Lecture on security and securitization as a utopian urban imaginary, and on the interweaving of the open and closed utopias in single formal structures, borders, embassies. Given at The Future of Urbanism conference at Taubman School of Architecture, University of Michigan and Theory, Culture and Society event at Critical Theory Institute UC Irvine, and at Encuentro Internacional de Arquitectura 2011, CentroCultural Tijuana, MX. It will be published in a special issue of Bracket on Soft Systems.
First off let me begin my remarks on the troubled relationship between urbanism and futurity by citing the dictum by that famous British urbanist, J.G. Ballard which says that ‘sex times technology equals the future’1 and for our purposes modify it slightly but without changing its essential meaning to ‘political theology times technology equals the integral utopia.’ That is, the historical temporality of the city is, as Walter Benjamin has already argued, bound to the rhythms of theological and prophetic history and in the guise of the city, that prophetic economy takes the form of utopia and dystopia.2 In this, Urbanism is not only the design of systems in the spatial present but better and for worse, a politico-theologic projection for which real cities exist always in some fallen simulacrum of an eventual ideal. Among these, the aspiration of security as a utopia of urban interfaces is my topic.
Utopia is essentially both a political and an urban-geographic function and it not only depends upon futurity, it produces futurity as a space to be described and filled with peace or war. Unlike cities in the real world, utopias are bounded totalities, enveloped singularities, from the Jerusalem that was the geographic center of the world, to the island jurisdiction of Thomas More, to Theodor Adorno’s insistence to Ernst Bloch that the utopian impulse is not that of positive reform but of complete transformation of the totality of what is, up to and including the apparent reality of death.3 But what is their use today? Against disavowals of the 20th century as a bloodbath of totalitarian utopias, Alain Badiou demands that it was the transformative spirit even of their failure even that must inspire and inform a continuous push toward a total transformation. So is Fredric Jameson’s oft-repeated line that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” even still true?4 Was it less true at the end of 2008 than now in 2010, when after the storm, we have blithely resumed business-as-usual and officially wasted a good crisis?
But we are hardly lacking in utopias and utopians: capitalist, critical, green, securitarian, sacred; and it is this surplus of utopias that presents the problem. First let’s be clear that whatever “end of history” began in 1989 and ended in 2008 was in no way the eclipse of utopia as some who believe themselves dispassionate pragmatists would have it. The flat earth of digital globalization was nothing if not intensely utopian. Cities too were adorned with a new brotherhood of obelisks to this new “post-utopian “order, predicated on the cargo-cult economics of Bilbao effects and affects. And, of course, this era was punctuated by the destruction in NYC by the utopian urbanist Muhammed Atta, whose masters degree in Urban Planning described the segmentation of Aleppo, Syria into Islamic and Western zones where the immunity of the former could be protected from the dangers of the later as well as his mortificiation at the mistreatment of the twin towers of the Gates of Al Basir. His utopian security urbanism was to sacrifice one set of twin towers to save another.5
What for our Urbanism? Cambrian lurches forward in design ecologies tend to occur in response to an emergency, often a war. Recently design has been asked to choose between two meta-emergencies: 1. ecological deterioration or 2. securitization/ the war on terror. Lines are drawn. Use cases are modelled. Budgets are allocated. And now a 3rd, the financial crisis adds a third meta-emergency/ productive constraint condition against which design thinking can push. The 3 work in combination and in competition for prioritization and through them constraint is not only a set of conditions in which design must struggle, to constrain is itself the design strategy.
These crises are predicated on a shared set of technological developments and perspectives. urban computing, ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, and so forth turn our attention the interfaces between urban software and hardware as critical design points; the realities of climatic, ecological, natural and energy economies as limit conditions on urban systems focus attention on every point within that system as a interfacial transference point to be interrogated, subtracted or optimized; then, for security, the permanent emergency of potential exceptional violence recasts every partition, aperture, orifice, choke point as a site of governance for the generalized interior and the immunity of the aggregate urban body. The utopia of security might even be defined as the aspirational notion that the polymorphous, polyspatial and polytemporal interfaces of the city can be known and governed in total and as a totality.
