Cities Without Citizens - Slought Foundation

210 Pages·2003·14.63 MB·English

Cities Without Citizens
Edited by Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy
Contributions by:Giorgio Agamben, Arakawa + Gins, Branka Arsic, Eduardo
Cadava, Joan Dayan, Gans & Jelacic Architecture, Thomas Keenan, Gregg
Lambert, Aaron Levy, David Lloyd, Rafi Segal Eyal Weizman Architects,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Slought Books, Philadelphia with the Rosenbach Museum & Library
Theory Series, No. 1
Copyright © 2003 by Aaron Levy and Eduardo Cadava, Slought Foundation.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or parts thereof, in any form, without
written permission from Slought Books, a division of Slought Foundation. No part may be stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission, except in the case of brief
quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
This project was made possible through the Vanguard Group Foundation and the
5-County Arts Fund, a Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts program of the Pennsylvania Council on
the Arts, a state agency. It is funded by the citizens of Pennsylvania through an annual legislative
appropriation, and administered locally by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. The
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal
agency. Additional support for the 5-County Arts Fund is provided by the Delaware River Port
Authority and PECO energy. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Memorial
Foundation for Jewish Culture, NYfor Aaron Levy’s Kloster Indersdorfseries, and the International
Artists’Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS) for Lars Wallsten’s Crimescapeseries. We are grateful
for the organizational and curatorial support of Bill Adair, Frank Smigiel, and Catherine Hitchens at S ix Contributors
the Rosenbach Museum, whose invitation prompted this project, and editorial assistants Jen Kollar, T xv Introduction
Joyce Sim, and Alyssa Timin at Slought Foundation. N Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy
E
T
These articles have appeared in the following publications acknowledged here:
N
1. Giorgio Agamben, Means without ends: notes on politics. Theory Out of Bounds, I. CITIZENS and DISCIPLINE
O
V. 20. University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2000.
C
2. Gans and Jelacic Architecture and Design, Perspecta 34: Temporary Architecture, Yale 3 Beyond Human Rights
Architecture School/ MIT2003. Giorgio Agamben
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper by Coach House Books, Ltd. 13 Universal Hospitality
Set in 9pt Arial Narrow. Design by Sinder Design & Consulting, Philadelphia Gregg Lambert
For further information, http://slought.org/books/ 33 The Home of Shame
SLOUGHTFOUNDATION Branka Arsic
4017 Walnut Street
Philadelphia PA, 19104 55 Harlem
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
87 Servile Law
Cities without citizens / edited by Aaron Levy and Eduardo Cadava ; Joan Dayan
contributions by Giorgio Agamben ... [et al.].
p. cm. -- (Theory series ; no. 1)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-9714848-4-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Human rights--Exhibitions. 2. Refugees--Exhibitions. 3. Social
justice--Exhibitions. 4. Marginality, Social--Exhibitions. 5.
Citizenship--Exhibitions. 6. Archives--Administration--Moral and
ethical aspects. 7. Historical libraries--Exhibitions--Moral and
ethical aspects. 8. Historical museums--Exhibitions--Moral and ethical
aspects. 9. Rosenbach Museum & Library--Exhibitions. I. Levy, Aaron,
1977- II. Cadava, Eduardo. III. Agamben, Giorgio, 1942- IV. Rosenbach
Museum & Library. V. Series: Theory series (Philadelphia, Pa.) ; no. 1.
JC585 .C497 2003
323--dc22
II. LIQUIDATION and SETTLEMENT
121 Ruins/Runes
David Lloyd
137 The Guano of History
Eduardo Cadava
167 Military Operations as Urban Planning
APanorama of the West Bank, from Giloh, 2003 [Insert]
Rafi Segal Eyal Weizman Architects
201 Mobilizing Shame
Thomas Keenan
221 Displacement:The Realpolitik of Utopia
234 Refugee Cities
Gans &Jelacic Architecture
243 LIVING BODYMuseumeum
Arakawa + Gins
III. DOCUMENTATION
Documentation for Cities Without Citizens, an installation organized by
Aaron Levy, 2003 artist-in-residence, at The Rosenbach Museum &
Library, July 8 through September 28, 2003
261 Introduction to the exhibition
265 Settlement
299 Citizen
315 Discipline
333 Liquidation
349 Installation
361 Kloster Indersdorf
379 Inventory
REFERENCE MATTER
S Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the University of Verona. His
R
O publications include The Community Community (1993), Homo Sacer:
T
U Sovereign Power and Bare Life(1998), Remnants of Auschwitz:The Witness
B
and the Archive(1998), The Man Without Content(1999), The End of the
I
R
T Poem(1999), and Potentialities:Collected Essays in Philosophy(1999).
