Session 5a: Institutions and Ideology

3rd Global Conference

Thursday 15th March – Saturday 17th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic

Correctional Institutions: Structures of Cleansing or Vessels of Evil?
Valia Petraki
Architect, Greece

Prisons and psychiatric institutions are the primary purgatories of modern societies. They are means of isolating what causes dysfunction and endangers the larger part of a community. All institutions of this kind use specific architectural signifiers, destined not only to isolate, but also to intimidate, seclude, correct and transform individuals and sets of behaviors. Is evilness represented by the very structure of space and subsequently retransmitted even after the end of its use? Can such a structure not only contain but enhance evilness and if so, by what means?

Is a place that is destined to treat what contemporary societies reject, a place where evil is engraved? When the “ruin” of such a place is visited, its memory remains extremely palpable. Is it the identity of a place that used to host and treat evilness that makes it resonate a specific message when all use is ceased?

Similar observations can be made for a place as monstrous as a concentration camp: in this case it is not primarily its form and design, but mostly the use with which it is associated that define its memory and current identity. Without the atrocities that took place in a concentration camp, it is nothing but a set of barracks and service buildings. However, an ex-camp today, or a memorial on this particular subject, directly addresses the darkest side of their visitors yet appeal to their deepest emotions of compassion. This uncanny feeling is achieved through a semi-intentional syntax of the given space.

Through these two categories, it is attempted to verify whether a physical diagram of such places represents a direct or indirect psychological impact on individuals. Finally, it is examined if such a place has the ability to form a persons’ conscience and through which processes.

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Oume, An Icon of the Meja Era: How a Murderous Disrupts Gender Ideology
Yoshie Endo
Osaka Gakuin University, Japan

I will examine how Hanai Oume (1863-1916), a notorious murderess in the early-modern Japan, a famous geisha at the time, has been portrayed both in film (“Meiji Ichidai-onna,” 1955) and other theatrical works. The investigation of the film is illuminating because Oume disrupts the notion and image of women that had been propagated and proliferated via media since Japan built itself as one of the modern nations in Meiji (early-modern) period.

The media at the time displayed hysterical reactions and asked a question: can such an evil woman be a woman? This question brings about more essential inquiry of femininity and its relationship with violence and notion of evil. Those questions are aggravating, because the female violence in some way deeply threatens ideological definitions of gender that bind together and inform the cultural ideals and ideological systems. Therefore, a theoretical discussion of the relation between the realms of femininity and narrative is unavoidable for the examination of how Oume is portrayed in this film.

One of the main clues to find out what kind of narrative this film exhibits and how that narrative is constructed lies in what makes the relationship between masculinity and femininity ideological. And this ideological relationship is dependent on the concept of the complementary roles of femininity and masculinity. A violent woman such as Oume who murders a man, thereby, disrupts this complementary relationship. This notion of complementary roles of gender is deeply entrenched in our concepts of love and sex, as well as masculinity and femininity. This notion, according to psychoanalysis, is the most motivating force to support the social order and masks antagonism and makes the world seem whole. However, a violent woman like Oume creates a moment in which the sexual antagonism is revealed; she also provokes an impulse of redefining gender, thus reveals the antagonism that underlies narrative; she even opens up possibilities for change of the social construction. Moreover, the tension between Oume, an evil woman and the romantic narrative presents the traumatic nature of such a woman in the early-modern Japan.

Nation-State Artifacts: reflections About the Latest Breed
Karim Medjad
Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (Cnam), Paris, France

Protectorates have always been a convenient response to regional complexity. Since antiquity, they have pervaded international relations in a variety of guises for a variety of purposes.

To date, they continue to flourish from Afghanistan to the seceding Georgian republics of North Ossetia and Abkhazia. While formally diverse, their basic institutional ingredients typically boil down to a weak state whose puppet government is closely monitored by a foreign protector.

Next to this traditional version, another breed has appeared in the Balkans in the end of the twentieth century, in the aftermath of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. A key innovation of this “modern” protectorate is that the representative of the protector has become a collective, ad hoc international administration, established and monitored by the United Nations. Just as in the most primitive forms however, local populations play a negligible role whereas their protectors enjoy exorbitant powers and a lack of accountability altogether.

In effect, modern protectorates are Kafkaesque bureaucracies operated on the assumption that a democracy can function without the people. In this legal utopia, democracy is expected to stem from a different recipe, in which a higher dose of transparency and a collective management are expected to make up for the missing ingredient.

In a world made of increasingly well co-ordinated strong states and increasingly chaotic weak states, this legal utopia deserves a closer examination, for it has arguably a bright future.

Drawing from a thirty five century-long history as well as from empirical findings made in the course of various missions on the field, this paper makes a critical examination of this new breed of protectorate and discusses the legal and institutional challenges it announces.

It argues, in particular, that it is questionable to operate today’s protectorates in the guise of traditional nation-states, for it is this very denial of what they actually are that allows their most archaic features to endure.

However detestable it may be, the protectorate existed thousands of years before the nation-state and may very well outlast it. It is thus outside, and arguably against this latter framework, that institutional responses must be sought to ensure minimum democratic standards in the – probably many – protectorates to come.