Felix Stalder on Thu, 4 Dec 2008 14:55:50 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> Saskia Sassen: Cities and new wars: after Mumbai |
It strikes me that the issue is perhaps less city vs open field, but the difference between the function of cities in conventional conflict (state vs state) and asymmetric conflicts which the events in Mumbai were a part of. The main difference relates to the goals pursued through these conflicts. In the first case, cities are attractive, as Ted noted, because they constitute the center of administration necessary to take over in order to govern the country as a whole. In the latter, cities, or more precisely particular segments of (inter)national significance, constitute what some theorists call "systempunkt", the critical node that can destabilize the entire system [1]. Why should the system be destabilized? Not in order to take it over. Al- Qaeda did not plan to occupy the US after 9/11. Rather, the goal seems to be affect the overall dynamics of the system, either in the terms of weakening the state so the withdraws from certain areas / functions, or to force the state to over-react. In Mumbai, it seems that the goal was the latter, with the attacks occurring shortly before elections and in the context of a real attempt of both governments to ease hostilities between Pakistan and India. If the elections now shift to the nationalist right and the relations between the countries deteroritate, the attacks will have been successful. If not, they will have failed. In a way, it's violent, large-scale system's hacking, ie. use the resources of the system to make it do something that is counter to its stated goals. [1] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/12/the_systempunkt.html --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now: *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org