places, where a solitary anonymity is performed, are nonetheless defining characteristics of contemporary urban identities. Those transit-identities of the motorway traveler, the supermarket shopper, and so on, construct the typology of the average modern city dweller. Explicit or implicit instructions for use always accompany these spaces, addressing each person individually, but eventually, as with advertising messages, they fabricate recurrent characteristics. Nonverbal messages are especially powerful, such as advertising images in department stores, company logos in fast-food restaurants or service stations. Transit identities are not the product of chance experience; on the contrary, they distill what is typical and recurrent out of what is contingent and personal in the experience of urban “non-places” (Augé 1995).
Clearly these identities are framed as well, enclosed as they are between socially identified spatial and temporal parentheses. This framing has something in common with the snapshot. No matter how arbitrarily framed, these pictures somehow lose their contingent character as soon as they are shown and appear as recognizable typical scenes. Family and vacation albums are full of such photographs: “In front of the Eiffel Tower,” “Our baby walking,” “Daddy’s first fishing success,” and so on. Arguably, modern urban identities are framed spatially and temporally according to practices that transpose the experience of the partitioned city into the experience of partitioned identities. Metropolitan enclaves of various kinds but are always perceived and performed as defining frames that seem to ignore the urban space that surrounds them. Actually, however, their status is founded upon their relations with the surrounding environment and these relations are regulated by concrete checkpoints.
Metropolitan enclaves are characterized by checkpoints. One must prove their innocence in advance, as Marc Augé (1995, 102) brilliantly remarks, in order to be allowed to use these enclaves. Checkpoints punctuate the city: you can see them in airports, office buildings, supermarkets and banks, clubs and theaters, and of course, in guarded public buildings.
Checkpoints are modular elements of a prevailing rhythm that produce a new dominant experience of “being in public.” Checkpoints define distinct everyday routines for different categories of inhabitants of the partitioned city. Toll gates or subway turnstiles mark the everyday movements of many city dwellers. The rhythm of the supermarket cashier marks an everyday ceremony of shopping.
Collective and seemingly individualized identities are enacted in the process of participating in such rhythms. Even the temporary identities of the traveler or the purchaser are marked by the act of crossing identifying entrance points. There, one has to show his or her passport, debit or credit card in order to be allowed a seemingly liberating anonymity—“the passive joys of identity loss” (Augé 1995, 103).
“Advanced marginality” in Korogocho, Nairobi.
We can easily discern in those new urban rhythms, regulated by checkpoints, the emergence of new linear rhythmicalities. These linear rhythms generate ceremonial practices of identity confirmation. No matter how functionally necessary those control points are, their existence requires the performance of practices devoted to ritual repetition. As in the case of “prophylactic rituals” (Turner 1977, 168–169 and 1982, 109–110), devoted to protection from unexpected natural disasters, checkpoints appear above all as self-evident protection from practices that are unpredictable, other, different—in other words, protection from “a-rhythmical” practices. Checkpoints appear to protect society from outside, foreign, and therefore hostile elements. They “normalize” rhythms.
A “state of exception” becoming the rule
Contemporary ideologies of security find fertile ground in our everyday addiction to normalizing checkpoints. What this mass obsession for security that is promoted throughout the world is adding to the status of metropolitan public space is the inauguration of a state of emergency with no apparent end. Checkpoints become metastatic, police blocks punctuate the city, public sites are heavily guarded, immigration controls are enacted everywhere. Contemporary wars, often generated by outside interventions to allegedly protect threatened populations, cause massive movements of people. Checkpoints are always there to identify, separate, and subordinate helpless people by ceaselessly searching for the “infiltrating terrorist.” Security, elevated to the status of the most important goal, justifies the metastasis of control points as markers of exception. However, this situation is, in essence, a new model of governance in the making (Vecchi, 2001). The state of emergency turns out to be a test. New mutations of the partitioned city are justified by recourse to exceptional conditions that demand exceptional measures, such as those that suspend basic civil rights.
Agamben’s (2005) idea of exception can be used to understand and conceptualize the contemporary city of enclaves. Central to this idea is an essentially juridico-political understanding of exception: exception must be compared to a rule. For Agamben, exception is not the opposite of the rule; it is the founding condition of the rule.
There is a historical component to this reasoning as well as a logico-mathematic component. Historically, the state of exception describes moments or periods during which law is suspended in the name of society’s protection from internal or external crucial threats. During a state of exception, a sovereign authority is justified in taking such a decision to suspend the law in its promise to reinstitute law and order as soon as the threat is eliminated. This situation, Agamben argues, reveals what is essential about authority: the legitimate ability to decide when and for how long the law will be suspended. In this act, authority reveals itself to be the precondition of law and not vice versa.
During the state of exception, a very peculiar relation between law and power is revealed. It is not that naked power simply replaces the regulating force of law. Law is present in its suspension as a legitimate force, a power to impose certain actions and prohibit others, a power with the ability to punish. The force of law as a legitimate force is passed over to the executive power while law is simultaneously suspended. A kind of ambiguous zone of indeterminacy is thus created “where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (Agamben 2005, 23).
Agamben characterizes this situation as a “threshold of undecidability … at which factum [concrete events and acts] and ius [law] fade into each other” (ibid., 29). It is interesting to observe how and why Agamben employs the image and concept of the threshold here. The threshold appears as an intermediary zone where supposedly distinct areas—in spatial terms, inside and outside; in juridical terms, law and anomie—lose their margins and “blur with each other.” Had he used the image of border or limit, he would have described the state of exception as a situation of trespassing, of exceeding or crossing a limit. The exceptionality of the state of exception would have been conceived as the complete outside of law, the complete other of law. Agamben, however, insists that the law is present in the state of exception as the legitimating element of a sovereign decision. Law is present in its suspension. In the threshold-like condition of the state of exception, opposing parts are co-present and indistinguishable (as their defining perimeters are replaced by a zone of indistinction) and thus no longer exclusive. In terms of the historical analysis of the exception, the threshold is an in-between period during which crucial differences (between law and anomie) are suspended.
There is, however, a certain inconsistency in using the image of the threshold in historical terms. If the period of threshold is an in-between period, “before” and “after” should exist as concrete and differentiated periods, their essential difference being created by the act of passage from one to the other. But the state of exception is supposedly not a period that produces qualitative differences and changes, rather, it is an intermediary period of difference during which a threat to the social status quo is eliminated. This period of difference mediates between two periods of order,
