PAULICEIA DESVAIRADA

VISÔES DO PERÍMETRO

Dionisio González

The relationship inculcated in people towards their own excrement provides the model of relationship that exists with all waste products in life. Until now, they have been regularly ignored. It is only in the light of modern ecologist thinking that we are forced to gather up our waste products in our conscience.

Between rua Tabapua and Pedroso de Morais avenue, in the city of São Paulo; this is where he has been since the year '72, when he left the psychiatric hospital, inhabiting an island of waste and plastic, the diameter of which is the same as that of a children's swimming pool -taking up, in fact, the space of a traffic island, in this case one of detritus and tangled masses of wrappings- O Condicionado. This homeless Afro-Brazilian, a native of Salvador de Bahía, is invariably occupied with writing, neurotically prosifying -like the violent opponent of an all-seeing regime- about vigilance: "Unidades matemáticas do universo todo, laconicamente, avisaráo á humanidade, que ha um erro congenito, de uma unidade na matemática."

Is not this old man, enveloped in a subdelirium of mathematism, proclaiming the error that Virilio defines as an accident inherent in the fact of dromological overflowing and speed? Is he not really proclaiming, from the stance of his presence and the perpetuation of that public micro-space -this beautiful, static indigent with no camouflaged weighing in his world of casein and cellulose- that any attitude, let alone attire, is plastic, and that image, in truth all images, are no more than the registering of a previous accident? Is he not seeking, contradictorily, from his rigid dissidence, to adopt the malleable disguise of the remould in order to operate against acceleration from a total braking effect, through the anonymity of that black, tarred obscurantism of plastic?

Anyway if, as Virilio sustains, all technological development contains a negative side, given the need to dominate power through high speed and said speed in turn, when deprogrammed, causes accident, jumble, heap and disaster, is that denial of mobility, that time-space halting of statuary, not precisely the miracle of absolute detection of accident; a minute attitude of an antimissile shield?
In any case, if the accident precedes the image, what is the function of art? Showing the event and therefore, delaying, or preceding and thus, contingent? In this way it is foreseeable that we may witness the imaginal exaltation of the explosion of the Columbia space shuttle and its dissemination, together with that of its seven crew members, around the states of Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. It is foreseeable because the image culture is unitary; because the aesthetic values of superficiality are arrogated. It seems that the event only took place in accidentality, in the precise moment of the impact, of the disaster, the eclosion, the sound and luminosity of things contemptible. Nobody appears to attend to the great immersed structure of the iceberg; from the distance and perversion of a sublimed gaze we only attend to the dramatics of the scene, to the collusion of the facts. News is the sale of "current affairs", for which it is always premiè re night.

The surprising thing is that this indigent narrator, in another of his texts, crosses callipaedic space (which seeks the generation of beautiful children) and reveals himself as a eugenist, in spite of probably being eliminated by his own theories, bearing in mind his "dysgenic nature": "Sou da opinao, que os mais velhos, deveriao eliminar toda a parte da juventude que eles consideram indigna do progresso. Eles farao e controlarao a natalidade, deixassem nascer so aqueles que eles considerassem dignos de tudo que eles fizeram. Para um mundo melhor."
These fascist aesthetics of bodies and minds surprise, unless they respond to a natural withdrawal, that is; to self-sacrifice in the interests of a society that would be governed by the introduction of human guinea pigs and the exclusion of deprived elements. Given that the latter, the exinscribed, already inhabit "non-places", O Condicionado, like the vagrant in The man without a past by Aki Kaurismäki, has the burlesque disguise of the invisible man and just like him, spends the night in yielded detritus, in containers or amongst the architectural provisions and trimmings of the sweepings and waste contained in them.

The other sedimentation, that of being fragmented or clastic, is that which originates from the secrecy of agricultural day-workers or seasonal workers. They are the sum of another social fragment of invisible men, that is, those who come from illegal immigration and form a sub-class of temporary gender, living in anonymity, waiting in a semi-slavish state for their employers and spending their nights in overcrowded circumstances and the architectural model of plastic or pigsties, as they are still chain gang workers or negro slaves.

