by Luke Bennett
Virilio also took design inspiration from the bunker, and thus looked towards its future, exploring the possibilities of its form. Reflecting on his experience of entering the Atlantic Wall bunker, Virilio started to define the essentialism of the ‘cryptic architecture’ that he had encountered there and wrote about the essence of sheltering and dwelling within urban forms. He also wrote (in 1965) about ‘cryptic energy’ – ‘it is the energy of everything that hides’ (quoted in Redhead 2004a, 16), the driver of an infra-architecture which is obscured from the Greeks onwards, and yet which is a hallmark of any design that is truly of, and for, the body and the acts of dwelling that buildings contain. Here, Virilio’s concern was for a return to an embrace of buildings as places of physical and psychic shelter rather than of symbolic display. Inspired by his encounters with bunkers toppled over in the sand, Virilio shared with Parent a faith in the transformatory powers of dwelling within buildings built at oblique angles: where their slopes would encourage new modes of urban dwelling based upon ‘habitable circulation’ (Gane 1999, 90). This now strikes Mike Gane (1999, 87) as ‘a frighteningly naïve vision’ indicative of a ‘radical but obscure utopianism’ (88), but it may have seemed more credible set within the radical optimism of mid-1960s modernism.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Virilio and Parent’s plans for awkward, cryptically confined living spaces were never realized on a large scale – but they did manage to express their ideas in material form when they won a commission for a new church: the church of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay in Nevers (which was built between 1964 and 1966). Saint Bernadette had her vision of the Virgin Mary in a cave (the Grotto of Massabielle) at nearby Lourdes in 1858, and Virilio and Parent’s commission-winning design sought to exploit cryptic architecture within the design of the church. Although (according to Parent) the styling of the exterior to look like an Atlantic Wall bunker was a late-stage addition by Virilio, the church is remarkably bunker-like in its entire design4 – cast of rough concrete, with each of two modules intersecting at an oblique angle (to form the outline of a stylized heart if viewed from above). The building appears to be all about the cryptic properties of shelter, and in its sloping flooring an ‘architecture of disequilibrium’ (Redhead 2004b, 24).
Commissioned by the Catholic Church at a time when Pope John XXIII (through the Second Vatican Council) was trying to re-establish the proximity between the servants of God and the faithful, we can perhaps see how the anti-ornate, Brutalist styling of the proposed design for the new church at Nevers would have resonated with its commissioners, through its lack of ostentation, its solidity and its offer of an atmosphere of protection. Thus it can be said that Parent and Virilio ‘expressed a new function for the church in an age of uncertainty and tension’ (Joly et al. 2009). Furthermore, Armitage (2015, 28) makes an explicit connection to the Cold War, viewing the church as ‘an amalgamation between bunker concrete and a vibrant, ruptured space [which] does exemplify the alarming and conflicting vitalities of enormous power and uneasy deadlock typical of the Cold War era’. He also credibly suggests that its cryptic (sheltering) properties speak more of a fallout shelter than the Atlantic Wall bunkers, and here we should indeed appreciate that while Virilio’s declared inspiration was the bunkers of the Second World War, his bunker-hunting and the Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay project were both implemented amid the Cold War’s first heightened phase of tension during which the USSR forged ahead in the Space Race5 having launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 and achieved the first human orbit in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was erected. The following year the world was brought to the brink of nuclear conflagration in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Meanwhile during this period France was embroiled in the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), and in 1960 it had revealed that it was developing its own nuclear weapons.
In Bunker Archeology, Virilio reflected upon the meaning of bunkers, upon their essential forms and upon the factors driving their presence and evolution. For Ian Klinke (2015, 6), Virilio ‘approaches bunkers as monolithic spaces that promise survival in an era of aerial bombing, asphyxiating gases, flamethrowers, and nuclear warheads. [Bunkers] emerge in an age in which weapons have become so omnipotent that distance can no longer act protectively’. Here Klinke encapsulates Virilio’s view that the evolution of modern warfare sees an acceleration (of events, energy and velocity) such that the defensive capabilities of being spatially elsewhere than your opponent offer increasingly less protection. This realization led onto much of Virilio’s later work on the dynamics of late modernity, but it also spurred his conclusion that the future of warfare lies in an ‘aesthetics of disappearance’ (Virilio 1994, 167) in which ‘the essence of the new fortress is elsewhere, underfoot, invisible from here on in’ (1994, 46).
