Speculations on Unicity: Rearticulations of Urban Space and Theory during Global Crisis

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CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2009, pp. 109–138, issn 1532-687x.© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

Speculations on UnicityRearticulations of Urban Space and Theory

during Global Crisis

J u s t i n R e a d

University at Buffalo

The twenty-first century has begun in global crisis. Here I am not referring to 9/11, Iraq, or Afghanistan, since war—sadly—is the constant of human history.1 Th e crises now facing us are environmental (global climate change) and economic (global finance). Both have resulted from what we might call, for lack of a better term, structural shifts in world order. But are these crises parts of the same crisis? Is one crisis the cause or eff ect of the other? Such questions are beyond the scope of the present essay, which will provide no theory of “crisis” as such. Frankly, I am incapable of proving causal relationships between environmental systems and political-economic sys-tems. Nevertheless I can say unequivocally that crisis in the twenty-first cen-tury—any crisis—is global. Th e structural shift I refer to is a move to global world order. “Global,” however, is a word used indiscriminately—wantonly, we might say—without clear understanding of its meaning or implication for the world it describes. Th e purpose of the present essay, therefore, is not to critique crisis—neither to analyze root causes nor to propose solutions

S p e c u l a t i o n s o n U n i c i t y110 ●

in any comprehensive way. Rather, my purpose is to speculate on how to understand the “global,” speculations that I will mediate through the concept of “Unicity.”

T h e A n t h r o p o g e n i c W o r l d

Th e world has changed. Perhaps we have grown unaccustomed to such definitive statements, especially in the humanities. But the world has changed, and there is no point in debating whether it really has or has not. My statements here need only be measured by the United Nations Intergov-ernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from ob-

servations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, wide-

spread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level. (2007, 2)

Th e exact causes of global warming cannot yet be conclusively measured, but all evidence so far places responsibility on a specific source:

Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-

20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG

[Greenhouse Gas] concentrations. It is likely that there has been significant

anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent

(except Antarctica). . . . Anthropogenic warming over the last three decades

has likely had a discernible influence at the global scale on observed changes

in many physical and biological systems. (IPCC 2007, 5, 6; emphasis in the

original)

To summarize that which is already widely known, the temperature of the earth’s air and water—and hence the earth’s land areas—have risen over the past century as a result of manmade (anthropogenic) causes.2 Over the course of the next century climate change will threaten the survival of all life on the planet. Furthermore, the IPCC provides only two options for the survival of the species (all species): adaptation and mitigation. Th at is, we either adapt

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the lived environment to promote survival, and/or we mitigate the causes for climate change thus limiting the harmful eff ects of warming. Tellingly, there is no mention in the IPCC Summary referenced here to biological adaptation, mitigation, evolution. Th e response to global climate change, rather, must be economic and political.

Th is is quite a diff erent view of the world than would have been expressed in the nineteenth century—200 years ago, a relative blip in the span of re-corded human history. We could seek out any number of indices, but I will choose one from my own field of Latin American poetry. In his 1825 poem “Niágara,” the exiled Cuban poet José María Heredia expresses a typically Romantic perspective on the state of nature:

¡Asombroso torrente!

¡Cómo tu vista el ánimo enajena

y de terror y admiración me llena!

¿Dó tu origen está? ¿Quién fertiliza

por tantos siglos tu inexhausta fuente?

¿Qué poderosa mano

hace que al recibirte,

no rebose en la tierra el océano?

[Frightful torrent!

How your vision the spirit estranges

and with terror and admiration fills me!

Wherefore your origin? Who fertilizes

over so many centuries your inexhaustible spring?

What powerful hand

has it that upon receiving you,

the ocean does not overwhelm the land?] (Heredia 1825; my translation)

Placing himself before Niagara Falls, Heredia experiences a crisis of a com-pletely other sort than the one in which we are now living—a phenomenologi-

cal crisis. Th e poet knows that nature has frightful, terrible power, but he does not know how that power is contained or channeled. Heredia recognizes the


potential for natural disaster—he knows that the Falls index the power of oceans to flood the land—but he cannot recognize what power (poderosa

mano) prevents this potential from being realized. All he knows is that the terror of the natural torrent is both sublime and inexhaustible (an evidently ontic reality), and this it inspires in him a sense of his own power and sublime spirit as a subject (a subjective phenomenon)—all without his ever under-standing or even speculating on how subject and object come to resemble one another. Finally, however, the immanently sublime nature of his spirit provides the exiled subject hope for political sovereignty: because he is im-bued with inherent power (derived for some still-mysterious reason from the power of nature), he hopes to return to an “other climate” (otros climas, Cuba) presently ruled by “vile” and “execrable monsters” who blaspheme the “sacrosanct name” of God and Nature.3

In other words, Heredia rehearses all the elements of a prominent strain of political philosophy—not only the philosophy of Rousseau or Wordsworth, but perhaps also one widely held throughout the world today. Th ese elements are: (1) a division between the human and the natural, or if you will, between subject and object; (2) a division of the world between natural space, Niagara Falls in this case, and social space, Cuba and its execrable colonial rulers; (3) a sense that natural power always exceeds social power, such that some form of social contract is necessary to prevent a regression into barbarity and disaster; and (4) that while nature exhibits physical power, all politics is immanently metaphysical in that each political subject has been granted by some god a spirit from which all human power flows. By stating all this, my intention is not to reinvent the wheel: romantic political philosophy has al-ready been analyzed, critiqued, and deconstructed in far greater detail than I can provide here. I am merely noting how greatly perspectives on relations among climate/environment, politics, and subjectivity have changed in a relatively short amount of time.

Th e IPCC Synthesis Report of 2007 presents an entirely diff erent world than the one Heredia presented in 1826. At least in the summary provided to policymakers, the IPCC makes little or no mention of nature or the natural, except to speak of natural systems. Rather, climate change is a condition that aff ects the climate or the environment. Th e climate of this environment


has been altered anthropogenically, thus threatening biological survival. As the climate heats up, natural systems will become more chaotic, and the environment will be less viable. Th e solution to this undesired predicament is social and political: certain governmental and economic policies must be enacted on a global scale to reduce GHG emissions and arrest global warming, and thereby make social adaptation to a changed environment more achievable. In other words, to engineer adaptation, humans must enact social policies that allow them to engineer the environment. In this sense it is not the case that we must learn to engineer nature, for in fact there is no such thing as a “nature” that stands prior to human production. Th e problem of climate change is that an environment has already been produced through anthropogenesis, so that the survival of the human species depends upon increasingly coherent and refined anthropogenic procedures. Where is Nature in all its metaphysical splendor in all of this?

