Riot Thoughts

Rough, off-the-cuff, not an expert, not an eyewitness, just a Londoner, just thinking what I've been thinking.

1. "This is criminality, pure and simple" - D Cameron. Theresa May said something very similar. Criminality, maybe, but not very simple. Criminals are not the sole source of criminality. It can be manufactured in wholesale quantities by the state and applied to sections of the population who might not actually be directly involved in criminal activities. I think most of us who live in the centre of London are aware of large groups of young people who exist in a semi-criminalised state - they are essentially close to being illegal for who they are, simply because of their age, their background, how they dress, where they live and how they carry themselves, before any crime or "antisocial behaviour" is actually perpetrated. These young people face almost unimaginable restrictions on their freedom of movement. They are policed by displacement, being moved on. The fabric of the city is increasingly built to deter and exclude them - "mosquito" sonic alarms drive them out of shops and they are unwelcome in shopping centres and privatised public space like Spitalfields. ASBOs operated spatially, banning people from certain areas. Perhaps as a consequence of this displacement and exclusion, they have become ferociously territorial, and their movement is further confined by gang allegiances and nasty little "postcode wars". (Something I've touched on before: 1, 2, 3)

2. Yesterday the containment efforts failed. At around 5pm, watching the live coverage of the start of the night's violence on Mare Street, it struck me that things were kicking off in broad daylight. The disturbances on Sunday seemed opportunistic, "copycat" - people taking advantage of the overstretched police to launch a relatively minor spree of theft and destruction. On Monday, this "opportunism" had become a strategy. A daylight confrontation meant open defiance of the police, not simply taking advantage of darkness and overstretch. It was as if, all of a sudden, groups across London realised that the police could not be everywhere.

3. It looked as if the rioters were revelling in their mobility, flowing from place to place without pattern but simply because they could. It looked like a kind of sudden freedom. Call it mob rule, call it Hobbesian anarchy; condemn these robberies, the arson, the assaults on passers-by, the destruction of small businesses. All those things were disgusting. But the kids doing them were clearly dizzy with a kind of liberation. The visible breakdown of the rule of law frightened me because I benefit from the rule of law. So do most people. But this group who wanted to rip it down, who were boasting of their desire to fight with the police, who were setting fires and snatching phones - this group clearly has a different conception of what that rule means, and (whatever "community leaders " and our political class might claim) it isn't a tiny nucleus of habitual criminals.

4. People marvelled at the stupidity of people setting fire to their own neighbourhoods. And because this behaviour cannot be simply comprehended it is called "mindless", and the rioters are called "animals". Attacking your own neighbourhood by fire and attacking your own neighbours as animals are cousin impulses, in my opinion.

5. We have done our best to make these people, our neighbours, the angry ones, go away. Now more efforts will be made to get them back in their zones, and move those zones further out into the periphery, but we're only storing up more trouble for the future. After three nights of fire, and one frightening night of chaos, people are screaming for punitive policing, which can be understood. But once the situation is back under control, punitive policing is only going to store up more trouble for the future, too. How to break the cycle? I don't know. But I know that the solution will be expensive, it will take time, and it will be hard to reduce to a slogan as simple as "bring back the birch". Difficult and complicated it may be, but we are going to have to do it eventually.

6. Those who are calling for the army to be sent in have taken leave of their senses. Unless we really are going to solidify this failure, to carve it into stone, and exclude the angry ones from the citizenship altogether, to declare them to be something more than criminals: our enemies, the enemies of the state. I don't want to live in a city in a state where that happens.

7. Fortitude now; later, along with everything else that will follow these events, let's have some curiosity, a spirit of inquiry, of exploration. Something terrible has happened in our city (and may yet continue to happen). It's damnable, deplorable, heartbreaking. But it is also extraordinary, unusual, bizarre. Slamming the door on it without studying and understanding it is a dangerous and short-term tactic. Allowing yourself to feel nothing but anger, and doing nothing but lashing out ... isn't that a little mindless? It would be nice, and useful, if we could ask London "why" without already having an answer in mind.

8. Stay safe out there.

3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Launch

The Unknown Fields expedition to Chernobyl and Baikonur - fulcrum of my promised book Toxic Tourism - is steadily clearing its no/no-go checks and trundling towards the launchpad. The official launch will be on Monday with a frankly blockbusting public forum at the AA on Bedford Square, London. The line-up is simply incredible, extending beyond the participants in the expedition to include everyone from artist Paul Duffield to UFO folklorist Mark Pilkington - plus poets, sound artists, filmmakers, it really promises to be a really fascinating day. (Liam Young, Unknown Fields co-mastermind with Kate Davies, is also the creator of Thrilling Wonder Stories, so he knows how to put on an amazing day-long event.)

I'm also in the line-up, introducing my work and talking a little about my intentions and aspirations for Toxic Tourism. To give you a taster, I will be dealing with the lure of forbidden places and wildernesses, why places like Chernobyl, Aral and Baikonur tug at the imagination, and the ultimate in getting away from it all: excursions into a posthuman, postapocalyptic world.

So, please come along.

The photo at the top of this post shows the AA's 2009 summer pavilion, and is from my Flickr photostream.

High-speed Panopticon and the Thames Valley State of Mind

Image from the Flickr stream of edwbaker and used under a Creative Commons Licence.

