth. By reducing consciousness to nothing more than the generic, populations are suckered into wanting the same thing. This creates mass markets out of thin air, generating superefficient production, yielding endless income from endless consumption. Genius at its most evil, certainly. And so, like semiotic robin hoods, the Collective steals cultural value from the generic and crass, and puts it in the hands of the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the forgotten. Aged vernaculars, quirky originals, subtleties, richness, and soul must be liberated from the shackles of late Capitalism.
True to the character of many an anarchist on the fringe, the Collective resolves to use symbolic violence as its method of attack. The objective: communicate their opinions to the public, educate them, scare them into wakefulness. They are provocateurs, performance artists, cultural practitioners, vigilantes for a noble cause. Spaces must be skilfully appropriated, untruthful architectures defamed, and the whole symbology of the Northern Suburbs made a mockery of.
Thus, they come upon a perfect target, an archetype of paranoid, materialist, paper-thin Tuscan fantasy: Dainfern. Dainfern is unique in that its aesthetic repugnance is accompanied by an object of extreme conceptual repugnance: a huge overhead sewage pipe spanning Dainfern valley, visible to all. Nervously known as the ‘Dainfern Aqueduct’, it occasionally smells and spews forth flies, and transports 306 million litres of sewage a day to a nearby sewage plant.
Photo: David Goldblatt. Source: http://www.macba.cat/media/goldblatt/
The potential is almost irresistible, and so the Collective enacts their plot: they plant small explosives along the length of the pipe, alert the press, and trigger them successively. The result is one of perfect symbolic symmetry: tons of sewage rain down on those Tuscan roofs, architectural excreta meeting its human counterpart, forever united in public consciousness, made one in unholy matrimony, which, as we know, no man may put asunder. Tuscany retreats back to Italy where it belongs. Jo’burgers take a stab at inventing a local vernacular. Dainfern lies abandoned, entombed in its own symbol. The world is a little brighter.
The undulating spaces between Sandton and Centurion, known to some as the Filthy North, is a repository for the spoils of a vast consumerist empire. The Powers That Be create an army of middle-class drones, depleted of cultural richness and hungry to display newfound material wealth. By reducing consciousness to nothing more than the generic, populations are suckered into wanting the same thing. This creates mass markets out of thin air, generating superefficient production, yielding endless income from endless consumption. Genius at its most evil, certainly. And so, like semiotic robin hoods, the Collective steals cultural value from the generic and crass, and puts it in the hands of the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the forgotten. Aged vernaculars, quirky originals, subtleties, richness, and soul must be liberated from the shackles of late Capitalism.
True to the character of many an anarchist on the fringe, the Collective resolves to use symbolic violence as its method of attack. The objective: communicate their opinions to the public, educate them, scare them into wakefulness. They are provocateurs, performance artists, cultural practitioners, vigilantes for a noble cause. Spaces must be skilfully appropriated, untruthful architectures defamed, and the whole symbology of the Northern Suburbs made a mockery of.
Thus, they come upon a perfect target, an archetype of paranoid, materialist, paper-thin Tuscan fantasy: Dainfern. Dainfern is unique in that its aesthetic repugnance is accompanied by an object of extreme conceptual repugnance: a huge overhead sewage pipe spanning Dainfern valley, visible to all. Nervously known as the ‘Dainfern Aqueduct’, it occasionally smells and spews forth flies, and transports 306 million litres of sewage a day to a nearby sewage plant.
Photo: David Goldblatt. Source: http://www.macba.cat/media/goldblatt/
The potential is almost irresistible, and so the Collective enacts their plot: they plant small explosives along the length of the pipe, alert the press, and trigger them successively. The result is one of perfect symbolic symmetry: tons of sewage rain down on those Tuscan roofs, architectural excreta meeting its human counterpart, forever united in public consciousness, made one in unholy matrimony, which, as we know, no man may put asunder. Tuscany retreats back to Italy where it belongs. Jo’burgers take a stab at inventing a local vernacular. Dainfern lies abandoned, entombed in its own symbol. The world is a little brighter.