This is the society of slums, of rubbish containers, of sluices and metros, of drains, of cavities of filth and muck, of the motility of portable architectures, of foulness and crematoriums. The contemporary homeless person inhabits a heteroclite territory which includes transparency and therefore, the vigilance of cashpoint porches that end up carpeting the space of those who have left their social class, occupying a greenhouse watertight space, a panoptic cell they turn up to with no possibility of transaction. This territory also includes a cardboard stucco which moulds to the shape of bodies thanks to urine and the damp of the air. The body is, therefore, seduced by the cellulose and the printed word; it is seduced in the way the word ceases to bother about its intrinsic value (communication) and thus appears not to agree on the eccentricity; on the absence of centre, on the exinscription and margins. In this way, the remnants dry up on the body of the tramp, of the infra-heroic invisible man, conditioning his singularity, his disorientation to the detritus hindrance of consumption; that is, they end up protecting themselves from environmental accidents, from common packaging to the production chain - to a reflex, specular chain of venality, unfortunately giving lactic products its own expiry dates. These, without doubt, are the aliens of begging; those who fell in the face of an imbalance in income and resources called the development ditch.

Another indigent genre of invisibility, or at least of concealment, is that of mole people. Here we could speak of a sub-genre, as the whole of their existence is assumed to be subsumed, subterranean, subverted. The Mole People, the inhabitants of the subway, the tramps who live out an existence undermined by tunnels in the subsoil of the cities, and on different levels: "Some tramps live on the walkways constructed a short distance from the deafening roar of underground trains or in holes dug in the base of the platforms where the passengers wait, although the majority have installed their dwellings at a distance from operational rail lines." The same metro, in short, opened up as a precautionary measure in Madrid last winter because of the low temperatures, which prevented the homeless who occupied the different stations freezing to death, using them as preventative bedrooms. But these contemporary caverns, which swallow up the time of the metronome in the great cities or metropolis -metro is the apocopated form of metropolitan- hide, in their inextricable nervation and levels of tunnels, delinquents, drug addicts, social misfits, mentally ill people, graffiti artists and also vulnerable beings, with no means of subsistence, who come to the darkness to avoid open gazes, to bury themselves alive under a system they are unable to integrate in because they are dysgenic, different or unproductive. The metro, apart from being a form of transport that unblocks the large urban surfaces, is an architectural structure for the uncompetitive.

To sum up (and return to the beginning), for immobilists, for those who react in the face of speed, in the face of the Virilian dromology from paralysis. In short, like O Condicionado, a non-returnable individual, landless, slum-dweller, if by slum we understand an irregular settlement with no public services, promoted, amongst other social considerations, by the non self-government of a country, in this case Brazil, in the face of a situation of increasing subordination (indebtedness) in the flow-chart of the international economic system. This sterilisation in the space of economic debate is concomitant to the sterilisation of watertight, depressed spaces on the outer slopes of the mega-cities or in their epicentres and, at the same time, it is concomitant to union movements such as the MST (Movimiento de los Sin Tierra - Movement of Rural Workers Without Land).

Since, however you look at it, the Brazilian disease appears to be a social disease, given there is a certain amount of impossibility in transferring a whole modern, growing technology to these barely productive jobs, an e-mail campaign has been set in motion for the "favelas" of Rio, with digitalisation financed by a 1,5 million dollar credit from the Inter-American Development Bank. The portal -what else- that seeks to take the Internet to 20 slums in the city and attain a volume of 40,000 e-mail operations a month, is called "Viva Favela". A "Viva Zapata" of digitography and modernisation that will install itself like a trace of transparency and transaction to the only non-panoptic habilitation structure still maintained on the planet. If calculations mathematise a social accident of refuge for three million people out of a city of six million -the star emblem of which, the Corcovado Christ, seems to be the only vigilance icon of hardship in a social structure controlled by bands of drug-traffickers- the moment of disintoxication-mania, perhaps of that atmoterrorism, 7 in this case psychotropic, indicated by Sloterdijk, seems far off.

