Escape from Alphaville: Introducing Paul Virilio’s City of Panic

CULTURAL POLITICS 331 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2005 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 1, ISSUE 3 PP 331–338 ESCAPE FROM ALPHAVILLE: INTRODUCING PAUL VIRILIO’S CITY OF PANIC JOHN ARMITAGE Private cities, protected by their electronic fences, surveillance cameras and guards ... ghettoes ... even called FORTRESS AMERICA... Those on the subcontinent , such as the five ALPHAVILLES that now ring Sao Paulo in Brazil, don’t bear mentioning. Paul Virilio,“The Accident in Time,” City of Panic: Elsewhere Begins Here (2005) ALPHA-60 (A disembodied supercomputer): Your name is written “Ivan Johnson,” but it is pronounced “Lemmy Caution,” Secret Agent Zero Zero Three of the Outlands. You are a threat to the security of Alphaville. LEMMY CAUTION: I refuse to become what you call “normal.” Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville (1965) Questions of the panicked structures and spaces of the city are at the center of intellectual investigation across a variety of fields from cultural politics JOHN ARMITAGE TEACHES MEDIA, CULTURAL, AND POLITICAL STUDIES AT NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY, UK. HE HAS RECENTLY CONTRIBUTED CHAPTERS ON AND WITH PAUL VIRILIO TO ARTHUR AND MARILOUISE KROKER’S (2004) EDITED COLLECTION, LIFE IN THE WIRES: THE CTHEORY READER. > CULTURAL POLITICS 332 JOHN ARMITAGE and architecture to cultural geography and literature. The extract and three articles collected here differ in the positions they represent, the intent behind their texts, and their emphasis. These texts relate to such issues as the importance of democratic city formations and political associations, the sensation of urban fear and esthetic spaces of catastrophe, including their function in our increasingly technologized everyday life and moods. But for whom has the contemporary city been devised? The typical modern city of Paris, for example, was that imagined in and realized through the application of the plans of a number of extremely powerful architects and town planners. The most well-known and powerful of these was the French town planner, Baron George-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91). Haussmann drew up guidelines and was responsible for envisaging, developing, and achieving the extensive rebuilding of the modern city of Paris under Napoléon III (1808–73), Emperor of the French (1852–71). The most completely accomplished of Haussmann’s renovations were the extended boulevards and spectacular vistas branching out from the Arc de Triomphe, the ceremonial arch standing at the heart of the Place de l’Etoile at the pinnacle of the Champs Elysées, and which even today form much of the city’s character. Haussmann was personally associated with a public and rather bureaucratic architectural idea of the modern movement of town planning, distinguished by his audacious transformation of the layout of Paris. His was a modern line of attack on architecture and town planning that stressed the guiding principles of movement, broadening, and laceration rooted in a forcefully centralized and circular plan, and the building of wide approaches to France’s capital city. A critical account of Haussmann’s appliance of his ideas can be found in Jules Ferry’s scathing descriptions of “Haussmannization,” Les Comptes fantastiques d’Haussmann (2000 [1868]). Haussmann’s methods strengthened an important alteration of the mid-nineteenth-century city environment of Paris as his notions were taken up and enacted by a multitude of Parisian architects and planners under his direction. Essentially, the entire city was reconstructed according to Haussmann’s policies, with the most famed examples arguably being the open spaces he engineered, such as the Place de l’Opéra and the Place de la Nation. Still, Haussmann’s conceptions are recognizable in the majority of mid-nineteenth-century European cities in the shape of,for instance,the great railway station projects that additional architects and planners believed fulfilled the need to transport rising mid-nineteenth-century metropolitan residents economically. In terms of sheer numbers of people the huge railway stations of Paris such as the Gare du Nord at Place Napoléon III have clearly transported hundreds of thousands of French and other citizens from every corner of France and beyond. However, many French people protested at the time that Haussmannization and the erecting of such public utilities also ruined the only remaining CULTURAL POLITICS 333...