LA+ TYRANNY/Spring 2016 55
“Its time to draw new maps.”1
W
hat I refer to as “the new military urbanism”2 is characterized by a normalized separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’; crumbling market fundamentalism; permanent securocratic war and ubiquitous bordering; accumulation through dispossession; a blurring of the military, entertainment, and security industries; and the mobilization of states of emergency and exception. My question in this context is how might ‘countergeographies’ be mobilized to contest and disrupt the circuits and logics of this new military urbanism? Within civil society, especially the multiple media circuits circling the globe, there has been much recent experimentation to address this question. Though scattered and often ephemeral, these experiments present an important complement to more traditional methods of resistance and political mobilization – street protests, social movements, grassroots organizations, and formal political organizing aimed at, for instance, the re-regulation of economies or the redirection of state power.
In these times of war and empire, the idea of the ‘public domain’ must move beyond the traditional notion that it encompasses media content and geographical space exempt from proprietary control, which combine to “form our common aesthetic, cultural and intellectual landscape.”3 Public domains in contemporary transnational urban life are continually emergent, highly fluid, pluralized, and organized by interactions among many producers and consumers. The new public domains through which countergeographies can be sustained must forge collaborations and connections across distance and difference. Though that’s a tall order, requiring extremely strong political and cultural mobilizations which are not currently in evidence, I propose six overlapping avenues of countergeographic experimentation that could help pave the way. Exposure First, and most obviously, countergeographies must work to render the invisible visible: to map, visualize, and represent the hidden geographies of the new military urbanism. The task of exposure must confront the fact that the new military urbanism relies on violence to obfuscate what is often taboo or invisible. Once the hidden is unhidden, its seductive and ubiquitous mythologies can be confronted and potentially reversed.4