So then it is not the utopian versus the realist but of multiple utopias, of open utopias and closed utopias, fully operational at once and co-occupying the same location: totalities on top of totalities. In thinking about the futurity of urbanism, what I want to sketch is how this interlacing of utopias, one involving the other, even through the medium of a single urban form, defines the present. Let me quickly touch on four sites: Mumbai, the USA government footprint, San Diego, Jerusalem
Mumbai: Consider by way of parable the attacks in and on civilian Mumbai by Laskar-e Taiba, the Pakistani state within a state, armed, we believe, with an array of sophisticated, but off-the-shelf personal locative media tools: satellite phones, stolen SIM cards, encrypted email, and to plan and organize the mission, Google Earth and Google Maps. Laskhar’s utopian urbanism is predicated on an expansive geographical vision of Dar-es Islam, whereas the cosmopolitan logic of Google and Google Earth is a singular denuded space into which competing claims can be enveloped. I think one lesson of Mumbai is less that Jihad can fit within Google Earth but than Google Earth fits within Jihad. Just as fundamentalism is a function of Modernity, Modernity becomes a fucntion of fundamentialism. The open utopia of Google Earth’s cosmographic capacities are instrumentalized by fundamentalist politico-theological geographies, such that one space can interweave through the other in the same projection. And again, their interweaving and interdependency produces the space of their encounter. Whatever highly conditional equivalence or exchangeability that exists is not an a priori feature, but the result of the real operations of encounter. In other words this space of this interlacing of utopias is made and thereby entered into, not entered into and so made, or again, after Adorno, “but in that we travel there, the island of utopia rises out of the sea...”6
USA Embassy: today we are overwhelmed by a surplus of now ubiquitous even normative utopianism, both of openness and closeness at once, and this is rendered in the offical symbolism of the State. While the Bush2 era new USA embassy in Berlin by Moore Ruble Yudell didn’t bother to even suggest civil space or civilian purpose, others do. Consider Kieran and Timberlake’s winning USA Embassy in London design, quickly derided for its schizophrenic posture to the world, both transparent glass and defensive bunker at once, an ambivalent posture for global presence in the Obama era. Or Morphosis’ CalTrans where dynamic expressionistic forms look like public sculpture but perform as martial security program: decorative camouflage precisely. Our attempts to reconcile the demands of open and closed within the same architectonic entity, whether a building or a city, means interweaving the open and closed into one, liberal cosmopolitan urbanity interlocked with control society partitions and surveillant sorting. Enlightenment transparency plus gated bunker: a typology we can could call the “Glass Fort”. What is the effect? This interweaving of both into a single fabric and single body makes for densely reversible political boundaries and interiorities collapsing on themselves, and, less for the vast pens of Giorgio Agamben’s canonical model of “the camp” as the space of universal exception, but for soft and provisional camps, furtive moments of mundane exception, closely sandwiched between interfaces of generalized freedom and mobility: like the 5 minutes of the airport security lines.7
In San Diego the affluent Global North directly abuts the Global South. San Diego’s self-image of the North-South interface is something like Thomas Kinkade sitting on top of a Latino Children of Men, but this is not true. Along with Tijuana, the border towns and the maquiladoras it should be seen as a single indissoluble urban form, bifurcated by an international border into two formal jurisdictions and two socio-economic realities. The border, like any interface, activates as much energy and information as it cleaves and suppresses, and while there are persistent calls to finalize a West Bank style total wedge, from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, the utopia of securitization that motivates this not possible. The border economy is so deeply and thoroughly interdependent (money, goods, labor, people, data, water, food) that to imagine their final disentanglement the strong sorting central to any security of utopia is impossible. Instead the emergent conditions of flow and networkicity continually overwhelm the zombie jurisdictions of this prophylactic geopolitics. At Calit2 at UCSD in the core of the Golden Triangle, BANG Lab has launched the Transborder Immigrant Tool, software running on inexpensive GPS cell phone that allows migrants attempting to cross the dangerous desert to find fresh drinking water. This is one example of how security lines produce complex interfacialities that are as productive of new modes of political subjectivity, in this case a “user” half-way between homo sacer and full citizen, beyond security’s capacity to control.