Road Wars, a cheapo Sky-made reality television show which follows British police patrols, is objectionable on a number of levels. It's relentlessly bombastic and sensationalist, from the titles to the thundering incidental music and the breathless, slang-heavy commentary. It's unashamed in this pursuit of sensation, interspersing the fly-on-the-plod reality stuff with "the best" (that is, the most exciting and entertaining) clips of police "in action" from around the world. It's essentially nuance-free, presenting a completely Hobbesian view of Britain in which a thin blue line of dedicated, calm professionals is the only thing standing between Decent Citizens and a feral, raging, incoherent, bloodthirsty underclass that commits crime for little more reason than sheer love of mayhem. It gives a pretty clear picture of what all British television would be like if the country succumbs to fascism.

And yet all these unassailable objections don't stop it being tremendous atavistic fun. High-speed pursuits, filmed by helicopters and from the dashboards of pursuing vehicles are naturally compelling and frankly I'm a sucker for them. It can't all be Rothko and Satie, dammit, a man needs candy. Before Road Wars, it was Police, Camera, Action that I found compulsive. There's something about the genre "just look at this maniac!!"

That appeal to the lizard brain aside, there's something else at work. From the speeding time-stamped panopticon of the police vehicle fleet, the landscape changes. "It heaved and merged like porridge," said EM Forster of the the countryside seen from the window of a train. "Presently it congealed. They had arrived." The landscape in Road Wars performs a similarly hypnotic, continuous transformation, but a century on from Howard's End we have a far less clear boundary between town and country. Road Wars mostly unfolds along trunk roads, a context-free exurban blur of detached houses, shopping centres and grass verges planted with scrawny saplings. This is where it is at its most natural - when a fleeing car takes a turn towards an urban centre or residential district (a "built-up area" in the pervasive jargon), somewhere with a bit of character and activity beyond the constant flow of vehicles, the reaction of the commentator is of course horror and the alarmist voiceover cranks up a notch, promising near-certain blood and chaos unless the police are able to do something, anything. There are good reasons to be fearful of a car chase through a city centre but in the landscape of permanent pursuit, the landscape of Road Wars, what resolves is a place where the pursuit can be tolerated and a place it cannot. Southern Britain refocuses as a place of flow interspersed with islands of stasis and danger.

For me, this connects with the familiar parcel of Britain that the rozzers are laying rubber over. Although it will clearly show any bit of suitably adrenalised official video, Road Wars focuses of the activites of the Thames Valley Police's "roads policing proactive unit" (Newspeak abounds). I grew up in Oxford, part of the TVP's sprawling beat, a rare British example of a city with proper banlieue. The centre was safe for the middle classes - the less fortunate were hutched in estates on the outskirts, around a ring road that was conveniently racetrack-like. These estates rioted and developed a national reputation for joyriding in the early 1990s, which might go some way to explain why the Thames Valley plod is the heavily tooled-up force that appears in Road Wars.

Not that the blackened peripherique had the slightest impact on us in the centre; it might have been on another planet. Central Oxford was well suited to cycling. When I reached driving age, I had no need to learn, and never took lessons. But for friends of mine in more isolated places like Old Marston and Whytham, the driving licence was a necessity - they learned right away. As soon as they did, my sense of living in a city weakened perceptibly. Piling in a car at the weekends, we could go bowling in Aylesbury, or go to the waterslides at the Oasis centre in Swindon. Southern England suddenly felt curiously Californian, or what a Oxfordshire teenager's perception of California might be. For about a year it was a boundaryless autopia, a free zone of leisure and consumption, a kind of paradise. (Then I went to university.) Road Wars suggests this endless Californian Thames Valley of A-roads and motorways, out-of-town leisure parks and grass verges, where the discrete towns and cities melted into a more general, more modern state of mind. Localism? Give me unlocalism. Adulthood seemed to arrive the day I no longer felt confined by place.

Children of the Bunker

This is part of 50 Posts About Cyborgs.

The Mark 3 Travel Device.

The end of a thousand-year war. Two races locked in the embrace of murder-suicide. Technology in reverse. Attrition on a planetary scale: every living thing, every scrap of life-sustaining environment, must be destroyed to deny it to the enemy. The triumph of nihilism, genocide as business-as-usual. Few Doctor Who serials have even come in sight of the creative peak represented by Genesis of the Daleks, Terry Nation's 1975 story. Throughout its 47-year history, Doctor Who has continually shown a frustrating lack of economy with its own reserves of imagination, flinging away fascinating concepts after only the briefest examination and then eking out unoriginal stories far beyond their natural life. The series had a routine disregard for its own continuity even before the baroque absurdities of the post-2005 "New" series. Genesis of the Daleks is different. An extraordinarily powerful scenario is thoroughly explored, and the existing Dalek timeline is enriched and extended with what is essentially a super-prequel.

As the name suggests, Genesis is the beginning of the Daleks. What's striking about it is that it feels like an ending. The Doctor, played by Tom Baker, arrives on the planet Skaro at the tail end of a millennial war between the Thals and the Kaleds, two sets of humanoid aliens. The world is devastated by centuries of atomic and chemical warfare. The armies of the two races are reduced to ragged bands of skirmishers with mismatched, salvaged equipment, the detritus of a technological civilisation that has all but totally unravelled. The combatants are in regression, on the path back to the bow and arrow. The exhaustion is palpable.

Technology in retreat.

