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Violent Urbanism is Us

Simone Brott

There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

Gilles Deleuze, “The Control Society”1

To everyone's surprise, the ship didn't come to a stop... over Manhattan or Washington or Chicago...

but instead coasted to a halt directly over the city of Johannesburg.

...a temporary camp was set up...just beneath the ship. We didn't have a plan. There was a

million of them. What was a temporary holding zone...soon became fenced, became militarized.

Documentary footage, District 92

Late in 2009, I attended a Melbourne screening of the South African film District 9, created by two Canadian, South African-born film makers, Neill Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley, about an extra-terrestrial immigration camp, based on the original short Alive in Joburg3 and filmed on location in Chiawelo, Soweto,4 during the Soweto riots of May 2008, in Alexandra,

Gauteng. Forty-two African émigrés from Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe were killed in the massacre by indigenous, black South Africans.5 While the film will no doubt be read as an apologue for the rising xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa – and, no less, a flashback to the 1976 Soweto riots and forced migrations in District 6, Cape Town to the notorious Cape-Flats from 1968 to 1982 under Apartheid6 – the filming of the science-fiction film in an evacuated shack settlement used real immigrants as extras, and it witnessed those same dispossessed persons being forcibly transferred to Reconstruction and Development

Program (RDP) government housing during the making of the film, leaving behind a sea of empty shacks. District 9 is not hyperreality or verité, it is reality.

1

A Black resident bitterly tirades about the presence of aliens in his neighbourhood: “They must just go. I don't know where, but they must just go!”7 in an early sequence of constructed, documentary-style footage that is the lingua franca of the film. What is not revealed is that these dialogues were cut directly from street interviews by Blomkamp who in researching for the film asked black South Africans in downtown Johannesburg: “how do you feel about the Nigerian[s] and Zimbabweans living here [in Soweto]?8 District 9 substituted

“immigrants” for “aliens,” and, to “they must just go,” “If they were from another country, we might understand. But they are not even from this planet at all.”

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, District 9 has been condemned and the South

African government contracts a privatised military company Multi National United, MNU, to relocate 1.8 million aliens to the wasteland of “District 10,” AKA “Sanctuary Park,” 200km from the city (described in the film as “more like a concentration camp”). A year before the film was shot, the Western Cape government erected Symphony Way TRA (Temporary

Relocation Area), or Blikkiesdorp, “Tin Can Town” as it is called in Afrikaans, in Delft, Cape

Town, a corrugated-iron shack encampment 30km from the city centre, to house any number of floating residents evicted from anywhere in the city.9 A private company, Thubelisha, was outsourced to manage the construction. The ensuing political crisis surrounding the project and protracted operationalisation of the camp is itself the subject of an epic political narrative. Since the mid-1980s, an explosion of people living in illegal freestanding shack settlements, in urban peripheries and city centres, imijondolo (shack dwellers), tells us that

District 9 is not science-fiction, speculation, or a “state of exception,” in South Africa today, but that of the rule.10

2

Accompanied by heavily armed private security forces, a documentary film crew, and four militant groups in the air, Wikus van de Merwe, an ingenuous Afrikaner MNU bureaucrat is sent into the District 9 field, in order to compel each resident to sign the eviction notice which

“gives the aliens 24-hours’ notice...of [MNU’s] right to evict...” “The legality that MNU is using to evict the aliens is simply a whitewash.” “Rights groups have demanded that mercenaries... comply with all UIO regulations in District 9... many suspect...abuses might occur.”

In one attempted eviction, an alien protesting the legality of the notice flicks the contract page for a second, causing Wikus to exclaim that a de facto signature has thus been obtained in the trace, alien-DNA left on the page, by the alien “scrawl.” The touch of a finger alone gives the forced removal legal imprimatur, but more importantly it ushers in a disturbing trend, where the semiotic regime of twentieth-century law, with its basis in language, signification, and interpretation, has been superseded by biometrics – a technique for controlling the general population and individuals under surveillance by recording intrinsic biological traits – body scanning in airports and schools in France, as critiqued by Giorgio Agamben; iris scanning, famously anticipated in Blade Runner11 and now commonplace; and blood testing and so on.

Biometrics, it could be said, is supralinguistic, and the “l-27 form” a sham.12

The problem of biometrics in South Africa attains to a certain intensity given the historical context of apartheid whose legislation was premised on and operationalised by the obsessive documentation and classification of its population into 13 “racial federations” – by identifying and attributing genetic and racial minutiae to each citizen in order to derive his or her biological ethnicity and concomitant legal status fixed under the Population Registration

Act of 1950. Each race was assigned to one out of ten bantustans (black African

3

“homelands”) under The Group Areas Act of 1950 legislation, which was notoriously deployed toward violent removals.13 What I call Violent Urbanism in Johannesburg today

(biopolitics, corporate-run detention centres and capitalist paramilitary violence) and enacted with utter precision in District 9, is none other than a perpetual war which has survived apartheid and post-apartheid and ensues in South Africa unabated. Its modus operandi is weaponry, technology, and “equipments of power” – those live arrangements for producing subjectivity (subjectivization) – in a word, architecture.

District 9, is of course not a civilian detention centre or humanitarian operation. It is principally a warzone. “MNU, the second-largest weapons manufacturer in the world,” has a direct interest in Violent Urbanism as it covets the advanced extraterrestrial bio-weaponry, a

Tessla style directed-energy weapon, operable only via alien DNA. The biologically- engineered gun’s impact is devastating, everything is violently pulled apart, “obliterated on a molecular level.”