In spite of everything, at least Rocinha, a 'favela' slum where over 200,000 people crowd together, has already been installed in cyber-space; a virtual pan-space installed in an architecture of slicing and supra-fusion of remnants, that architecture of cyberception, defined by Roy Ascot, that will be established then with its interface in the conscience of the non-visible, of the illegal immigrant. Can those outside the class structure finally extend themselves from their displacement? Will this cancel out their singular condition of paralysis and braking? Does the worker without land, the static person, the cryptic peasant acquire, from his impenetrable sanctuary of habitat and crime, an elasticity that will uncover him and assimilate him into a fundamentalist capitalism of conscience and displacement? What then, will happen to O Condicionado and the slum-dwellers of Brasilia Teimosa, on the outskirts of Recife, where the shanty towns are constructed on stilts above water? What will happen to all the shanty towns in Latin America, the populations of Chile, the "barrios" of Venezuela and Ecuador, the "misery towns" of Argentina and the "barriadas" in Peru? Will this be the syntagm of a telematic prayer, a global secret discussion, will it be a cyber-café, however precarious its furniture? At the moment, this initiative is connected to the Internet by radio waves as these Human Hives have no telephone networks. To start with, make a note of: www.rocinha.com.br.

Already previously, during the second visit to Rio de Janeiro by John Paul II, a logical otherness of space occurred, profaning the shanty sanctuaries with extreme protection measures, including the capture of 29 popular districts; 20.000 police officers and 6.000 soldiers, with their natural distribution of the human settlement, deployed their positions, analysing the possible offensives (analysing them in terms of tactics and strategy) they could undertake from the counter-figure of transparency against transparency in itself. That is to say, are the slums, inasmuch as they are irregular, impenetrable settlements, not those insubordinate, light-dissolvent social spaces; those small fragments of darkness where the institutions and bodies that execute panoptism cannot operate? Is there not, then, logically, the possibility of an offensive from camouflage and social burial without tabulation or qualifying organisation, against the army of Light? Even the position of military and police bodies, preventative but at the same time primary executors, in definitive cases, of the organisation of hardship, do not only foresee movements of direct intervention, such as snipers stationed on the hilltops or in the profitable accident rate of the detritus emporium; they also foresee the risk of "stray bullets" from conflicts between inhabitants of neighbouring districts.

A total of 43 streets and avenues in Rio de Janeiro were sealed off to vehicles to enable the free movement of the only sealed, panoptic vehicle by definition: the Pope Mobile. Its water-tightness protects him from attacks; its visibility provides him with the supreme window dressing. Really, given the Pontiff's hierarchy and his capacity for bringing in crowds, 1,5 million of the faithful were observing him, bestowing on the vehicle a transmission of total visuality, given that in it one perceives the figure in real time and the original place, but also in recorded time and in an informational space. Panoptic, glass window, for planetary contemplation of all the religious fellows -or not- of the Catholic representative of God on Earth. The Pope Mobile is, in fact, unique in design, unique in that its transfer is merely presence-related and its technology is more anti-ballistic than motorised. But it is also part of that ideological system: terrorific ultraliberalism (proposed by Viviane Forrester, and which endemically passes on segregationism) as it covers territory which is not planetary and geographical, but immaterial and physical. Transport of the Pope is pan-planetary, its telex is extended with orbital precision, its televisual window requires the same distribution channel that generates the differences in abstract form, quite probably involuntary by now. The world is the victim of a devastating system aroused by gain, of a social distribution of profits, which in turn yields with its rubbish the pillars of the, among many others, 3.950 slum settlements in existence in Brazil.

Back to São Paulo, the city of O Condicionado, one of the planet's huge cities, a metropolis with over 17 million inhabitants where the remotest districts concentrate a population which barely has any income in areas lacking in town planning regulations, but where there are spaces in the centre expanding uncontrollably, territorialized by a population with precarious incomes. A population with sound legal advice for squatting in deserted properties or empty buildings, giving rise to the so-called vertical 'favelas'. Authentic towers of gigantism, the external vision of which reminds one of a swarm. Human paraphrases added to windows that are unfinished, newly-cemented or de-structured by acquiescent environmental pollution, general and passive, without frames or glass, similar in their elevation to the gemellarity of 'terror-destruction'. This may be a more than constructive ethic demolition, but the effect of challenge is the same, the same visuality segregated in one case due to stentorian prosifying of capitalism and in the other due to the prosifying of the counter-powers of the dictatorship of absolutism and speculation. It is no accident that near the largest vertical "favela" in São Paulo there is an equally colossal replica of the Empire State building.

