Metropolis

SPATIAL PRODUCTS seminar

Keller Easterling

The seminar looks at the political misadventures of "spatial products"- the Teflon formulas for resorts, ports, retail, IT campuses and other enclave formations. As naturalized states of exception, these legal lacunae, like tax shelters, data havens or free trade zones create their own worlds of development logic, utopias of political immunity that move across and through national jurisdictions like weather fronts. Imbued with myths and symbolic capital, the hilarious and dangerous masquerades of retail, business or trade often mix quite easily with political platforms, becoming pawns, no less important than the familiar weapons of war and peace.As recipes for organization they are also recipes for political constitution possessing the disposition of a polity with their capacity for collusion, persuasion and aggression. Most also thrive by the cunning of stupidity-a denial of extrinsic logic and circumstance in favor or compatible information. The discussion reconsiders classic forms of resistance in light of the often unpredictable successes and failures of these environments, rehearsing a political imagination that permits duplicity and comedy in countering the violence of remaining intact.

As lubricating agents of a market, spatial products arc usually presumed to be innocent of involvement in the extreme spaces of war. Yet even the most banal space has been a military target, acting as an apparatus or a provocation of aggression. Moreover, the architecture of warfare evident in detention camps, military bases, and border crossings is eerily similar to our own familiar offshore real estate cocktails, with their devices for security and territorial conquest. Like any camp or zone of conflict, the next free trade zone, data haven, tax shelter, or residential golf development seeks immunity as an exceptional condition, a legal lacuna or island entitled to special sovereignty and exemption from law. Giorgio Agamben's argument chat the camp is a place of legal exception or lawlessness becomes all the more compelling when he also argues that this condition can be naturalized or stabilized as a political paradigm that reappears in the "zones d'attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities."4

A strange political content harbors in the worlds familiar cyberpoles. technopoles, and agripoles--air-conditioned Dubais and Jebel Alis of the architectural soul. The classic indicators of political contention may not be effective in exposing their disguises. They ideally exist in a self-reflexive political quarantine. Yet attempts to secure political exemption may, paradoxically, land an organization in the crosshairs of the conflict they thought they had banished.