District 9, we learn, is home to underground Nigerian clans who are obsessed with alien weaponry, ostensibly due to a reigning myth surrounding the healing nature of alien limbs, in what is now a controversial reference to present-day biological superstitions and rites, both attributed to – and refuted by – real Nigerians.14 The aliens are also inexplicably addicted to

“cat food” (which has an iconic and perverse significance among the poor in South Africa today), and they trade their weaponry and body parts with Nigerian factions to support their addiction (which is absolutely inelastic, and the cause of floating rates of exchange).15 “You put the money here first. You don't get anything until you pay. ...Not to mention interspecies prostitution. ...And they also dealt in alien weaponry.” Biological weaponry that equals the alien arm itself is the Lacanian “Real” or objet petit a around which all the drives circulate in

4

District 9 – everyone wants it – while the aliens themselves remain disenfranchised, dispossessed, drug addled (the alien body is routinely sacrificed in this arms war).

This Wild-esque self-portrait of contemporary South Africa, a nation-state eating away at itself from within, evinced in the real-time-space of the cinema, of aesthetics, speaks to the global expansion of all violent urbanisms, given by the militarisation of the city, the dystopia of biopolitics16 and constant wars, and the residuum of modernity correctly portrayed in the cinema as science fiction.

I walked out of the cinema with the usual guilty combination of elation and terror, an adrenalin rush that derives from the immediacy and prescience of any reality-turning film, and the terror of proper sci-fi cinema, namely that this is not fiction but streaming reality.

South Africa is not the only place in which this could or is still happening – the reach of

Violent Urbanism is worldwide. Johannesburg is the urban nightmare of late-capitalism realised in high definition.

“...Once the septicaemia set in, it just spread.” The film turns on the biological metamorphosis of Wikus who comes into contact with a canister of alien fuel (that is also blood) which sprays into his face. In a classic science-fiction reversal, Wikus, infected with alien DNA, begins to develop alien characteristics, spitting black fluid and losing his fingernails, invoking a microgenre of science-fiction films I have always liked, beginning with The Fly (1958)17 and David Cronenberg’s remake in 1986.18 Only here Wikus is now rendered an enemy of the state, no longer a bureaucrat in service to the corporation, but “the most valuable business artifact on Earth” to be vivisected and studied. Wikus’s identity flip is of epic Deleuzian proportions (like an FBI agent who becomes a drug runner or a Cold

5

War double agent) – his biopolitical polarity thus reversed, leads us along a giddy path to the end of the film given as a series of electric shocks to Wikus and the spectator alike, as Wikus shows us what he’s made of.

Wikus is kidnapped to MNU headquarters’ covert Biological Laboratory (BioLab) four stories underground a 1970s’ modernist tower where he is forced to shoot laboratory aliens with his fully transformed arm; he also sees alien carcasses on stretchers in various states, eviscerated, blackened, burned, the grotesque remains of illegal biological experiments. In what is a decidedly un-Kafkaesque turn of fate, Wikus manages to escape the MNU

Castle/Burrow, just...and becomes a fugitive in Johannesburg.

Piet Smit, an MNU executive, lies to the press saying that Wikus is infected with an alien

STD, and is highly contagious “after prolonged sexual activity with aliens in District 9,” in a bizarre parallel with Australian Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who as I write is being legally pursued for a putative sex crime, in what can only be described as a legal non sequitur to the real crime which cannot be named. Wikus hides in the landfill of District 9 to become imperceptible to the human-run state, and in this brilliant Machiavellian act we will see once and for all how District 9, and Violent Urbanism in the new millennium, functions as a smooth space for the deterritorialization of subjectivity – contrary to the Foucauldian disciplinary model of incarceration. (We rarely see Foucauldian “discipline” enacted in – nor do we ever see an alien try and escape from – District 9, notwithstanding the old signifiers put in place as mise en scène: barbed wire fencing, “humans only” signage and so on... 19) In the District 9 landfill “Wikus” as a State-constituted subject is dissipated, but his organs are secure. Wikus is indeed alive in Joburg.

6

Violent Urbanism

In the twenty-first century, the detention centre is no longer a prison but a chemical and biological weapons research facility.20 District 9 is the real laboratory, gone live, whereby a real-time research takes place as war – where research conducted in the traditional spaces of scientific knowledge, MNU’s BioLab, is put into action and tested on the ground. District 9 is an amorphous espace quelconque (“any-space-whatever”21), sucking in both the skyscraper

(MNU) and the slum (District 9), and all the deterritorializing effects which circulate around the camp. The film reveals exactly how architecture is complicit in Violent Urbanism, and it thereby redefines the slippery contours of architecture and urbanism in the twenty first century.

District 9 was erected when the aliens arrived in 1982, during the heady new liberalism and laissez faire governance of post-apartheid South Africa. To be clear, laissez faire does not refer to leniency, but is a strategic framework of the corporation in which to observe Violent

Urbanism and fuel the camp’s blackmarket economy allowed to flourish for 20 years under the transparent gaze of MNU,22 whose interests, the film suggests, are directly served by the flows of sex, drugs and bioweaponry, evaporating out of District 9 and reabsorbed back into

MNU’s laboratories as condensation.

District 9 evinces a compelling urban image that is futural just as it is firmly rooted in the present. It depicts the shift from the free gestation of a District 9-style urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s to the twenty-first century of biopolitics, and its familiar post-09-11 obsessions:

“war on terror,” “homeland security” and “biological weapons of mass destruction”23 – where the black population, previously alienated under apartheid, will no longer tolerate the presence of the aliens, and MNU is finally pressured into shutting District 9 down.

