Shaha Raphael Architectural Association - Diploma History and Theory Studies Term 1 2020 Invisibles Teresa Stoppani
“One day or another, it is true, dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain the upper hand over domestics, invading the immense ruins of abandoned buildings, deserted dockyards; and, at that distant epoch, nothing will remain to ward off night-terrors, for lack of which we have become such great book-keepers…”1
1 Bataille 1995, 43
Beirut, 4th of August 2020
Three transforming dust assemblages will be described in the context of the explosion that occurred on that day. They exist in various timeframes, at different speeds, consisting of different actors. The mundane dust of the city slowly accretes over a long period of time in a chaotic manner, the hazardous dust accumulated in warehouse #12 in the port of Beirut, whole highly volatile inventory of tonnes of ammonium nitrate (NH₄NO₃) was left exposed for over 6 years in the heat of a Mediterranean port. That warehouse dust took a new form when a spark ignited the chemical, coupling the hazardous with the mundane, to forever change the state and character of the city, ultimately invading its personal space.
Formula : NH₄NO₃ Molar mass : 80.043 g/mol Density : 1.72 g/cm³ Detonation velocity : 2,500 m/s
The chemical compound of ammonium nitrate, a white crystalline solid consisting of ions, highly soluble in water and hygroscopic as a solid. The composite is an oxidiser, its role at a molecular level is to increase the oxygen available to substances it interacts with. In practical terms, it is a catalyst to the interaction between the smallest spark and a flammable agent. This is an introduction to one of the actants of the Beirut blast in its stripped-down thermodynamics constitution. In another more descriptive dialect this could be described as a ‘latent potency’. It was a key part of a web of accumulation of different actors over time; some human, some non human; some negligent, some deliberate; some oblivious, some aware. These actors, intermingling through assemblages, lurched into each other, turning into a sea of forces rushing and flowing together, pulverising more than 20 km2 . While the assemblages were coming in and out of form, totally ignored by superior human orders, the city was acted upon. Did we fall prey to inattentiveness? Historically, cities have found their demise in inattentiveness. Usually, the ruling class's deliberate ignorance of the people’s demands leads to revolt, then war, itself leading to destruction. Often referred to as 'man on man' violence, with structures taken as deliberate casualties by the former. That said, the deliberate ignorance that led to the Beirut explosion finds its roots in a slightly more common form of misdemeanour: the repeated habit of the ruling class to assign little value to its fellow citizens’ lives. This eventually turned into an accumulation of dust, enough ammonium nitrate, stored with contempt for global safety standards, to wipe out all man. Walking around the city that same morning, little did I know about the intense core of vibrant matter2 yards away from me. The particles that had lingered for years, accumulated in the heart of the city, were completely invisible to the wandering observer. Even to the heavy cluster, the political assemblage a.k.a the ruling class, deciding to turn a blind eye and offload the responsibility. This matter exists on paper, in lost documents and bribery; in theory it should make it more easily noticeable, but they deemed it unnecessary to inform the inhabitants of the city of the ticking time bomb next-door or make any attempt to dismantle it. Hannah Arendt reminds us that ‘We are not helpless animals: we can engage in further action, take initiatives to interrupt such processes, and try to bring them under control through agreements’3.
2
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
3
Arendt 2018, 19
The desire of a chemist to see what ammonium can do as an oxidising agent, the desire of a farmer to know how it can contribute to growth, or a pharmacist to incorporate it in an antibiotics formula, or a baker to increases the number of yeast cells and the fermentation speed, enabled them to discern a life in ammonium and thus to collaborate productively with it. Could desire and inattentiveness be opposites? If desire is productive, is inattentiveness destructive? The desire of letting ammonium nitrate linger, en masse, waiting to be something else is of another nature. It has an intrinsic capacity, potential, fate. What does it want? Stored in warehouse #12 for 6 years, absorbing its environment until it is able to, in its turn, act on it, transform it. Tonnes of NH₄NO₃ cramped in a warehouse, haphazardly disposed of, sack after sack, one on top of the other; naturally swerving, pressed down under its own weight, swelling, falling out, being attracted by the occasional added substances, searching for the spark. The origins of the intricate chain of events began in 2014, when a vessel in Georgia was loaded with 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate on a voyage to West Africa. On course to West Africa, it is said that the ship’s captain was forced to sail in the direction of the port of Beirut, where the ship and its merchandise were abandoned. An essential human actor in the series of events, the captain, resumes his normal life, never to think about his ship and its terrible demise. Here, I would like to note the importance of the objective necessity of the captain rather than pointing fingers. The humidity and heat of the Mediterranean coastal city slowly morphs the salt like particles into a huge rock, binding them together, reinforcing its possible detonation. Rubber, in the form of vehicle tires, also accumulated in the same hangar, in addition to fireworks. All of these elements have an inevitable hunger to meet, excited to borrow energies or atoms from each other. Billions of microscopic organisms were thriving, at the entrance of the city, in waiting. The choreographers, the human actors, are aware of the packed matter in a hangar at the port of Beirut, ignorant