On arrival in this apocalypse, the Doctor is informed by a senior Time Lord that, in the distant future, the tyrannical cyborg race known as the Daleks has come to dominate the universe. This outcome must be prevented, so he has been sent back to the moment of the Daleks' creation to interfere with their development - either he must snuff them out at birth, or intervene to steer the race in a less belligerent direction. There have been too many times when the Daleks were thought to be defeated and came back stronger than ever, like a hospital superbug. The Doctor has been sent ad fontes to pre-empt a Dalek universe. Even the possibility of a Dalek universe is too great a risk to take.

This might sound like Dick Cheney's One Percent Doctrine, but a viewer familiar with the Daleks' later exploits is immediately on the Doctor's side. The Daleks are near-perfect villains, "gliding like priests, talking like Nazis, chimerical yet simple, and with that unpleasantly ambiguous relation to the ground beneath them" in Jenny Turner's beautiful description from 2006. They don't just talk like Nazis, they talk like the angriest, barking, spittle-hurling Schutzstaffel creep; they are Nazis reduced to their perfect essence, in a wheeled tin can. Tinned extract of Nazi. At the moment the Doctor arrives on Skaro, we already know a little of their origins - inside their armoured shell, the "real" Dalek is a degenerate mutant, just a ball of squealing, mucus-covered malignancy. If you had one under your foot, your instinct would be to stamp down, hard. They are bad news. Wipe them out before they do any harm? Sure.

But our trip to the nursery with a flamethrower can also be educational. What could cause that kind of debasement? What sort of florid developmental trauma could lead to that sort of galaxywide psychopathy? If this is the child, what are the parents like?

Trekking across the devastated surface of Skaro, the Doctor and his companions see, in the distance, the first sign that civilisation of some kind is still operating: a domed city. They encounter a network of trenches - manned by corpses - and the entrance to a bunker. They are surprised by a raiding party, captured, and led into this underground world: the Kaled headquarters.

Inside the Kaled bunker.

Terry Nation does not play down the parallels with the Nazis. Although the Kaleds are exhausted, near total defeat, down in the bunker they're still bleating on about huge offensives and Wunderwaffe that will bring about victory. Armies are confidently moved about a situation map, although from the depopulation we've seen on the surface it's clear they represent handfuls of soliders, if they exist at all. Peter Miles plays the security chief Nyder, an SS officer down to his Iron Cross, licking his lips over lines like "The Kaled race must be kept pure!". Great faith is placed in the charismatic chief scientist Davros, promiser of the Wunderwaffe, the man whose genius has kept the Kaled war machine going, and apparent source of the Kaleds' racial rhetoric.

Nyder. The parallels with the Nazis are not subtle.

This is the first appearance of Davros, a recurring character in later Doctor Who serials, inextricably tied up with the Daleks. We, the viewers, know that the wonder-weapon he is promising is the Dalek, and his appearance tells most of the story of this creation. Davros is crippled, confined to a transport device that resembles the lower half of a Dalek; he is blind, able to see only through an artificial eye mounted on his forehead; a single withered arm operates the switches on the chair that allow him to interact with the world around him. The Daleks are, it is immediately clear, simply elaborations of the cyborg technology that has kept their creator alive. He introduces the Daleks as the "Mark 3 Travel Device" - obviously he is sitting in the Mark 2. The Dalek is presented to the Kaleds as the only possible way to survive: it is designed to travel over the toxic surface of the planet, and will accommodate the "ultimate" form of the Kaled race - what the race will mutate into when the chemicals and radiation in the environment have completed their work. Davros has, for experimental purposes, hurried this process of mutation along on a few test subjects, and the results are not pretty. The Kaleds only have Davros' word that his test subjects are really the genetic destination of their race, but their chief scientist has brought them this far, and his own state (ruined, but alive and pugnacious) is a kind of guarantee - a sort of Hitlerian brinksmanship, which says "I'm prepared to go this far, to sacrifice this much, why aren't you?"

Davros: proto-Dalek.

The Kaleds are quite captivated by Davros, and impressed by the obvious potential of his creation to wreak victory, but they are not yet so far down the step-free path to Dalekhood. There are qualms, doubts, power struggles. Some of the scientists, quite understandably, don't much like the idea of ending up as one of Davros' future-slugs. It's not necessary to relay the entire plot here: there is much (too much) toing and froing across the wasteland between the Kaled dome and the Thal dome, many captures, escapes and recaptures, a lot of intrigue and moral calculus, some unintentionally comic encounters with giant polystyrene clams, and eventually the Daleks are unleashed and do what they do best: Ex-ter-min-ate, Ex-ter-min-ate. What's fascinating about Genesis is the way it explains so much about the psychology of the Daleks and how they ended up as such compelling villains, simultaneously terrifying and pathetic, "utterly evil and utterly childish" in Turner's phrase: "What is ‘Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!’ but the most notorious command of the 20th century, done as a comic turn?"

The Daleks confer with their creator.

The childish edge is key: the Daleks are erratic, hyperactive, prone to tantrums. Their debasement could also be seen as under-development. In Genesis, Davros orders chromosomal alterations to the mutant Kaled test subjects. A scientist objects that the change will mean significant defects: No compassion, no conscience. Not defects, says Davros, enhancements! Deficiency is passed off as improvement, just as a slimy residue is being passed off as the apogee of the Master Race. Alongside under-development, the Daleks' hysteria and insanity also has an edge of claustrophobic panic, almost a horror at its own situation, trapped in a metal shell. Their superiority compex is Napoleonic, based on inferiority.

The Kaled super-race.