But this precedent is reiterated in a spectacularly symbolic way, in an illustrious town planning project: the verticalisation project for the favelas de Cingapura districts. A proposal by the municipal government selected in the good practice contest sponsored by UNESCO in Dubai in 1996. Its services seek to reduce and prevent crime, provide access to communications, use and generation of energy, drinking water supply, waste management, housing and access to financing for it, and of course, town planning organisation and regulation. All those without land, without law, the obscured, those invisible to the system are finally catalogued; that is, they are prescribed a certain type of morality, given that they are being furnished with the usage of a pre-defined space, something Foucault defined as history of spaces which is in turn the history of powers. A sum of tactics for a minimised geography of habitat.

The idea of verticalisation (high-rise residential buildings) is none other than the re-housing of high-density slum populations in the same terrain they occupied previously, institutionalising their context and regularising ownership of the land. To sum up, given there are no spaces in which to create road networks or other services, building takes place upwards and the tenants are not evacuated, they are given citizenship and are not expelled to outlying areas where it would be more difficult for them to gain access to their places of work. The city, which is already excessively stratified in itself, in a constructive disequilibrium brought on by acceleration (see the height of the 1950s and the de-structuring of the large rural areas), thus gains access to those small bodies constituted unofficially and which have a notable influence on the decisions of the powers.

If in the city of São Paulo 380.000 families live in deprived areas, it seems logical that the first problem this project is coming up against is the lack of interest in becoming a legal community in certain districts dominated by criminal groups. To date 51 degraded areas have been regenerated. This resistance to constructive erection by the mole is none other than the persistence, in small agglutinating stages, of independent town planning that can be consolidated in micro-spheres inserted at the base of a detachment of organising, automatic distribution. These districts act as counter-panoptics removed from their compression and overcrowding to a system of coactive surveillance, enquiring and police-like. The shanty town problem acts against the state like an insurrectional system against the gaze. To sum up, the action of uprising against military assault troops and the subsequent entry of demolition infrastructure: tractors and power shovels. These urban development micro-grafting epics -from a natural ideology of counter-panoptism, of recovery of the dark spaces, of the black holes and the night that is postponed and in constant perpetuation- are now experiencing the contraction of uprising, of insurrectionary uprising against construction uprising. In short, a growth in horizontal expansion subject to the laws of group hiding against vertical growth subject to the laws of visibility and individual notation. There is also the problem, to date at least, of the ruling class which has approached the illegal city, not with the intention of studying its creative deregulation or Diaspora-like concentration, but as "clients", not incorporating a housing policy, but rather a propaganda policy that strengthens development that is conflictive, to say the least.

Transformation, reform, from a partial vision of remnants and intrigues, make the town planning vision of the municipality see these districts as tangled, homemade and lousy, excluding any possibility of aesthetic debate; when the truth is that this rubbish-tip, recycling architecture acquires calo-urban, identitary values. The configuration of container spaces (resolved since the revalidation of rubbish-tip material) alongside the management and treatment of waste, are two of the greatest town planning concerns. It is precisely that architectural vertibility (exposed to collapses and landslides) or the lack of septic tanks - that is residual and excrement progression, which unfortunately make these areas new zero zones susceptible not to airborne terrorism, but to the legalised terrorism of demolition: that of power shovels and evacuation.

Sloterdijk said: "Anyone who says he is not a rubbish-producer and that he has no opportunity to be otherwise risks dying by suffocating in his own crap." If we agree with Sloterdijk that we are the children of an anal culture in spite of having a perturbed relationship with our own shit, how can we comprehend that around three thousand million people in the world do not have toilets with cisterns, due to lack of water in countries such as Ethiopia, or the staggering reality that over one thousand inhabitants of the planet live in slums and that this figure will double in just 20 years? It is logical then to think that that perturbed relationship with our own excrement must be modified in cities such as Cairo (inhabited by 16 million people who create 10.000 tonnes of rubbish a day). All over India the women go to the fields before day breaks; it is a form of bowel movement under the shadow of night, a desire to dispel all excretory needs. Bowel movement is another natural, individualising and exhaustive way of desertion of the gaze, it is an everyday ability immersed in dissolvent tactics. On this point we should agree with Joseph Jenkins that we must turn human waste into fertiliser, as he explains in detail in his Humanure Manual -A Guide to Composting Human Manure-, where he stresses that "Defecating in our drinking water is perhaps one of the most curious customs of our culture, and the one spoken of least." These detritus reintegration habits are the same as those concerning re-utilisation of rubbish. This rubbish collection work is carried out in Cairo by the Zabbaleen, experts in the elimination of waste products and in the classification and subsequent recycling of them to raw material state. Rubbish and faeces are none other than the same excogitable nightmare; a dream of volcanic eruption, of excremental, totalising magma that slowly, but with terminal consistency, becomes dense on the outskirts of our cities, contributing to the creation of a syncretic space of atmo-emotional alterity. A symbolic link of the random ultra-tyranny of a non-realist and speculative political vocation; a symbolic link of the ravages of the surplus; a clear sign of the weakening of the West around a real conjecture of accident. It is the structural intoxication of a mediatically pathophobic, environmentally microbial world.

