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Terrorism, Urbs and a liable opposition Rui Aristides 07.2011

“If the U.S. is a leading terrorist state, if, as you say, Britain is another example of a

terrorist state, how do you distinguish between that kind of what you describe as terrorism and what they are saying “Osama Bin Laden is a terrorist”? Make the distinction.

“That’s very simple. if they do it its terrorism, if we do it its counter-terrorism.”1 Is it possible to place the distinction between city and informal city or non-city, slum,

musseque, in the same terms? If so, does the reason for that distinction arise from the political dialectic between Empire and its dissidents, or is it grounded on something else?

The difference between polis and urbs. The greek polis can be understood through the distinction between politikè and

oikonomikè, respectively, between politics and economics. The latter one applies, in greek society, for the oikos or the house, the private cellular unit, thus oikonomikè is the management of the private domain, in its plethora of despotic relations, the man is the king of the house.

Inversely, politikè is the management of public relations for the public’s interest, it is the polis’ basic tool of management, having arisen from it.

Hence, and agreeing with Pier Aureli, “The principle of economy can be distinguished from the principle of politics in the same way that the house is distinguished from the polis.”2

On the other hand, the Latin term urbs implies, contrary to polis, a city making process exempt of political background or, in other words, a city conception that is justified solely through the physical structure of the city, essential to life, that is embodied in the territory. The conception of urbs is allowed to act on the condition of tabula rasa, bear in mind the roman cities formed out of military encampments. For this reason, let’s put forward the idea that “(…)urbs describes a generic condition of protected cohabitation reducible to the principle of the house and its material necessities.”3

City of Timgad, Roman colony located to the north of the massif of the Aurès in Algeria, founded in AD 100.

1 Interview to Noam Chomsky by Evan Solomon, about the book "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10rTPSSmOFw&feature=related 2 Pier Vittorio Aureli, “The possibility of an absolute architecture”, MIT 2011, p. 3 3 Ibid., p.4

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Consequently, to polis and urbs correspond two distinct sets of notions, respectively:

constrained city (walled), encompassing public, state, politics; and expansive city, drawing on infra-structure, private, empire, symbolism.

The contents of these two sets demand a thorough explanation, however, instead of explaining them independently, I would like to expose them taking into account another reading of the difference between polis and urbs, attempting to clarify the dialectic between both.

City of Mileto, Greek colony on the Aegean sea founded in BC 500 The difference between nomos and lex. For the greeks the law was the nomos, it did not regulate political action in itself, but it

created a framing for its proceedings based on a concrete spatial profile, the one of the polis with its clear division between public and private domains: thus the distinction between Aghora and oikoi.

For the romans there was the lex, from which the word law derives, and it was a set of different politics, of laws, based on a political consensus and working as a treaty. It was an integral component of roman expansionist logic, for it was through the acting out of the treaty (lex) that the diverse defeated tribes and kingdoms would integrate the empire.

While the nomos was that element that restricted and sustained the polis in its social and formal unity, the concept of lex was precisely the opposite, an inclusive and generic concept, that transformed Rome from a polis to a civitas and, following this argument, to an empire4.

4 Ibid., p 5

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Civitas originated the word city and, in the same manner, from urbs derived urbanization. In their roman conception the two were complementary, the first (civitas) stood for the social and political condition that we currently designate as citizenship, and the second (urbs) stood for the generic infra-structure needed for the act of dwelling, currently named as urban or urbanity.

What nowadays is emphasized in our use of the territory is, on the one hand - the contradiction between the idea of polis (political and finite city) and the idea of urbs (infinite-object); on the other - a type of urbs that is put in motion not by the management of cohabitation by the law (civitas), but rather by an economical management, and which purposely concedes full meaning to current processes of urbanization (China, Índia, Brasil, Angola, etc…).

Beijing, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Angola

Archizoom’s No-stop City - more than an artistic piece forged from extreme

ambiances and acids or an exuberant irony of modernist decadency - is above all a perfect foresight of what was unfolded with city-making in late Capitalism.

As Pier Aureli suggests, “No-Stop City ultimately “succeeded” in prophesying a world in which human associations are ruled only by the logic of economy and rendered in terms of diagrams and growth statistics.”5

What has gradually become clearer is that the management of the city has definitely fallen under the dominion of technè oikonomikè and, as such, there is a tendency to treat the city as oikos, as a house, the private space par excellence, despotically managed for the interest of a small sector of the society that inhabits it.

Through the words of Pier Aureli let’s resume the evolution of the modern city as such:

“If, as stated before, the city began as a dilemma between civitas and urbs, between the possibility of encounter (the possibility of conflict) and the possibility of security, it has ended up as completely absorbed by the infinite process of urbanization and its despotic nature.”6

Archizoom’s No-stop City, elevation and plan

5 Ibid., p. 20 6 Ibid., p. 27

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Given this, the distinction Chomsky puts forward regarding the issue of who is the

terrorist is valid for the difference between city and non-city or slum. Bottom-line, this distinction represents the partition between those that belong to the state of civitas, urbanization’s (empire) recognised citizens and those who don’t, the dissidents, the poor; or when these do belong, they are only allowed so in a segregated manner. The condition for their belonging is an unwritten slavery contract. In other words, it is a distinction similar to that that existed amongst those who could access the Aghora and all the other-ones, marginalized from the polis’s public and political life.