of its liveliness. But awareness alone is not enough. One can be aware and careless, aware and ignorant, aware and inattentive. An open flame has to come in contact with ammonium nitrate in order for it to decompose and activate. A spark? A welder? A match? A planted bomb? A missile? Perhaps a deliberate human actor that wanted to exploit the volatile condition of these actants detonated it all. And this is what happened on that day, while the sun was setting at 6:08, the estimated 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate collided with its environment, heat, pressure rapidly decayed the chemical into two gases, nitrous oxide and water vapour exploding violently. Wiping out a city and its people. Political scientist Hannah Arendt describes her work as being “nothing more than to think what we are doing.”4 In her writings on Eichmann in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil, she describes a revealing representation of modern society in which human self-consciousness is dominated by economics. She describes the condition of individuality as being swamped in the collective life of the human species, committed to consumption and production, moving relentlessly on its way.5 There was a monster forming and before revealing itself, the political fabric kept feeding it with their lack of energy, fuelling it with life. Perhaps the lack of energy converted into massive energy is the formula of inattentiveness. A life that tore the fabric of the actual without ever coming fully ‘out’ in a person, place, thing, or material. A life that handled a restless activeness, a creative-destructive presence that does not coincide fully with any specific body. ‘Do you know what life is to me?’ Friedrich Nietzsche says in Will to Power, ‘a monster of energy that does not expand itself but only transforms itself, [a] play of forces, at the same time one and many.’6 Forensic architecture’s investigation unfolds through visualisation of the events minutes prior to the blast. They reveal and assert what the inhabitants saw but couldn’t process or describe. It took fourteen minutes.7 Fourteen minutes between the first visible sign, a tame white plume of smoke coming out of 4
Arendt 2016, 5
5
ibid. 405
6
Nietzche 1924 , 550
7
Forensic Architecture, forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-explosion.
warehouse #12 and the detonation that generated a wave of energy that ravaged the city and its surroundings. The white smoke that began to come out from the north-eastern side of the warehouse at 5:54 was rapidly morphing and expanding, four minutes later the smoke turns black which suggests the participation of another character, potentially rubber, growing darker until it was eaten by a different, larger plume flashing with explosives and fireworks. The sky in the distance was getting filled with a dust plume, changing colours, from white to grey, black and pink, transforming per split second, until reaching its final form at 6:08: a large spherical plume, consuming the whole city and before losing its form. Right after this instant, a new assemblage forms, when the loaded warehouse dust, the hazardous dust collides with the slowly formed mundane dust of the city. It is now a different entity consisting of new characters with different meanings. Within the span of nine seconds, the spherical plume turns pink and projects eight hundred meters into the atmosphere, ravaging everything in and around it. It only took seconds for the dust from the damage of the blast to invade us, although it had been forming, mixing, decomposing, acting for years, in complete silence and darkness. It is growing through the accumulation of the disintegration of matter, to its smallest particles, swept to the corners of the rooms, streets, cities, swarming with life, in waiting. It is the invisible that ‘modernity endeavours to remove from the bourgeois interior and from the streets of the city’8, that, in this condition, no one could escape. This explosion did not discriminate against an ethnicity, religious minority, or political party. In that respect, the explosion was a flattening event that razed the urban and social fabric, insensitive to intellect or class.’Clean and unclean are an aspect of the given culture and its conception of order, which is also made visible in the behaviour prescribed for each social group.’ 9 Dust always settles, but before it does, it is the most powerful, homogenising agent. It conquered the territory, blinding, muting, numbing every living organism it encountered that day in Beirut. Suffocating life, penetrating the innermost pockets of the living system. Then it settled. In homes, streets, lungs, offices, nostrils, hair. This dust might live in our lungs to permanently damage them, or create respiratory problems. How long is it going to stick around? How much of the original warehouse actants are in that dust? Ammonium nitrate bonded to what? During the seconds dust was in motion it accumulated to form a huge sheet covering the city and its suburbs. That sheet constitutes of an innumerable number of particles, the smallest fragments of everything that constituted the city, including its buildings and people. I had never seen so much dust, such varied dust. A composite of glass, stone, dirt, blood, metal, human emotions. And we had to brush it away, clear people's lives away, speculating on what exactly each speckle of dust was. Encountering ripped pieces of a photograph with the face of a young woman, who is no longer. Pieces of shattered glass embedded in a wooden door with unthinkable violence. The items on the floor that day, and for days after the explosion were vibratory, at one moment disclosing themselves as live presence and at the next as inanimate matter.10 Jane Bennet in Vibrant Matter writes about the thing-power: ‘the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects, dramatic and subtle.’11 From that day, detritus existed beyond its alliance with human significance, nature, or activities. ‘In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which human subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotic’12.