I am not lamenting some loss of nature in any way, since I am not con-vinced there ever was such a thing as nature in the first place, at least as some space distinct from that of human nature. By the same token I am not suggesting that man (whatever that is) should now destroy nature (whatever that is) and transform the world into a giant factory akin to what was imag-ined in Th e Matrix movies. On one hand, a statement such as “man destroys nature” merely reiterates divisibility between man and nature that must be rejected. On the other, we have no idea how the destruction of any part (even a seemingly microscopic aspect) of any ecosystem aff ects the whole. I am merely stating that we must confront the facts: there can be no debate that the world has changed, and the world has changed through human produc-tion. Th e world is anthropogenic. As an index of change, one merely needs to go to Niagara Falls today. Th e water flowing over the Falls is thoroughly regulated, so that the actual force of the Falls may be increased or decreased by human control. And the land area surrounding the Falls is now occupied by skyscrapers (primarily casinos) that are part of a single urban area zoned and governed across two juridical territories spanning two nations (Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, and Niagara Falls, New York, U.S.A.).

Th is example of Niagara Falls is merely the phenotype of a structural gen-otype. Th e space of life is singular: there is but one environment in which one


lives, and this environment operates as an environmental system. One of the terms that we use (in English) to denominate the singular environmental sys-tem (with emphasis on system) is “globe.” But “globe” should not be so readily conflated with “world” or “planet”; or rather, before proceeding any further, we must know how to conflate “globe” and “planet” to produce a “world.” A globe is an abstract shape. In the sense used in this essay (and in the world), the globe is an abstract shape that is used to map the space of the planet to position, pinpoint, or orient locations on the planet; the globe is always a “global positioning system.” Th e globe is always therefore involved in some sort of mapping process, but the globe ( from which we derive the “global”) is not the kind of spherical map one might place in one’s office. Rather, the globe is an abstract informational environment that overlays the planet. (Th is virtual overlay over concrete reality is most often perceived as seam-less, though it is anything but.) Th is informational environment overlays the planetary environment so closely that we eff ectively cannot diff erentiate real and virtual. Th e structural shift in world order emerges from the fact that this lack of diff erentiation between real/virtual, knowledge-that/knowledge-how, globe/planet is thoroughly mediated through human technology, engineer-ing . . . anthropogenesis.

It is with this understanding of globe and global in mind that we can begin to appreciate the anthropogenic eff ects on the environment. Anthropogen-esis does not mean that man (whatever that means) has recreated or regen-erated the world in his own image (whatever “his” means). To the contrary, anthropogenesis is the process by which everything has been saturated with information by human means, such that information is potentially retriev-able from everything via some means or another. Anthropogenesis does not mean, therefore, that humans have engineered everything; it only means that humans may decide to engineer everything at some point in the future if they have not done so already. Molecular biology provides the clearest example of what I mean by this. For a nineteenth-century poet like Heredia, life and nature had no meaningful content except as assigned by some unknowable god; life and nature exist in Heredia’s poetry, but they overwhelm all attempts by the poet to understand what they could mean. In contrast, contemporary


molecular biology has already succeeded in characterizing life in terms of meaning, as information metabolism:

Th e last major part of our study of biochemistry concerns the storage re-

trieval, processing, and transmission of biological information. Th e processes

involved, which we call information metabolism, are distinguished from inter-

mediary metabolism as follows. In intermediary metabolism, all the infor-

mation specifying the nature of a reaction lies within the three-dimensional

structure of the enzyme involved. Th at structure determines which substrates

are bound and which reactions are catalyzed. Of course, all metabolic reac-

tions are controlled ultimately by genetic information, which specifies the

structures and properties of enzymes. However, the reactions we encounter

from here on are distinguished by the direct involvement of genetic infor-

mation—specifically, the requirement for a template, which functions along

with the enzyme to specify the reaction catalyzed. Th e biological templates

are nucleic acids—either DNA or RNA. In general, the template plays a pas-

sive role, determining which specific stubstrates will be bound, whereas the

enzyme continues to specify the nature of the reaction, once substrates have

been bound. (Matthews et al. 2000, 876; emphases in original)

Information metabolism consists of the following: deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) replication (DNA as the template for its own copy), DNA transcription (DNA as the template for the synthesis of ribonucleic acid [RNA]), and RNA translation (the transcribed RNA as template for the production of protein [a polypeptide chain]). Th e meaning of life is therefore to be found in DNA, since DNA stores information. An overly simplified description of DNA rep-lication: certain enzymes de-torque (topoisomerase), unwind, and elongate (helicase and primase) the two-stranded, double-helix DNA; other enzymes (polymerases) then read each separate strand of DNA to produce comple-mentary strands (ligating RNA primers when necessary [ligase]), and hence producing two daughter copies of the template DNA.

During transcription, another set of enzymes (RNA polymerases) read specific sequences of the DNA to produce messenger RNA (mRNA). In the


initial stages of transcription, the synthesized RNA includes both “meaning-ful” units of genetic code (exons, which can be translated into protein) and “untranslatable” units (introns, which are spliced out of the RNA strand). As a final product, then, mRNA is comprised only of “meaningful” exons that have been ligated together. Th e “sensible” components (commonly called “genetic code”) of both DNA and RNA are composed of only four bases (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine). (RNA may also contain a fifth base, Uracil, instead of thymine.) Translation therefore refers to something like the decodification and recodification of these four bases into the twenty amino acids that comprise the proteins of which all our cells are made. Th e genetic code of mRNA is bundled into three-base-pair units (codons, e.g., ACU, CAG); during translation, mRNA is bound to a transfer RNA (tRNA) by means of an enzyme, aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase. Th e tRNA is bundled into three-base-pair units that complement the codons in mRNA (anticodons, e.g., UGA, GTC). At last:

In order to translate an mRNA, machinery must exist that brings the amino

acid-charged tRNAs and the mRNA together, matching anticodon and codon

triplets and joining amino acid residues together in the correct sequence. Th e

cellular apparatus that accomplishes this feat is the ribosome, a particle com-

posed of both RNA and proteins. A ribosome can bind to mRNA and “read” it,

as it moves along the RNA, accepting the charged tRNAs in the order dictated

by the message and transferring their amino acid residues one by one and in

proper order to the growing polypeptide chain. (Matthews et al. 2000, 1027)

My point in this long description of information metabolism is not to belabor the details of genetics, but rather to show that biochemical metabo-lism has now been shown to involve processes through which information is replicated and transcribed into a useable form, and then translated into content (in the form of proteins, the stuff of which your body is actually made). Life as we know it has been transposed into information, and this information is replicable, transcribable, and translatable. Th is does not mean that the life of your cells has been engineered by human hands, only that your human hands are formed by an informational process that


is now potentially engineerable by and for human society. Just because sci-ence has infused biological systems with information, and then generates more information through experimentation, does not mean that science or scientific knowledge is always already reductive or false. Rather, the global environmental system is a dynamic system in which natural life and human knowledge recombine into one another. Anthropogenesis therefore refers only to a potential for the human engineering of natural systems (biological, environmental, climatological systems), thus rendering these systems open to social regulation.