7

What is visionary about this film is its ability to see that we are now standing on new ground.

Arguably, architecture has always been involved in violent urban practices, as even the legend of Romulus and Remus suggest. The very first notion of the city was as military containment, which was later civilianised (its citizens are former troops). Vitruvius provides the precedent for the inclusion of military architecture along with any general treatise, because cities provide first and foremost security.

Violent Urbanism was, of course, alive in Joburg long before 2008.24 Since the 1960s, South

Africa has ruthlessly advanced a war economics through armed conflicts, inflated security/military budgets, and controversial chemical and biological armament programs.

Violent Urbanism in fact increased at the 1994 moment, of the new democracy and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, under the ravages of state corruption and neoliberalism. The

“new wars” South Africa in the 2000s, as described by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon

Bichler, completes the deterritorialization of ‘ethnicity,’ ‘race’ and ‘territory,’ of twentieth- century critique: it sees only severed genes, weapons, body parts and targets through the eyes of a hyped-up warfare capitalism that is utterly mad.

The biological and genetic testing of alien bodies by MNU, and the film’s vivid references to underground, State-weaponisation of drugs, chemicals, and biological substances, darkly mirrors the documented but little-known covert chemical and biological warfare (CBW) program of the South African Defence Force (SADF) named Project Coast, established in

1981 under the direction of the Prime Minister, previously Minister of Defence, Pieter

Willem Botha,25 who appointed the cardiologist Wouter Basson26 aka “Dr. Death” its principal. Project Coast was the SADF’s response to South Africa’s perceived threat of “red” and “black” forces – the continued civil unrest, internally, and externally that of the Soviet

8

Union which was supporting hostile regimes of the insurgency, such as Cuban-backed regimes, which threatened a takeover of Mozambique and Angola.27 Project Coast’s secret military interventions into both urban and pastoral areas are powerfully summoned in the acting out of MNU’s relationship with District 9, which, as per Project Coast, ramifies into governmental corruption, Nigerian drug rings, prostitution, and a blackmarket arms economy

– from which, it should now be patently obvious, South Africa to this day has struggled to extricate itself.

While District 9 has been mostly reviewed as a tale of post-colonial or post-apartheid politics gone wrong, the film explodes this historicising shibboleth of our time. Its message, in 2010, is that post-apartheid, the utopian promise inherent in Nelson Mandela’s “rainbow nation,” to create a non-racial state through the installation of a liberal democratic constitution, never happened.28 The spectacular failure of new liberalism in South Africa, its attempt to integrate

South Africa into the global economy through privatization and increasing leverage given to multinational corporations, created widespread poverty,29 more and more violence, and millions of home repossessions and evictions30 as District 9 has nakedly depicted (while warlords profited and are still profiting from Violent Urbanism).31

The prolific violence in South Africa today absorbs in its neutral surface: random, motiveless train shootings, assassinations, squatter camp violence, homeland riots, routine carjackings; and, increasingly, Afrikaner men “wiping out their own families, shooting their wives and children...”32 Violent Urbanism is irreducible to post-apartheid or any afterward – the conflict has run in all directions, no longer traceable to any of its putative original lines. We should ask not what is the cause of violence; but, rather, we should grasp violence as the very nature of South Africa, a shameless nation-state that answers only to the global-wars project.

9

The functional virtualities of District 9 are anarchy and sedition, yet the stream of mediatic violence and disturbing images we see here, in Australia, and throughout the Western world eclipses another more elusive violence, described as the Third Force, of underground, state security apparatus, including the South African Police Service (SAP) and military apparatus, either orchestrating or being complicit in wide-front political violence.33 “The third force is what our own people have used to draw a line between what the government is doing openly and what it is doing covertly”34; it demonstrates that CBW proliferation did not cease when

Project Coast was dismantled.35 The Stanford academic Jonathan Jansen argues that the Third

Force is not a paranoiac fantasy or conspiracy. Project Coast is indeed such a Third Force institution symptomatic of a predatory state under the thrall of liberalisation.

Project Coast

In 1976, the Soweto uprisings began, followed by a long period of civil unrest that would persist until 1984 when a series of violent and deadly mass actions, far worse than in 1960 or after 1976, took place in the Vaal Triangle, south of Johannesburg, reverberating throughout the country, and continuing for the next fifteen years. In 1978, when the Defence Minister

P.W. Botha became Prime Minister, power, under his influence, was increasingly appropriated by the military from civilians.36 In District 9, the militarisation of everyday life is already a fait accompli – in Violent Urbanism an alien, i.e. a starving immigrant or dispossessed person, is simply an ill-equipped troop.37

Project Coast’s avowed goal was to collect and test a range of biological agents in order to develop its defence38 from a Soviet CBW attack; but it supplied military and police units with chemical and biological agents for counter-insurgency warfare, assassination, and execution of war prisoners. District 9 is an extension of MNU’s underground BioLab, and it

10

corporealises the conflation of the laboratory and the battlefield characteristic of Violent

Urbanism – even if the BioLab and District 9 are given to the aliens as two modes of juridical life (their goals are one and the same).

