ABCD Lars & Roemer

Roemer
van
Toorn
in
conversation
with
Lars
Lerup
Antonio Negri’s choice for O in his alphabet (Negri on Negri 3 ) is the word
Oppression. He states that oppression has become invisible. One no longer
knows where to look for oppression. One finds oneself suffering from a kind of
mental block regarding the definition of oppression. New forms of immaterial
oppression can be found in the media, new technologies, and the service sectors,
or emerging from the flexibility and ferocious mobility of the labor market. “The
big difficulty,” says Negri, “is that it is no longer possible to identify a specific
form of oppression capable of provoking an equally specific form of resistance.
Perhaps the term oppression should be replaced by exclusion, or perhaps by
destitution, suffering, or poverty.” And “Oppression is so nebulous that it can’t
be named, so diffuse and so gray that responding to it is hard. (…) The same army
drops bombs, propaganda, packages of medicine and supplies: liberation or
oppression?” This is difficult to answer, says Negri. “What we have to do is find a
way to dispel the fog of oppression, to invent new alternatives, to learn to struggle
against an invisible enemy, a non-identifiable oppressor.” How do you see this?
Are there invisible enemies in architecture? Should we indeed teach students to
fight, built alternatives, and dispel the fog of oppression in architecture?
Michel Foucault suggested a long time ago that centralized power is
now atomized and that the “disciplinary society” lives in (and is
performed by) all of us. Closely associated with discipline, oppression
(as Negri suggests) comes in a multitude of versions, from family to
society. Having struggled philosophically with the oppressive
consequences of architectural form, as played out in my book
Planned Assaults, I have come to believe that, yes, we will stumble
over Marcel Duchamp’s coat hanger nailed to the floor (Trebuchet,
1917), but real oppression comes from human beings employing
architectural form to oppress each other. Any building can be turned
3
Negri
on
Negri:
In
Conversation
with
Anne
Dufourmentelle
(New
York
and
Oxford:
Routledge,
2004).
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