Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Diana Coole and Michael J. Shapiro Much of Theory and Event and 10.2 is devoted to nine papers drawn from the Urbicide: The Killing of Cities? workshop that was convened at Durham University (UK) during 2005. Four additional articles complement them. Together these contributions make for a sobering assessment of our current geopolitical situation. They show just how entwined global events and domestic life have become and how much, as a consequence, the lines between international relations or geographies of space on the one hand, and political philosophy on the other, have become blurred. While themes of democratization and of creative resistances to the disciplinary regimes of western governments have been the stock in trade of so much recent theorizing, these newer influences are indicative of an appreciation of an altogether darker world, where more visceral forms of violence are proliferating in the name of a security agenda whose main targets are urban criminality and international terror networks. Questions about the relationships between symbolic, virtual and material power are reopened in some provocative and troubling ways as this context of war and death impinges on our erstwhile fascination with life, and politics reasserts itself in some alarmingly unmediated ways. While we have been celebrating the creative diversity of postmodernity, it seems, more atavistic yet hi-tech forces have been gaining the strength to bring destruction and lawlessness, and these encompass the modern state itself. Some contributions to the current issue do still end with rays of hope - such as Martin and Harney’s “opening to the collective genius of mass intellectuality” on behalf of an “expansive principle”, Burke’s appeal to Heideggerian “questioning” or Woodward’s invocation of a variety of inventive citizenship challenges to “urbicide” – but it is notable that they are relegated to vague exhortations in the closing sentences of some otherwise bleak analyses. David Campbell, Stephen Graham and Daniel Bertrand Monk provide a lucid introduction to the Urbicide papers in their “Introduction to Urbicide: The Killing of Cities?” Drawing attention to the sheer scale of global urbanization (a majority of people live in cities for the first time in 2007), they note its corollary in the new interdisciplinary interest in cities. This is no longer the nineteenth-century metropolitan imaginary, nor the twentieth-century’s doomed utopian plans for clean, safe and functional urban spaces; rather, it is the role of cities as “dominant sites of destruction, violence, insurgency and terrorism” that comes to the fore where urban violence and violent urbanism meet. Campbell et al. sketch a helpful genealogy of the resulting concept of Urbicide, emphasizing its distinctiveness from perspectives that merely refer to the urban impact of war or that examine the city as a theater of violence. Instead, Urbicide refers to a “particular formation of purposive violence where urbanity is the strategic object of violence.” This definition is fleshed out in the papers that follow, from Eduardo Mendieta, Michael Dudley, Stefan Kipfer and Kanishka Goonewardena, Martin Coward, Andrew Herscher, Simon Philpot, Deborah Cowen, Caroline Croser and Rachel Woodward. Their papers testify to urbicide’s global reach as well as help us to glimpse it effects on everyday lives. In “Mode of Excess: Bataille, Criminality, and the War on Terror,” Stefano Harney and Randy Martin also write about violence and criminality. Their argument is that our contemporary mode of expenditure is illuminated by, yet different from, Bataille’s notion of modes of excess. Noting the luxurious abundance of the latter’s general economy, with its “energic extension” and “irrecuperable consumption,” they show how the three possible forms of excess Bataille identified in his own era – the mass consumerism accompanying fordist production; war as “the consummate category of expenditure” and Soviet socialism – has yielded in ours to a post-fordist condition where production and consumption merge in immaterial labor, whence economic excess and domestic life are made over by financialization and the terrorist exemplifies the bad risk that haunts the social. Congruent with concerns expressed as urbicide, they locate terror within a self-sustaining logic of occupation, where inassimilable excess occasions intervention without end or constraint. Those who lack interests amenable to privatization are simply consigned to the residues of the social, where they...