Four front companies were established by the SADF to house Project Coast’s research and development: Delta G Scientific Company (1982)39 which produced chemical warfare agents;

Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL) (1983) which tested Delta G’s biological agents and their effects, and was responsible for biological warfare; and Protechnik Company (1987) which performed quality assurance testing of chemical protective materials and equipment.40

“A virus, a selective virus. Release it near the aliens.” In the early 1980s, RRL both acquired and produced anthrax, Plague, cholera, E. coli, staph, necrotizing fasciitis, ricin, botulinum, gas gangrene, anti-matter bacteria, and the Ebola, Marburg, and Rift Valley viruses.41 Fears of a “black tidal wave” led scientists to pursue the survival of “white South Africa” by chemical and biological means. Project Coast scientists engaged in genetic engineering research to produce a “black bomb,” an ethnic biological weapon engineered to kill or incapacitate blacks and not whites where an insurrection was taking place.42 Plans were devised to build a large-scale anthrax production facility at RRL and were almost operationalised in 1985.”43 The SADF had been experimenting with anthrax as early as the late 1970s when a controversial outbreak of the anthrax epizootic was reported in Zimbabwe

(1978–1980), allegedly due to deliberate spread.44

“Don't shoot. You're gonna turn it into a war zone. What is that? Tear gas? Is that tear gas?” Toward the end of the film we see yellow smoke issue from a drone aircraft hovering over District 9, a Clausewitzian fog of war. A real drone was tested in 1992, which sprayed a

11

yellow substance similar to teargas over Mozambique.45 Under Project Coast, Delta G produced a New Generation Tear (NGT) Gas, tranquilizing drugs and gas grenades “to counteract rolling mass actions led by the ANC or its surrogates.”46 Basson was infamously tried for Operation Duel in 1982, where he tranquilized 200 SWAPO prisoners and then dumped their bodies from airplanes into the sea.47

Basson testified that Delta G manufactured large amounts of Mandrax and Ecstasy, intended for use in crowd control in South Africa. Project Coast also worked on the weaponisation of hallucinogenic drugs and dagga (marijuana).48 The aliens of District 9 are also narcotized.

Cat food is a biological weapon, an alternative to tear gas, which mollifies (as narcotic). The tactical advantage of ecstasy or any ‘biologic’ of course is that its scope is not limited to use in insurgencies. The weaponisation of drugs in District 9 is simply a part of the culture. In

Violent Urbanism, CBW is self-administered as therapy rather than cure (a political solution, or offensive issued by the enemy).

What is intriguing about the Basson case is his bizarre involvement in clandestine arms procurement deals with Marxist groups fighting for black liberation and his exporting and selling of psychoactive pills (LSD) on the black market to those same groups fighting the conservative Afrikaner movement of which Basson is the quintessence.49 Wikus’s alien turn similarly leads him into District 9-Nigerian territory, where he tries to procure first meat, then cat food, and weapons (like Basson) biologically inserting himself into an economy that he had previously policed.50

If we go along with the film’s suggestion that Wikus is Wouter (Basson), both a product of and on the run from the law, then we must accept that the film’s premise is schadenfreude for

12

the spectator, i.e. Wikus ‘gets what he deserves’; or, the moral of the story is put an apartheid war criminal in District 9 (Violent Urbanism) and he or she will finally see through the ideology of the state; “becoming alien” (an other) means to become human (humane). But in

Violent Urbanism everyone is an alien (a potential enemy, a dispossessed citizen) and WE

(the humans) are the enemy. Consider for a moment the sheer dereliction of the aliens of

District 9 with the dominant subject positions of aliens in Alien, Aliens, Predator, and the super-human and artificial-intelligence machines in The Terminator, and Robocop – films which Blomkamp said were his “subconscious influences.” District 9 debunks the oldest

Hollywood fantasy of the cinema’s purpose, a la Sigmund Freud, to “strengthen the ego.” For

Freud this ego purpose was precisely “the work of culture”, and in what is a disturbing irony,

District 9 works toward the cultural “defacement” of the aliens into the faceless (defaced) subjectivities of bio-weaponry and weaponisation of life.51

“MNU's illegal experiments on the aliens are uncovered and exposed by Fundiswa Mhlanga,

Wikus’ former trainee, who is prosecuted and incarcerated. District 9 is completely demolished.” By 1988, the Soviet and Cuban threat that Project Coast was responding to rapidly faded as the SADF and President Botha realized that the Soviet Union was collapsing, and negotiations opened up between U.S., Cuba, Angola, and South Africa for the withdrawal of Cuban troops. A year later, de Klerk replaced President Botha and instigated his plan to dismantle apartheid. One of his stated goals was to re-instate civilian control over the

“security apparatus” and rein in the “securocrats” and secret projects like Project Coast.52

Basson was captured in January 1997 and arrested during a sting operation charged with fraud and the possession and trading of illegal substances53; and in 1998 with murder and conspiracy to commit murder54; and, he was famously acquitted of every charge.55 One of the

13

revelations to emerge in the course of Basson’s trial was that American scientists provided much information and materials to Project Coast.56 In Bob Cohen’s recent documentary on

Project Coast, Basson intimated: “U.S., America and Europe helped our technology...help from UK and U.S. was ideological, [but] we went with the sole objective to determine how we could advance our programme with their technology.”57 The deceased American forensic investigator Stephen Dresch suggested that “Western Nations helped in order to let South

Africa to do their dirty work for them, to test UK and U.S. techniques in South Africa.” Just as District 9’s ground operations tested CBW technology produced in MNU’s BioLab, South

Africa via Project Coast was for scientists world-wide a veritable laboratory for testing CBW weapons synthesised by the U.S. and UK and Middle East in the 1980s, a haven for unregulated CBW proliferation and activity.58

The rolling back of Project Coast was part and parcel of the liberalization of the defence industry in the early 1990s, but owing to loose financial supervision and Project Coast’s

Baroque economic structure, the privatization of RRL, Delta G, and Protechnik was a veritable racket.59 When the front companies were sold on the open market, Basson and his coterie became instant millionaires attracting the attention of the Office for Serious Economic

Offences (OEO).”60 MNU like Project Coast exploits the deregulated economic flows of selfish urbanism, and represents the future of governance whereby the city as Deleuze predicted is “a single corporation that now has only stockholders” (or a company gone public in the stock exchange).

