Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)
Return to Contents »
Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy, eds. Cities Without Citizens. Philadelphia: Slought Books, 2003. 395 pp. Softcover. $25.00. ISBN: 0971484848
<1> What, the editors of this collection ask in their introduction,
is the nature of the relationship between cities and the people who inhabit
them? And how do the historical situation of cities and their citizens limit
the potentiality of new modes of subjectification? These are surely evocative
questions, and as the editors remark, increasingly necessary ones, as the
city is quickly becoming the organizing principle for global flows (of bodies,
capital, law, etc.), but, in the collection that follows, the contributing
authors barely scratch the surface of these issues, nor do they properly
problematize such latter-day master narratives as the primacy of capitalism,
globalization, warfare and the law, let alone citizenship itself. Instead
this collection reads as a series of rather disconnected chapters brought
together seemingly only by the force of will of the editors. That being
said, a number of the chapters are provocative and insightful in their various
critiques, however far from the site of the city and the problematics of
citizenship they may stray.
<2> The most interesting chapters in the collection are Gregg Lambert's
"Universal Hospitality," Eduardo Cadava's "The Guano of History,"
and Joan Dayan's "Servile Law." Lambert has previously written
on Gilles Deleuze (The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Continuum 2002),
but in this essay he turns his attention to Kant and Derrida to discuss
the role of the stranger and the place of law in relation to the question
of hospitality, a chapter taken from a longer ongoing study of Lambert's
on the philosophy of right. Lambert situates these questions at the border
of the contemporary state in an effort to question the role of indifference
(if not hostility) towards the stranger, particularly apparent, he claims,
at the borders of the United States. Dayan's chapter is similarly part of
a larger forthcoming work, Held in the Body of the State, and draws
on participant-observation at Special Management Unit II, in Florence, Arizona,
as well as legal textual analysis. Dayan raises questions about the process
of subjectification and its relationship to the law, as well as the troubled
role of the law within the context of prisons in the United States both
for American citizens and those suspected of terrorist activities. In so
doing, she participates in the growing body of literature on prisons and
their social and cultural complexities in American culture (Cf. Lorna Rhodes'
Total Confinement, California 2004, and Loic Wacquant's forthcoming
Deadly Symbiosis), but adds an attention to the role that religiosity
places in facilitating and undergirding such processes. Cadava's piece is
the least related to the concerns of the volume, but stands apart as one
of the most lyrical and well researched of the chapters. In it, he focuses
on Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Fate" essay and its relationship to
race, the economy and imperialism. In a wonderfully strange turn, Cadava
focuses on the guano markets of colonial American society, and the politicking
that occurred to facilitate the imperial seizure of a number of small, guano
ridden islands in the Pacific and Caribbean.
<3> The most famous authors in the collection, Giorgio Agamben and
Gayatri Spivak, do little to bolster the strength of the book. Agamben's
piece, "Beyond Human Rights," is a reprint from his Means Without
Ends (2000), and although it provides nothing new to the reader of Agamben,
it is strangely the chapter most effective in pursuing the questions raised
by the editors in their introduction. Spivak's chapter, "Harlem,"
makes one wonder what holds Spivak back from fully adopting the aphoristic
style of Nietzsche: The chapter is a rambling reminiscence on Spivak's relationship
with her adopted home of Harlem, the role of race in claims to legitimate
identity/place politics, and the wages of gentrification. Accompanied by
a series of photographs of Harlem, the piece reads akin to the ramblings
of a sentimental expatriate inundating new friends with photographs of a
lost home. While it may be evocative at times, it lacks any attempt at coherence
and may - for some - be as frustrating as it is spirited.
<4> The last third of the book is dedicated to reproducing materials
that were part of an exhibition curated by Aaron Levy at the Rosenbach Museum
& Library in 2003, entitled "Cities Without Citizens." The
majority of the plates are reproductions of archival material from the Rosenbach
archives (mostly pertaining to the history of Pennsylvania as well as the
other colonies), and include such diverse things as excerpts from George
Washington's declination of a second nomination to the frontispieces of
colonial true crime narratives and legislative decrees. The pieces are organized
into four sections, "Settlement," "Citizen," "Discipline,"
and "Liquidation," and are meant to provide the reader (or viewer
in the case of the exhibition) with a non-linear narrative of the process
of defining citizenship and urban space in colonial American culture. Following
this are descriptions of the other artists' work from the exhibition, unfortunately
limited to only a half page apiece with summaries supplied by Levy. The
last inclusion in the book is a series of doctored photographs of World
War II orphans who were part of a United Nations effort to reconnect children
with their parents; in place of the children's name plates (which they hold
before them), Levy has replaced their names with duplications of their faces,
creating a sort of facial abundance in lieu of identity in the form of a
recognizable name. As they smile into the camera, they seem to be cheerfully
willing their own namelessness, and become strange specters of themselves.
The art collected in the volume is all very interesting, but with the whole
of the attention being paid to Levy's work, one cannot help but wonder about
the artists whose work is merely summarized and its relation to the exhibition
and book. This becomes especially prescient when the lesser chapters in
the collection are brought into focus, as many of them, especially the underdeveloped
contributions from Gans & Jelacic Architecture and Arakawa + Gins are
taken into account.
<5> Both of these later chapters are attempts to formulate new architectures,
and suffer from (probably) being too dependent on visual models that fail
to be included in the collection or at reproduced at such small scales as
to render them unintelligible. Moreover, the Arakawa + Gins piece is a proposal
for a "Living Body Museumeum," which includes pages of budget
projections, which a reader can only wonder at the relevance of, since neither
of these architectural chapters is granted an introduction from the editors.
More problematic however in the Arakawa + Gins piece is the very style of
the piece, which swings wildly between what seems to be tongue-in-cheek
hippyisms and self-congratulations of their own previous work. What might
have been more appropriate than the inclusion of these two preliminary pieces
from the architects themselves would be an appraisal of their projects by
an academic firmly educated in the geography of refugees and the contemporary
urban climate, which are the focus of the architects' designs.
<6> The other chapters in the book include a theoretical analysis
of Vladimir Radojicic's photographs by Branka Arsic, who is concerned with
the process of defacement and death (with no mention of Michael Taussig's
work on defacement), a meditation on the transnational role of ruins in
the Irish landscape by David Lloyd (which resonates well with the work of
Stuart McLean, The Event and Its Terrors, Stanford 2005), an interview
of architect Eyal Weizman by Philipp Misselwitz on the mutual influences
of urban planning and contemporary warfare (interesting, but lacking citations
to support the claims made by Weizman), and an essay on the continuing role
of televisuality in warfare by Thomas Keenan.
<7> As a reviewer I cannot help but feel that Cities Without Citizens
is the result of an interdisciplinary push led astray: The content is simply
too divergent in content, style and concern to produce a coherent whole.
It might simply be that the book is inaccurately titled (Levy's "Settlement,
Citizen, Discipline, and Liquidation" would be more appropriate), or
that the introduction raises the wrong questions; in any case, the collection
does bring together a number of interesting chapters which may be better
read individually than as an attempt to elucidate the contemporary mutual
constitution of citizens and their cities.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer
ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.