So they are trapped - just like the Kaleds, just like the Thals, confined to their bunkers, unable to venture out onto the planet they're fighting over without gasmasks, radiation detectors, helmets and other technological enhancements. The bunker can be seen like a kind of super-Dalek, the dome of the head poking above the surface of the planet, while the remains of each race desperately operates the controls inside. The Daleks are the products of the psychosis of the bunker.

Going further back into the rear of the fortification, you meet once again the system of staggered nearby defenses, with its small firing slits—one along the entrance axis, the other on the flanks—with low visibility, through which the immediate surroundings can be seen, in a narrow space with a low ceiling. The crushing feeling felt during the exterior circuit around the work becomes acute here. The various volumes are too narrow for normal activity, for real corporal mobility; the whole structure weighs down on the visitor’s shoulders. Like a slightly undersized piece of clothing that hampers as much as it enclothes, the reinforced concrete and steel envelope is too tight under the arms and sets you in a semiparalysis fairly close to that of illness.

That's Paul Virilio describing a Nazi-built fortification on Europe's Atlantic Coast ("The Frightening Beauty of Bunkers", The Morning News 2 February 2009, an article distilling the ideas laid out in Virilio's classic Bunker Archaeology) - the kind of structure that the Third Reich put its faith in as its manpower dwindled and defeat started to press in on all sides. Internal volumes too narrow for corporal mobility, the structure weighing down on the shoulders, semiparalysis close to illness - it's inescapably Dalekoid. The Dalek vehicle, the "Mark 3 Travel Device", can be seen as a sort of mobile, personal bunker, complete with its own raging, raving Hitler inside, screaming and commanding. It even looks like a pillbox, with the slits at the top, the swivelling weapon, the domed top.

The Doctor does not destroy the Daleks in Genesis. They keep coming back, again and again - hardly a surprise, as they are in many ways a more powerful creation than the Doctor himself, a perfectly tied knot of 20th-century pathologies, one that is for the time being quite at home in our own century as well. They're a warning about desperation, about wonder-weapons, about giving away too much for victory. Genesis of the Daleks is full of destruction and evil, but it ends on a resoundingly humane note. The Doctor plants explosives in the Dalek nursery , among the specimen jars containing the Kaled mutants. But when given the live wires that will trigger the detonation, he can't bring himself to do it. It's a striking moment - the Kaled blobs are after all, helpless, no matter how bellicose they might be. The Doctor agonises, and chucks away his chance, endangering the whole universe just to prevent himself sinking to the Daleks' level.

Genocide anxiety.

Rather than destroy the Daleks, the Doctor settles for blowing up the entrance tunnel to the underground complex, setting back their progress a few centuries, hopefully enough to tilt the scale of history against them. The Daleks are left to trundle about the Kaled bunker on their own, shrieking and plotting. Even after they dig their way out, they will never, ever escape.

Radio Alarm

A 500-word short story written on a plane using an idea destined for another project. This was written for the Campaign For Real Fear competition, where it didn't get a place on the longlist. Because of the hugely unsatisfactory last line, I imagine. Or because I screwed up the formatting of my entry, which I did. Or any number of other reasons. Photo from my Flickr stream.

Around the time he stopped drinking, he started seeing the bottles. They had probably always been there, left in the gutter outside his building, but now he noticed them. Just soft drink bottles, Coke and Pepsi mostly, but filled with yellow liquid. It was easy to imagine what this fluid might be, but hard to guess why it was being bottled and abandoned like this. The question preyed on his mind.

Many things troubled him like that. He had cut out the drink one hundred percent, the coldest cold turkey. His days were filled with slow clocks watched with a racing pulse, and anxieties that clawed at him. The nights were worse. With no drink to knock him out, he had forgotten how to fall asleep. Instead he lay in bed, between sheets that felt filthy even when clean, sweat on his face and the palms of his hands, back taut like a bow. As he stared at the ceiling, stained sodium-orange by the streetlights, terrible thoughts came to visit. Every twinge was the warning sign of painful and terminal disease. He would fail, continue the fatal trajectory the drink had shown him.

In this limbo, jaws clenched, small distractions became intolerable. The radio alarm was worst. It was old, and in its senility it had become promiscuous. When it was quiet, and he lay next to it, he heard soft voices emitting from its yellowing plastic shell. The radio was off, volume at zero, but still there were the voices. Often it was the jarring electronic bleating that comes from a speaker before a nearby mobile phone rings. Only turning it off at the mains, killing the clock, could silence it.

Presently he was able to connect the interference with the bottles. It was minicab drivers parking in his street off the main road late at night between their calls. The alarm picked up their radios, and they were leaving the bottles in the gutter after filling them in their cabs. After that, when he heard the radio alarm crackle and voices speak across the electronic gulf, he would go to the window and find the parked car, its driver visible in the light of the dashboard, waiting out the night with him.

One night, after a day spent watching his hands quivering and feeling his heart tighten, an electrostatic bark again broke into his sleeplessness. He listened to it hiss and rip, longing for a second's rest. With the clock past three, he crossed to the window.

The street was empty.

Returning to bed, the static was joined by a voice, quiet and insistent. Angry, sick, he pulled the plug from the wall. The digital display went dead. He closed his eyes.

Still the voice went on, repeating its message into the night. The plug lay on the floor, but the radio alarm spoke, buzzing and whistling through space. "You will die, you will die, I am patient, I can wait, you will die.”

Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us

I was in the Independent yesterday, mounting a weak defence of a heavily defended building.

