The concentration camp is a part of the history of modern society. The destructive power of modern technology was tested on the battlefields of mass war, with the slaughterhouses of the concentration camps serving as a proving ground for the destructive power of modern organization. The modern era liberated humanity from incomprehensible forces, yet at the same time immensely increased the power of human beings to kill. Measured against this hypertrophy, earlier forms of power seem fragmentary, irrational, crude in their means and limited in their scope.
Wolfgang Sofsky, THE ORDER OF TERROR, 1993.
In terms of this project, I have largely neglected this aspect of the camps situation and failed to explore its new and unique aspects. How the slaughterhouses were not just factories for "manufacturing corpses", but were destructive of humanity on many other levels: consciously, methodically developing techniques for ravaging the universal structures within which human beings move — their relations to the world, to others, and to themselves. They used terror to redefine work, time, death.
I must freely admit that I do not comprehend the motivation or intention of the development of this system that seems bent purely on wrecking destruction. That may be my main motivation for setting out on this project.
What lessons of organization, for better or for ill, have we learned from the camps? About the power of terror, about the force of organization, that we presume upon today? Will there ever be a future in which the techniques of the camps will seem to us fragmentary and crude?
