The Right to the City

"Everywhere, the state is at war with those who it rules"

Boston's like a frickin horn of plenty when it comes to intellectual life. Last week I decided to start taking advantage of the endless talks, lectures, colloquia, free/cheap films, lessons and tours offered in this city of schools. So I found myself watching a talk on The Right to the City, sponsored by MIT's Visual Arts Program , and running wild with Henri LeFebvre, generously framed by scholars/practitioners Philippe Rekacewicz and Shuddhabrata Sengupta.

I couldn't stay for the full Q&A, but needless to say the presentations were top notch - Rekacewicz's radical cartography particularly shined in his poignant reminder of map-making as an imaginative rendering of perspective and power struggles rather than unbiased, immutable truth-telling, as well as his wry discussion of the privatization of airports (autonomous authoritarian zones, no less, whose public spaces have been manipulated into oblivion by the encroaching free trade of Duty Free). Interesting to note that these same "free" commercial zones tend to obscure the pervasive surveillance and policing that constitutes our airports, making for a telling paradox of our obligation to consume versus our lack of right to do much else.

Sangupta, a founder of SARAI , made the night entirely worth it, however, with his intervention on "Bodies, Biographies and Bombs." I'd love a copy of the talk, although the VAP (see link above) should have the talk recorded for those interested. He's a poetic writer and confident speaker, all of which made for a captivating talk that began with Galton's visual archive of the "homo criminalis", moved into the Delhi police force's "identikit" recognition system (which helps image criminal faces using an archive of physical features taken from police officers), and then concluded with the consequences of images of violence in the media, and the resulting anxiety "fatigue".

The entire talk was riveting, but one of the ideas I keep turning over in my mind is what Sangupta referred to as a "pornography of quantity" in the news, or the obsession with (and fetish for?) numbers associated with violent crimes and acts of terrorism. It is the numbers that pull in our fascination, and his assessment of the September 13, 2008, bombs in Delhi drew sharp parallels with (obviously) the U.S. 9/11, and, for me, the rising murders on the U.S./Mexico border. Juarez isn't the only city with killings spiralling upwards like a lotto of souls, Tijuana's got its own share and the media's fascinated .

Sangupta derided this news porno as more degrading and objectifying than any of the usual erotic acrobatics we'd usually associate with the term, an abuse of bodies and flesh for ratings. What happens to life when we render it news clip and pull quote? What happens to life when we mediate it, photograph it, copy it and re-tell it in the name of nationalism and security?

Both talks gestured towards the schema we use in our rhetoric to achieve certainty, and the ruptures that occur when the facts don't always fit the frame. In pursuing more of Sangupta's work, I found a wonderful piece on borders - as applicable to the U.S./Mexico division I know so well as to the India/Pakistan border he refers to. It's yet another critique of the violence that these schema produce, of how so many of what we think of as rights and liberties are so dependent on just a line in the sand.

"The border is the mark on the ground which tells you that wherever you are on earth, hell begins close to home. And you are never far from a border. It doesn't matter in which city, continent or country you are in, the border seeks you out in the end."