To modulate my overall position somewhat: global does not merely mean planetary. A global planet would be one in which every element on the planet were saturated with information that could be readily retrieved, measured, and mediated by humans. Th is is not to say that a truly global planet has already been achieved, although it is significant that we are now precipitously close to establishing a Th eory of Everything that would allow humans to measure everything from subatomic particles (including those of the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus atoms that comprise most of our bodies) to the entire universe (including the galaxy in which we locate ourselves) along a singular scale. To reiterate, the fact that global climate change is a crisis brought on by anthropogenesis also means that any potential solution will also be anthropogenic in nature. Here I am not judging if any solution to the crisis will be found, or if solutions can be found through science or engineering, or whether science and engineering are “valid” or “true” in the first place. I am only interested in a particular kind of hermeneutic circle: once information is virtually encoded into real matter (everything), information virtually overlays all reality, which is not to say that this information is any less real for being virtual, or vice versa. Globalization is the process by which the planet is becoming global—globally saturated with information.

T h e M a r k e t i n V i r t u a l R e a l i t y

I would now like to modulate my speculations in another way: there is plan-etary space, that which we know of primarily through our senses, and there


is global space, the informational environment through which we know how the world works (measurement). We reside in or inhabit planetary space; we locate ourselves in global space. Global space overlays planetary space, to the point that we can no longer perceive a diff erence between them; in fact, there is no diff erence between them. “Overlay” is just a term of convenience, since global space saturates planetary space. But how or where does this saturation occur? Th e Unicity is the seam, the contact zone, between globe and planet through which our present world-space is produced. “Unicity” is a term I have derived from a poem, “cidade/city/cité,” by the Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos (1986). As I have written elsewhere, Augusto’s one-line poem works to map the megalopolis of São Paulo, Brazil, as “composed of time” and “decomposed in space.” For the moment I will leave my reading of the poem to a previous article (and another to come shortly), except to say that “cidade/city/cité” is not only a poetic representation (or map) of São Paulo. It is a virtual, internal border that demarcates how the city has been produced in time and space. As I wrote in my initial analysis, Augusto’s poem is itself an aspect of Unicity:

But I cannot leave this essay without one final observation: if the border of

the global city has been internalized, then there can be no external limit to the

growth of the city. If this is the case, then we might begin to imagine—albeit

poetically—that São Paulo is the world or that it will soon cover the globe, that

there is now really only one city that operates as a reiterative network or

global rhyme scheme from one place to the next. (2006, 297)

Moving forward from what I wrote in 2006, my present speculations in this essay represent a refinement in some of my terms: Unicity is the internal limit or border that ligates global space to planetary space. Accordingly the global environment is a singular border zone.

Unicity presents several challenges to our knowledge of the world. I have been grappling with the first challenge in the preceding pages in an eff ort to understand the global environment, not as natural, but as an anthropogenic environmental system constituted through human sociability (an engineer-able world). By thinking through the ways biological and environmental


systems come into contact with human information and informational sys-tems, I have located Unicity as the contact point between them. From here on, however, Unicity is best understood by recourse to other systems and other crises: the global financial crisis.

If the first challenge presented to knowledge is anthropogenesis, the sec-ond challenge presented by Unicity is the fluidity and polymorphism of space that ensues from it. If we look at global finance, we are constantly reminded of how localized it is. To recapitulate the financial crisis in which I am writing this essay, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the world’s largest financial institutions overleveraged themselves in the U.S. housing market. Mass defaults on home mortgages (many of which had been issued in corrupt fashion in the first place) caused a panic in mortgage-backed securities mar-kets such that the institutions’ leverage imploded upon itself in spectacular fashion over the course of 2008. Th is set in motion what many believe to be the first global recession (or depression, depending on how pessimistic the economist you ask). Yet if one looks at the map of where the financial institu-tions are on the planet, one realizes how small an area global finance appears to occupy. In many ways, the real crisis began within a highly circumscribed area of Lower Manhattan, within a mere handful of skyscrapers.

What has happened is that various components of the United States financial sector have been unified over the past few decades. Th rough a persistent (and I would say also, manic) drive to state deregulation, retail and commercial banking, investment banking, insurance, and so forth—all components of the financial sector that were once kept separated by law—have all been allowed to merge into massive corporate entities. At the same time, the financial sector worldwide was technologized, so that capital can now flow around the planet in less time than it takes to send an email. Th e crisis resulting from deregulation, global integration, and technologization is national, of course, and I would never wish to diminish that: people across the United States (and North America, and everwhere else) can no longer live in their homes, they are losing their jobs, and they can’t feed their families.

But even still, the plight of individual families in suburban and exurban America pales, in terms of sheer monetary value, in comparison to what has happened in Lower Manhattan. By now it is well known how Citibank,


American Insurance Group (AIG), Bank of America, and other prominent financial institutions have in one way or another over-issued mortgages (either directly or by providing the capital to other lending institutions). They then bundled these mortgages into mortgage-backed derivatives. What is not widely understood by the public is that, in addition to lend-ing capital to people and businesses, all of the large financial institutions on Wall Street have all along been loaning each other the capital they then use to loan out mortgages; they have been buying mortgage-backed securities

