“ Imagine no lines ” is the manifesto of security experts, as in no frontlines to definitely situate war and no clear interior demarcated by exterior membrane. This infinite smoothing is perhaps another name for what Schmitt called total war and Virilio called pure war. It is in effect the same thing as “ imagine nothing but lines ” where the infinity of smoothness proves on closer inspection to be infinite striation. The reversibility of the line and the no line is expressed in the reversibility of the open and the closed within the same architecture, the line that draws the enclave that flips into the line that draws the camp. Just as for the embassies, the paired demands of open and transparent urbanity and the megastructure-under-siege, democratic and martial, co-occupying the same structure and the same architecture, less juxtaposed than twisted one within the other, never dissolve into the same solution. So for The Stack, this leaves more questions. Does the surplus of utopias prevent political will from acting on a planetary level precisely because it sublimates so much energy into the realm of the imaginary, leaving us to conquer only fantastic worlds? Are these dreamworld fragments recuperable? If romanticism is foremost the will to lost unity, and utopia the will to potential totality, can there be an antiromantic utopianism? A catastrophe without melancholy? For the geodesign we most need, can there be a true plurality of utopias, not a totality of the multiple, but like real cities, a multiple of totalities?
It would seem that the positive answers to these questions point away from Security (with a capital S) as the sovereign utopian imaginary for which all governance becomes a subset of policing. It does not, however, bend away from governance per se (and from the design of governance). An urban interfacial regime constitutes and mediates power, and this is why it is worth designing at all. The unromantic and unmelancholic utopian impulse as a conceptual driver for urban futures (whatever direction that might lead) may or may not involve the politicization of this difference between securitization and the programmatic interests of another geodesign frame work. Just as civil technologies can and do have martial qualities and consequences regardless of whether militaries or paramilitaries ever touch them, so too can explicitly military technologies have civil purpose that goes beyond, or even altogether evades, their instrumentality for violence or how that violence would have designated the city. In fact, the city itself, the primordial bunker on the horizon or the boulevard turned into battleground, is perhaps the exemplary technology for the oscillation between military and civilian deployments. We already say all too readily that violent irruptions within the City represent failures in the governance of interfaces. Any architecture not only symbolizes power; it also mediates it directly, even consti tutes it. One core weakness of securitization as the design driver of urban interfacial systems is its consistent tendency to enact greater violence onto the city that it is ostensibly protecting than the dangers it defends against is ever likely to bring. As perhaps our single most important form of technology, the City suffers from a kind of autoimmune disorder by which we disfigure them in advance of potential future disfiguring; we attack them with defensive measures in the inverted image of a potential threat of future criminal or terrorist attack. This is designing for the emergency (as discussed in the Earth layer chapter, and not on behalf of the emergent) by preemptively repeating the possibility of the catastrophic violence before it actually occurs. That eventual violence may or may not come, and now it does not even need to come because its disfiguring plot has already been accomplished by security engineers. By way of precedent, consider that for the entirety of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union did not explode a single nuclear device on the enemy ’ s territory. Instead, in the guise of the test, the United States bombed the United States (over 1,000 bomb tests, over 300 of them atmospheric, in Nevada, Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, New Mexico, the Marshall Islands, and elsewhere, for a total of 174 megatons) and the Soviet Union bombed the Soviet Union (700 to 900 bombs, in Kazakhstan, Arctic archipelagos, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and other areas of Russia proper, including the Tsar Bomba in 1961 — 50 megatons all by itself, or ten times the total munitions of World War II, for a total of 285 megatons). By comparison, the bombs that were used in a war on an external enemy, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States, were 15 and 20 kilotons, respectively. To attack one ’ s own body, not just to demonstrate the capacity to attack, but to ward off the possibility of the attack from occurring in the future by performing the attack over and over again on oneself: this is pathological, is it not?
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The Stack to Come