Like Wikus, but for very different reasons, economic malfeasance, Basson had to flee the state. While Wikus hides in an alien shack filled with illegal technologies of mobility that he later uses to escape, Basson was found hiding in his car, filled with Project Coast

14

technologies: documents, discs, and dangerous CBW samples. Basson’s collateral was the scientific knowledge and expertise accumulated via his role in Project Coast on CBW weapons, including rare formulae and details on exotic substances. He was too valuable to lose, so in the end “they rehired him.”61 Wikus is also invaluable to MNU for the hybrid code to human-alien DNA that he holds in his arm. MNU covets this information, whose end game is the freeing of the biological component in other words weaponisation and operationalisation of subjectivity, of partial subjects or body parts (that is, after all, the end- goal of all violent urbanisms).

But this is not entirely a one-sided war. The film gains momentum and is adrenalized by the resistance front of a single alien, Wikus’s reluctant collaborator, whose flight from the state we will see is enabled by technologies of “becoming”62 and architectural “equipments of power.”63 These are, respectively, the partial-subjectivities Wikus uses to his advantage

(becoming alien, becoming machine, becoming ship, where the fusion between two bodies is underway), and those architectural devices, substances, and stratagems in which such makeshift yet precise subjectivities are corporealized to mobilize an escape plan (which could also be used for a wider resistance, rebellion or other schemata as is implied for the future of the aliens and a District 9 sequel yet to come).

Wikus moves from one set of surfaces to the next in a serial exchange of the political envelope that is equally architectural as it is biological: He leaves the public servant office cubicle (a lining), to inspect and later hide in the interior of a District 9 corrugated metal shed

(both around the same internal area). Later he will hijack the command module by plunging his hand in a gelatinous liquid; and, when the miniature-craft is destroyed, he will put on his

15

last suit, the mechanized war machine which he steps into and mobilises to defeat Venter an

MNU soldier.

These formal envelopes are in and of themselves insufficient; what makes everything run in

District 9 is the precious alien blood and fuel (which are tantamount to each other) – it takes

20 years to acquire the smallest amount required to awaken the ship. Fuel from the alien body is what drives the command module. Fuel-blood is what is required to reverse engineer

Wikus’s hybrid-alien DNA just as it holds the key to alien DNA. Fuel-blood is surplus value or profit. It is capital itself. It can be converted and exchanged from and between any body to the next, human or technoid, body, machine or weaponry. In this sense, MNU deploys alien blood against them, just as they render useless sophisticated alien technologies. MNU thus reterritorializes the weapon-augmented bodies of the aliens, bodies that undergo biochemical violence of the worst kind. (The main trouble with the aliens is that they are the misbegotten heirs of militarism and Violent Urbanism.)

Urbanism and Lies

Prior to his death, Dresch moodily described the existence of an international bioweapons mafia. “In the shadows, the Death Sciences are spreading like germs across the globe. It’s time to disinfect.”64 According to Jim Parker, a former Selous Scouts,65 South Africa and the

U.S. continue to make CBW deals, and “America is preparing to fight a biological war. The

Pentagon could do it now. The troops are all inoculated. Anthrax War Planning in the U.S. is clearly underway. They are capable of a worldwide strike of 5000 types of biological weapons.” It is this global security project of that is most alarming and that District 9 brings into sudden focus. The U.S. has budgeted 50 billion dollars for biodefence. The problem of

16

security, and the question asked by Cohen is, Could the embers of the Cold War be reignited with the new bioweapons?66

The answer is yes. But also no. The Ballardian international, defensive war is already underway because CBW proliferation thrives noislessly underground, eclipsed by the nuclear deproliferation program audible to everyone. CBW is not a Cold- but a Quiet-War. Clearly, the prefix post has expired, just as the terms of the Cold War have passed their use-by date.

We can no longer say that we are postwar, postmodern (or more recently postpolitical or postcritical for that matter). The political and aesthetic category of the postmodern speaks a specific historical construction of modernism which valorises a pure (ahistorical) conception of space; and, as such, self-destructs under the palpable return of a more sinister modernism we are witnessing in a film such as District 9. District 9 turns inside out the twentieth- century modern epistème (upon which the postmodern is assembled) even as it brings us into a violent confrontation with space. Violent Urbanism is a war of the very air we breathe.

CBW mercilessly engulfs modern and postmodern space alike rendering them indistinguishable. It is no longer the ego subject’s conquest of Giedionian Zeitraum, a space- time which serves the middle class; neither is it the dematerialization of space via postmodern doubt and aporia. Rather, Violent Urbanism is the reterritorialization of subjectivity by the very molecules that constitute space – the conquest of the air we breathe. We could call this hypermodern (the revenge of space). Space is the new enemy, a nonsentient entity constituted by microscopic particles which threaten to invade our bodies and kill from the inside.

District 9 realizes the jump cut from disciplinary society to biopolitics and security, like no other film,67 what Deleuze once called the Control Society. Blomkamp reveals in concrete

17

terms the invasion of the molecular and biological in twenty-first century geopolitics, if we can even call it that any more. Under Violent Urbanism, the entire urban machine – viz. detention centres, border control, and enforced relocation and so on is dissolved into a spectrum of bio-techniques which violate the body to serve the security agenda of the twenty- first century nation-state including ‘defensive’68 CBW proliferation, genetic engineering, and bio-surveillance. Increasingly, biological components, genes, and chemicals are replacing individuals, dividuals, and masses or populations in the new politics, yet the legal status of genes and genetic material remains unresolved.69 As such, subjects are reduced to biological data, and the enemy is anyone, everyone. As Osama Bin Laden once said, “We don’t distinguish between military and civilians. Everyone is a target.”70

The question that remains unanswered, the question that is no longer asked, is: What is or will be architecture’s role in Violent Urbanism? How are or will we be culpable?