8
Teresa 2007, 438
9
Lagerspetz 2009, 84
10
Bennet 2010, 5
11
ibid. 21
12
ibid. 39
To go back to our original character, the compacted tonnes of ammonium nitrate, the moment it left that warehouse, along with its enablers, formed a new assemblage. It went from being a powerful, invisible, foreign, unmanageable concept to becoming the most mundane, inert, daily encountered form: dust. It is paradoxical that the most powerful of assemblages was ‘invisible’, but as soon as it is noticed in its switch of state it becomes completely power-less, dust, the most harmless of its states. No human agent interacted with it until it settled. Ammonium nitrate was ignored in its spring-loaded, most volatile capacity, is it that we are unable to process things outside of our scope? Equipped with industrial brooms, buckets, gloves, glasses, masks - everyone was sweeping dust. The hazardous or the mundane? Even if we identified it under its new intertwined form, where are we to brush it off ? We only know that we don’t want it because it represents chaos, pain and entropy, evolving beyond its chemical nature to directly impact the so called ‘human order’. A new condition is born in the aftermath, the warehouse containing the chemicals is not what it was, in its broken shards and rubble metal frame it unites with every fragmented home in the city, there is a moment of empathy, a national worry, reality as opposed to individual realities. The notion of home is now extended, the attention is shifted from the inside to everything that has also been affected, the territory. The unwanted, disordered matter is the unifying actor. With a collective effort, the mess is gone in a few days from the narrow vision of individuals. Out of sight, out of mind, like the contents of the warehouse; but in fact it is still everywhere. Rubble, dust has been moved, from the interior down the stairs and to the sidewalk for a few days. And then on the opposite sidewalk, 4 months later it is piled up in the middle of the city, in various locations. Heaps of ‘ordered’ material now inhabit the few empty plots of land in Beirut. Is the discarded matter now stable? Has it really settled, as an energy, or is it still eager to be charged with energy? Do ‘purer’ assemblages bother us less? The new assemblage teeming with life in the empty lots of Beirut no longer possesses a chemical intensity, instead it exudes a less empirical intensity: our memories embedded in the objects torn apart by the explosion. Those memories are still being swept away in the invisible corners of the city, but there isn’t really a place to sweep things ‘away’. Cleaning is an act of erasure, moving the dust away, erasing the memory of what once was. Dust is but the smallest bit of memory, it contains something beyond itself; an archive of something that once was. Memory takes root in spaces, images, objects, gesture, it takes place in the concrete13. The buildings, facades, cars, vases, people that once were, atomised. How can we preserve the memory? Or should we? Marc Augé would argue that it may be an aphorism that forgetting is as intrinsic to memory as death is to life, ‘the definition of oblivion as loss of remembrance takes on another meaning as soon as one perceives it as a component of memory itself,’14 As counterintuitive as that may be.
Stripped of every bit of material memory, what does the destruction of one’s environment mean? Our place in the world is acknowledged by a communication with the built environment and grounding these interactions with those of others, projecting the creation of social identity in time and space. 'The destruction of one’s environment, of everything that is familiar could mean a disorientating exile from the memories they have created. It is the threat of a loss to one’s collective identity and the continuity of those individual identities, even if constantly shifting over time.’15 Smells, textures, shapes are actants that trigger memory, can memory exist independently of its material counterpart? Hannah Arendt has argued, ‘the reality and reliability of the human world rests primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced.’16 But somehow in the case of Beirut, we outlived the city, the older generation seemed to have outlived the city, twice, experiencing two total dismemberments of the territory in a mere lifetime. The city, in all its beauty 13
Nora 2008, 9
14
Augé 2004, 48
15
Bevan 2016, 117
16
Arendt 2018, 95
and energy is built to outlive us; it is an attempt to grasp eternity.17 Transcending our individual destiny. A dead woman is one of us , but the city is all of us.
The essay emphasises the importance and permanence (or impermanence) of matter, and what it carries with it throughout its change of states. In order for this extraordinarily dangerous thing to be noticed it had to become plain old mess, rubble, dust that broke into one’s safe space. That’s what it took for people to care about it, to interact with it. Will this dust not settle blissfully this time? My hope is for it to have awakened a hunger for attentiveness, in the wider scheme of things, to matter that people usually deem disorder, or discard easily. To everything that surrounds us and its agency. Inattention is precisely how the ammonium nitrate was able to be what it became, to freely express its agency, connecting with its surroundings. This event is not a unique, isolated phenomenon, but rather a product of years of inattentiveness, a part of a system. Will it provoke a paradigm shift or are we doomed to repeat these cycles of inattention? What is destructive is our oblivion, romanticising that life goes on. They say ignorance is bliss.
Jane Bennet advocates the vitality of matter, because her hunch is that ‘the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human-hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. These material powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness.’18
17
18
Bevan 2016, Bennett 2010, preface ix
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah, and Amos Elon. Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books, 2006. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. The University of Chicago Press, 2018. Augé Marc. Oblivion. University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Bataille, Georges, et al. Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary and Related Texts. Atlas Press, 1995. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010. Bevan, Robert. The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. Reaktion Books Ltd, 2016. Forensic Architecture, forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-explosion. Lagerspetz, Olli. A Philosophy of Dirt. Reaktion Books, 2018. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Will to Power. Allen, 1924. Nora, Pierre. Les Lieux De Mémoire. Gallimard, 2008. Teresa 'Dust revolutions. Dust, informe, architecture (notes for a reading of Dust in Bataille)', The Journal of Architecture, 12:4, 437 - 447, 2017.