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The Overexposed City

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The Overexposed City The Blackwell City Reader (ed. by G. Bridge and S. Watson). Blackwell Publishing, 2002 The Overexposed City Paul Virilio At the beginning of the 1960s, with black United States, Dortmund in West Germany, ghettoes rioting, the mayor of Philadelphia and all of this at the very moment in announced: 'From here on in, the frontiers which other areas were being built up, of the State pass to the interior of the cities.' around tremendous international airports, a While this sentence translated the political METROPLEX, a metropolitan complex reality for all Americans who were being such as Dallas/Fort Worth. Since the discriminated against, it also pointed to an 1970s and the beginnings of the world even larger dimension, given the construc- economic crisis, the construction of these tion of the Berlin Wall, on 13 August 1961, airports was further subjected to the in the heart of the ancient capital of the imperatives of the defence against air Reich. pirates. Since then, this assertion has been con- Construction no longer derived simply firmed time and again: Belfast, London- from traditional technical constraint. The derry where not so long ago certain streets plan had become a function of the risks of bore a yellow band separating the Catholic 'terrorist contamination' and the dispos- side from the Protestant, so that neither ition of sites conceived of as sterile zones would move too far, leaving a chain-link for departures and non-sterile zones for ar- no man's land to divide their communities rivals. Suddenly, all forms of loading and even more clearly. And then there's Beirut unloading - regardless of passenger, bag- with its East and West sections, its tortured gage or freight status - and all manner of internal boundaries, its tunnels and its airport transit had to be submitted to a mined boulevards. system of interior/exterior traffic control, Basically, the American mayor's state- The architecture that resulted from this ment revealed a general phenomenon that had little to do with the architect's person- was just beginning to hit the capital cities as ality. It emerged instead from perceived well as the provincial towns and hamlets, public security requirements. the phenomenon of obligatory introversion in As the last gateway to the State, the air- which the City sustained the first effects of port came to resemble the fort, port or a multinational economy modelled railway station of earlier days. The airports along the lines of industrial enterprises, a were turned into theatres of necessary regu- real urban redeployment which soon con- lation of exchange and communication, tributed to the gutting of certain worker they also became breeding and testing cities such as Liverpool and Sheffield in grounds for high-pressured experiments in England, Detroit and Saint Louis in the control and aerial surveillance performed tor and by a new 'air and border patrol', whose anti- staying for a year and then moving on -that it terrorist exploits began to make headlines with the contributed to the ruin of a place that each intervention of the German GS.G9 border guards in inhabitant found adequate... the Mogadishu hijacking, several thousand miles In fact, since the originary enclosures, the concept away from Germany. of boundary has undergone numerous changes as At that instant, the strategy of confining the sick or regards both the facade and the neighbourhood it the suspect gave way to a tactic of mid-voyage fronts. From the palisade to the screen, by way of interception. Practically, this meant examining stone ramparts, the boundary-surface has clothing and baggage, which explains the sudden recorded innumerable perceptible and proliferation of cameras, radars and detectors in all imperceptible transformations, of which the latest restricted passageways. When the French built is probably that of the interface. Once again, we 'maximum security cell-blocks', they used the have to approach the question of access to the City magnetized doorways that air- ports had had for in a new manner. For example, does the metropolis years. Paradoxically, the equipment that ensured possess its own facade? At which moment does the maximal freedom in travel formed part of the core city show us its face? of penitentiary incarceration. At the same time, in a The phrase 'to go into town', which replaced the number of residential areas in the United States, nineteenth-century's 'to go to town', indicates the security was maintained exclusively through closed- uncertainty of the encounter, as if we could no circuit television hook-ups with a central police longer stand before the city but rather abide station. In hanks, in supermarkets, and on major forever within. If the metropolis is still a place, a highways, where toll-booths resembled the ancient geographic site, it no longer has anything to do cit gates, the rite of passage was no longer with the classical oppositions of city/ country nor