from one another; and most catastrophically they have been insuring each

other’s mortgages and mortgage-backed securities against default. In fact it gets worse, because they have also been securitizing the insurance they issue to one another into secondary derivatives (credit default swaps and other collateralized debt obligations), which they have also bought and sold to one another. In terms as simplified as I can provide, Wall Street lent capital to consumer borrowers; Wall Street then used the debt owed to it as collateral to borrow more capital; then Wall Street borrowed yet more capital against the borrowed capital; then Wall Street issued insurance to hedge against its loaning and borrowing; and finally Wall Street borrowed even more capital against the insurance. Th us, the crisis did not ensue because banks lost money on individual mortgages. Rather, once a mortgage default caused a debt to be incurred, that debt automatically expanded geometrically without any insurance against the loss. In fact, the more insurance these institutions have bought and sold, the more rapidly their debt grew. Th e tipping point came when AIG was required actually to show that it had sufficient capital to cover its insurance obligations; since it potentially owed some $30 on every $1 invested, it had no means to survive without a massive government bailout. Moreover, with capital sucked out of the financial system at such geometric proportions, there was no capital left for one institution to loan to another institution to cover its short-term obligations, which as we see above, is how Wall Street had been operating for some.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, fluctuations in local markets could remain relatively insulated. I recall, as anecdotal evidence, a real estate bubble in California that burst around 1987 or 1988. Between 1990 and 2000, there were several catastrophic market meltdowns localized in diff erent parts of


the globe that caused great damage internationally, such as the extended Japanese slowdown of the 1990s, the Bangkok real estate crisis of 1997–1998, and the Argentinean economic crisis of 2000. But none of these exploded into truly global crises, and none of them dragged down markets in North America and Europe in general, or even Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Since 2007, however, local housing bubbles have popped and burst all over the place, as if in a coordinated fashion: not only Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tampa, but also in the U.K., Iceland, and Hungary. Th ese local events have infected almost all areas of the global economy.

What has happened in the interim? Capital has become thoroughly digitized, technologized, “informationalized”—it only exists in virtual space. Th is allows capital to be transferred from one locality to another far-off local-ity efficiently; capital can be transferred from Lower Manhattan to suburban Atlanta or upper Reykjavik efficiently. And in capitalism there are only a few ways to maximize profit: lowering labor costs, developing new technologies, and maximizing efficiency. Th e virtualization of capital means that there are no longer physical or geographical barriers to slow its movement. Th is means that capital can be transferred instantly (that is, profitably) from sovereign wealth funds in Asia to the U.S. Treasury, from the U.S. Treasury to Wall Street, and from financial centers on Wall Street to external markets. But it may also open a reverse flow so that any disruptions in far-off external markets can instantly cause much larger disruptions back in Manhattan, and from Man-hattan to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Dubai, Frankfurt, and back again. Further-more, the virtualization of capital paradoxically allows financial institutions to concentrate their physical functions locally. Th at is, it allows corporations to concentrate management, research and development, informational tech-nology, and so forth—the actual people who work for them—into highly con-centrated locations, the actual office space employees physically inhabit. Th e central command functions of these institutions are physically concentrated locally, because virtual reality allows them to distribute capital globally. Virtualization has allowed discrete financial institutions to integrate global financial activities as I just mentioned (banking, investment, insurance), but it has also allowed financial institutions to integrate themselves into one another. So, as a virtual entity, capital exists wherever the digital information


network exists, which is to say that capital exists everywhere on the globe. But the real crisis, though global, is not precisely planetary. Th e crisis is a major disruption of the flow of capital from one office building to the next within a radius of a few city blocks in downtown Manhattan, and from there to concentrations of corporate office parks scattered across the planet. Because the credit crisis froze the movement of capital across a the space of a few city blocks, in other words, the entire world will suff er. At the very least, it has become impossible to distinguish local actions from planetary actions in the global economy.

It is true that capitalism has always constituted a world system, and that capitalism has also tended to project a fantasy of its dominion over the entire planet. Th is much has been known at least as far back as Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto: “Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way” (1985 [1848], 81). However, up until 1990 the overall value of the world’s capital itself was always split between ideal abstraction and base concreteness. On one hand, the total value of capital in the world was an abstract cipher. Value was an abstraction, and some would say a fetish; moreover, capital was not global-ized insofar as it was always determined by the distinct monetary policies of individual nation-states. On the other hand, then, in light of nationalized monetary policy, the value of capital was always pegged to physical depos-

its of minerals (namely gold and silver) held in reserve by each nation—a system known as the gold standard that finally died out by 1971 (although the system entered into major crisis during the Great Depression). After 1990, however, we cannot speak of capital except as a virtual entity held in interconnected digital networks. Th is means that capital, although still certainly eff ected by national monetary policies, exists somewhere beyond the horizon of the nation-state per se; it also means that the value of capital is no longer an ideal cipher, but rather a physical quantity. In other words, it used to be that capital was an abstract value that was pegged to some natural element; this presupposed a diff erence between social content and natural element from which economic value could be derived. Now, however, capital is physically quantifiable as information processed in net-worked computers, and nothing else.


Moreover, it is true that multinational corporations ( financial and oth-erwise) have branches all over the planet. Nevertheless, under globalization, the dispersal of their activities has mandated the focalization of command-and-control functions in a handful of urban centers, chiefly Lower Man-hattan. Th e proximity of corporate command nodes to one another has perhaps allowed the integration of diff erent multinational corporations into one another, even if commanded separately. More significantly and precari-ously, it means the command-and-control functionaries who actually run the corporations are subject to local social psychological conditions (what we call “groupthink”) that insulate them from perceiving and comprehend-ing the global consequences of their actions. Th us, capital is thoroughly global, as a physical (although nontactile) quantity spread across the planet as information; but the movement of capital is determined locally, so that if its movement is halted between one command-and-control node and another node just across the street, the entire global economy will likely come to a halt.

G l o b a l U r b a n i z a t i o n : E x o n e s a n d I n t r o n e s

Globalization is a structural shift in world political-economic order, not merely because there is a world market like Marx and Engels proposed in 1848; political economy is now global insofar as its ultimate basis (its envi-ronment, if you will) is the flow of information. In the current crisis we are witnessing the negative or painful aspects of globalization in a more direct and visceral way than we might have before. But the crisis is not signaling the end of globalization; it is merely demonstrating that recessions and de-pressions can now flow across the entire planet, and in so doing the present crisis only solidifies globalization as the current paradigm of world order. Th e flow of information through, over, or across the planet occurs along a single line: what I have called the Unicity. We can think of Unicity as a kind of “oneness” that seeks to saturate the planet, in which geographic, topological, climatic, and cultural diff erences would not merely be overcome but elimi-nated altogether. Somewhat strangely, Unicity does not deny the appearance of diff erence, usually framed as a binary relation of inclusion vs. exclusion,


or even the belief in diff erence per se; all the same, Unicity cannot respect diff erences, since nothing can be diff erent if all is One.