Thus, they come upon a perfect target, an archetype of paranoid, materialist, paper-thin Tuscan fantasy: Dainfern. Dainfern is unique in that its aesthetic repugnance is accompanied by an object of extreme conceptual repugnance: a huge overhead sewage pipe spanning Dainfern valley, visible to all. Nervously known as the ‘Dainfern Aqueduct’, it occasionally smells and spews forth flies, and transports 306 million litres of sewage a day to a nearby sewage plant.
Photo: David Goldblatt. Source: http://www.macba.cat/media/goldblatt/
The potential is almost irresistible, and so the Collective enacts their plot: they plant small explosives along the length of the pipe, alert the press, and trigger them successively. The result is one of perfect symbolic symmetry: tons of sewage rain down on those Tuscan roofs, architectural excreta meeting its human counterpart, forever united in public consciousness, made one in unholy matrimony, which, as we know, no man may put asunder. Tuscany retreats back to Italy where it belongs. Jo’burgers take a stab at inventing a local vernacular. Dainfern lies abandoned, entombed in its own symbol. The world is a little brighter.
Photo: David Goldblatt. Source: http://www.macba.cat/media/goldblatt/
Myths of Kenosis 
For an interesting discussion on this post, check out http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=163929463751
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Here’s the Facebook discussion thus far:
Kristi Maria Hansen:
when and where? i want to be there with my camera ready.
Tues at 16:24 · Delete
Wendy Lydall:
When I was young you could drive from Bryanston to Pretoria and see only one house – at Halfway House. The house was halfway to Pretoria, which is why they called it Halfway House.
The area called Fourways already had that name. It was a huge patch of veld that had two dirt roads crossing each other. When you got to the junction, there were four ways that you could go, but no buildings were visible. So the obvious name for that patch of veld was Fourways.
Wed at 01:21 · Delete
Arlyn Culwick:
To property developers, all that lovely veld is simply as dead as a blank page until a mechanism that delivers a return on an investment is installed on it.
Wed at 10:13 · Delete
Arlyn Culwick:
Kiristi, alas, I’m unable to contact the Collective. I presume they will let the public know whenever they see fit…
Wed at 10:15 · Delete
Michael Graham Smith:
Sounds awful. Imagine having sewage raining down on your house. I don’t think any political agenda is worth subjecting people to that. The hatred of suburbia is in itself a conservative impulse, imagining as it does some pre-capitalist halcyon period, and attempting to invoke some bastardised European notion of city dwelling as somehow less offensive and more PC.
These suburbs are the spaces we live in, however imperfect or aesthetically barren. The people in Dainfern are just like you and I: trying to make their way through life the best way they know how. To propose to punish them for their desire to carve out a little niche for themselves in this awful city seems, just because their aesthetic sensibility is unpalatable to you (The Anarchitects), seems awfully mean-spirited.
Anyway, I bet there are members of the Anarchitects named Ryan, Tracy, Brett and Michelle: any other suburban name you can think of, whose upbringing wasn’t so far away from the Dainfern idyll, who go home at night like everyone else, cook food in microwaves and drink instant coffee, and frankly whose excrement flows through the Dainfern pipe: they, like all of us, are part of this big picture: their proposed act of symbolic violence seems to deny their participation and culpability.
Wed at 13:55 · Delete
Kristi Maria Hansen:
Very good point Micheal. Feeling very convicted. That said, I still want the scoop if and when it happens. Imagine the youtube ratings for that clip!? Its just not funny without the poo.
Wed at 14:16 · Delete
Candice Lee De Carvalho:
Reads like a PETA advert. I believe in your cause but not in your tactics; after all, I wish to win the war, not the battle.
