[-empyre-] networks of catastrophe

[Verena Conley]

To add to Tim's post: The attacks also remind us of Virilio's *city of panic
*. The planetary suburbs--that will add 1 billion slum dwellers by 2020 and
gated communities (hotels) or missile shields. As PV puts it, through the
accident of time, cities have become citadels. They are under siege. What is
inside is global, outside is local, *in situ*. Civil peace is a figment of
our imagination. Everything that takes place, in a strong sense, has been
excluded from view.

For PV, the entire world has become a *banlieue* and a *panic city.* Fear
spreads through urban spaces  not as a mental but instru-mental image. The
worldwide panic city--that includes us--is in the grip of terrorizing
images. The city and its tele-spectartors live in a permanent state of
siege.  Benjamin's notion of a reproduction of stereotypical images has been
supseded by the production, even the collevtive hallucination of a unique
image. PV urges us to deconstruct the mediated presentations of the
*polis*(as they are seen in news programming) in real time and not as
idealized
representations in real space.

It is in the city that the war agains civilians is tested. Since the
nineteenth century, war has evolved from organized battles to the creation
of panic in urban centers. To struggle against a generalized sense of panic
among the civilian population, PV wants to come back to a real geopolitics,
that is, to a material politics whose transmissions and negotiations are not
merely calibrated according to the speed of light.  The world, he argues, is
not only liberal, it is territorial.

This is interesting in view of the Mumbai attacks and the confusion between
territory and network that Tim pointed out. The area of Mumbai where the
attacks occurred is at the same time one of the most networked and
globalized in India. We can also think of the attacks and news programming.
Where does art come in? How does it deal with these dilemmas?


On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Timothy Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu> wrote:

> Watching news coverage of the Mumbai catastrophe, I heard the Quote of the
> Day:
>
> John Casey, Former Director of the CIA,
>
> We think of this area as countries, India, Pakistan, etc., Al-Qaida
> thinks of them as networks.
> --
> Timothy Murray
> Director, Society for the Humanities
> http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
> Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
> http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
> A. D. White House
> Cornell University
> Ithaca, New York 14853
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
Verena Andermatt Conley

Department of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages
and Literature
Dana Palmer 202
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
tel: 617-495-2274; 617-496-6090
fax: 617-496-4682

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~rll/

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