How otherwise can we interpret the fact that in towns such as Sambhaji Nagar II, an Indian NGO has constructed a toilet building, several storeys high, for around 500 local families? The toilets (pouring under), at the end of the day, are next to the crypts (underlying), remote, hidden spaces, with a sense of nuclear removal from gazes. The Spanish word for toilet, "retrete", comes from "retirado", "removed" or "remote" from the subject who withdraws to take a short break in the toilet, the loo, the lavatory. Lavatory is "xcusado" n Spanish; voluntarily excluded, therefore, from the omni-contemplative power of the inquiring gaze.
This verticalisation of the multiple latrine is the same as that which has led Pele to rent a niche on the ninth floor of a funerary building that can be seen from the Santos stadium; the same that leads to the verticalisation of the favela to a desire of visual control over imprisonment spaces.
Favela, lavatory and niche are the only figures of spatial resistance to the gaze because they enclose a desire for burial, for closure, for anti-corrective tactics of the habitat. A certain illegalism by law but not by offence. Society needs a sure future establishment of its subjects in order to not feel attacked. A stable society would be that which registers the DNA of all its individuals on a macro-computer, with a giant screen enabling immediate visualisation (speed is a synonym of power), as in the pseudo-film Minority Reports.

What strange Babelic execution, with a large projecting, emerging window, ends up generating buildings of funerary flats or toilet blocks like small temples placed on top of one another with the function of inhabiting (which is possessing) in a non-visual, private, intimate manner, given that showing it would qualify such spaces as obscene? Without doubt, an exhibitionist action if we bear in mind that vertical expansion of it, in some way, infringes its natural context, so we could say that these buildings take on a value of possession due to violation as they break the regulation or at least, the habitual horizontal expansion that occupies symbolic segments for both death and micturition with their depurative burial and drainpipes. The vertical favela is, nevertheless, a building by territorialization, by extension. In short, it reproduces, in a high-rise squatting field, the same local habits, where the corridors and community area interpret the gestures and actions of the road network and the apartments are still shacks, subdivided shanties, where light comes in through the skylight but which still maintain, within that irregularly, although not illegally occupied space (as this type of capture of space by the homeless is not an offence), failings in the communications systems, the drinking water supply and waste treatment. A problem which can be extended no only to Brazilian cities such as Rio de Janeiro, S?o Paulo or Recife; in Kingston, (Jamaica), for example, only 18 percent of the inhabitants have access to drains. And in the same way, it is not only in Brazil that there are advisory services for squatters - they also exist in England (Advisory Service for Squatters) or in France (Droit Au Logement), within Europe, although regularisation of the state of land ownership is another matter.

Meanwhile, the world is becoming detrital and requires alternative planning for the generation of the architecture of warning lights, of toilet or funerary signalling. Jacques Fresco, engineer, industrialist and designer, is preparing a town without noise, pollution or crime for Venus in Florida; a hygienist utopia called Venus Project: a prototype based on high technology and new energy resources, constructed using intelligent materials, self-management materials, nano-cubes. Therefore it seems obligatory to strengthen the "venusity" of towns, protect them from undesired agents of irregular construction and unofficial maintenance. It also appears correct to think of global experiences that assimilate the gaps in a magnitude that totalises the cognitive and perceptive experience and delete the tracks of any obscene terrenity. Terrenity, which is none other than the symptomatology of an invaluable fragmentary discontinuation.