A 30m-wide "stand-off zone" will make the new US embassy stick out like a sore thumb. "It could have been a lot worse," says Will Wiles, senior editor at Icon architecture and design magazine. "We already knew that security was paramount in the design – it's a big factor in the Americans wanting a new building in the first place. Any design would have this 30m setback, defined by the blast radius of car bombs."

This "stand-off zone" is one part of what's called "hostile vehicle mitigation" or "HVM" - a field of building I'm pleasantly well informed about, having attended a conference on designing for terrorism last year*. There are such things, for instance, as armoured trees; a growing tree can absorb steel bars that will help it stop or slow a rogue vehicle. These hostile vehicles are the car- and truck-bombs that give security planners sleepless nights and twitchy days. As I told the Indie, they're the reason the Americans have decamped to Nine Elms (they wanted a site with the necessary space for the defensive zone). The defensive zone itself was always going to be heavily landscaped, because if vehicles can just drive into your stand-off it's not much of a stand-off. And so all this "it's a fortress behind a moat" talk is old news - that is what the Americans wanted and what Kieran Timberlake has delivered. It's what all the other architects delivered as well.

Kieran Timberlake's winning design for the new US Embassy in London.

I don't see anything particularly fortress-like about the building itself, although the vaguely Corblike pilotis do suggest the hem of a skirt raised against scurrying al-Qaeda mice. Its apparent isolation and aloofness are products of the defensive zone. The contradictions built into the brief must have been impossible - welcoming but defended, open yet closed, War is Peace. This inscrutable International Style Cube is a suitably ambivalent response to that. A winsome and civil bit of Scandinavian modernism, all civic manners and democratic openness, would have been duplicitous to the point of being highly sinister. As I said to the Independent, but they didn't quote: "The symbolism seems rather appropriate to me: a shining city on a hill, surrounded by the most formidable defensive network ever known." And that skin also has potential. A complicated double-surface like that, with its brise-soleil, makes me think of fractals, and the way they contain a small area within a long boundary. It's as if the surface of the embassy has the potential to cover a far larger building, perhaps up to the street edge, but the building has shrunk back. Forgive the simile, but it's like the wrinkled skin of a detumescent penis. I mean that in a good way. Really.

New security structures outside the existing US Embassy's building in Grosvenor Square. Image from the embassy's own Flickr stream.

Duplicitous to the point of being highly sinister. I had to visit the American Embassy on Grosvenor square to get a media visa shortly before Christmas last year. Interfacing with the State Department's bureaucracy is an unpleasant and intrusive business at the best of times, whatever their efficiency and politeness (and they were efficient and polite). But progressing through the improvised security perimeter outside Arne Jacobsen's Eero Saarinen's embassy building was frankly dystopian. Part of a London square was militarised, with heavy hard defences. One progresses from queue to queue before entering the building, progressing to slightly higher echelons of security clearance each time depending on the paperwork one has brought with one. Unsmiling police officers with automatic weapons stare at you, and you realise that if you made a dash towards the building itself, you would have to enter an area of open space that designed as a killzone, surrounded by armed representatives of the Metropolitan constabulary. Behind crossfire plaza is the building itself, its generous Scandinavian spaces seemingly as distant as the country you are trying to visit. The contradictions of that space are horribly unsettling, with a strongly dystopian odour: we can see the structures of a democracy retrofitted with the apparatus of authoritarianism. It gives a sense of how far we've fallen in 10 years.

The new embassy is at least designed with these contradictions in mind, and is consequently fascinating. It's worth taking a step back to really admire what we're looking at: a building designed with explosions in mind. A shape formed by the manipulation of spheres of destruction. It could be the first London building built with attack from the ground in mind since the Second World War. (It's also a testament to the extraordinary power of terror: the fact that a few hypothetical malcontents with A-level chemistry and a driver's licence can race to the head of the queue ahead of a whole gang of other diplomatic considerations.) So, what new forms are these? Going back through my notes from that terror conference is a dispiriting experience; the bureaucratic jargon like "hostile vehicle mitigation" and "exponential decay of blast effect" does not exactly induce good cheer. There are some aspects of HVM that might give pause to Londoners. Firstly, it doesn't stop attacks, it just makes them more difficult and limits their impact. Secondly, it's primarily meant to protect facilities, rather than people. Obviously some people are protected into the bargain - I'm not saying that to make some Spartist the-Yanks-care-more-about-their-office-furniture-than-the-lives-of-honest-cockneys point, it's just a fact of life. 30m stand-off will prevent a truck bomb causing massive structural collapse, but said bomb could still cause horrific death and injury. Thirdly, HVM only protects the one facility, not the buildings around it. The plans for the new embassy show new glass blocks surrounding it at street's edge. Will they still be glass when they're built, I wonder.


That's something important to bear in mind: the effect of the new embassy's security measures extends beyond the perimeter of the embassy itself.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Chapter 1; emphasis mine

The HVM landscaping creates what can be called a "hard zone" of security. There are also nested "soft zones" of security in and around the building: the sight arcs of CCTV cameras, the streets on which you are more likely to be stopped by police or prevented from taking photographs, maybe a "no-protest" radius around the building like the one around Parliament (now scrapped), no-fly zones. The electronic haze of listening devices and broadcasting devices, security down to the ions in the atmosphere. And there are the streets on which one may feel uneasy and prefer not to linger.


The now-scrapped Parliament no-protest zone. Image: BBC.