Hypothetically, if an Assange-inspired Archileaks site was erected to document architecture’s complicity with state violence at any level; if this journal entertained a theme issue on security and corruption, what would be revealed? What is that we dare not say under our own name? Conversely, can we construct new spaces and subjectivities out of these self-same technologies on the other side of Violent Urbanism? Can we use surveillance, biometrics or

CBW techniques as an opening for social transformation and autonomy from the militarised

State? Or have these goals been spirited away?

It is precisely in architecture that forces of liberation and domination confront each other, and, through this confrontation, architecture is the locus for fighting the war of ideas, even if it cannot win the ground war. No matter what happens, architecture is complicit at the symbolic level (even if we’ve forgotten it is so), and for this it is all the more terrible. District

18

9 functions as a pure critique that lives on in the cinematic image, even if, elsewhere (viz. in architectural discussion), it is not possible. Charles Jencks once said that architecture is a weak player in geopolitics. But this is frankly untrue. It is crashingly immoral, and District 9 tells us so. How will architecture respond to or situate itself against the hypnotic demand for security and for chemical and biological weaponry research and development? Just as the protagonist of District 9, Wikus, becomes a fugitive, enemy of the state, so we too are now the enemy, by dint of our human genes. We are no longer countering an external threat.

Violent Urbanism is us.

Film still, opening aerial footage of District 9, and the real immigration camp used as the film site

19

The original District 6, to which the film site refers

Blikkiesdorp, “Tin Can Town”, Symphony Way Temporary Relocation camp, Delft, Cape Town

20

Blikkiesdorp, “Tin Can Town”, Symphony Way Temporary Relocation camp, Delft, Cape Town

“The Architects of Apartheid” Original map showing the new nominated homelands

21

Wouter Basson in Court at the Truth and Reconciliation Hearing

Note

This critique is not intended as an attack on South Africa from a purer place. Since the West produced selfish capitalism, we all have a part in its failure in Africa. If a nation-state disgorges the new regime is it the chef or restaurant patron that is to blame? When a child does not like its new-born sibling, do we punish the first born?

What is disturbing in this paternalistic-oedipalising analogy is exactly the problem. The audience of District 9 is ostensibly everyone and anyone. Ipso facto the film suggests we are all responsible for the politics of urban violence, detention and displaced persons; just as the intrinsic horror of the film experience is given to each individual spectator. The film importantly defames the immigration camp as a set of violent practices that function in the most banal and therefore evil capacity – and one as Walter Benjamin said is experienced by the humans in a state of distraction. But this sharpens the point about a deep and immanent culpability of the city itself. The location of District 9 in the centre of town and the humans that campaign to have the camp shut down, reveal that the ethics of the city involves everyone even if its subjects, the human citizens, the militants and the aliens themselves, are equally apathetic (stripped of will). The parties directly responsible for the controversial N2 Gateway Housing Project in Cape Town and its mass evictions are the National Department of

Housing, the City of Cape Town, and Thubelisha, who manage the project. Urban violence is enabled by those contracted architects, planners, urbanists, builders, government officials, legal practitioners and so on, even if this consortium is complex and irreducible.

22

1 Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control," October 59 (1992): 20.

2 Neill Blomkamp, District 9 (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2009).

3 Neill Blomkamp, Alive in Joburg (Spy Films, 2005). Jo’burg is the common name for Johannesburg.

4 Ironically, “Soweto” an acronym for South Western Townships was the original place to which the first evictees, from Johannesburg, were removed at the inception of Apartheid rule in 1948.

5 "South African Mob Kills Migrants," BBC News, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7396868.stm.

6 Apartheid, meaning separateness in Afrikaans (in English apart-hood), was the system of racial segregation in

South Africa enforced under the minority rule of white Afrikaners in 1948 till 1994 where the majority ‘non- white’ citizens were deprived of their rights.

7 Excerpts of such dialogue by the film’s characters, or various narrators in talking-heads accounts, drawn from the script, appear interspersed throughout this essay, set in italics and in double quotation marks.

8 “Those answers – they weren’t actors, those are real answers...” Neill Blomkamp, "Interview District 9 - Neill

Blomkamp and Meredith Woerner " in Comic-Con Roundtable (2009).

9 David Smith, "Life in 'Tin Can Town' for the South Africans Evicted Ahead of World Cup," The Guardian, 1

April 2010.; Anna Majavu, "We’d Rather Die Than Move Away," Sowetan, 8 October 2009.

10 The population of South Africa is 49.99-million. 10% of the population live in informal shack dwellings. "The

Politics of Housing," HSRC Review (Human Sciences Research Council) 8, no. 2 (August 2010). In 2005,

28.7% of the urban population in South Africa lived in slums. "Press Release on Its Report, "the Challenge of

Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003"," UN-HABITAT ( 2007);"Un-Habitat: For a Better Urban

Future," 2009, http://www.unhabitat.org/stats/Default.aspx.

11 Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1982).

12 For what’s wrong with biometrics see Giorgio Agamben, "Non À La Biométrie (No to Biometrics)," Le

Monde, December 5, 2005. He asks, Were the photos that allowed the Nazi police force to locate, record, and deport the Jews to death camps originally identity cards or professional cards? After September 11, South Africa introduced biometric passports which some have argued will result in “biometric apartheid” for those who refuse to be recorded.

