The Language of Damage

Abstract

Architecture fulfills a representational function not only through its construc- tion, but also throughits destruction.Damageis a formof design, and the traces of damage inflicted by political violence-a facade stippled by the spray of bullets, a penumbra of smoke around the hole where a door or window once was, or a pile of rubble no longer identifiable as architecture at all-are at least as significant as any of the elements from which buildings are constructed for living, for the living. Architecture's representational status is, in fact, often more vivid, intense, and insistent when it is damaged than when it is intact, and this effect of heightened representationality can take hold even when architecture is destroyed and ceases to exist. A devastated ground zero is materially empty but also a zero signifier, an absence that can evoke the for- mer presence of a site, the presences of those who formerly inhabited it, and a proliferating arrayof other significations, some of which are capable of moti- vating the infliction of further damage as well. Damage, then, is both a vio- lence inflicted on architecture and an architecture inflicted on violence; it is not simply a misuse or abuse of architecture, but a manifestation of archi- tecture's potential for producing meaning, effected as and through violence. The language of damage is based on damage's double status as a direct and unmediated trace of violence and as a signifier whose meaning is wholly determined by the chain of signification it is inserted into. Thus, though the physical remains of damage appear to be evidence, precisely what these remains are evidence of is a result of the often fantasmic social meanings that damageis endowed with. Consider,for example, the compellingly real damage of the attacksof September 11,2001, understood by some as the work of Islamic terrorists and by others as the work of the Israeli secret service, by some as a result of a sophisticated co-option of technology and by others as a result of a pretechnological worldview, by some as a response to an overly militaristic America too willing to wreak violence on its adversaries and by others as a response to an overly tolerant America too welcoming to its adversaries to secure the safety of its own citizens. These readings correspond not only to more or less informed interpretationsof the violence of September 11,but also, in a precise and specific manner, to the very antagonisms from which that violence erupted. Damage, then, is both a nonideological record of violence and a manifestation of violence's ideological structure, both the means by which violence is inflicted and the means by which violence is socially con- stituted and sustained.