The Continuation of the City by Other Means

A municipal government that wishes to attract the ‘ creative class’ – and this includes practically the entire upper middle class – employs a paradoxical marketing strategy. On the one hand, the city is pictured as a creative space in which innovation, amusement and cultural edification combine to form what is in fact a utopia, a blissful place that does not exist. On the other hand, the city is pictured as a dystopia, a miserable place in which crime, deprivation and all the rest of it have the upper hand, and in which vigorous steps must be taken in order to make and keep the city attractive for the middle class. This place does not exist either, but its image is effective because it mobilizes policy. Those who want to do something about ‘ the underprivileged districts’ must pull open all the semantic registers in order to present the situation as serious, for nothing will happen in Rotterdam Zuid, The Hague Transvaal or Amsterdam Slotervaart for less than millions. The creative class, in turn, has every reason to contribute to the dystopian image of the city because in accordance with the classic pattern of gentrification it can live cheaply where it is a pioneer in the urban jungle.

The ultimate semantic register is that of war. War rhetoric is often heard in contemporary urban policy. There is a ‘ front line’, for example, with ‘ front-line workers’ who need sufficient ‘ striking power’ to carry out ‘ interventions’. ‘ Urban recovery’ is accomplished in this manner, sometimes even with the aid of so-called ‘ city marines’ or ‘ housing brigades’.

To properly access the theme of ‘ Amsterdam at War’, I would first of all like to examine the present – and perhaps also future – meaning of the concept of war. Next, I will discuss the role played by the rhetoric of war in the city’ s political economy, and in that light I will conclude by taking a critical look at the current city marketing campaign – ‘ I Amsterdam’ – by posing the question, ‘ Who is Amsterdam? ’

Our present-day world is tending toward a multi-polar division of power in which the Cold War situation remains as relevant as ever. Most of what now passes for war, however, is no longer war as we have known it since modernity. Modernity actually brought order to the wars in the West. After the religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) introduced the beginning of a system of inter-state relations that did not so much outlaw war as regulate it. Wars were kept relatively controllable because they were conducted between sovereign nation-states. A typical characteristic of a nation-state was that it could, with sufficient grievances, start a war. This is one of the claims explicitly expressed in the American Declaration of Independence (1776): the right to start a war.2 The increased interweaving of modern nation-states has meant that wars between two nation-states have grown scarcer. War has been replaced by more diffuse forms of political violence. But the model of war, which in its most ‘ pure’ sense is characterized by political opposition between ‘ friend’ and ‘ enemy’, as the political philosopher Carl Schmitt put it, is on the contrary more alive than ever – albeit, paradoxically enough, in a strongly depoliticized sense.

War is a metaphor, a rhetoric that has real effects. For example, the USA recently has been able to conduct two ‘ old-fashioned’ wars against nation-states (Afghanistan and Iraq) because it used the rhetoric of war to describe a situation that did not satisfy the characteristics of a war: the War on Terror was a rhetorical recoding of the conflict between the USA and Al-Qaeda terrorists that ultimately could legitimize two wars. But there also have been a ‘ war on poverty’ (Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964) and a ‘ war on drugs’ (Richard Nixon, 1969). Such wars converge in urban policy that is aimed at what was once known as the ‘ urban crisis’.

The post-political context can be seen as the condition (a weak condition) that I have dubbed ‘ social hypochondria’.4 This ties in with a metaphor of corporeality that has been used throughout history to describe social and political life. Like the human body, society, according to the organicistic view, was a whole consisting of parts. An example of such a corporeal representation of society is Plato’ s image of the polis. At the top, at the head of the social body, was the logos: the philosopher-regents. Below that was the noble disposition, the thymos, the source of the higher aspirations: the sentinels. And, similar to the human body, Plato saw the lower regions of the social body as the source of the lower aspirations, the eros. This was equivalent to ordinary people in the polis.

Nowadays, we have a social concept that still exhibits characteristics of the old corporeal mentality. We think of society as a whole that is comprised of individual parts; we are concerned about ‘ cohesion’ and ‘ integration’ – typical corporeal terminology – and we ascribe a top and a bottom to society (for there happens to be such a thing as a ‘ social ladder’). As with every bottom, the bottom of society is spoken of in a negative fashion. Thus, just as with Plato, the problematizing of the bottom of society is an erotic consideration. The most important erogenous zones of society are at the bottom of the social body. This is why contemporary cultural offensives are a form of moral politics, conceived for the purpose of disciplining the eroticism of the lowest regions to conform to the norms and values of good social mores.