In his theorizing on the nature of war in an era of ‘accelerated modernity’ (Redhead 2004b), Virilio reflected on the Atlantic Wall structures as a symbol of what he called ‘Total War’ – where the immensity of a project like that defensive line and its consumption of resources reveals what a society looks like when war demands that all aspects of life must be subjugated to the act of waging war. But, importantly he did not regard ‘Total War’ as the end of the evolutionary journey. Instead he argued the Second World War never really ended (Virilio & Lotringer 1983) and that that conflict had simply changed its form to one of ‘Pure War’, a circumstance in which the obviousness of war itself falls subject to its own aesthetics of disappearance. In this ‘Pure War’ state conflict becomes sublimated: it disappears into the routines of the everyday. Indeed, for Virilio, the acceleration of weaponry produced a state of what he has called ‘polar inertia’ (Virilio 1999a) – whereby ironically this acceleration causes conditions to appear to be frozen-still. This is certainly an apt characterization of the nuclear standoff between the superpowers during the Cold War.
BUNKER-HUNTING, MOTIVE AND TRAUMA
We now turn to consider Virilio’s motivations for his bunker-hunting, and its link to the Cold War. Virilio’s relationship with the bunker was complex: ‘For me the bunker is a kind of metaphor for suffocation, asphyxiation, both what I fear and what fascinates me’ (Virilio, 2002, 23). This suggests the classic revenant push-pull effect of trauma, unresolved issues that are returning to haunt (Lafleur 2007; Klinke 2016). Elsewhere (Bennett 2013a) I have argued that 21st-century bunker hunters are working something out in their repeated engagements with these abandoned structures – much like the obsessive surveying of Günter Grass’s character Herzog described earlier and there is considerable evidence to suggest that Virilio’s own bunker-hunting was an attempt to work through his childhood wartime trauma. Virilio’s project was certainly not a dispassionate pastime, and there is an affective edge to Bunker Archeology, and palpably something going on within Virilio’s compulsive, engaged interest in the Atlantic Wall’s bunkers.
Virilio has described his motivation for Bunker Archeology as ‘a personal one, motivated by the desire to uncover the geostrategic and geopolitical foundations of the total war I had lived through as a young boy in Nantes’ (Virilio & Parent 1996, 11). He spent the war in Nantes, a city in which 8,000 buildings were destroyed, and during the war he kept a journal, detailing the destruction of his city, its armament factories and submarine port. He has stated that this experience of the ruination of the built environment was the reason for his developing an interest in architecture and urbanism. Virilio has repeatedly described his childhood wartime experience using the word ‘traumatic’, and has referred to himself as a ‘child of the war’. He has also stated that his wartime experience has been the most lasting influence over his work. This is all particularly notable given his Catholic faith, as is his description of his childhood experience of the war as being his ‘baptism’. But perhaps most telling is his revelation that he and his family escaped the Gestapo in 1941 only because of the ‘cryptic architecture’ of the family home, which enabled them to hide and evade their unwelcome callers.
