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The Anguish

In her skillfully synthetic accounts (1992, 1998, 2000), Saskia Sassen offers a benchmark argument about the importance of local place in the new globalism. Place, she insists, is central to the circulation of people and capital that constitute globalization, and a focus on urban places in a globalizing world brings with it a recognition of the rapidly declining significance of the national economy, while also insisting that globalization takes place through specific social and economic complexes rooted in specific places. This builds on a familiar picture of globalization, defined in terms of the economic shift from production to finance. Global cities emerged when, in the 1970s, the global financial system expanded dramatically and foreign direct investment was dominated, not by capital invested directly in productive func-tions, but rather by capital moving into and between capital markets. This, in turn, pollinated a broad expansion of ancillary producer services concentrated in command and control posts in the financial economy, and those new urban forms are marked by extreme bifurcations of wealth and poverty, dramatic realignments of class relations, and dependence on new streams of immigrant labor. This, of course, is the paradigmatic global city. The balance of economic power has shifted since the 1970s “from production places, such as Detroit and Manchester, to centers of finance and highly specialized services” (Sassen 1992:325).

The police are everywhere confronted with a deep crisis of legitimacy, mission and recruitment that the recent managerial turn can neither contain nor mask, since it finds its source in the overall reconfiguration of the state, the erosion of the public monopoly over systems of surveillance and sanction of the deviancy, and the broad diffusion of a feeling of social insecurity to which political leaders have chosen to respond with the all-out politicization of criminal insecurity, which sets off an upward spiralling of expectations that the forces of order cannot but betray in the end. While the social foundations of ‘police fetishism’ - the ideological illusion that would make it the ‘solution’ to the ‘crime problem’ - are crumbling, the police have again been entrusted, not only with maintaining public order, but also, in a very concrete sense that returns it to the historic mission of its origin, with buttressing the new social order woven out of vertiginous inequalities and with checking the turbulences both of the explosive conjunction of rampant poverty and stupendous affluence engendered by the neoliberal capitalism in the cities of the advanced and advancing countries around the globe. And if putting working-class districts left economically and socially fallow under police restraint has recently become so popular among rulers, it is because it enables the high state nobility to give itself the comforting feeling that it is responding to the demands of the ‘people’ while at the same time exculpating its own historic responsibility in the making of the urban outcasts of the new century.

From the eighteenth century on, every discussion of politics as the art of government of men [sic] necessarily involved a chapter or a series of chapters on urbanism, on collective facilities, on hygiene, and on private architecture.

The basic tendency of Hegel’s social thought is to undermine modern society’s liberal self-interpretation; to the extent that its institutions have been shaped by this interpretation, its tendency is even to criticize those institutions themselves. He presents a communitarian rather than an individualistic rationale for modern economic and political institutions and of the freedom they seek to actualize. This provides the basis for an indictment of any society which tries to call itself ‘free’ even though it fails to offer its members any rationally credible sense of collective purpose, leaves them cynically discontented with and alienated from its political institutions, deprives them of a socially structured sense of self-identity, and condemns many of them to lives of poverty, frustration, and alienation.

The milieu is a certain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it. It is an element in which a circular link is produced between effects and causes, since an effect from one point of view will be a cause from another...So it is this phenomenon of circulation of causes and effects that is targeted through the milieu. Finally, the milieu appears as a field of intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions - which would be the case of sovereignty e and instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances e as in discipline - one tries to affect, precisely, a population. I mean a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live. What one tries to reach through this milieu, is precisely the conjunction of a series of events produced by these individuals, populations, and groups, and quasi natural events which occur around them.

In short, the interesting thing is that Le Maitre dreams of connecting the political effectiveness of sovereignty to a spatial distribution. A good sovereign, be it a collective or individual sovereign, is someone well placed within a territory, and a territory that is well policed in terms of its obedience to the sovereign is a territory that has a good spatial layout. All of this, this idea of the political effectiveness of sovereignty is linked to the idea of an intensity of circulations: circulation of ideas, of wills, and of orders, and also commercial circulation. Ultimately, what is involved for Le Maitre  - and this is both an old idea, since it is a matter of sovereignty, and a modern idea, since it involves circulation - is the superimposition of the state of sovereignty, the territorial state, and the commercial state.

Discipline is of course also exercised on the bodies of individuals, but I have tried to show you how the individual is not the primary datum on which discipline is exercised. Discipline only exists insofar as there is a multiplicity and an end, or an objective or result to be obtained on the basis of this multiplicity. School and military discipline, as well as penal discipline, workshop discipline, worker discipline, are all particular ways of managing and organizing a multiplicity, of fixing its points of implantation, its lateral or horizontal, vertical and pyramidal trajectories, its hierarchy, and so on. The individual is much more a particular way of dividing up the multiplicity for a discipline than the raw material from which it is constructed. Discipline is a mode of individualization of multiplicities rather than something that constructs an edifice of multiple elements on the basis of individuals who are worked on as, first of all, individuals. So sovereignty and discipline, as well as security, can only be concerned with multiplicities.

In passive nihilistic planning, a war is waged on the unwanted elements of “the creative city”, the poor and marginalized urban spaces, the “ugly places”, places that may offend the sensibilities of the middle class, and on the “right to stay put” for marginalized people (Newman & Wyly 2006). Spurred by the logic of the revanchist city (Smith 1996), passive nihilistic planning wages territorial, symbolic and corporeal, class wars – urbicide in Coward’s (2006) formulation – targeting unwanted/deviant elements, that “pose risks to the creative city”, “unattractive places”, poor neighbourhoods, segregated and other fringe spaces, with the punitive moral of “zero tolerance” and violent resolutions of urban conflict. The current militarization of the city and the amalgamation of city branding and military securitization are tangible trajectories of this tendency (Graham 2010). The marketing and branding of cities to service the needs and whims of the affluent sections of people is reliant on arguments stressing surveillance, security and resilience not only against terrorist attacks but almost everything that may disrupt business, leisurely and consumption (Coaffee 2005). At the same time, city marketing and branding have become recurrent elements of the planning apparatus, not least via various planning showrooms and other marketing strategies used in city development processes (Ek 2011). The result is a struggle at several levels over access to urban public spaces, struggles over the nature and meaning of urban commons, such deepened commercialization, exclusion and more or less materially manifested boundary practices (Smith-Bowers & Manzi 2006, Kärrholm 2008), as the public space increasingly is privatized and commercialized, created for some of its inhabitants, destroyed for others. The transformation of the city into a set of isolated and securitized hedonistic enclaves – passive nihilistic planning in action – is an aspect of the actualization of the camp as the political paradigm of the modern (Diken 2004).