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O
C
Arakawa and Madeline Gins started collaborating in 1963. Their collaborative
work, The Mechanism of Meaning,was published in 1971, and a sequel to
that, To Not To Die, appeared in 1987. Gins and Arakawa have exhibited
jointly throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States. Their exhibition, Site
of Reversible Destiny, was on view at the Guggenheim Museum Soho in
December 1997 and won the College Art Association’s Exhibition of the Year
award. Arakawa’s large-scale paintings are in the permanent collections of
museums throughout the world. Gins’s published works include the avant-
garde classic, What the President Will Say or Do!!, and an innovative art-
historical novel, Helen Keller or Arakawa.
Branka Arsic teaches critical theory and American literature at the University
of Albany. Her book The Passive Eyewas recently published by Stanford
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University Press. She is currently completing a volume on Melville’s (1997), and editor of books on the museum and on the wartime journalism of
“Bartleby, The Scrivener” and has begun a project on Henry David Thoreau. Paul de Man. His current manuscript is called Live Feed: Crisis, Intervention,
Media, and is about the news media and contemporary conflicts.
Eduardo Cadava teaches in the English Department at Princeton University.
His publications include Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of Gregg Lambert teaches at Syracuse University and is author of several
History (1997), Emerson and the Climates of History (1997), Who Comes books, including Return of the Baroque: Art, Theory and Culture in the
After the Subject?(co-editor with Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy; 1991). Modern Age(forthcoming), The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze(2002) and
He is currently writing a collection of essays on the ethics and politics of Report to the Academy(2001). This chapter is part of a study in-progress on
mourning entitled Of Mourning and a book on music and techniques of the new philosophy of Right.
reproduction, memorization, and writing entitled Music on Bones.
Aaron Levy is Executive Director of and a Senior Curator at Slought
Joan Dayan is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Foundation, a Philadelphia arts organization and archival resource, also
University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Fables of Mind: An Inquiry available online (http://slought.org). Since 1999, he has organized over 100
into Poe’s Fiction (1987) Haiti, History, and the Gods(1995), and numerous live events and exhibitions on contemporary art and theory. He recently
articles on North American and Caribbean literature and issues of race. She edited Searching for Romberg (2001), on artist Osvaldo Romberg, Untitled
is currently completing Held in the Body of the Stateand The Law is a White (After Cinema)(2002), on photography after cinema, and, with Jean-Michel
Dog, a series of essays on law and spiritual belief. Rabaté, Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (2003). He curated the
exhibition “Cities without Citizens” at the Rosenbach Museum as their 2003
Deborah Gans and Matthew Jelacic are partners in the firm Gans & Jelacic artist-in-residence.
Architecture and Design. Their architectural, urban and industrial design
projects and competitions have been exhibited at RIBA, London, IFA, Paris, David Lloyd is Professor of English at University of Southern California. He
the Van Alen Institute, New York City, and Slought Foundation, Philadelphia. is the author of several books, including Nationalism and Minor Literature:
In 1999 Gans & Jelacic won an international competition to house refugees James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Culture Nationalism
in the Balkans hosted by Architecture for Humanity, WarChild, USAID and (1987), Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment
UNHCR. Deborah Gans is the author of The Le Corbusier Guide(1987) and (1993), Culture and the State, with Paul Thomas (1997), The Politics of
the editor of The Organic Approach (2002). Both Gans and Jelacic are Culture in the Shadow of Capital, edited with Lisa Lowe (1997), and Ireland
Professors in architecture at Pratt Institute in New York. after History(2000).
Thomas Keenan teaches media theory, literature, and human rights at Bard Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the
College, where he is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities and presently the director of The Center for Comparative
directs the Human Rights Project. He is author of Fables of Responsibility Literature and Society at Columbia University. She is the author of In Other
x xi
Worlds:Essays in Cultural Politics (1988), The Post-Colonial Critic:
Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990),Outside in the Teaching Machine
(1993),ACritique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing
Present (1999) and Death of a Discipline(2003). She was the translator of
Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976)and of Mahasweta Devi’s
Imaginary Maps (1994) and Chotti Munda and His Arrow (2003).
Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal established their architectural practice in Tel
Aviv in 2000 after working together with Zvi Hecker. Their office attempts to
integrate architectural projects with research and writing. Amongst their
recent works are the re-design of the Ashdod Museum of Art, a set design for
“Electra,” and the exhibition and publication “ACivilian Occupation” (Verso,
2003). Rafi Segal worked together with Zvi Hecker on the design of the
Palmach History Museum in Tel Aviv. Eyal Weizman is developing his
“Politics of Verticality” project into a book and a film. His previous books are
Yellow Rhythms(2000) and Random Walk(1998).
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Ny What is a city? What are the laws or constitutions that make a city a city, that
v
Oe
In L prevent it from becoming something else, even as it inevitably undergoes
To
Car transformation and change? What would it mean to establish the borders of
A
Ud
Dan a city, to define and delimit it in order to confer an identity upon it? How is a
Oa
Rav city lost, destroyed, abandoned, and then perhaps rebuilt from its ruins,
d
Ta
C sometimes in other places and in memory of its name and patrimony? What
No
Id
ar would it mean for a city to remain self-identical to itself, or for it to remain
u
d
E internally consistent? Is this possible, or must a city always remain open to
transformation, to the changes that alter and displace it? Must a city remain
open, that is, to knowing that it does not yet know what it is or may be? And,
if so, what is the relation between this uncertainty, this relation to a future,
and the changing, heterogeneous populations within its permeable borders?