The hard defences of Kieran Timberlake's new embassy don't bother me in the slightest. They are obvious, they invite an architectural response, they can be well-mannered and attractive, and they are in their way honest. (I'm reminded of the temporary barricades around Parliament here - unattractive black slabs that were partly reclaimed when people started sitting on them to eat their lunch.) The new US embassy has the potential to be one of the most interesting buildings in London, and I would love to visit it once it is finished (although it's possible I'm now blowing my chance). Hard zones aren't such a big deal - no one complains about the Tower of London, a fortress behind a defensive setback on the Thames. It's these CCTV-covered, drone-overflown soft zones that we need fear. Although ID cards might not be here yet, ID card culture is. We face the slow advance of soft-zone ambivalence, that creeping sense of being unwelcome on the street, a desire to look over one's shoulder. Soft zones are easy to introduce and difficult to shift; they exist in the mind as much as in the city. A bollard is just a bollard, and it can't strike half as much fear into one's heart as the sudden sense that one has brought along the wrong piece of paper.

* "Places Not Fortresses: Can and Should we Design for Terror?", New London Architecture with the Association of Consultant Architects, at the Building Centre, 27 January 2009.

Imagining the Nazis

Part of an anti-fascist photomontage by John Heartfield, via this Flickr feed.

Controversy is a strange thing. Unlike rage or disgust, you can't feel controversy – it's not an emotional response to a work of art. It is, at best, an abstract, group phenomenon, a manifestation of the hive mind, something that you can take part in somehow (details are hazy). At worst – and I think this is the case nine-tenths of the time – it is entirely contrived, imagined, a Jabberwocky invented by yellow press that can pursue targets that aren't actually causing any rage, disgust or hurt feelings. Controversy is a red herring – either the problem is something else (the thing in question is revolting, hurtful, dangerous or whatever) or there is no problem.

Over Christmas and the New Year I read a controversial book – Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, a fictional memoir of an SS officer closely involved in the Holocaust. An attempt to get inside the head of a Nazi genocidaire, The Kindly Ones was feted in France and condemned in Germany and by the influential Michiko Kakutani in the USA. A delightful miasma of ill-repute surrounded the book when I picked it up in the spring of 2009 - I then proceeded to ignore it on a shelf for some months, intimidated by its length - more than a thousand pages of closely printed hardback.

It took about a month to read - far more time than I'd normally have to devote to a book - but the effort was worth it. It's superb, and I think it's a fairly safe bet that its reputation will grow in the coming decades. Much of its content is revolting: the protagonist, Maximilien Aue, is personally involved in mass-killing of Jews in occupied Russia, and later in the mechanised slaughter of the extermination camps in Poland. He's also a sexual and moral degenerate, possessed by incestuous desire for his sister and sexual hatred of his Mother. It's not easy to like him, but spend enough time in any character's company and (if they're well written) you will at least begin to understand their patterns of thought and the how they see the world.

And Aue is superbly written. The book has its off-passages, where it drags, but at its best it is magnificent. Aue is not a front-line soldier - he is in the rearguard, theoretically charged with military security but in fact among those responsible for exterminating large chunks of the civilian population of the Soviet Union (mostly the Jews). The opening third of the book, 1941-1942, cover the helter-skelter early successes of operation Barbarossa, and for Aue the pestilent absurdities of turning the mystic hatred of a handful of daydreaming bigots into actual "actions". Much turns on the practical question of how to kill very large numbers of people efficiently: and with minimum human cost to the killers. (That's the Nazi state all over - institutional mass violence coupled with soppy-stern nannying.)

In the Caucasus, where the Wehrmacht's advance finally runs out of steam, Aue become involved in steadily more crazy hair-splitting over the questions of which nationalities should be exterminated and which should be considered potential allies – an attempt to fine-tune racial boundaries that is totally in the realm of pseudoscience, given that the whole notion of distinct races is doubtful. One character is able to voice this view at one point – in context, the moment is utterly shocking, as the story is told from the point of view of a man whose entire job is identifying and “dealing with” racial differences. Although Aue is insane – possibly at the start of the book and certainly by the end of it – he's also lucid, and makes his case. Of course he can't come close to justifying the business to the readers, but instead he stirs up clouds of relativism (at the time Aue is writing his memoir, the Vietnam war is being fought, giving opportunities for a lot of “are we really so different” talk) and attempts to show the logic of the actions where it exists. He doesn't harbour any particular hatred of the Jews; instead, for him, the “problem” is all logistics and linguistics – and efficiency, as he is at the perversely humane end of the spectrum of Holocaust engineers: if such a group is subhuman, better to use them as slaves than to waste resources snuffing them out, no? Senseless killing bothers him because it is senseless, not because it is killing.

Anti-fascist playing card, via this site and the Bibliodyssey Twitter feed.

With its involved (pseudo-)academic debates and bitchy rivalries, for a surreal moment The Kindly Ones feels like a campus novel, with the occasional interlude of ultraviolence (a rhythm that reminds one of American Psycho). This moment is cut short when Aue is sent to Stalingrad.

