Ryan Bishop

State of emergency

THE QUESTION concerning the condition and application of the contemporary State of Emergency is now at the centre of theoretical exploration across a range of specialities within the humanities and the critical social sciences, from sociology and political theory to literature, cultural, philosophical and international studies. The 14 articles written by highly distinguished contributors for this Special Section of Theory, Culture & Society on the State of Emergency are varied in their theoretical viewpoints, the cultural intentions behind their texts and in their social emphasis. The contributions are engaged with investigating questions such as the critical social significance of state and military institutions, with law and political order, the implications of terror and violence, and for whose political objectives the State of Emergency is planned. The orthodox modern State of Emergency was a situation, declared by the state, in which the strategies and tactics of the military were employed legally, typically because of a number of occurrences of civil disorder such as terrorism, the methodical use of carnage and coercion to attain political aims. Nazi Germany’s Decrees of 1933 are, for instance, a first-rate illustration of the modern State of Emergency. The 28 February Decree, for example, was one of the most oppressive acts of the new Nazi administration. It authorized the suspension of civil liberties in the wake of the fictitious crisis produced by the Nazis as a consequence of the fire that wrecked the Reichstag parliament building on the preceding day. Now, George W. Bush, the President of the United States, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, have not, of course, formally affirmed a contemporary State of Emergency in their governments. Yet, in this Introduction, I shall argue that the Bush and Blair regimes are certainly beginning to lay the foundations for the state and purposes of a ‘hypermodern’ State of Emergency (Armitage,

Technics, Media, Teleology Interview with Bernard Stiegler

BS: Indeed, I think we are currently living through a period of very important technological and industrial transformations, to do with the fact that with digital technology, and particularly network technology, the technical milieu is becoming what Simondon called an associated technical milieu (milieu technique associé) or a techno-geographical milieu. Simondon had developed this latter notion to describe a rather special kind of machine, the wavepower generating factory, which is a turbine located on the north-west coast of France, designed to transform the movement of waves into electricity. To describe the specificity of this turbine, called Guimbal after the engineer who built it, Simondon invented the term associated technical milieu. He argued that with this machine, it was the first time that an industrial machine had been built that could convert its environment into a technical function. The environment in question is sea water, which was made to combine, in a simultaneous operation, movement, cooling function and pressure, and thus establish the self-contained character of the machine. This triple functionality of the natural milieu enabled the size of the turbine to be greatly reduced, allowing the channelling of the water to deliver a very high output. Now, it so happens that I had worked for over 15 years with an engineer, Philippe Aigrin, in the field on digital technology at a time when the Internet as we know it had not yet appeared, and we had developed this idea of a

Sighted Weapons and Modernist Opacity: Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics

The cockpit of the Apache helicopter, the U.S. Army’s premiere aerial fighting machine, reveals itself as a distillation of visual culture and visual prosthesis, for the pilot is encased in a virtual world and is allowed very limited use of his raw sensory organs. But while the electronically extended field of vision heightens and extends the illusion of agency, the pilot also becomes more instrumental and less responsible for decisions and actions. The emergence of the military machine, as Paul Virilio claims, was complemented by and synchronous with a watching (or seeing) machine. The two machines conflate in the Apache cockpit, which resembles a flying camera

The Urban Problematic

This article, which introduces the special section on The Urban Problematic, takes as its starting point the ways in which categories associated with the ‘urban’ have broken down, such that the once singular and coherent concept ‘city’ has disintegrated in certain ways: the notion has been demythologized, so that representations of the city must now be regarded as partial and invested; and cities themselves have become opaque and unpredictable both to urban scholars and to governments, planners and various kinds of welfare organizations. The indications of crisis, captured for instance by concerns about the slums, favelas and shanty towns of the world’s megacities, also indicate that much of what counts in modern urban life is in some way connected with the marginal, the unofficial, and the supplemental. The article takes a supplemental view of the current state of urban dwelling. This involves at the same time a longer, more patient, historical view in its attempt to understand the current state of the city as part of a shift in the play of heterogeneous forces. With reference to the articles contained in The Urban Problematic, this introductory article finally draws attention to some of the urgent and critical issues of contemporary urbanism.

Project ‘Transparent Earth’ and the Autoscopy of Aerial Targeting The Visual Geopolitics of the Underground

The import of underground facilities in military strategy in the US grew exponentially after the Gulf War. The success of precision-guided conventional missiles meant that any above-ground building or complex could be accurately targeted and destroyed, thus driving states with less sophisticated weapons to go underground to secure space for covert weapons development and the protection of command and control centres for military and governmental functions. Underground facilities have thus become the main challenge to objects of detection and targeting practices for US military research and development. This article provides a meditation on the underground in relation to military planning and technology, the limits of aerial visual control of terrain, the plans by the US military to counter underground defensive moves, the efficacy of tele-technologies to detect and destroy such installations at a distance, and an oblique genealogy of aerial and subterrestrial strategies in relation to technologies to overcome the limitations of each. In so doing, the article argues a deeply connected relationship between the imaginary and the material in attempts to realize a mastery of space and populations essential to military operations, thus posing questions about sensory perception, the status of the subject with regard to agency and control, and the prosthetic outfitting of the subject that both supports and blunts agency and control.

