Alexandra Warwick

The Scene of the Crime: Inventing the Serial Killer

This article examines the meanings of the crime scene in serial killings, and the tensions between the real and the imagined in the circulation of those meanings. Starting with the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 it argues that they, as well as forming an origin for the construction of the identity of ‘the serial killer’, initiate certain ideas about the relationship of subjects to spaces and the existence of the self in the modern urban landscape. It suggests that these ideas come to play an integral part in the contemporary discourse of serial killing, both in the popular imagination and in professional analysis. Examining the Whitechapel Murders, more recent cases and modern profiling techniques, it argues that popular and professional representations of crime scenes reveal more of social anxieties about the nature of the public and the private than they do about serial killers. It suggests that ‘the serial killer’ is not a coherent type, but an invention produced from the confusions of persons and places.

Unnoticed apocalypse: The science fiction politics of urban crisis

The slogan ‘capitalism is crisis’ is one that has recently circulated swiftly around the global Occupy movement. From Schumpeter to Marx himself, the notion that the economic cycles instituted by capitalism require periodic crises as a condition of renewed capital accumulation is a commonplace. However, in a number of recent texts, this conception of crisis as constituting the very form of urban capitalist development itself has taken on a more explicitly apocalyptic tone, exemplified by the Invisible Committees influential 2007 book The Coming Insurrection, and its account of what it calls simply ‘the metropolis’. ‘It is useless to wait’, write the texts anonymous authors, ‘for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement.… The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.’ In considering such an apocalyptic tone, this paper thus situates and interrogates the text in terms both of its vision of the metropolis as a terrain of total urbanization and its effective spatialization of the present as itself a kind of ‘unnoticed’ apocalypse: the catastrophe which is already here. It does so by approaching this not only apropos its place within contemporary debates surrounding leftist politics and crisis theory but also via its imaginative intersection with certain post-1960s science fiction apocalyptic motifs. What, the paper asks, does it mean to think apocalypse as the ongoing condition of the urban present itself, as well as the opening up of political and cultural opportunity for some speculative exit from its supposedly endless terrain?

Ruined Paradise: Geology and the Emergence of Archaeology

When Percy Shelley in his “Ode toNaples” (1820) called that city the “metropolis of a ruined paradise” hewas reflecting, as he tells us, on his earlier visit and the “enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the proclamation of a Constitutional Government” (111). The poem opens elsewhere, however, in Pompeii, the “city disinterr”d” a fewmiles south-east of Naples and probably the best-known feature of the paradise of ruins, both natural and human-made, that the region represented. It hadmany literary and historical associations, and the landscape toowas dramatic; aswell as the phenomena produced by the Campi Flegrei, Vesuvius, the volcano that had brought about the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii in 79CE, was still active and therewere serious eruptions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The landscape was always seen as deeply connected to human activity.When Shelley climbed Vesuvius in 1818 he, like many others, associated the volcano with the idea of revolution (Jones 2:276; 371) and Lady Blessington, one of the numerous British community in Naples, writes in 1823: “The Neapolitans, like their volcanic country, are never in a state of repose” (Clay 27–8). English liberals, drawn to the fashionable cause of Italian unity, saw Naples as under ‘foreign’ oppression, and writers and intellectuals like the Brownings and George Eliot were public in their denunciation of the tyranny of the Bourbonmonarchy, as weremany politicians. Gladstone, who had toured the Kingdom of Naples in 1832, returned again in 1850 and saw with horror the conditions of imprisoned liberals, including formerministers, famously quoting a description of the regime as “the negation ofGod erected into a system of government”(6). Naples then, and its surrounding environs, has a multiple image. It appears as both a location of dynamic (and possibly dangerously volatile) energy and as a place of repression of that energy. It is the territory of historical and natural wonders that was the legacy of the Grand Tour, and the locus of complex political problems which are, as Shelley voices, all dissolved into the landscape. Alain Schnapp, in his introduction to a collection of essays on eighteenth-century Neapolitan natural history and antiquarianism, describes Naples as “a laboratory seething with contradictory ideas, original experiments and fierce polemics that raged between men of letters, presided over by a government which, after a period of reform, rapidly fell back on the status quo and authoritarianism”. He further remarks that “what is at play in antiquarianism in Naples during the second half of the eighteenth century is a preview of the debates that would come to surround what we now call archaeology”. (163). I want to pick up that preview in the early nineteenth century and suggest that elements of this Neapolitan landscape do indeed have a profound effect on the emergence of the discipline of archaeology during the nineteenth century, though perhaps in ways rather different than Schnapp indicates. As archaeology begins to consolidate it can be seen to follow a pattern found in geology, whereby the difficult negotiation of the presence of people and the implications of their politics leads to the attempt to erase the human figure. The problem for the development of archaeology is that the stronger science of geology has already begun to use the proto-archaeological for the displacement of humanity from its own field. Although the significance of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the history of archaeology seems obvious, given the ubiquity of their representation in the period, (see Hale), the fact that they are