13 Catherine Lowe Besteman, Transforming Cape Town (University of California Press, 2008), 6. There were two types of apartheid: the geographic (residential) segregation called “structural apartheid”; and “petty apartheid,” the infamous racial segregation on buses, in schools and hospitals and so on.

23

14 The film is banned in Nigeria. See Bashir Adigun, "Nigerian Officials: 'District 9' Not Welcome Here," The

Associated Press, September 19, 2009;" Government Bans Showing of District 9 Film in Nigeria," Vanguard,

September 25, 2009.

15 Cat food is like “firewater” for American Indians, who also traded their priceless technology for drugs. (They were also the recipients of germ-infested blankets.)

16 Biopolitics means the use of the body and life as weapons a la Antonio Negri and Michel Foucault, the latter, in relation to his concept of “biopower.”

17 Kurt Neumann, The Fly, DVD (1958; Beverly Hills, Calif.: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007).

18 David Cronenberg, The Fly, DVD (1986; U.S.: 20th Century Fox, 2005).

19 In this alien city “sovereignty” and “territory” are secondary to the logic of “security” which is used to justify anything in the name of weapons acquisition. See Michel Foucault et al., Security, Territory, Population:

Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977-78 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan: République

Française, 2007).; and Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France 1978-1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Arnold I. Davidson (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

20 The aliens are a biological milieu in the Lamarckian sense.

21 Espace quelconque was the French filmmaker Pascal Augé’s term, used by Gilles Deleuze – while Augé was

Deleuze’s student – in Cinéma 1: L’image-Mouvement (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983).

22 Violent Urbanism “responds to and regulates reality...only ever situating oneself in this interplay of reality with itself... [which is] the general principle of liberalism – not interfering, allowing free movement...according to the laws and mechanisms of reality itself.” Foucault et al., Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the

Collège De France, 1977-78, 48.

23 Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, "Dominant Capital and the New Wars," Journal of World-Systems

Research Volume X, no. 2 (Summer 2004).

24 Conflict between ethnic groups in South Africa goes back to the colonial expansion of British rule in South

Africa from the beginning of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, prior to the apartheid regime and its fall out.

25 Pieter Willem Botha, known as “P. W.” and Die Groot Krokodil (“The Big Crocodile”), was the Prime

Minister of South Africa from 1978 to 1984.

26 Basson was Botha’s personal physician.

27 Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, 1, 14.

24

28 Johann Rossouw, "South Africa: Not yet Post-Colonial," Le Monde Diplomatique 2008.

29 Adam Habib, "State-Civil Society Relations in Post Apartheid South Africa," social research 72, no. 3 (Fall

2005): 681. This was due to the fact that foreign investment, which is the first premise of liberal economic policy, did not flow into the country as predicted; at the same time, the relaxation of foreign exchange controls, created a massive leak of capital which flowed out of the country. The markets became and remain volatile.

30 A. Habib, and V. Padayachee, "Economic Policy and Power Relations in South Africa’s Transition to

Democracy," World Development 28, no. 2 (2000).

31 E. Wayne Nafzige, "Development, Inequality, and War in Africa," The Economics of Peace and Security

Journal 1, no. 1 (2006): 17.

32 Jonathan Jansen, "Why So Much Violence in South Africa?," Stanford University News Service 11 October

1992.

33 Paulus Zulu, "Political Violence and the "Third Force"," Southern Africa Report 8, no. 2 (1992).

34 Sipho Gcabashe, a member of the ANC, in Jansen, "Why So Much Violence in South Africa?."

35 Mark Wheelis, Lajos Rózsa, and Malcolm Dando, Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons since 1945 (Harvard

University Press, 2006), 284–93, 301–03.

36 Stephen Burgess Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program

(Alabama: USAF Counterproliferation Center, Air War College, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, April

2001), 13. The original report cited throughout this essay has since been published as the book: Helen E. Purkitt and Stephen F. Burgess, South Africa’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University

Press, c2005). See also Edward Regis, The Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare

Project (New York: Henry Holt, 1999).; and Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, Plague Wars: A True Story of

Biological Warfare (New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1999).

37 The aliens were first discovered on their ship in a state of starvation. Starvation was employed strategically in

Zimbabwe to weaken resistance movements. The documented weaponisation of “food control” (rationing of food, contamination of water supply, etc.) is discussed at length in M.D. Meryl Nass, "Anthrax Epizootic in

Zimbabwe, 1978-1980: Due to Deliberate Spread?," Physicians for social Responsibility Quarterly (PSR)

2(1992).; and in J. K. Cilliers, Counter-Insurgency in Rhodesia (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 67.

38 Ibid., 17. See Transcript from Television Release, Television Documentary (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/shows/plague/sa/).

25

39 "Chemical Facilities," NTI Working for a Safer World, Updated March 2004, http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/safrica/chemical/facilities.html; and http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/SAfrica/Chemical/index.html. See also "The South African Chemical and

Biological Warfare Programme, Trial Report: Thirty-One," in Reports pertaining to 10 October (2000).

40 "The South African Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme, Trial Report: Twenty-Eight," in Reports pertaining to 4 September (2000).

41 Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, 20.

42 Basson was sent to procure a peptide synthesizer outside of South Africa for genetic research. Project Coast also worked on a contraceptive that could be applied clandestinely to blacks, and Basson was asked by the

SADF to develop a substance that would stain the skin temporarily and thereby identify the frontrunners in the violence. Ibid., 21.