Earlier I mentioned that we inhabit planetary space and locate ourselves in global space; the world that emerges in the combination of these two spaces is an anthropogenic one in which all life is marked by sociability, by which I mean that life systems (biological, environmental, and now economic and political) are “engineerable” and “technologizeable.” We are well served to think of the Unicity, therefore, as that space of sociable life. Th e Unicity, moreover, operates in several key modes, the first of which is network integration. Globalization emerges, first and foremost, as a para-digm of corporate organization, but obviously one that has far-reaching consequences beyond the corporate world. To maximize efficiency (i.e., profit), large corporations have learned how to distribute discrete func-tions (IT, R&D, finance, marketing, sales, transportation logistics, and so forth) across the planet. It used to be that comparative advantage in an international economy was given to those geographic locations where all stages of the production process—from the extraction of natural resources, to manufacture, to shipping/transportation—could be most concentrated; this is certainly the case of the northeast United States (including the Buf-falo-Niagara region) from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. But where is my home base of Buff alo now? Buff alo is now peripheral to the world economy because comparative advantage now resides with those who distribute the production process rather than concentrate it, with those who distribute the flow of production to whatever location provides the lowest costs relative to output.

Th is can only occur because disparate corporate functions are all net-worked. Advanced transportation networks have been invented to move goods, materials, and people from anywhere to anywhere on the planet. Advanced communications networks have been created so that managers in one location can communicate with other managers in other locations at minimal cost. And digital computer networks have been created, not only to facilitate communication, but perhaps more importantly to measure and track quantitatively the movement of goods, services, products, and people throughout the supply chain. Th us, just as capital has become physically


quantifiable as information, so too does capitalism seek to locate or position quantifiably the movement of all things. Th e Internet is the most important piece of this puzzle, because it allows the integration of multiple networks (not just computers, but cars, airplanes, power grids, art, and culture). Th e Internet is the network of networks, which is to say that the Internet is the network Unicity. Perhaps we are accustomed to thinking of a network as an immaterial, imaginary, or virtual entity—a virtual reality. Th is is indeed the case, but we also need to understand and accept that the Internet is not just something that globalization uses like a hammer or supertanker. Th e network is the space—the only space—of globalization, which is to say, the network is the space of the world we inhabit.

Accordingly, network Unicity no longer permits certain foundational dis-tinctions of philosophy, of thought itself. Th ere can be no diff erence between the real and the imaginary, between concrete and ideal, much less between body and spirit. Th ere can be no room for metaphysics in a world ordered by the physics of networking. Th ere is only virtual reality, which is no longer some fictional counterpart to real or true reality. Unicity is virtual reality insofar as it is both virtual and reality. I have already mentioned an example of this: there can be nothing more real than capital, but capital itself now only exists in virtual space as a virtualization of value.

Th e second (and most important) mode of Unicity is global urbanization. Quite literally and tautologically, Unicity is the Uni-City. It is a One City that virtually covers the world. Perhaps we are accustomed to think of a city as a territory bounded by city limits, as a kind of static space marked by human artifice that is demarcated from a natural landscape or wilderness. Th is is a bad way of thinking about a city, because urban space is never static. In fact, cities as we now know them are organizational systems. Th ey organize move-ments of people and things through space. In a city, people move around in an organized (but not always coherent) fashion, and we call that transit. Structures are built, maintained, or destroyed in an organized fashion, and we call that zoning. Water, electricity, and food each have their own produc-tion and distribution networks. Garbage and waste are removed, treated, or just stored in an organized fashion, and we call that sewage and waste

management. Th e city can therefore only be thought of as the coordination


and/or the agglomeration of all these discrete networks. Th e city, in other words, is a network of networks.

In an age of instant communicability between one urban area and the next, in an age in which all urban areas are connected to each other by trans-portation lines and lines of communication, one “city” (in quotation marks) is networked to all other “cities” in one way or another. Th e entire globe,

therefore, is an urban network, is one urban network, the Unicity. In this sense we can no longer think of the city along the classical Athenian model, of an agora or plaza surrounded by some austere buildings, surrounded by some private residences and streets, all enclosed by walls. As Vilém Flusser writes: “Th e typical image we construct of the city looks something like this: houses as economic private spaces that surround a marketplace, the political public sphere, and over there on a hill stands a temple, the theoretical sacred space. You can beat your head against the wall trying to decide how these spaces are coupled together” (2005 [1988], 323). Th is typical image of the city no longer makes sense because there are no walls between home, market, public sphere, and theory anymore. Mind you, there are real borders that shape how we live. But these borders have been thoroughly internalized—think of how a border exists between Los Angeles and East Los Angeles even though each juridical unit pertains to a larger metropolitan area we still call “Los Ange-les.” Th e same can be said of the border between Manhattan and Bronx, or between San Diego and Tijuana, or between Buff alo and Toronto. Th e most significant borders, however, are being drawn within existing juridical city limits, as I have sought to show in my own work on São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Furthermore, although we may still distinguish home from street from office from parliament from market, all these spaces regularly intermingle for us on a daily basis: Internet cables deliver politics, exchange, and friend-ship into our private homes and back out again. Drawing on Flusser once again: “A striking aspect of this image of the city, when one has mobilized the necessary imagination for it, is its immateriality. In this image there are neither houses nor squares nor temples that are recognizable, rather only a network of wires, a confusion of cables” (326).

Once urban borders have been internalized, we cannot think of distinct urban spaces as, in fact, distinct. Market, home, plaza, there can be no


external limit to them. And once all cities are networked to each other, the city limit reaches infinity. Furthermore, there can be no distinction between city and nature, between a human landscape and a natural landscape. To reiterate my position from the first section of this essay, there is no longer such a thing as nature, much less a state of nature. Because the entire globe is a Unicity without external limits, there is only one single environmental

system in which we all live, an environment that one hopes may be managed

and regulated. A philosophical, theoretical term has already been named to conceptualize how the One environment might be managed: “biopolitics.” If there are politics in the Unicity (and we cannot assume that there are), it would have to take the form of an intensified biopolitics going beyond the mere survival of life (zoe

–) at the level of the phenotype.4 In the Unicity bio-politics would have to extend to the level of the genotype. In this intensified sense of the biopolitical I am using here, the most important border would not be one between nations or continents or cities; it would be the border that opens within a cell between one strand of DNA and the other during replication. To wit, uncontrolled cell division is not only a biological event. It rapidly spreads into an uncontrollable disease called “cancer” that is not only a natural occurrence, but an environmental condition that must be managed medically, bioinformatically, politically, economically, ethically, socially.

