project47

I think a theme running between the four sites is that they are all institutions or structures that are part of what Norbert Elias terms, the civilizing process.

They are institutions or structures implemented by a larger power or parliamentary regime to control some sort of disorder or supervise a process of civilisation.

The prison to reform, the museum to educate, the stadium to excite and entertain, and the tunnel to unite and control the disorder of the irregular ferry service.

They evoke Enlightenment notions of a civilised society, where people are intended to become educated (to a certain point), non-violent, workers.

Therefore I think it is important to come at these projects not from the institutional level, but a personal level, to engage with the effects these institutions and structures have had on the surrounding communities.

To engage with the reactions AGAINST the civilising process.  Particularly in relation with the prison and the football stadium, and the role of violence in positioning oneself outside of society and the civilizing process.

I think the emphasis should be on the social, the people that these institutions affect.  Instead of looking at them as structures, we should humanise them, by relating and engaging with the personal element.

I think it is interesting to look at the effects of environments- space and place –on the communities that they intend to affect, alter, improve, change, or control.

In relation to the Millwall football stadium, considering the ways of living and the behaviour of the fans could be an interesting way to approach the project.  As Norbert Elias states, the violence of football fans can represent wider social developments and tensions.  This violence seems to me as a sort of retaliation to the hegemony of the civilizing process and the force of dominant ideologies.  Therefore it would be interesting to look at the counteractions against these institutions to gain a wider understanding of their social effect, and thus the surrounding community.

I think it is interesting to approach the projects with the “power” of mimetic faculty, so to reveal, explain, and complicate rather than translate and reason.  We do not want to go in like enlightened ethnographers with an aim to establish a reasoned universal ideal.  We need to obtain/retain the objectness of the object.  We do not want our representation to become more powerful than the represented, so I think a process of mimesis and collaboration is highly important, and not to empower people, how can you claim to do that, but to remain aware and alert to the existing power of the ‘represented’, the power of the personal, the communities that exist already, rather than the institutions and structures that attempt to define them.