Mumbai: City-as-Target Introduction

This article introduces the themes and theoretical concerns of a special section that explores the various ways the specificities of the Mumbai attacks serve as a metonym for issues found in other urban sites within the conditions, concerns and vulnerabilities of globalization-as-urbanization and does so through the rubric of the city-as-target. As urbanization grows exponentially in unforecastable ways, the likelihood of violent urban targeting of many different kinds — state-sponsored, paramilitary, sectarian, economic, racial, tribal, etc., to name but a few — grows as well. Mumbai is a specific event, but it is also the common-place, the cityscape that is our daily lives and quotidian existence rendered unusual in all the expected ways. With Mumbai, the article argues, one does not necessarily see the future of the urban, but rather a reminder of what the urban has always been, even from the great walled cities of antiquity: a target. There is an imperative, then, to rethink urban space at all levels. The pieces in this section consider immaterial and material aspects of the city: its plan, infrastructure (economic and military bases), buildings and dwellings, polity and policy, protection and penetration. The technologies and technicities involved in the attacks, as well as the specific historicity, reveal a great deal about the Mumbai events, as well as revealing potential modes of engagement with cities in the present and future.

Introduction: The Problem of Violence Megacities and Violence Special Section

The scale and diversity of megacities finds analogous scale and diversity in the violence witnessed and experienced in these complexly dense urban sites. From full-scale military invasion to internecine ethnic and tribal conflict, from paramilitary incursions to strategic car bombs, from slum clearance to pervasive everyday low-level violence, from Mafia-led armies to incessant inflictions of violence on the urban poor, and from missile launches to machete attacks, megacities, most unfortunately, have them all. This article contextualizes many of the key concerns and issues addressed by the four main articles in the section; it does so by arguing for some specific historical, genealogical and technological explanations for the range and scale of violence inflicted upon and within megacity sites. The section proleptically discusses megacity phenomena that will be taken up in greater detail in the forthcoming second volume of the New Encyclopaedia Project Megacities: Problematizing the Urban.

The Global University

university’ is the site of intersecting alienations, and is alienated as a whole from the organization which bears that name. The detachment of the universitas from the university (as studium generale) has a positive effect in that the former is constituting itself across universities and countries, in the form of networks, journals, conferences and so on. This interactivity – still housed by universities, but implicated in career structures, inter-institutional competition, accountability mechanisms – sustains the universitas, and allows Readings (1996), for example, to speak in non-lamenting tones about the possibilities of maintaining academic life in some ‘real’ sense amidst ‘the ruins’. There are also possibilities of the universitas (re-)occupying parts of the university, through new or existing teaching programmes, research centres and colleges. Governance structures may provide a residual basis for re-autonomizing and revitalizing corporatized institutions. Some of these conflicts can flow into union/management conflict. In any case, the growing non-coincidence of the universitas with the ‘university’, and of both with what such terms might authentically connote, is fundamental to understanding the condition and dynamic of the contemporary university, and can be expected to remain so. In that combination of globalization and cybernation that is setting the parameters for the next round of the university’s hypermodern development, a prominent trend will be the growth of global universities – both virtual and land-based – competing around the world. At the same time, the growth of professional life outside of and between institutions has lessened dependency on them, and the academic intelligentsia has become interconnected as never before. It remains to be seen whether and in what way a ‘community of scholars’ can reconstitute itself in this new configuration.

The tele-technics of agency, the Net, the urban and sex tourism

This paper examines the effects of various tele-technologies (technologies at a distance) on the subject-object relationship within a context of Western conceptualizations about agency, self-other, and thought in relation to action. To examine these effects, the article uses the Internet postings of sex tourists as well as an example of ubiquitous media and screen culture in the form of a Hollywood film. How the loss of writing at a spatial and temporal distance influences these sex tourists, as well as how mass media (cinema) merge anxieties about the subject-object relationship with concerns about the status of individual agency supposedly enhanced by these tele-technologies is considered in the light of how thought has been constructed and understood from the early twentieth century to the present. The media through which thought and action are mediated become the focus of the inquiry.

Baudrillard and the Evil Genius

This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard’s career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard’s sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. The consistency of Baudrillard’s arguments belies the many superficial judgements made about them, which were anyway often knowingly encouraged by Baudrillard’s rhetorical strategies.