This erotic self-palpitation of the social body is a typical form of social hypochondria. Social hypochondria arises at the moment that the social body no longer is making its way toward a goal, but is stuck with itself. It no longer really believes in Progress or the Last Judgment – on the contrary, it has exposed Progress as the Last Prejudice. It is thus a body with amputated legs, no longer going anywhere and simply sitting still, focused on itself, feeling its body and finding all sorts of complaints and disorders – for which the most common denominator undoubtedly is ‘ integration’.

Over the past several years, however, ‘ integration policy’ has become increasingly localized, concentrating on the city – and within its borders, on the district or neighbourhood. Like Plato’ s polisand also later on, as Richard Sennett for instance has shown, today’ s city is equally often seen as an organism.5 And nowadays the city is the body upon which semi-military operations are carried out and where the ‘ front line’ of policy is to be found. The trenches of the city’ s political economy lie in the neighbourhoods characterized by poverty. Here, poverty often goes together with ethnicity, in the sense that people who have a ‘ non-Western background’ are relatively among the poorest and at the same time by far the most important target groups for policies on integration, citizenship, living standards, safety and social cohesion.

One of the most prevalent images of the enemy is accordingly that of the foreigner. The figure of the hostis, both guest and enemy,6 contains in one word what is currently the most important configuration of friend (‘ society’) and enemy (the foreigner who, to use a spatial metaphor, ‘ stands outside society’). But before the foreigner is conceived of as an enemy within populist rhetoric, city policy latches onto the ‘ non-integrated’ figure, which more broadly speaking can be the ‘ non-civilized’, those who are not adapted to the modern economy: the single mother (often ‘ Antillean’), the housebound mother (often ‘ Moroccan’), the adolescent school dropout (usually ‘ boys’).

So, in a certain sense there is an enemy, but this is not the enemy that is in diametrical, antagonistic opposition to the friend, such as in the political theory of Carl Schmitt. It is sooner the enemy who simultaneously is a guest – the foreigner who is close enough to be completely included and assimilated,7 the person who still has to become civilized into an autonomous, tolerant subject. This is a ‘ suitable enemy’,8 an ‘ enemy within’, to be sure, but mainly threatening because of his or her pathological deviation.

If war is conducted in the city, what is at stake in the battle at the ‘ frontline’ of city policy is the transformation of this enemy. That war is about the erogenous zones of the city, the ‘ inside outsider’ s spaces’,9 the ‘ safety zones’ or ‘ hot spots’ that accommodate the ‘ pit’ of the city, the bottom that does not disappear as long as there is also a top and that therefore is in danger of becoming a semi-permanent target of the police.

The spatial focus is nevertheless evident. Just as in Foucault’s analysis, ‘ policing’ concerns a certain milieu of the troubled community. The contemporary concept of ‘ policing’, moreover, is again changing in a way that seems to be coming closer to the earlier concept that Foucault described. Nowadays, ‘ the’ police are responsible for a growing number of functions and have a growing number of functionaries. This is particularly clear in the city. Not only do the police operate from time to time in ‘ public-private partnerships’,13 but ‘ civic guards’ and citizens are also increasingly being mobilized. Civic guards have been given powers of arrest and citizens are being mobilized to act as what Jane Jacobs called ‘ eyes on the street’,14 albeit this time as ‘ eyes of the state’ also. Civilians, often with great initiative on their part, are becoming involved as community workers or as ‘ burghers in blue’, complete with (blue) uniforms. In general, the civilian is being ‘ responsibilized’. The neoliberal emphasis on ‘ individual responsibility’ easily goes together with the conservative-communitarian emphasis on ‘ community’. This combination, which can be called ‘ neoliberal communitarianism’,15 is what situates the individual in a milieu that can be managed. Particularly in the area of ‘ safety’, which smoothly transitions into the problematization of ‘ filth’ (such as the ‘ broken windows’ ideology, for example, which in the Netherlands translates as ‘ clean, intact and safe’ and ‘ neat, orderly and peaceful’), this ‘ responsibilization’ is the furthest advanced.16 This evolution of  ‘the’ police, however, is simply part of a broader development from politics to police. I would also therefore understand ‘ policing’ to be an entirety of practices and principles that has the spatial management of populations as its object.