If Viri
lio’s formative experiences between the ages of 7 and 11 in Nantes can have this lasting effect upon his attitude towards Nazi fortifications, could not the generalized trauma of the world population awaiting an anticipated nuclear war between 1945 and 1989 also have a similar effect in inspiring some to seek out and engage with the once-secret spaces of prospective nuclear annihilation? In a 1996 interview, Virilio appears to accord significant traumatic power to the experience of war by children, and to see this as not confined to any special circumstances of the Second World War and he has stated:
I am a war victim. A lot of people of my generation, whether in Germany, France or England went through this childhood trauma of war. Today in Sarajevo there must be a lot of Virilio kids watching war like voyeurs. A kid is a war voyeur. He watches the atrocities though a key-hole. That explains Bunker Archeology. (Virilio interviewed in Limon 1996, 52)
Child psychologists, writing during the Cold War, certainly worried about the traumatic effects of exposing children to the atmosphere of the nuclear standoff (on this see, for example, Barnett, & Lee 1989; Greenwald & Zeitlin 1987; Bourke 2006). For Joseph Masco (2006) the Cold War state of sublimated Pure War created an insidious framing of reality and being which acted to distort our perception of the world, and to blind us to the evidence of the military-industrial complex and the nuclear state. Persisting for four decades, and requiring us to live with the prospect of sudden, unannounced global destruction, the Cold War held us in a state of neurotic tension, a polar inertia that we were told would have to be endured in perpetuity. Virilio acknowledges the weight of this frozen trauma of the Cold War thus:
The years of nuclear deterrence, of the great anxiety which lasted for forty years. I lived that and I have to say that at the time, fear became a mass phenomenon. During the [Second World War], there were mass fears concerning exterminated populations, but they didn’t last very long – often just the time of the bombing or the seizing of hostages. After 1945–50 the world was afraid of the end of the world. (Virilio 1999b, 30)
This enduring Pure War condition thus colonized the subconscious, inhabiting ‘the insinuating dreamscape of buried nuclear fears’ (Beck 2009, 237) and set up a strange sado-masochistic relationship between citizen and state, as Adam Piette (2009, 11) puts it: ‘The hostile pseudo-friend of the state [that] targets its own citizens in the long game of deterrence’. The Cold War’s was an ‘uncanny modernity’ (Masco 2006, 1), borne of a nuclear era riddled with contradictions, culturally promiscuous imaginaries of apocalyptic destruction sitting alongside the paucity of civil defence provision and the anti-nuclear movements’ revelation of the state’s preparations for its own survival.
For Joseph Masco (2006, 4) this Pure War condition remarkably produced the near-erasure of the nuclear economy from public view; and the banalization of the nuclear weapons, via a process of fetishization. Here Masco draws on the work of Ann McClintock (1995), who (broadening Freud’s notion of the ‘fetish’ beyond his fixation on the phallus) explains that the fetish inhabits the crossroads where personal and historical memories meet. The fetish is a site of a crisis in social meaning, because it is an attempt at an impossible resolution. A fetish is made when a contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in an object (the fetish). This displacement is reinforced by compulsive repetition (which is why the fetish then appears to have some agency: to hold the fetishist in its thrall). Thus the making of a fetish by a fetishist is a psychic survival strategy, which gives the fetishist some sense of meaning if not actual control or resolution: ‘By displacing power onto the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities’ (McClintock 1995, 184).
Masco then further develops his argument by enlisting Walter Benjamin’s claim that modernity overstimulates and leads individuals to retreat inwards, to find ways of dulling that sensory experience. He also draws upon Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the uncanny – the unhomely – a condition in which givens (i.e. received and expected understandings) are unsettled creating a perceptual dislocation which then gives the appearance that things have strange powers – because this is the only way in which we can make sense of the change to the givens which we thought were certainties in the world.
Thus, for Masco, these psycho-cultural processes all lead us to fix upon an object that seems related to our trauma and that offers up some prospect of helping us to make sense of the unresolved issues that still haunt us. Masco applies this analysis to nuclear weapons, describing how bombs, missiles and images of nuclear explosions became the fetish of the Cold War era. But the analysis seems equally applicable to Cold War bunkers, for if you carry trauma from the Cold War, then what is better to fetishize than the supposed places of safety (where things are fundamentally familiar and protective courtesy of their cryptic architectural properties)? As a surrogate womb to return to, the bunker is the ultimate sensory shock-absorber.