The Stalingrad sequence is astonishing - an awe-inspiring symphony of human misery, pain and violence that I think propels Littell's book from the merely good to the great. When Aue arrives, the German armies besieging the city have already been encircled, in turn, by Soviet armies. Inside the encirclement, the “kessel” (cauldron), conditions are beyond terrible. The imagery of Aue's arrival in the kessel is haunting – it is snowbound; an ominous mountain of wreckage overlooks the airfield, which is under constant artillery fire; a cluster of radio trucks; a line of railway carriages, buried in snow, serving as a field office. The railway goes nowhere – the airfield and the radio trucks are the only link with “civilisation”. Indeed, the airfield – and Goering's vain promise that the trapped armies could be supplied by air – is the only reason the kessel does not collapse immediately. The promise is that 1940s high-tech (in the form of radio and Junker aircraft) can redeem the situation – but it is doing is prolonging the agony. Many of Aue's (savage and strange) experiences in the city take place in the structures of modernity: theatre, factory, department store.Although it's not written as such, the Stalingrad sequence of The Kindly Ones feels like a mockery of the whole idea of technological civilisation. Having read Antony Beevor's superb book about Stalingrad, I was interested to see exactly how Littell could do justice to the real story of the battle there – but he succeeds, superbly.

There's much else - Stalingrad doesn't even take the book to the half-way point - but this isn't a review or a summary, more a sweeping together of loose ends of thought. Back to the matter of controversy. It's now 65 years since the defeat of Nazism. There is a desire, an understandable desire, to screen off the Nazis from the imagination - to keep them in the realms of heartless supervillains or comic butts of jokes, rather than flesh them out as human beings. It is somehow feared that a book like The Kindly Ones, and a character like Aue, makes Nazism thinkable again. Aue, for all his insanity and despicable traits, says "hey, see things my way", and if we read to the end, we've given him a hearing. And some believe that they shouldn't be given that hearing at all.

It doesn't matter if this is a reasonable position or not - given time, the special cultural status of the Nazis is going to crumble. We're fortunate that the first fruits of this cultural thaw are extremely high quality: The Kindly Ones and Downfall are superb. The "angry Hitler" remixes on Youtube are a sign that the dam is bursting, but luckily standards have been set quite high.

Two Very Short Stories

Houses in Ixtapaluca, Mexico. Image taken from the Flickr photostream of jmb1977 and used under a CC Licence.

[These are two stories written for the Ballardian/Savoy Books microfiction competition, the results of which have now been announced. Stories written for the contest had to explore Ballardian or Savoyard themes. "Live-Work" got an honourable mention. The second story, "Unruins", was inspired by the above image, first seen on this Things post some months ago. It's now the basis of a longer, more elaborate project, to be announced at a later date.]

Live-Work

“After the crash, all the money went out of urban renewal,” said the property developer, Maxinalon. “This warehouse conversion was slumming itself anyway, so ...”

He had moved in the dealers and the people-traffickers. The live-work units were now meth labs, and the niche coffee outlet was a burned-out husk. The redundant creatives had adapted marvellously, because the hours were flexible.

To the sound of the exhausted police beating down the period-feature, iron-braced doors (wires trailed from the smashed entryphone), Maxinalon smiled a smile that was all percentages. “We’ve exhausted the potential of regeneration; the future is obviously degeneration.”

Unruins

The machines were still moving somewhere on the surface of the mutilated planet. They still extruded the epoxycrete frames of suburban houses, open at both ends, windows gaping. In some places, the land was eight deep in rapid-rendered family homes, jumbled in the upper levels as walls intersected with pitched roofs and the detritus of civilisation. Pictures from the ocean floor were discouraging. The hunting party had found a pocket of stale air in a second level subdivision. A car radio was embedded in the wall, and snarled the signals of new lifeforms emerging in the unruins.

Bunkerlust

Robert Kusmirowski's Bunker at the Barbican Centre.

More ruins, and a touch more retro-future. Here's a review by me of Robert Kusmirowski's Bunker installation at the Barbican. It was in Icon 078, and went online on Friday. Bunker is more subtle than it first appears - as I say in the piece, it's a highly ambiguous work. Emergency or wartime bunkers are symbols of catastrophe - the last resort, the futility of the Sheffield bureaucrats in Threads, the impotent rage and nihilism of Hitler's last hours. But as well as being a bunker, it's a ruin - another pessimistic environment, tied up with (stop me if you've heard this before) melancholy and the shadow of mortality.

Put those two negatives together, and what do you get? Well, an interesting installation for a start. But do they cancel each other out, or compound the darkness? A ruined bunker could suggest that the danger has passed and the bunker is no longer needed - or it could suggest that the war has gone badly, that the crisis is terminal, that the last refuge has been breached?


Robert Kusmirowski's Bunker at the Barbican Centre.

Or a third alternative. The text accompanying Bunker stresses Kusmirowski's obsession with the past and the nostalgia that characterises his work - so the bunker may be obsolete, and one kind of danger might have passed, but it could have been replaced with other dangers that call for different responses. A quote from Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology is reproduced in the texts that come with the installation: "The essence of the new fortress is elsewhere, underfoot, invisible from here on in." Perhaps we can't even imagine a planned response to the dangers of the new world - we can't build bunkers, long-range rader networks and DARPAnets to anticipate it, so we dream of bunkers. Or perhaps we're already holed up in the fortress - a worrying thought as Virilio saw stepping into the bunker to be the first step towards the death that the bunker was ostensibly built to prevent. Whatever the cause, bunkerlust - or bunkernostalgia - certainly seems to be widespread right now.

Ruins, the future becoming the past, the disintegration of expectations of progress - these thoughts point in the direction of JG Ballard. This is from High Rise:

Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this - sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.

Robert Kusmirowski's Bunker at the Barbican Centre.

Another stray thought from Bunker. I was wandering around the installation, nodding thoughtfully, stroking my chin and trying hard to look like I was thinking about Paul Virilio and the nature of melancholy and the horror of war and all that. But in fact, more often than I would care to admit, I was thinking: "Wow, this is very like Resident Evil/The Suffering/Silent Hill."

