by protocols of use. While such protocols have the appearance of administrative or functional directions for use, they essentially constitute a localized legal system in place of a suspended general law.4 Accordingly, urban enclaves are not simply places where general laws do not apply, but places where localized rules, having the form of functional decrees, normalize an exceptional status that becomes permanent.
Is there a specific urban order from which enclaves depart? First of all, urban order has not ceased to be a project to govern the contemporary city. Legal acts in support of zero tolerance politics are exemplary of such a project based on the reinstitution of a general law defining the status of urban citizenship. It is interesting, however, that this project is inspired by the regulating efficiency of protocols for the use of the enclaves. The city itself can thus be legally and administratively fantasized as a gigantic enclave. Order can also be projected as a system of delimiting obligations, as a restraint for those inhabiting privileged enclaves. Exception can be welcome to inhabitants as a defining mark of their privilege.5
Generally speaking, the construction of spatial as well as legal orders is always a process open to social antagonism. What seems to be a crucial characteristic of current administrative practices and logic is the acceptance of a dynamic condition of ordering. This is based on two premises: the localized order of urban-island enclaves and the regulating power of metastatic checkpoints which impose a partial and precarious order on the urban sea surrounding those enclaves.
Indeed, refugee and immigrant detention centers constitute a kind of containment that marks “a radical crisis of the concept [of human rights]” (Agamben 2000, 19). Perhaps what is more important is the fact that the camp as a model enclave of normalized exception metastasizes in every aspect of city life. We don’t have to be refugees reduced to bare life to be treated as enclave-confined users. We are trained to accept as legitimate “site-specific” protocols of use without reference to general (or universal) rights. We tend to consider it normal that exception is organized in spatial terms as an area where specific rules apply.
We learn to adapt to exception without even considering what we live as exception. This is how “red zones” become normal: routine control procedures and limited access rules tend to characterize access to the city center or to specified areas guarded as potential “terrorist” (whatever the word is taken to mean) targets. Checkpoints and surveillance systems in shops have become normal. Body searches at athletic events have become normal as well. It is in this direction that the state of exception becomes a rule. It is not that we generally live in a state of emergency (even though lots of people do, as for example the Palestinians and the Israeli people). Rather, it is that we are constantly deprived of a crucial characteristic of urban space which also happens to be a crucial characteristic of any legal culture: the ability and the opportunity to compare, to dispute by comparing, and to investigate the ways limits are imposed. Thresholds can be both spatiotemporal urban experiences and areas of actively experiencing spatial and juridico-political indistinctions alike.
If we are to investigate the liberating potential of the experience and conceptualization of thresholds, then we should clearly understand thresholds as always being crossed. A dynamic image of threshold crossing can help to locate the potential of change in the mechanism (and not in the state) of exception. If Agamben’s use of the threshold image can only be taken to describe a state, then exception can only be understood as a trap. Exception, in this case, describes “a passage that cannot be completed, a distinction that can be neither maintained nor eliminated” (Norris 2005, 4).
It is important to understand the state of exception as a dynamic mechanism, which only once it’s immobilized can be transformed to the setting of an exclusive inclusion (Agamben 1998, 177). In this context, Walter Benjamin’s thought that “our task [is] to bring about a real state of emergency” (Benjamin 1992, 248), acquires an interesting meaning. Taken not simply as a historically specific appeal for anti-Nazi mobilization, Benjamin summarizes the task of creating thresholds in history. On those thresholds past and present are not connected in a linear way. The present is just one of the possible futures the past contained. Discovering hope in the past is the ability to locate ourselves in the past’s unrealized potentialities. “Being aware of historical discontinuity is the defining characteristic of revolutionary classes in the moment of their action” (Benjamin 1980, 1236). Thresholds in history are created out of this awareness.
In this understanding of historical thresholds, the exception triggers a transformative disruption of normality. Exception, thus, can be the spatiotemporal condition of change, of difference. In place of the state of emergency’s cyclical sequence of normality-exception-return to normality, in Benjamin’s “real” state of emergency, normality is replaced by exception leading to possibility. Exception thus destroys normality instead of becoming its supporting mechanism.
Red zones as normalizing exceptions and the “city of thresholds”
Red zones appear to belong to these kinds of spatial formations that have nothing to do with the rhythms that organize public spaces. No cyclical rhythm seems to govern their emergence, no linearity calculates their presence in the modern city. Red zones instantiate a form of temporal conception which is not based on repetition, i.e., rhythmicality, but on exception. Red zones are erected in exceptional cases and represent the “state of emergency.” Red zones though, are not as exceptional as they seem. Rather, they constitute “exceptional” cases of a whole category of urban rhythms that tend to define the characteristics of today’s urban public spaces.
Red zones are only the extreme case of ubiquitous checkpoints in the city. On the occasion of a major meeting of world leaders, the city is divided into forbidden and accessible sectors. The new “forbidden city” an enclave “temporarily” marked by fences, walls, surveillance cameras, police barricades, searchlights, flying helicopters, and so on is becoming the image of a publicized utopia of complete security. On the body of the city, the mark of a new project of subordination is inscribed. All the more so, because the city is increasingly becoming ungovernable. Urban conflicts erupt in major cities and the police assumes the role of an “interior army.” It used to be Beirut, Jerusalem, Belfast, Los Angeles, Paris or Rio; but now urban conflicts and riots, urban violence, and racial clashes are everywhere. As Agamben (2001) remarks, modern authorities tend to adopt the model of the infected medieval city, where zones of progressive control were erected, leaving part of the city to the plague while securing disinfected enclaves for the rich. In 2001, Genoa, with its prototypical red zone, appeared as an “infected city.” The new world order, utopian and nightmarish, is based on zones of varying degrees of control, where checkpoints attempt to introduce the globalizing rhythms of neoliberalism. The utopia of absolute governance is tested at various scales in cities as well as on continents. Eventually, a partitioned globe is strategically designed to emerge.
Red zone in front of French embassy in Tunis, 2013.
Red zones are temporary constructions aimed at permanent results. As the “terrorist threat” (which, as a term, is designed to encompass any threat to the status of the new order) is constantly renewed, exception becomes the rule and emergency becomes canonic. While red zones appear as exceptional when compared to ordinary urban rhythms, they in fact inaugurate new urban rhythms in view of a heavily mythologized new metropolitan order. Exception thus becomes the model of repetition.
Jon Coaffee has revealingly shown how the economic core of London, “the City,” has evolved into an enormous enclave defined by an urban “ring of steel” (Coaffee 2004, 276–296). As “counter-terrorist” urban policies have evolved from temporary responses to Provisional IRA threats and acts, to more permanent measures taken after 9/11, the City has gradually become an area “excluding itself from the rest of central London, through its territorial boundedness, surveillance and fortification
