Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict

by Andrew Herscher

While the construction of architecture has a place in architectural discourse, its destruction, generally seen as incompatible with the very idea of "culture," has been neglected in theoretical and historical discussion. Responding to this neglect, Herscher examines the case of the former Yugoslavia and in particular, Kosovo, where targeting architecture has been a prominent dimension of political violence. Rather than interpreting violence against architecture as a mere representation of "deeper" social, political, or ideological dynamics, Herscher reveals it to be a form of cultural production, irreducible to its contexts and formative of the identities and agencies that seemingly bear on it as causes. Focusing on the particular sites where violence is inflicted and where its subjects and objects are articulated, the book traces the intersection of violence and architecture from socialist modernization, through ethnic and nationalist conflict, to postwar reconstruction.

220 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 2010

Reviews

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Throughout, Herscher hones in on the question of re-presentation, qua Derridean supplement, an addition that is nonetheless redundant, what he also terms "mimesis." Architecture then comes to play what we could also call a metonymic role: the vandalism of Serbian Orthodox churches comes to stand in for Albanian aggression against what Benedict Anderson would term the "imagined community" of Serbs, "violence" against buildings becoming narratively figured as violence against a "peoples." Architecture and narrative: also figured in the retroaction of "socialist modernization" in the early Yugoslav days, which narratively constructs a "pre-modernity" only retroactively, as an interpretive act which reads pre-existing architecture as "pre-modern." Drawing on Barthes, Virilio, Bergson, Girard, et al., and Benjamin and Buck-Morss, Herscher seeks to trouble the violence/culture dichotomy, or the architecture/history one, to think phenomena not merely as epiphenomena, to follow a trace back to its (untheorizable) fundament, a "spatialization" of violence and its effects.