There is no better typology to explain the mapping between city and non-city than that provided by the greek house, the oikos, in its clear separation of the master’s and slaves’ domain in the house that is enunciated within the urban structure of a city like Rio de Janeiro in Brasil.

Paraisópolis, one of the biggest slums in Sao Paulo

Hence, the political condition of empire is the context in which this distinction is

allowed to exist, however, the lex is no longer a set of politics in its public sense. Indeed, the pax romana is no longer its closing purpose, may we look at Iraq as a recent and emblematic example of an imperial program, as a partial revival of Rome’s political legacy.

The lex and pax romana were transformed into what the character played by Brazilian actor Wagner Moura, Lieutenant-Colonel Roberto Nascimento, in the movie “Elite Squad 2 – The Enemy Within” exposes in the following line: “For the politicians it wasn’t interesting that I’ die right away, before I testify, I would become a martyr of human rights in the middle of the CPI and Fraga would transform the governor into a murder suspect. But the system doesn’t have central planning or a board of directors, my friend! The system is an impersonal mechanism, an articulation of shitty interests.”7

Consequently, civitas, the basic level of political belonging to a society, the condition of citizenship, sins for finding itself suppressed of any content; thus, the extensive use of the word (citizenship) in the attempt to hide or fill-in the void by contemporary sociologists and politicians, amongst others.

Hence, and independently of the political entities maintained, being these social-symbolical entities8, nowadays both the infra-structure of various societies as well as their 7 Taken from “Elite Squad 2 – The Enemy Within”, Dir. José Padilha, in the following time of movie: 1:38mn. 8 I propose that social-symbolical entity be understood as an image that generates symbolisms, in other words, an image-idea backgrounded by the social imaginary of a given society. Descriptively its function can be similar to that of the

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management are simultaneously generic, a-political and objective; and urbanization is its platform, the ultimate mechanism of territorial control of its inhabitants.

Cover of the movie “Elite Squad 2 – The Enemy Within”

That is why in two symbolically opposed extremes, both in their political and social

imaginaries, such as the USA and China, we can observe the same appropriation of urbs in its original sense, as the pre-condition for cohabitation. The urbs allows, on the one hand, to integrate all possible ‘citizens’ in a symbolical civitas in order to exert control over them, and on the other hand, the free management of the territory by the technè oikonomikè.

Through the urbs all places are prone to be domesticated for the private management of society. The fact that the word “management” in itself reminisces the concept of private when invoked, should be a clue to unveil the motions set in recent and present processes of urbanization.

Therefore, I would suggest that Chomsky is only half right, given that those who draw the line between good and bad guys are not specifically the USA or the Western Bloc (white countries), but instead it is the infra-structure, the management of the world as a house. The terrorist is he who is against that infra-structural despotism, whom is against the urbs, whom is searching for autonomy.

In face of this, I want to put forward what Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove wrote about the Kolis’ struggle for autonomy of land rights in Dharavi, Mumbai, India, which is the following:

“At the end of the day the triumph of Koliwada-Dharavi will be a triumph of Dharavi

as a whole.”9

image-ideas in brain mapping, they are not in themselves truths, but instead synthesis and interpretations of experiences or/and things that we wish to access immediately. (Taken from Damásio, from “Livro da Consciência – A Construção do Cérebro Consciente”, 2010. Círculo de Leitores.) 9 http://dharavi.org/index.php?title=C.Communities_%26_Nagars_of_Dharavi/Koliwada

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It is not only the koli’s defence for their life standards that is at stake in this struggle, which is in it-self quite ineffective given the scale of the problems, but rather, and more importantly, the sketching of an alternative belonging to the urbs, a project of autonomy.

In this process, rhetorics are purged, ‘who is the terrorist?’, ‘who is the citizen?’, ‘which one is the city and the non-city?’. Dichotomies are inverted, on the one hand, the terrorist, whom exerts terror, is the economical management of society through the apparatus of the state, on the other hand, the citizen is dissolved exposing the void within the shell of citizenship, finding itself replaced by a political community pursuing concrete objectives.

In this process the abolishing of the distinction between city and slum is worked out, both are forms of cohabitation and territory occupation, both are city, there is no both, there is not any authentic difference between these two ways of city-making, besides that qualitatively produced by those who govern urban space.

How this process will work out, what will be its results, I cannot tell. The so well defined experience of failure derived from various similar projects from the sixties and seventies will always creep in from behind, however, maybe this project, that of Koliwada-Dharavi, holds new lessons, maybe it brings a better understanding of how to build a project of autonomy in the present-day capitalist oikos.

If we think of urbs as the covering skin of that monstrous body10 which is capitalism, then any hole, wound, island in that continuous skin will register a possibility of autonomy, which is none-the-less than the possibility to reintegrate the political in the act of dwelling.

Uncertainties aside, the truth is that the current economical management of dwelling will always need terrorism.

10 “This capital-flesh oppresses us, but we are stuck within it. We hate it, but we are also compelled to love it, because we depend upon it for sustenance, and we cannot live without it. Understood according to the order of first causes, sub specie aeternitatis as Spinoza would have it, capital is parasitic upon the labor of the multitude. But existentially and experientially, the situation is rather the reverse: we are parasites on the monstrous body of Capital.” Steve Shaviro, extracted from: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=641