Wed at 14:32 · Delete
Arlyn Culwick:
Ah yes, never good to forget the human element in all this symbolism…
But I don’t think the Collective is targeting suburbia. They may be advocating tasteful suburbia, or something. But their real adversary is consumerism. The people whose homes would be drenched in sewage aren’t targets, just drones/spoils of the enemy, and they get caught in the crossfire of a symbolic conflict. The two opposing sides aren’t the Collective and the Capitalists, either. Rather, it’s two memes caught in conflict, embodying the logic of top-down, mass-market-generating, wealth-creating, population-suckering, environment-wrecking consumerism on the hand, and bottom-up, elitist, fascist, individual-empowering, decentralist anarchists on the other.
Both are wrong – and, I think – equally so. And wherever the one exists, the other is implied. I think that a culture that has one without the other is more dysfunctional than a culture with both. Johannesburg seems to be a ready victim of consumerism, with very little to keep it in check, and so I used rhetoric to glorify the alternative.
It’s worth mentioning that neither side is likely to exist as a physical, social reality. All I’ve done is reified the alternatives as concrete social entities to make imagining it more vivid. In reality though, the Collective is likely to be expressed in ‘sustainability’ talk, in green mindsets, in concern for the poor, and in worries about the one-size-fits-all packaging that dominates the media and the arts (one ought, I think, to worry about the extent to which such a thing inhibits consciousness in general). The other is the substance of magazines, malls, homemaking aspirations, and capitalist replication strategies.
And we’re all participants in both, to varying extents. To side with either is always an act of hypocrisy. But to side with the underdog is probably the beneficial thing to do…
Wed at 15:11 · Delete
Arlyn Culwick:
Candice: Interesting… what are your tactics?
(And yes, the Collective would be unlikely to win the war: they’d just represent themselves as the bad guys – al quaeda style – to the majority of Jo’burgers.)
Wed at 16:35 · Delete
Michael Graham Smith:
Ja, I hear your points Arlyn, you are a formidable arguer…! But i think where we differ is that this act wouldn’t be symbolic, it would be real: you couldn’t argue pure symbolism while hosing s*** off your Porsche, could you?
I think art, music, theatre, literature, even Facebook, are the arenas of symbolic resistance: anything like really blowing stuff up couldn’t reasonably call itself symbolic, or at least not only symbolic.
I think of actions like artist Manzoni canning his own excrement and selling it thru the Leo Castelli gallery for whatever the equivalent value in gold was on the day you the consumer chose to purchase it; Warhol’s Piss Paintings of the 1970’s in which he peed on painting surfaces prepared with copper paint; these are symbolic acts which attack, variously, consumerism and high art, and by implications the values of the society they represent. They remained contained within the bounds of art, not damaging anyone’s lives, but made their point nonetheless.
BTW, an artist called Gordon Matta Clark first used the word ‘anarchitecture’, in reference to his habit of cutting into abandoned buidlings, in an attempt to symbolically puncture capital and its attendant, real estate.
Wed at 19:22 · Delete
Candice Lee De Carvalho:
Arlyn and Michael; as far as I can understand, Arlyn’s symbolic act of resistance is the part of this post that describes the plot. By feigning a threat of action, you have created an emotional reaction that is intended to frighten people ‘into wakefulness’ (I hope that I am right about that and that ‘the collective’ does not truly intend to perform such a deplorable act!).
I think what bothers me most is how the people who live in the Northern Suburbs are described, are you suggesting that they have less value because they do not share your tastes or passions? Are they intolerable and beyond hope, or is education possible? What would you say to those living in Dainfern who lead an ethical existence?
I can’t say exactly what my tacticts would be. For now, I have made some significant life changes such as adopting a vegetarian lifestyle and cutting out all that extra expenditure, especially on cheap Chinese rubbish; supporting local and looking after what I already have. These changes have slowly begun to rub off on my family and friends. … Read more
Wed at 20:13 · Delete
Willi Badenhorst:
it all looks very interesting, but far too long to read.
Wed at 21:31 · Delete
Arlyn Culwick:
Michael, you’re entirely right about blowing up things not being pure symbolism. That’s the problem with reification in general: making things out of ideas is dealing in illusions to an extent, even if those ideas are real and have their effects on the world.
