REVOLT AND CRISIS IN GREECE
interpret and analyse the functions of the jungle. Density was what was at stake in designing the city of the Enlightenment and the craving for density paved the way for the domination of commerce. The city that should allow both adequate blood circulation (read: the unimpeded flow of goods and people through its road arteries) and successful breathing (read: adequate ventilation of buildings and the likely presence of a green component)11 was a city primarily obliged to manage densities (frighteningly similar to modern calls for bio-climatic design). And this demand for management was recorded, as history conclusively proves, in a broader demand for civilian control. The doctrine of social control is based upon these biological functional necessities of breathing and blood flow. This is rather paradoxical, considering that the political Hobbesian demand for eternal escape from the natural condition presupposed natural functional frameworks. And that this denial of the natural pre-political condition could not ultimately be conceived outside natural, biological, or apolitical frameworks. The demand of dominant urban design from the Enlightenment onward therefore brought a “biological” type of warfare, attempting to rewrite the contract in space. And careful densities constituted the syntax for such a successful rewriting. This biological warfare had already been organised since the time of the Victorian city through a moralistic campaign concerning public health, and it subsequently annexed parts of the (micro)biological discourse to displace their “dark” neighbourhoods spatially and their “dirty” social life politically. Official medical town planning was therefore called to organise obedience in territorial terms and, in so doing, to eliminate the possibility of a territorial breach of the social contract. Yet nights and days like those of December serve to remind us how urban space was, is, and will remain a site of deviation too. The Situationists were well aware of all of this when they wrote: if the city’s history is the history of freedom, it is also the history of tyranny, of state administration controlling the countryside and the city itself. The city has so far only managed to comprise the territory of the historical struggle for freedom, not its acquisition. The city is the environment of history because it comprises simultaneously both a concentration of social power (which makes its historical undertaking possible) and a consciousness of the past. (Internationale Situationniste 1979: 120)
68
A consciousness that keeps alive the tradition of the oppressed found in Benjamin’s eighth thesis, and which will explode within the uncontrol-