intermittent. It had become immanent. centre/periphery. The city is no longer organized In this new perspective devoid of horizon in the city into a localized and axial estate. While the was entered not through a gate or through an arc de suburbs contributed to this dissolution, in fact the triomphe but rather through an electronic audience intramural-extramural opposition collapsed with system. Users of the road were no longer understood the transport revolutions and the development of to be inhabitants or privileged residents. They were communication and telecommunications now interlocutors in permanent transit. From this technologies. These promoted the merger of moment on, continuity no longer breaks down in disconnected metropolitan fringes into a single space, nor in the physical space of urban lots nor in urban mass. the juridical space of their property tax records. From In effect, we are witnessing a paradoxical moment here, continuity is nip-Bed in time, in a time that in which the opacity of building materials is advanced technologies and industrial redeployment reduced to zero. With the invention of the steel incessantly arrange through a series of skeleton construction, curtain walls made of light interruptions, such as plant closings, unemployment, and transparent materials, such as glass or plastics, casual labour and successive I simultaneous replace stone facades, just as tracing paper, acetate disappearing acts. These surve to organize and then and plexiglass replace the opacity of paper in the disorganize the urban environment to the point of designing phase. provoking the irreversible decay and degradation of On the other hand, with the screen interface of "neighbourhoods, as in the housing development computers, television and teleconferences, the near Lyon where the occupants' ‘rate of rotation' surface of inscription, hitherto devoid of depth, became so great - people becomes a kind of 'distance', a depth of field of a new kind of representation, a 'visibility without any face-to-face encounter in which the PAULVIRILIO 442 vis-a-vis of the ancient streets disappears man/machine interface replaces the facades and is erased. In this situation, a difference of buildings as the surfaces of property al- of position blurs into fusion and confusion. lotments. Deprived of objective boundaries, the Where once the opening of the city gates architectonic element begins to drift and announced the alternating progression of float in an electronic ether, devoid of spatial days and nights, now we awaken to the dimensions, but inscribed in the singular opening of shutters and televisions. The temporality of an instantaneous diffusion. day has been changed. A new day has From here on people can't be separated by been added to the astronomers' solar day, physical obstacles or by temporal dis- to the flickering day of candles, to the elec- tances. With the interfacing of computer tric light. It is an electronic false-day, and terminals and video monitors, distinctions it appears on a calendar of information here and there no longer mean anything. 'commutations' that has absolutely no rela- This sudden reversion of boundaries and tionship whatsoever to real time. Chrono- oppositions introduces into everyday, logical and historical time, time that passes, common space an element which until is replaced by a time that exposes itself now was reserved for the world of micro- instantaneously- On the computer screen, scopes. There is no plenum; space is not a time period becomes the 'support-sur- filled with matter. Instead, an unbounded face' of inscription. Literally, or better cine- expanse appears in the false perspective of matically, time surfaces. Thanks to the the machines' luminous emissions. From cathode-ray tube, spatial dimensions have here on, constructed space occurs within become inseparable from their rate of an electronic topology where the framing transmission. As a unity of place without of perspective and the gridwork weft of any unity of time, the City has disappeared numerical images renovate the division of into the heterogeneity of that regime com- urban property. The ancient private/public prised of the temporality of advanced tech- occultation and the distinction between nologies. The urban figure is no longer housing and traffic are replaced by an over- designated by a dividing line that separates exposure in which the difference between here from there. Instead, it has become a 'near' and 'far' simply ceases to exist, just as computerized timetable. the difference between 'micro' and 'macro' Where once one necessarily entered the vanished in the scanning of the electron city by means of a physical gateway, now microscope. one passes through an audiovisual protocol The representation of the modern city in which the methods of audience and can no longer depend on the ceremonial surveillance have transformed even the opening of gates, nor on the ritual forms of public greeting and daily processions and parades lining the streets reception.
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