What is the relation between a city and its inhabitants, between a city and its
citizens, or between a city and all the people from which it perhaps withholds
its protections? What is citizenship and how is it established or lost, asserted
or taken away?
These questions have become more urgent than ever, if not more
melancholic or eschatological, since today’s city—because of its
permeability, because of its relation to the expanding forces of capital,
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globalization, and information technologies—can no longer be said to name according to several different historical models of citizenship—it is because
the geographical unity of a habitat, or an insulated network of they announce themselves as principles of articulation between birth,
communication, commerce, sociality, or even politics. But the fact that the language, culture, nationality, belonging, rights, and citizenship.
city increasingly seems to be an anachronistic feature of the contemporary To claim that there have always only been cities without citizens,
world does not mean that we have overcome it. If the borders of a city are however, is to recognize that any assertion of citizenship can only take place
vacillating, and perhaps less secure than ever before, this does not mean by simultaneously defining the limits and conditions of citizenship—by
that they are disappearing. In the wording of Etienne Balibar, “less than ever defining, that is, the non-citizen, the foreigner, the alien, the stranger, the
is the contemporary world a ‘world without borders.’” Indeed, we have immigrant, the refugee, the criminal, the prisoner, or the outsider—and,
witnessed the proliferation of borders and divisions in recent years—and similarly, that any delineation of the borders of a city must mark what remains
often within the theater of the bloody conflicts of economic wars, civil wars, within the city but also what is excluded from it. This means, among so many
ethnic conflicts, wars of culture and religion, and the unleashing of racisms other things, that there can be no cities or citizens without laws of
and xenophobias—and this despite the erasure of borders announced by the segregation and exclusion—without borders, barriers, interdictions,
rhetoric and practices of globalization. This is why this collection of essays displacements, censorships, racisms, and the marginalization and eviction of
takes its point of departure from this series of questions but also from the risk languages and peoples. In other words, the phrase “cities without citizens”
of two propositions, each of which appears impossible in relation to the other, also evokes the violence, the laws of denaturalization and denationalization,
but each of which asks us to think the nature of the city, and especially the the deprivation of civil rights, the strategies of depopulation, forced
nature of its relation both to its citizens and to its non-citizens: 1) there have deportation, enforced emigration, the refusal of the rights of asylum, the
never been cities without citizens; and 2) there have always only been cities murderous persecutions, massacres, colonizations, exterminations, exiles,
without citizens. and pogroms that so often have punctuated and defined the history of cities.
To claim that there have never been cities without citizens is In bringing these two propositions together, the essays in this
simply to recall that, by definition, cities can exist only if they are inhabited by volume seek to think about the many ways in which cities can be defined,
citizens who, inscribed in a network of affiliations that constitute the very built, settled, developed, and organized, but also how they can be either
structure of the city, or granted rights such as those of the right to political populated by, or evacuated of, their peoples or citizens. They touch on the
participation or the right to suffrage or education, can claim that the space in figures and forces of citizenship, discipline, settlement, and liquidation that
which they live is a city that guarantees these affiliations and rights. This also are at the heart of any meditation on the identity of cities but that are also
means that citizenship can exist only where we understand a city to exist— essentially related to the question of what it means to be a citizen, to be
where citizens and foreigners are distinguished in terms of rights and human, to have rights, and even to belong to a city, state, or nation. They
obligations in a given space. To say that there have never been cities without ask us to think about what it means to live in cities, but perhaps in ways that
citizens, then, is simply to indicate that there is a relation between the identity are not yet, or no longer, defined by citizenship and belonging. They call for
of a city and that of its citizens. If cities always have citizens—and this is true a reconceptualization of the relation between cities and citizens—for new
even if we know that these citizens have been understood and defined experiences of communities, frontiers, and identities, without models, and
xvi xvii
perhaps even without citizens as we generally have understood them.
Seeking to imagine a democracy that in fact would exist beyond
citizenship and citizenry—to imagine cities that, coming without citizens,
would open the spaces for new forms of democratic communities—these
new communities would involve alliances that go beyond the “political”
domain as it has been commonly defined (since this designation usually has
been reserved for the citizen in a nation linked to a particular territory), and
therefore would define the cities of tomorrow in relation to a democracy that
is still yet to come and yet to be imagined. The essays in this collection
gesture toward this democracy by asking us to invent the city anew—to
invent a city that would be open to the future because it would be open to its
own alterity, and because it would enable a sociality that is not determined in
advance by the fact of belonging to a community, a state, a nation, or even
just a language.
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