Th e Unicity’s “confusion of cables” goes beyond modernity—and its analogues premodern, early modern, and postmodern. Th e modern (or modern/colonial) world system—as theorized by Raúl Prebisch (1950), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1979 [1971]), Immanuel Wallerstein (1989), and others—was based on a division of the planet into centers and peripher-ies, First World and Th ird World, with inherent structural advantages given to central (rich) countries based on the political-economic dependency of peripheral (poor) ones. Globalization has reallocated the center-periphery dynamic significantly. Life in certain parts of Latin America’s metropolitan centers (São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City) is eff ectively the same as that of cosmopolitan areas of New York, London, or Tokyo. However, in any Latin American megacity, these cosmopolitan zones coexist with large and desperately impoverished zones, often located mere meters away from one another. It makes little sense to call these diff ering zones First World and


Th ird World any longer, since they are not distinct worlds that are ordered into a sequential hierarchy from one to three. I would therefore propose to call certain areas of urban space exones and others intrones. Exones are demographic concentrations with network densities of which information tends to be immediately translatable throughout the Unicity. Intrones may perhaps be more demographically dense than exones, but they are less dense informatically, because information in the introne is not as readily translat-able as meaningful content across the Unicity. Exones and intrones are not bounded territories in the typical sense, but are rather produced in tandem, perhaps within neighborhoods or even single city blocks, within a single urban area. Exones and intrones could potentially inhere in one another. And although there are no longer centers and peripheries as imagined in modernity, the lines of (political-economic) dependency between exones and intrones are still powerful. By this I mean that global wealth and global poverty are codependent relations through which urban space is produced.

What we now think of as cities are really only nodes in a unified network. Some parts of these nodes (exones) have high concentrations of meaningful network traffic, and others (intrones) have less concentration. As such ex-ones are often perceived as the only centralized nodes in the Unicity. (Again, we need to move away from centers/peripheries in physical space, and think more in terms of relative densities of network traffic.) Saskia Sassen has done well to think of New York City, London, Tokyo, Frankfurt—all of which are central nodes in the financial services sector—as Global Cities in the sense that each contains central command-and-control centers of multinational corporations (2001). Accordingly, cultural life in each of Sassen’s Global Cities resembles that of others, often more so than with respect to each national context; that is, cultural life in the Global Cities of New York and Singapore may be more similar to each other than New York is to other areas of the United States or Singapore is to other areas of Malaysia or Indonesia. But if there are such things as Global Cities, we would have to realize that they are only relatively reduced parts of an urban complex. In the case of New York, for instance, the Global City would only refer to exones in Manhattan and perhaps Brooklyn, but not to intrones in Bronx, Queens, Newark, and so forth.


A n t i n o m i c S p a c e

Global urbanization does produce resemblance between discrete urban com-plexes in far-flung parts of the world, but only insofar as “urban” means the

manifestation of the codependent production of exones and intrones. As early as 1970, Henri Lefebvre was correct in surmising that

Society has been completely urbanized. Th is hypothesis implies a definition:

An urban society is a society that results from a process of complete urbaniza-

tion. Th is urbanization is virtual today, but will become real in the future.

(2003 [1970], 1)

As of 2009, complete urbanization is statistically verifiable. Mike Davis runs the numbers in one of his recent books:

[C]ities will account for virtually all future population growth, which is ex-

pected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050. . . . Ninety-five percent of this final

buildout of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries,

whose populations will double to nearly 4 billion over the next generation.

(2006, 2)

Here I would quibble with some of Davis’s terminology, in that I cannot quite recognize diff erences between “developed” and “developing” nations in this day and age. Nevertheless, Davis points to the dissolution of a modern world-view even if certain terminology is no longer adequate. Modernity sought to divide the world in two halves that could be located through two distinct chains of signifiers: “modern” societies that were rich, industrial, developed, urban; and “traditional” societies that were poor, agrarian, underdeveloped, rural. In today’s world, however, the largest concentrations of urban popula-tions are now in the so-called “underdeveloped” world. And although these urban zones concentrate great wealth (and thus, can be seen as Global Cities), they simultaneously concentrate dire poverty. As Davis rightly conjectures, “Th e price of this new urban order, however, will be increasing inequality within and between cities of diff erent sizes and economic specializations” (7).


As concerns global urbanization, moreover, we would be wrong to think of the Unicity as a gigantic structure or machine of oppression that is being imposed on the world from above, one that is being directed from the exone.5 Globalization has been devised as a corporate-organizational paradigm to maximize profit, this is true; but once the Unicity emerges, the borders between rich and poor, powerful and powerless become increasingly refined and complex. Th e fantasy of globalization—a particularly pernicious fantasy among the capitalist classes—is that globalization will “lift” the poor or underdeveloped world into some First World. But such a fantasy presup-poses a diff erence between those who are excluded from globalization (the Th ird World or Fourth World poor) and those who are included (the First World wealthy). Hardt and Negri repeat this error, even if in its negative space, by positing an oppression-machine called “Empire” (those included in the sovereign body) and those oppressed by the machine whom they name “multitude” (those whose exclusion is maintained by the Imperial parasite “sucking” out their power) (2000, 60–63). Even the most perceptive critics of globalization, such as Manuel Castells, fall into the trap of exclusivity and inclusivity: “Th us, overall, the ascent of informational, global capitalism is

indeed characterized by simultaneous economic development and underdevel-

opment, social inclusion and exclusion, in a process very roughly reflected in comparative statistics” (1998, 82; emphasis in original). Th e Unicity cannot permit any diff erence between included and excluded, however. Th at is, you cannot pretend to include someone into globalization by giving them a job, a cell phone, or a modem; this is because their poverty and social exclusion are already integral to globalization. Th e emergence of an exone is predicated on the emergence of an introne, even if (or rather, especially because) there is quantifiable disparity between them. All the same, there is no such thing as a class of sovereign subjects (or some vague notion of “Imperial sovereignty” per se) directing this production process, nor some mass of humanity strug-gling to attain to the status of “sovereign subject of the Unicity.”

Admittedly this makes the question of politics in the Unicity rather difficult. Th ere is political-economy in the Unicity, of course, but this due primarily to the conversion of capital into an informational flow. Th e border that inheres between exone and introne is economic in nature. In brute terms,


the exone requires the labor force in the introne (even if unused labor force) as the basis of all economic production; this much should be nothing new to anyone who has read Adam Smith or Karl Marx. However, efficiency (the ve-locity at which information is translated throughout the Unicity, which is the key to profitability) can only be calculated in the exone, because exones are by definition zones of informational translatability. Th e introne can only be measured and calculated in an incomplete manner. Certain movements of the introne can be registered in the exone, such as work or physical violence; populations in the introne may organize themselves and enter into politics in the exone. Nonetheless, information in the introne will remain nonsensical or only partially sensible to the exone.