43 Ibid.

44 M. Nass, "Anthrax Epizootic in Zimbabwe, 1978-1980: Due to Deliberate Spread," Physicians for social

Responsibility Quarterly 2(1992). According to scientists, the outbreak of anthrax in six entirely separate areas is extremely unlikely. Anthrax usually appears as a point source outbreak. Doctors further argued that “only the

African-owned cattle in the Tribal Trust Lands were affected; cattle belonging to whites were uninvolved.”

Regardless of the veracity of the claims, what this illustrates is the insidiousness of CBW as technique.

45 See The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa

Report," ed. Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Cape Town1998).

46 Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, 23.

47 South West Africa People’s Organization. Ibid., 22. The SADF also used Napalm and phosphorous in Angola during the 1980s.

48 Ibid., 77. “In the early 1990s, Delta-G made a cash purchase for mercury from another former state-owned company, Thor Chemicals, an SADF front-company... The prosecutor in the Basson trial investigated this purchase since mercury can also be used for the production of sassafras to produce Ecstasy. Others speculate that this purchase was related to the production of Mandrax. However, mercury produced by Thor Chemicals has also been linked to the mysterious nuclear substance, Red Mercury.” Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South

Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, 47. See also Peter Hounam and Steve McQuillen, The

Mini-Nuke Conspiracy: Mandela's Nuclear Nightmare (London: Faber & Faber, 1995).

26

49 Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, 47. Basson was also a major player in an international sales and procurement network involving the Pakistani and Libyan governments.

50 The chain of command for Project Coast included three elite military personnel at the top, followed by the

SAP Commissioner Johan Van der Merwe, Basson’s boss, from which Wikus appears to have derived his name.

Van der Merwe is a common Afrikaans surname, in Dutch, ”from the Merwe,” river in Holland. Colloquially,

“Van der Merwe” is the subject of a running joke against affluent Afrikaners. See Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of

South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, 19.

51 See Bill Desowitz, "Neill Blomkamp Talks District 9," VFXWorld (AWN, Inc.), Friday, August 14, 2009.

52 Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, 39, 65-66. “The

South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established at the end of 1995, and mandated complete disclosure about the previous activities of government officials.”

53 Ibid., 66.

54 Ibid., 70.

55 First, the court deemed the murders and crimes that took place outside of South Africa to be outside its jurisdiction. Further, the allegations of Basson’s use of CBW weaponry were very difficult to examine and assess. Chemical and biological weapons use, and their harm are often undetectable as in the anthrax case, and in more recent examples the documented bacteriological nervous disorders of Iraqi War soldiers which only manifested months after their return to the U.S., but which scientists are now attributing to the troops having been exposed to CBW attack.

56 Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, 58-59.

57 Bob Cohen, Anthrax War, Documentary (Cape Town, May 2008). Bob Cohen notes in this rare interview,

Basson’s “unrepentant manner,” not unlike the interview with Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl, who said

“why should I say sorry? What do I have to say sorry for?”.

58 Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, 42. In 1989 the

CIA placed South Africa on a list of countries that had created and stockpiled “offensive chemical and biological weapons,” yet neither the U.S. nor UK objected to Project Coast in the late 1980s (contrary to the demarche given by the U.S. backed by Britain and Israel in relation to South Africa’s nuclear armament program in 1990).

59 Ibid., 34.

27

60 Ibid., 45.

61 Ibid., 62.

62 A term which derives from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "Rhizome," in On the Line (New York:

Semiotext(e), c1983).

63 This is Félix Guattari’s phrase from the early 1970s “équipements du pouvoir.” See Félix Guattari et al.,

"Equipments of Power: Towns, Territories and Collective Equipments," in Foucault Live: Michel Foucault

Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996).

64 Cohen, Anthrax War.

65 C.D. Melson, "Top Secret War: Rhodesian Special Operations," Small Wars and Insurgencies 16, no. 1.

The Selous Scouts was a special forces regiment of the Rhodesian Army (1973–1980) who were mandated to clandestinely eliminate terrorists both inside and outside South Africa.

66 The documentary also reveals that powdered anthrax was produced in 1998 by scientists at the U.S. Army’s

Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, under a CIA project only discovered in 2001. Can we compare South African violence and U.S. urban violence? In the United States, “you could call out the National Guard and restore some semblance of order. If you call out our equivalent of the National Guard you would have another riot on your hands.” South Africa is the world laboratory for Violent Urbanism and shows us where we might be headed in other Western Nations if we allow CBW proliferation.

67 District 9 vindicates Michel Foucault who long ago predicted the shift from disciplinary society to biopower.

68 As Purkitt says, offensive and defensive CBW proliferation is almost indistinguishable. Everything is an attack.

69 A heated debate is now being played out between biotechnology companies who are seeking to patent human

DNA sequences, and those scientists who believe that DNA is not a commodity to be owned or sold, who have responded to such pending gene/DNA patent applications, by anarchically duplicating the exact-same contested sequences online with free access for all. See Rogeer Hoedemaekers, "Human Gene Patents: Core Issues in a

Multi-Layered Debate," Medicine, Health Care And Philosophy 4, no. 2 (2001).; and Russell Belk, "Why Not

Share Rather Than Own?," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611 no. 1 (May

2007 vol. no. ).

70 Peter Taylor, Age of Terror: War on the West, Documentary (U.K.: BBC, 22 December, 2008). “We so far have been reactive/defensive. We react to a bombing. What we need to do is be proactive/offensive e.g. win the war of ideas, al-Qaeda’s ideology. Ten years after 09/11, al-Qaeda is still winning the ideological war.”

28