But the weird part of this scenario (which is why I wrote this piece) is that consumerism isn’t just an idea. It’s as ‘reified’ as one can get, which is just to say that it gets manifested or expressed in the real world. And so consumerism, having become a physical and social fact, MAY invite a correspondingly physical counter.
Whether such a counter is ethical or not, it’s certainly not less ethical than consumerism. I would think that a single suburb, on a single day, getting covered in poo is a drop in the ocean compared to the years and ubiquity of consumerism. When one thinks of all the pervasive, time-stealing, money-sucking and environmentally dangerous evils of consumerism, its damage to real live people (not just ‘society’) is vast and difficult to imagine.
Also, a central part of its malevolence is that it’s able to make its victims unaware of its effects – and so one wouldn’t be able to appeal to a personal liberty-type defence of consumerism: just because people want it, it doesn’t make them any less suckered, and it doesn’t make it any less damaging. If someone likes their torturer, the ethical thing to do is still to rescue them, and then to get them to realise what they were suffering under.
So, the plot thickens: is subjecting a few hundred people to a poo-drenching justified given that (a) they’re blinded to their oppression, (b) in terms of quantity, it is by far the lesser evil that they’re suffering under, (c) society needs some counterculture in this respect, and (d) their suffering will bring positive benefit to the whole population, not just to them.
So I think the overall measure of the ethics of this situation is how effective it’ll be in actually changing culture for the better. And I don’t think it’ll be that effective.
Wed at 21:57 · Delete
Arlyn Culwick:
Willi: no pain no gain.
Wed at 23:43 · Delete
Arlyn Culwick:
Candice: I think your concerns are the prime reason why the Collective’s plans won’t work. However, I don’t think your concerns are intrinsic problems with the tactic, but rather matters of how one interprets it. I’d imagine victims (and clever consumerists) using exactly your arguments to blacken the name of the Collective!
For example, blowing up the Dainfern ‘aqueduct’ isn’t a matter of devaluing people. If I were a member of the Collective, I’d make a point of valuing people intrinsically and for their potential – and certainly not for their values. I’d say that their aesthetic sensibilities and ethical practices were horrible, but that wouldn’t make me devalue them in themselves.
As for ‘winning the war’, I doubt your practices will convert the masses. Only an impending environmental disaster is sure to do that. However, I suspect that there is an interesting middle road between the Collective and Consumerism, and one that doesn’t just take the alternative on a personal level. Most importantly, it’ll be a profoundly ethical way of doing things. I’ve been working out a form of activism that basically creates structural snowball effects in cultures, and can create genuine change… and doesn’t involve blowing things up. Heh.
Wed at 23:51 · Delete
Arlyn Culwick:
P.S. Everyone, check out the Myths of Kenosis Blog! (which is where this post originated): http://www.kenoticmyth.wordpress.com
Wed at 23:53 · Delete
Arlyn Culwick:
btw, Michael, what amazing examples of artists having a go at Capital! Ha!
Yesterday at 00:12 · Delete
Kristi Maria Hansen:
great discussion, really. Thanks all. I think Arlyn, a success. At least some of us have been forced to challenge our thinking. I think i will certainly be grinnning inside next time a person tells me they live in dainfern.
Yesterday at 10:43 · Delete
Arlyn Culwick:
Thanks Kristi! Yeah, what fun. I’ve certainly been able to clarify some thoughts I’ve had about all this.
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Jessica Schnehage, 10:32am, 5 Nov ’09:
I don’t feel that “scaring people” would make them realise the the illusion of consumerism – and even if they do fall out of that lifestyle as a result of an action such as this, they still would not understand why they were trapped in it in the first place. Nothing would heal. They would simply desist because they have been frightened.