Jerusalem is in so many ways archetypical of this interweaving. The physical city constitutes the material signified for the sacred maps of three major religions, one layered on top of another, one woven through another, history and prophetic future differentially activated for Jews, Muslims and Christians, constituted by the imaginary architectures of rebuilt temples, original foundations, polydimensional boundaries and land rights codes, and of course a blunt wedge introducing an artificial canal between spaces torturing the limits of legitimate jurisdictionality. But the boundary of this camp condition is not only at the external membrane of official Israeli territory. Like the the international borders held deep within landlocked airports nowhere near another country it is inside Jerusalem, with the ubiquitous check-points the political envelope of interior and exterior, is repeated again and again,, these checkpoints infinitely multiply the border interface internalizing it (lots of little within big) like some self-reproducing fractal fold into the interfaces of everyday life, effectively dissolving the politico-theological imaginaires of the civil war of Abrahamaic monotheism into the symbolic realities of everyday urbanism. Finally, it is no clearer there than here where the secular economy is predicated on military segmentation and where military segmentation is built on the secular economy, their association is concretized in the governed interfaces of mutual immunization.
“Imagine no lines,” is the manifesto of security experts, as in no frontlines to definitely site war and the no clear interior demarcated by exterior membrane but this infinite smoothing is another name for what Paul Virilio called “Pure War” it is the same thing as “imagine nothing but lines” where the infinity of smoothness proves upon more granular inspection to be infinite striation.8 The reversibility of the line and the no line is mirrored in the reversibility of the open and the closed within the same architecture. Just as for the embassies, the paired demands of open liberal democracy and its open transparent interfaces and the western hegemon under siege from multitudinous enemies, open and closed, democratic and martial, co-occupying the same structure and the same architecture, less juxtaposed than interwoven one within the other like two solutions that won’t dissolve, threads in same quilt.
No dichotomy between soft systems and hard systems can last long under such incessant inversions. Or perhaps it is the persistence of the dichotomy itself which allows for these oscillations between soft targets that become hardened + hard targets that become squishy to continue in this way, and to serve the needs of its programs so efficiently: decorative camouflage, the theater of security, the spectacle of transparency, the proscenium of public infrastructure. The hard is what gives the un-politicized flux of soft architecture its alibis, the soft is what gives the stale authority of the hard its claim on institutionality. They are complicit, the hard and the soft. For Michel Serres information and language soften up the hard things of the world.9 But as Jean Genet plays out for us in The Balcony, this is a political pantomime, the soft dressing up in the cop suit of the hard, the hard escaping out the back door in the streetwalker’s costume of revolution: it’s a drag show.10
So what then? Only more questions: is the surplus of utopias what is preventing macrostructural political will to act on a planetary level precisely because it sublimates too much energy into realm of the imaginary? Are these dreamworld fragments recuperable? If Romanticism is foremost the will to lost unity, and utopia the will to potential totality, can their be an ant-romantic utopianism? A catastrophe without melancholy? For cosmopolitics can their be a true plurality of utopias, not a totality of the multiple, but like cities or as cities, a multiple of totalities?
Benjamin H. Bratton is a Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics and Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego.
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1 See J.G. Ballard: Quotes, edited by Mike Ryan, V.Vale. RESearch Publications, San Francisco. (2004)
2 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Howard Eiland. Belknap Press of Harvard University. (2002)
3 “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernest Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing, 1964”, in Ernest Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. The MIT Press. (1988)
4 I don’t think anyone knows for certain the origin of this now famous bot mot, but it is often, and with good cause, referenced to Fredric Jameson, “Future City” New Left Review 21, May-June (2003). However in this article Jameson himself attributes the quote to “someone once said..”
5 This line is drawn from Roger O. Friedland, “Money, Sex and God: The Erotic Logics of Religious Nationalism,” Sociological Theory. Vol. 20, issue 3, November 2002. Pp. 381-425. To my mind, this essay remains the most provocative reading of Atta’s motivations and the complexity of the dark utopiansm that drove his violent vision of the symbolic city.
6 This line is from the same Adorno/ Bloch debate cited above.
7 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press. (1998)
8 Virilio’s use of the term Pure War is considered in detail in the book of the same name, Pure War, edited by Sylvere Lotringer. Semiotext(e). (1998)
9 See the chapter, “Boxes” in Michel Serres, The Five Senses, A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Continuum Press. (2009)
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