The fact is that behind this pompatic desire, of unknown cognition and supra-national governments, an incomprehensible concept of the most elemental rights is hidden. A world without crime is a callipaedic and eugenistic world, a viewpoint of capital wills, whose excess of regulations eliminates social flaws and the sum total of dysgenic subjects. We should ask ourselves Philip K. Dick's question, Do androids dream of electric sheep?, which gave rise to Ridley Scott's film, Blade Runner, amongst other things because it portrays a dehumanised metropolis, ecological disorder and biogenetic manipulation and at the same time involution towards police totalitarianism. We should also ask ourselves how to alternate self-management materials, (the highest quality products, sensitive, insulating materials) with the interiors of tetra bricks as the most technified slum system for insulating informal towns, as in the case of Salobral on the dual carriageway to Andalusia south of Madrid. It was Kant who put forward that what is sublime or terrible becomes bizarre when it is absolutely unnatural. There is more obscenity in the excess of sublimity than in the thinned-out skeleton of a building of cesspools and latrines. We should inquire about deicide as a recurring theme in contemporary architecture and about the considerations Derrida makes on the conquest of the sky… "that achievement of an observation point (rosh: head, chief, beginning) means giving oneself a name; and with this grandeur, the grandeur of the name, of the superiority of a meta-language, it seeks to dominate the remaining lineages, the other languages: to colonise them. But God descends from heaven and speaks one word: Babel…and with it, He condemns men to multiplicity." It seems clear that the non-execution of any possible Babel has made possible a history of architecture and at the same time, a constructive history of marginality. And with it that underlying desire for town and observation tower, as majestic symbols of hegemonic power and domination, have been succeeding, cyclic attempts at supra-national regulation and imperialist vigour. The Venus Project, without admitting it, is a project for a prospective Babel which would cancel out the alterity, strangeness, difference and multiplicity of languages. It is the prominent ambition of a single model as opposed to the deconstructive fulfilment of not adhering to any tradition; utopia versus heterotopia .

"When something which endures comes up, something that really does represent a basic change, it takes root and establishes itself. Its period of ugliness and revolution will be left behind. It will not have to change… The true revolution will cease to be revolutionary and ugly and will become beautiful. It will do so because of our perception of it."

To mention Cidade de Deus, Parais?polis or Novo Mundo by name, as designative forms for these 'favela' districts, is not a contradiction but a configuration made in accordance with the measure of their aesthetic significance.

If the Cingapura Project tends to cancel out some of these illegal territorializations, why not propose alternatives to this suppression? Would a housing programme that is determined to modify the dramatic living conditions of 380.000 families so dramatically that an undesired failure cannot be allowed, given the need to successfully exploit international financial resources, not also require a space for memory? If Wittgenstein's house is still standing and demolition was suspended at the last moment, should there not be museum viability for the 'favela'; an explicit reminder, in the style of the AUSCHWITZ museum; a planned form of perception of the counter-panoptics and underlying tunnels? Should we not consider recovering these spaces from recent historical memory? Some slum districts, such as Mahakan Fort, on the edge of demolition, on the island of Rattanakosin in Thailand, are almost one hundred and fifty years old. Are they not epic, then - symbols of the dromocracy sustained by Virilio? That is to say, should we not conserve, as ideological heritage, an architectural practice of remnants and pastiche as an indicative selenosis of the disagreement of the pariahs with the political economy of speed? And it is true that, from their small barricades, many slum districts protect themselves from governments and town councils every night as a precaution against demolition. Enzesberger said, "the more intensely a civilisation defends itself and builds walls around itself in the face of an external threat, the less there will be left to defend in the end." It seems, therefore, that whilst they grow, inguinally, on the outskirts and slopes, slum districts will have nothing to fear, except for the speculative growth of land or the planning of a dual carriageway, but if they are located in the epicentres of the larger cities they will find themselves in a cancerous phase, as for the town councils they mean chachectic architecture which will implode on its unbreathable rancidness and even worse, will function as indicative, apologetic mirrors of an ultra-liberal society drowned in the trimmings of its own excess.

If, as some political scientists sustain, in the future there will only be one ideology and it will be ultra-ecologism, these profitable, constructive recycling structures should not fall into disuse, but the mythical Babel advances and town planning will tend towards the ever-dangerous single model. Even a favela-dweller like O Condicionado, from his natural precedence, asks himself how long the merchants will take to manage materiais com as prestacoes necessarias para a construcao de novos universos.