Those are all computer games in the "survival horror" genre. In a typical survival-horror game, the protagonist - that is, you, the player - stumbles around in dimly lit and poorly maintained spaces being pursued by monsters or zombies. You can generally speaking fight back, but the mood of the genre relies on a strong and persistent feeling of intense peril - there's never quite enough ammo, or you might as well be flicking rubber bands at the armour-plated drooling thingy coming towards you down a gloomy hospital/prison/insane asylum corridor. (The lighting is key. In "survival horror" games, the dimmer is always down, or the energy-saving bulbs never quite warm up.)

Silent Hill.

I've been thinking about these games a lot lately - I recently wrote a review of Christopher Payne's beautiful book Asylum and its photographs of 19th-century mental hospitals and long corridors in advancing desuetude also led to reflections on the genre. The review is still unpublished - I might return to the architecture of survival horror when it goes live in the New Year, since this blog post is long enough already.

They Use the Train

Pudding Mill Lane DLR Station.

"Spies, terrorists, smugglers and other stealthy types use trains in Western Europe because they are fast, cheap and efficient," says Sebastian Rotella in this mysterious column in the LA Times, first spotted by Geoff Manaugh. As Geoff discusses in his post on the subject, Rotella uses the fact that railways and stations have been a venue for intrigue in popular culture for many decades as a starting point for a discussion of the alleged fondness of modern terrorists for trains. And by "modern" Rotella means Islamist, drawing murky cconnections between recent terror plots and the fact that "train stations tend to be in working-class immigrant areas where desperadoes find shelter, weapons, false documents and other tools of the trade". There follows some borderline-Orientalist musing about the exoticism and hidden danger of one such neighbourhood in Brussels. "Campaign posters of local politicians with first names like Ahmed and Fatima ... a music shop blaring desert rhythms ..." You get the picture.

Aside from its cultural insensitivity, what's really perplexing about this column is its suspicion towards the train. Rotella, an American, might find mass train use something of a novelty, so the thought of terror on rails caught his imagination. It must be the train's inherent cosmopolitanism, its relative classlessness, its blurring of individuality, that makes it suspect. Cars and vans are also very popular with terrorists - so are planes, and concealing clothing, and all areas of public assembly. This is what terrorism is: it's the weaponisation of the public domain. As Peter Sloterdijk says in his study of terrorism and modernity, Terror from the Air (my review): "Terrorism can only be understood when grasped as a form of exploration of the environment from the perspective of its destructibility."

I'm not drawing a comparison between Rotella's insensitivity and an ideology that has killed millions, but reading his article, I thought of Norman Cohn's extraordinary book Warrant for Genocide, an exploration of the history of so-called "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". This was a notorious antisemitic forgery that was among the inspirations for the Holocaust. If you ever fancy staring into the heart of hatred at its most surreal and malignant, Cohn's study of these documents is the book for you.

The Protocols claim to outline a Jewish plot for world domination, and - in line with the fascist ideologies they inspired - are fiercely anti-modern and hostile towards the city and modern technology. An aspect of this hostility is the author's specific concerns about underground railways (cutting-edge technology in the mid to late 19th century), which according to the Protocols were built by the conspirators in order to plant explosives under capital cities.

As is standard for the Protocols, this is paranoia on steroids. The author doesn't just fear that the conspirators might use subways, he suggests that the subways have been constructed specifically for the purpose of destroying industrial capitals. Their usefulness as a form is mass transit is purely a ruse. What a ruse!

This kind of fear remains current. Even before the 11 September attacks, the "conspiracy community" attached much significance to the fact that the Bin Laden family made much of its fortune in construction and therefore had the ability to mine infrastructure. A near-identical claim has been made about Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure. In these different modes of thinking, two different kinds of paranoia are evident. There's conventional terror-paranoia, fear that the environment is being exploited by rogues intent on destruction; and enhanced terror-paranoia, fear that the environment was designed and built by rogues intent on destruction. Paul Virilio's "integral accident" gone bad; gone worse.

Virilio explores the use of simulators to probe technology for potential accidents - accidents are, after all, built-in to technology, the invention of the aeroplane was the invention of the plane crash. If you're designing and building something that's meant to self-destruct, use of simulators and the machinery of "health and safety" becomes, in effect, what Sloterdijk called terrorism: "A form of exploration of the environment from the perspective of its destructibility." The machinery of "health and safety" and contingency planning involves the mass-manufacture of conceptual terrorist attacks.

Mention of the "health and safety" complex brings me to a point related to all this infrastructural anxiety: high-vis jackets. High-visibility jackets are fascinating, and almost certainly a subject I will return to, so I'll keep my thoughts here brief. It is a strange facet of our modern society (in Britain at least) that the construction, maintenance, transport and security industries have adopted the same uniform. There are entirely practical health-and-safety reasons for this, of course. But while the high-vis vest makes you more visible to moving machinery, it has the opposite effect for society at large. As one of the photographers on my recent stroll around the Olympic site said, "if you ever want to be invisible, wear a high-vis vest". And, in a curious way, they are the uniform of capital interacting with the environment. As Iain Sinclair suggested in Sorry Meniscus, the Thatcherite-Blairite money shot is a group of men with hardhats on and "tweetie-pie waistcoats" over their suits breaking ground with a gleaming shovel. "Britain is working. Hands-on management. Optimism. Good humour."