But not everyone chose the strategy of focusing into an object to resolve his or her Cold War trauma. The overwhelming apocalyptic contingency of nuclear war led many to be fatalistic and fundamentally bored by the prospect of possible annihilation (the existential fact of the unavoidable mortality of our individual bodies already being something that we inevitably must learn to habituate to). Thus for Masco, ‘The phantasmagoria of nuclear war leads some to find anaesthetic-comfort in a privatized everyday space, [but it leads] … others to find it, not through a psychic withdrawal and disinvestment, but through the flooding of the sense offered by participation in an all-or-nothing cosmology’ (Masco 2006, 15). Thus, the choice is: ignore the bombs or bunkers or become obsessed with them. Thus, by this analysis, Cold War bunker-hunting is a case of choosing to embrace the detail of the fetishized bunker, by hunting and dwelling upon, and in it as a way of coping with the repressed trauma of the Cold War. This is because (for some) that immersion makes this important-to-them aspect of their experience of the world knowable and less overwhelming. It also gives bunker hunters a chance to validate their reification of the bunker, and to enact their status and identity-building work within like-minded communities (as I have explored in Bennett 2013a).
IS IT NOW SAFE TO BE AFRAID? THE NUCLEAR SUBLIME AND COLD WAR NOSTALGIA
Masco (writing in 2006) suggested that the time was now right to explore the Cold War’s repressed sites, in order to ‘presence’ the suppressed nuclear world, and to address its deep trauma. It certainly appears that the processes of re-examination and communion enabled by Virilio’s bunker-hunting may have been a therapeutic endeavour for him. But is the opportunity to (as a Readers’ Digest documentary on Cold War bunkers put it) ‘discover the secrets you were never supposed to know; travel to the places you were never supposed to go’ (Croce 2008) always justification enough for attempting to do so? Is this opportunity-taking necessarily therapeutic (in the manner suggested earlier), or simply another form of the commodification of the world (via the experiential economy of ‘dark tourism’ [Lennon & Foley 2000] or urban exploration?). And what if bunker-hunting is actually nostalgia? Piette (2009, 12) notes that ‘the Cold War generated complex longings of a terrifying kind whilst it lasted, then this new state of rapt nostalgia in its aftermath’ including an ‘obscure longing for the stabilities of the nuclear stand-off and its fixed ideological confrontation’ (Piette 2009, 11).
Richard Ross’s Waiting for the End of the World (2004) gives us an insight into nuclear nostalgia and how it is performed. Ross’s study is a coffee-table-type book of photographs of fallout shelters around the world. Ross’s motivations are explored in a transcribed interview, conducted by Sara Vowell and included in his book. Here Vowell flags that she finds herself drawn to such places because she is trying to work through the apocalyptic anxieties that she lived through as a teenager growing up amid the nuclear missile bases of Montana. She and Virilio each testify to the nostalgic lure of such former places and times of terror, echoing Andreas Huyssen’s view that ‘in the body of the ruin the past is both pres
ent in its residues and yet no longer accessible, making the ruin an especially powerful trigger for nostalgia’ (2006, 7). This is because the ruin marks a conjunction of temporal and spatial loss: creating a yearning point for the time and a yearning moment for the place that once was. Thus in the ruin, in this conjunction, there is the promise that the haunting effects of the trauma might be confronted and potentially resolved. Vowell’s trauma is that the sudden ending of the Cold War took away the schema that had structured her childhood experience. The removal of that structuring left her unsettled in the post–Cold War (and adult world). In the case of Vowell, a longing for the certainties of childhood appears as a nostalgic longing for the Cold War. Thus, the dividing line (if there is one) between the working out of trauma and of a past-obsessed nostalgia is a difficult line to draw.
While we can only live in the present and it would seem appropriate to orientate our actions towards the future, our identity is constantly made and remade in our cycling between past, present and future. If viewed broadly nostalgia is merely that necessary part of identity work that draws upon the past, but defined narrowly, it is a pathological condition in which the affected person is incapable of acting in the present (and towards the future) because of his or her overwhelming longing to return to the past. Thus whether a nostalgic element present within bunker-hunting is problematic depends upon whether it prevents (or enables) happiness and gainful dwelling within the present (and acting towards the future). It is therefore likely that each bunker hunter is operating at different points on this spectrum, and that no generalization can be readily made about the danger of bunker-hunting’s nostalgic element. It is also apparent that truly (pathologically) nostalgic bunker-hunting is far less common in relation to Cold War bunkers than it is for Second World War bunker hunters. The latter have a far greater tendency to imbue their quarry with a patriotic fervour and narratives of fallen imperial greatness (on this see Bennett 2013b).