Th e borders between exones and intrones are not national or continen-tal; rather each zone (zoone?) coexists within the same locality. I am writing this on a university-owned, networked laptop with the expectation that these words could potentially reach a worldwide audience, even if (with all due respect to CR and its editors) a very small one. Th at is, I am writing this from within an exone, but believe me when I tell you that much of the east side of Buff alo, separated by just a few miles from where I sit right now, is not an exone. All the same, it is not correct to think that the exone commands total control or domination over the introne. Both exone and introne are defined by translatability. Th is means that it is not possible simply to transform an introne into an exone by extending more network access to it. Since both are zones of translatability (in addition to transcribability and replicability), it may be possible for an introne to “transfect” itself into an exone and thus spread globally.

“Intronic transfection” may be perceived as a problem of national secu-rity, but only because the scale of measurement in the political sphere is attuned to the nation-state. Can it be any accident that, over the past decade, the United States is now behaving like a Latin American nation from the 1970s and 80s? Th e United States has entrenched political and economic oligarchs who subvert the judicial system to ensure their power (the 2000 Presidential election). Th e United States now runs dirty wars in which it tor-tures people for no other reason than to instill fear and assert dominance. And as witnessed since 2008, the U.S. economy is now subject to massive


infusions of speculative capital that just as quickly evacuate at the first sign of danger. All these shifts have occurred just as disparities between wealth and poverty in the United States are reaching levels that are positively Brazil-ian in scope, even if the United States remains a far richer nation than Brazil in general. During his dictatorship of Chile (1973–1990), Augusto Pinochet followed Milton Friedman’s advice, privatized state-controlled industries and services, and sought to drive down real wages as a predicate to attract-ing foreign direct investment from multinational corporations. Th is was accomplished with great corruption and mismanagement, of course, which meant that after the economy collapsed, the newly privatized businesses went bankrupt and had to be renationalized. Over the past 25 years, U.S. politicians have talked incessantly about privatizing nearly everything (in-cluding health care, education, roads, even social security), and they have sought to deregulate what they haven’t tried to privatize. Due to corruption and mismanagement, the United States now finds that it must nationalize huge portions of the heretofore private sector. What we are living is not the next Great Depression; it is merely Round 2 of the Latin American debt crisis. Stated another way: U.S.-Americans easily accept that Chile now resembles the United States more than any other time before; they are less ready to accept that the United States now resembles Chile (or Malaysia, or Th ailand, or Angola).

Th e question that remains is, Why would the world’s richest nation-state manifest such behaviors? I would hypothesize that the answer is urban rather than national: Political and economic leadership in U.S. exones suddenly awakened to the existence of intrones; faced with the apparent untranslatability and immeasurability of the introne, the exone reacted in the only way it knew how in such circumstances: irrationally. Th is reaction would strike anyone who has lived in Brazil as entirely typical. In her analysis of São Paulo, for instance, Teresa Caldeira makes this cogent observation of the upper-class district of Morumbi:

After fifteen years of intensive real estate development for the upper classes

in areas with precarious infrastructure, combined with the proliferation of

favelas, Morumbi exemplifies the new face of social segregation in the city. If


one looks at the area around its main street, Avenue Giovanni Gronchi, and

at the advertisements for its high-rises, one is struck by the imagination of

the developers in endowing each apartment complex with “distinguishable”

characteristics: in addition to monumental architecture and foreign, vaguely

aristocratic names, the buildings display exotic features: one swimming pool

per individual apartment, three maids’ rooms, waiting rooms for drivers in

the basement, and special rooms for storing crystal, china, silver, and so on.

All this luxury contrasts with the views from the apartment windows: the

more than five thousand shacks of the favela Paraisópolis, one of the biggest

in São Paulo, which supplies the domestic servants for the condominiums

nearby. For the people interested in living exclusively among their peers the

walls have to be high indeed, and the rich residences do not conceal their

electric fences, video cameras, and private guards. (2000, 245–46)

Morumbi is an interesting case in the Unicity because exone and introne reside next to one another; they are connected physically and visually/perspectively. In fact, both have been produced through one another in a rather simple economic configuration: the rich want expensive high-rise apartments and cheap servants; the poor who work as servants wish to live in close proximity to their places of work. But ignorant to the fact that exone and introne have been produced in tandem, the exone cannot understand the introne just a few meters away and begins to panic. Worse, the exone seeks to monitor information from the introne through what we could call information-gathering devices (electric fences, video cameras, private guards). But the wall is the site of transfection from introne to exone. De-spite all eff orts to quantify the introne, keep it in its place or excise it, the introne has already integrated itself into the exone. Furthermore, the same transfected structure begins to replicate globally. Caldeira culminates by comparing São Paulo to Los Angeles:

In both São Paulo and Los Angeles, therefore, we can detect opposing so-

cial processes, some promoting tolerance of diff erence and the melting of

boundaries, and some promoting segregation, inequality, and the policing of

boundaries. . . . Th ese opposing processes are not unrelated but rather tensely


connected. Th ey express the contradictory tendencies that characterize both

societies. Both are going through significant transformations. Both have

been unsettled by the opening and blurring of boundaries (migration and

economic restructuring in Los Angeles, and democratization and economic

crisis and restructuring in São Paulo). If we look for a moment at other cit-

ies around the world where enclaves are increasing, we see that some are

going through similar processes of deep transformation and democratiza-

tion: Johannesburg and Buenos Aires, for example. Th e unsettling of social

boundaries is upsetting, especially for the elite. Th eir movement to build

walls is thus understandable. (2000, 334)

Here Caldeira undoubtedly means to say, “Th eir movement to build walls is thus made understandable.”