The increasing spatial action taken by ‘ the police’ occurs on the basis of techniques that are part of this ‘ policing’: the analysis of ‘ criminogenic spaces’, the actuarial estimation of individual risks on the basis of aggregated data, the ‘ tackling’ of a mixture of ‘ nuisance and crime’ that in fact expands the domain of criminality and thereby strengthens urban dystopia and further fixates it as the object of police control. To an increasing degree, this is all couched in terms of a ‘ target area approach’ within which both an ‘ individual approach’ and a ‘ group approach’ are distinguished on the basis of commercial policy advice. The difference between the last two lies in the size of the targeted milieu (only family or also beyond that). Administrative regulations such as prohibited areas, collective barring from stores and public transport prohibitions also are part of this.

An immediate effect of the creation of such a police is the depoliticization of the relation between the privileged and the nonprivileged. Or, even more fundamentally, a depoliticization of political antagonism per se, a sublimation of a tension that can be called ‘the political’.17 Schmitt also called depoliticization a neutralization of political antagonism, because the ‘ enemy’ is now rationally managed and no longer is on the same plane as the ‘ friend’.18 The enemy is ‘ moralized’ and – a purely Kantian thought, paradoxically – ‘ pathologized’. Scientists who act as ‘ social pathologists’19 zoom in on the city and mark out the zones that are ‘ multi-problematical’. Policymakers march out to intervene behind the front door and in the womb. Evermore intimate spheres – in Sloterdijk’ s terminology, psychosocial space bubbles or ‘ autogenic vessels’20 – are pried open in order to break through pathological discontinuities with the sphere of the statistically normal. The localizable private, the oikos, becomes the exclusive focus of a police work that consequently is in danger of not only forgetting the public, the polis, but also the critical questioning of fundamental economic distributions. The public sphere is a republican hope that particularly because of the neoliberal communitarian emphasis on ‘ individual responsibility’ and ‘ civil society’ is unmasked as a depoliticizing diversion tactic: since it is between market and state, it accepts the position of ‘ go play your utopian games there’, so that neither market nor state are subjected to real criticism. Meanwhile, a silent war is raging on the police front, which with every ‘ innovative policy intervention’ brings further depoliticizing. And the political? That can only come to the fore in grotesquely remodelled questions on ‘ privacy’.

In the cultural sphere, depoliticizing takes place on the basis of what political scientist Wendy Brown analyses as the idea of ‘tolerance’ used as a civilizing instrument of power.21 The identification of what is ‘ liberal’ and ‘ Western’ with tolerance legitimizes an intolerance on the basis of toleranc22 which is never politically refuted because the speaker would place him or herself outside the order of tolerance. Urban areas where the ‘ barbarians’ (Wendy Brown) reside who do not satisfy the idea of Western – but nonetheless universal – tolerance are ‘ tackled’ with ‘ zero tolerance’ rhetoric. In the economic sphere, depoliticization subsequently takes place by coding the economic (class positions, for example) as the cultural – as ‘ behavioural codes’, ‘ street culture’ or ‘ culture’ alone. This completes the Mobius strip of depoliticization, for the cultural recoding of the economic sphere always brings the administration of the urban population (police, ‘ policy’) back to the opposition between the advanced and the backward, the mobile and the stationary (the ‘ disadvantaged’).

