Just Targets

CULTURAL POLITICS 5 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2006 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 2, ISSUE 1 PP 5–28 JUST TARGETS RYAN BISHOP, GREGORY CLANCEY AND JOHN PHILLIPS Figure 1 London Tube Map 2004. Artwork by Emma Kay. RYAN BISHOP TEACHES AT THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND HAS PUBLISHED ON URBANISM, MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, CRITICAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL SEX TOURISM. GREGORY CLANCEY TEACHES AT THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY. MOST OF HIS RESEARCH HAS TO DO WITH JAPAN, TECHNOLOGY, ARCHITECTURE, CITIES, AND/OR THE PHENOMENA OF EMERGENCIES AND CATASTROPHES. JOHN PHILLIPS TEACHES AT THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND HAS PUBLISHED ON LINGUISTICS, PSYCHOANALYSIS, DECONSTRUCTION, PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, URBANISM, POSTMODERNISM, CRITICAL THEORY AND AESTHETICS. We argue in this introduction that targeting,in several interrelated and specified senses, must be regarded as intrinsic to urban processes,and that with intensifications of these processes during the last 150 years or so, issues of targeting and questions of the just in relation to cities have become increasingly urgent. With growing concerns about urban war, crime and terrorism, on the one hand, and urban government, administration and policies,on the other,the connection between targeting and justice is more fraught than ever. We examine the nature of the urban ensemble as a network of material and ideal relations that must perpetually negotiate new relations (of justice and targeting) with its outlaws, its misfits and criminals. We explore an emergent geopolitics of urban > CULTURAL POLITICS 6 RYAN BISHOP, GREGORY CLANCEY, AND JOHN PHILLIPS processes, looking at the need for new paradigms but also at the requirements of a deep historicity that helps to determine the present. We analyze the paradoxes inherent in targeting as they began to emerge from World War I onwards, and we question distinctions between war and urban society, acknowledging, as we must, the increasing militarization of the latter. The introduction also provides a sense of how the articles that follow contribute to a gathering intellectual engagement with issues of justice and the modes of targeting that characterize the 21st century city. Emma Kay’s artwork for the London Tube map plays with several closely related senses of the word “target” and imbricates these with the function of the tube itself. First the topography of the tube system is represented symbolically. The concentric circles form the image of the classical target – the targe, or light concave shield that gives the current notion of target its name – promising that the map inside will deliver you to your destination as surely as a well-aimed projectile. Then, the circles themselves also mimic the circularity of some of the actual tube lines (notably, of course, the Circle Line itself). Finally the tubular shape is suggested visually as if we were looking toward – or already speeding through – a tunnel. One might be struck, looking at this image today, by the sense that the possibility of this kind of visual play is neither trivial nor accidental. Mass rapid transport networks are emblematic, along with telecommunications systems, of the urban itself. And to move through a city, to travel its arterial networks by taxi, tram, omnibus, metro or tube, is to dwell in it. The image here of the shield painted in the traditional style, as a target, evokes both the city’s source of life and its vulnerabilities. The efficient and affordable transit network helps maintain the city itself, but here also lie perhaps its greatest dangers. In what follows we explore the motif of targeting as it applies in cities today. These motifs apply wherever there are cities, but especially after the spread of global urbanism since the nineteenth century. The city is a site of targeting in several senses (as Kay’s target image suggests). The city targets. It targets anything that falls outside the laws and logics of urban process. And it names its targets as criminals,outlaws, terrorists, thieves. It targets nonurban spaces for appropriation, development, preservation, resort. It targets itself as the site best suited for exhibitions, games, meetings, summits. In other words, the city targets; and the...