Caldeira is correct to point to democratization as a political transforma-tion in many nations, and yet this political process seems woefully stifled across the globe. Why? Th e walls she so elegantly describes are intrinsic borders of the city and not extrinsic territorial demarcations. As a final con-sideration, then, the last mode of Unicity I will discuss is this: the Unicity is an antinomic space. Here I am purposefully working with the terms nomos and anomie. Th e most commonly held theories of law and politics (such as tacitly endorsed by Heredia) claim that there is a space of the law (nomos) that is opposed to a space of disorder (anomie). Th e “enlightened” bourgeois nation-state as a political form was supposed to extend order and progress over a barbaric state of nature, an extension guaranteed through a constitu-tional social contract. In fact, bourgeois-constitutional nomos has historically proven to produce its own forms of anomie, as Giorgio Agamben has recently explored. Agamben proceeds from Carl Schmitt’s theories on the state of exception: the legal determination of when, under circumstances of social breakdown, the sovereign ruler may suspend the law and make extralegal decisions in the interests of protecting the law itself. Schmitt claims that the division between anomie and nomos is not one between some prehistorical state of nature versus some rational institutions of order and progress; rather it emerges in the division between the norm of the law as an abstract form and the application of power as a real force (Agamben 2005 [2003], 50–51). Agamben shows brilliantly how anomie serves as a necessary limit to nomos,


as the “outside” constructed by the nomos to constitute its legitimate “inside.” Th e state of exception is therefore the necessary point of fusion (con-fusion) between nomos and anomie; confusingly, the state of exception is a legal fiction through which the connection between law and life, form and con-tent, order and force may be eff ected (87–88). But as there are no divisions in the Unicity, and thus no divisions between fact and fiction in the Unicity, we cannot assign nomos to the exone and anomie to the introne even as a fiction in the service of the exercise of absolute power.

Th e Unicity is stateless, but it cannot be claimed that Unicity is equiva-lent to anomie. Globalization is not some “return” to a state of nature or state of unbounded passions by which social order is destroyed, which is what we mean by anomie. Rather, by characterizing the Unicity an antinomic

space, I mean to say that currently there is neither nomos nor anomie under globalization. Strangely—some would say, perversely—because the Unicity saturates the planet, because the Unicity is the planet and the globe, there is no territory of the law, there is no territory for juridical order or disorder in the Unicity. Th is is because political-juridical order (nomos) is constituted by delimiting a “territory of friends” as a space within against a “territory of en-emies” in a space without. Such a view reiterates the age-old game of defining citizens against barbarians. A city without walls around it (only within it) cannot sustain such diff erential territorialization, however. Th e fact of the matter is that globalization has no law, and therefore has no politics or politi-cal order (yet). Th is is not to say that that globalization is a “free market” unfettered by politics as such. Globalization does not signal the end of the nation-state; in fact globalization depends upon the nation-state, national laws, and national politics. For corporations to operate in diff erent nations, there must be some government to enforce contract law, protect the fungi-bility of assets, assert monetary policy, and so forth. (Perhaps “antinomic” misleads, then; perhaps we need to think of the Unicity as a retronomos, in the way of a retrovirus.)

All the same, we must recognize that there is no government or institu-tion with authority over globalization itself, no institution to monitor and oversee the movement of things, goods, capital, or people over the network. And there is therefore no possibility of a politics or political subjectivity within such an institution that does not, after all, exist. Unfortunately, there


are no citizens of the Unicity, only denizens. And denizens are just things to be pushed around like any other thing in globalization—like a pair of Nikes or an email or a kilo of cocaine. Th e politics of the Unicity cannot be completely theorized at this moment, but now that the global informational/

environmental system has been defined, I can finally bring this essay to its point of crisis. Th e central problem of philosophy and critical theory must be this: If globalization is antinomic, does this mean that it is necessarily

and constitutively so? If there is only the force of the Unicity, and no law or authority over it right now, does this mean that law and authority cannot be permitted by Unicity? Even if there can be no diff erence between the polis and the barbaros, between self and other, and even if urban and global, local and global, exone and introne, are one in the same, how can the governance, management, and regulation of the City be thought, if they can be thought at all, in One City (Unicity) so thoroughly saturated with thought itself ?

E n v o i

One final speculation: Unicity is an emergent form that extends itself through poeisis. It creates information, copies information, articulates and rearticulates information, configures and reconfigures information. Th us, the Unicity can be understood through poetic critique. Th at is to say: Unicity demands poeticity.

^

n o t e s

1. How can war be a crisis if it is constant? Th ere is no such thing as constant crisis, unless as a pretext for a state of exception; see “Cheney, Richard B.,” “Pinochet, Augusto,” and “National Socialist, Political Party (Germany).”

2. By saying “likely” or “very likely” the IPCC Synthesis Report’s authors mean to say “all but absolutely conclusively.”

3. Cuba remained a Spanish colony when Heredia wrote the poem. He had been forcibly exiled from the island for his opposition to Spanish rule and never returned. In this way “Niágara” seeks to end the tyranny of absolute monarchical rule in favor of a more “enlightened” social contract.


4. Both Foucault (2008) and Agamben (1998 [1995]) deploy “biopolitics” in a phenotypical sense, whether wittingly or not.

5. Th is is the primary fallacy of Hardt and Negri in their theories of “Empire” and “multi-tude” (2000).

r e f e r e n c e s

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998 [1995]. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

———. 2005 [2003]. State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Campos, Augusto de. 1986 [1963]. “cidade/city/cité.” In Viva Vaia, Poesia 1949–1979, 115. São Paulo:

Editora Brasiliense.Caldeira, Teresa P. R.. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berke-

ley, CA: University of California Press.Carduso, Fernando Henrique; and Enzo Faletto. 1979 [1971]. Dependency and Development in

Latin America, trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Castells, Manuel. 1998. End of Millenium. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso.Flusser, Vilém. 2005 [1988]. Th e City as Wave-Trough in the Image-Flood, trans. Phil Gochenour.

Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter 2005): 320–28.Foucault, Michel. 2008. Th e Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. New

York: Picador.Hardt, Michael; and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Heredia, José María. 1825. Niágara. Available online, http://www.niagarapoetry.ca/heredia1825.

htm (accessed May 1, 2009).IPCC (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). 2007. Climate Change 2007:

Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers. Available online, http://www.ipcc.ch/ (ac-cessed May 1, 2009).

Lefebvre, Henri. 2003 [1970]. Th e Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press.

Marx, Karl; and Friedrich Engels. 1985 [1848]. Th e Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin Books.Matthews, Christopher K.; K. E. van Holde; and Kevin G. Ahern. 2000. Biochemistry, 3rd ed. San

Francisco: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.Prebisch, Raúl. 1950. Th e Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems. New

York: United Nations.Read, Justin. 2006. Obverse Colonization: São Paulo, Global Urbanization, and the Poetics of

the Latin American City. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 15, no. 3 (December): 281–300.

Sassen, Saskia. 2001. Th e Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1989. Th e Modern World-System, 3 vols. New York: Academic Press.

Documents

Speculations on Unicity: Rearticulations of Urban Space and Theory during Global Crisis