Why is this police-form of population control now focusing so strongly on space in general and the city in particular? Because time is no longer an ideological category. The ‘ big stories’ of modern times, not in the least Marxism, were temporalized schemes for future emancipation.25 Such narratives have lost overall plausibility and made way for local forms of population management that no longer are characterized by politics but by police. This is why we often hear that ‘ time is running out’. The only time that matters is the ‘ now’ ; there’ s – literally – no time like the present. As such, modernity achieves its goal, for modernity has always been the only era to describe itself via the modo, the ‘ now’. The new urban state of war is characterized by a rhetoric of moral legitimacy: the problems we have now are so appalling that special, even exceptional measures are required. The state of emergency is announced rhetorically. Giorgio Agamben has described how the exceptional case of sovereignty has become the dominant paradigm of contemporary politics.26 He speaks of a development in which politics is increasingly being sidelined by government. This, says Agamben, leads to the production of what the Romans called the homo sacer, the outlaw who is outside the community that is characterized by law. The exception and the hors la loi explanation, however, are not the absolute, unadulterated categories that Agamben presupposes. The policing of ‘ marginals’ in the city is more and more often taking the form of the semi-exception, whereby urban zones move in and out of the sphere of the law and subjects gradually are transformed into homo sacer for the duration of the implementation of a particular policy instrument.27 The enclosing exclusion of the homo sacer is in reality more diffuse than Agamben suggests.

This generalized state of emergency is precisely what continually sets the definition of the community bound by law (bí os) at stake against bare life (zoè ) enclosed by exclusion. The community is thus in a permanent state of siege. In this situation, a ‘ cease-fire’ would mean the dissolution of the community itself. As the artist/writer Dan Perjovschi noted in New York’ s MOMA in 2007, global warming is not all that has come after the Cold War. In future, war threatens to become an urban condition, a phase that the city can slip in and out of, an exception that threatens to become the rule.

If I may speculate about the state of affairs in 2030: The image of the city conceals a permanent struggle over the criteria for inclusion in the ‘ marketed’ city image. This takes the form of a ‘ perpetual war’, but certainly not in the way that Noam Chomsky envisions. This war – which, like every war in an era of globalization, is a civil war – is not recognized or acknowledged as such because it is conducted in the form of policing, as urban policy aimed at population control. To the extent that it does not scare off tourists, this is perchance conducted with the bellicose rhetoric of urban dystopia, but it is not ‘ war’ in any familiar sense. It is not a fight over the  ghetto’ – which the Netherlands does not have and undoubtedly will not have 20 years from now. The mark of a ghetto is that you cannot leave it; on the contrary, what is problematized as detrimental to the quality of life in city districts is the rapidity with which people move out of them. Amsterdam will more probably have developed new techniques for the spatial fixation of an object by assimilation-oriented police in 2030.

In this sense, it is very well possible that the individual body will play a role through the use of biometric indicators. After all, the outsourcing of politics is coupled with an outsourcing of control over the individual. In terms of specific populations and locations, we will probably see the harnessing of a new form of surveillance – no longer one of panoptic surveillance, but of selfveillance, a form of self control in which the body is both the controlling and controlled agency.28 The iris scan for the frequent flyer at the airport is the cosmopolitan example of this. The equivalent in the battle – which is otherwise invisible for that cosmopolitan – against the degeneration of the urban community is perhaps the implant, which indicates who (meaning poor, ethnic minorities and/or criminal sub-populations) is moving where in the city. This incorporates the state of emergency in biological life, which then on one tramline belongs to the bí os of the community, but on another to the zoè of bare life, for which some parts of the law are nullified for statistical reasons (deviation from the ‘ normal population’).

‘Selfveillance’ assembles individuals from ‘ dividuals’. People are scattered (bit by bit) throughout different control systems as dividuals and are assembled into ‘ in-dividuals’ as soon as an attribution of bare life by such systems (a positive identification as a body-to-be-identified) comes into play. The object of that attribution (for instance the carrier of a self-identifying chip) is a self only insofar as (s) he controls him- or herself.29 The individual’ s self is thus affected by the control which it carries out on itself (as recently became clear with the self-control on the Metro turnstile: ‘ (in) eligibility’). The controlled individual produces the control herself, because the control is a signal that leads to a contingent amalgamation of data – in one district this means, for example, that a person is there ‘ illegally’, in the other, not. Such is the urban ‘ war’ that I can envision in the Amsterdam of 2030. The first skirmishes of this invisible battle will become visible on the flip side of the injunction ‘ I Amsterdam’. For artists, I believe it is a matter of turning against the sublimated creativity of the ‘ creative class’ and of not identifying with the ‘ I Amsterdam’ identification. Art should sooner creatively investigate ‘ Who, Amsterdam? ’ – and also: ‘ Where are you heading, Amsterdam? '30