I believe the reason people are trapped in consumerism is the same reason people are addicted to constant entertainment. This is a result of millions of disillusioned people looking for a way to fill an emptiness inside of them – whether they fill it with wealth, a expensive home or car, a cupboard full of clothes they don’t need, or constant entertainment to distract from their inherent unhappiness…consumerism is NOT the root of the problem. It is a phycological response to disillusionment with life – to not finding the true meaning behind why we are all here. The powers that be – the isolated money makers – have simply taken advantage of this in every way they can. If anyone needed to be woken up in this manner, it is those who perpetuate the media-consumerist mindset in those simply looking for something to hold on to.
If something such as described above really needs to happen – surely it is not the middle class that has to bear the brunt? I don’t think an act such as this would perpetuate positive change, but if it needs to happen – aim higher at those who perpetuate the current western lifestyle these people find themself trapped in – they perpetuate this in other people KNOWING that it is nothing but an illusion.
As for those who live consumerists – and as Candice suggests – by changing your own lifestyle and being aware, this slowly but surely wakes up those around you. The more you become aware, the more awareness spreads. One person at a time.
If the root of all these problems could only be adressed, we would not have to fight the giant of dissilusion that is consumerism. We would only have to deal with people on a much more human level – and discover what is “missing” that is causing people to look for it in anything from materialism to sensationalism.
People are afraid of space. Of silence. Of just sitting there. Doing “nothing”. Just being. How can we find excel in our western society if we do nothing? If we don’t have the job, the house, the car? The money? The PHD?
If we can learn to be comfortable in this uncertain realm of “nothingness” – we would be closer to who we really are and what we need to do. We would realise that we do not have to fill our lives with different things and activities in order to make it meaningful. That our lives are intrinsically meaningful, and our challenge is to realise this.
Everything happening in our outside world (external life force) is a mirror image of the turmoil that is happening inside of us (internal life force). If we can find peace and realise the essence of our being, behind the illusion of ego and who we think we are, we will be shown how to manifest this peace and harmony in our outside world.
We would realise that the most valuable thing we can do here on this earth, is to interact with our fellow human beings, and all of earth and the life she holds, with an open mind and heart, without having to defend our way of seeing things should there be a difference in opinion (another person seeing something differently does not threaten or change your opinion, it never will). To talk wiith love and compassion, to share the joys and the mysteries of this life, and to help where ever we can because we know that any one in need is a part of you – and by not helping them, you are not helping your self.. And to let our actions speak of what lies within our heart. To celebrate with each other the life that we have been given.
/end. haha. okay that was longer than I intended. Just my 5c. :)
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Hey Jessica! Good to hear from you (it’s been since… Magna Carta. Heh.)
Your take on things raises some interesting questions:
1) Does emptiness facilitate consumerism, or does consumerism facilitate emptiness?
2) Is it the people at the top that subject the masses to consumerism, or is it an emergent phenomenon?
3) Is it the fault of the media or the people?
4) Is being more important than doing, or vice versa?
My view is that the answer to all these questions is ‘both’. To justify myself would require roughly a PhD, and so all I’ll do is assert my position – which, at best, may stimulate thought: With respect to (1), Western culture’s existential crisis may have led to both emptiness and consumerism – as a pair of states (individual and social respectively) that aggravate each other. (2) If this is the case, then consumerism propagates itself, as well as being taken advantage of by the powers that be. (3) This is the people’s fault in the sense that everyone’s partially responsible for their own decisions, and it is the media’s fault for selling out to Capital instead of aiming to enrich culture. (4) We have no experience of being without some sort of happening occurring – which is something active, a ‘doing’. Nevertheless, all doing presupposes that something is doing the doing – i.e. there is a subject or an entity, that, presumably, in itself, consists of being. However, this kind of talk is prone to get fruity very easily. After all, what’s there to say that being isn’t reducible to the ‘doings’ of a being’s component parts? Or, alternatively, what’s there to say that all this ‘doing’ isn’t just an illusion – nothing more than mere thoughts about a reality that, in itself, is a-temporal and eternal (i.e. just composed of ‘being’). Who knows? I’m certainly not at liberty to say. So I’ll settle for ‘both’, since both these models, when combined, seems to arrive at an approximation of the nature of experience. And experience is all we have to go by.
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