Equal parts Borges, Burroughs, Baudrillard, and Black Ops, Dispute Plan
to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution charts a treacherous landscape
filled with paranoid master plans, failed schemes, and dubious
histories.
Benjamin H. Bratton's kaleidoscopic theory-fiction links the utopian
fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of
security and control. Both rely on all manner of doubles, models,
gimmicks, ruses, prototypes, and shock-and-awe campaigns to realize
their propagandas of the deed, threat, and image. Blurring reality and
delusion, they collaborate on a literally psychotic politics of
architecture.
The cast of characters in this ensemble drama of righteous desperation
and tactical trickery shuttle between fact and speculation, action and
script, flesh and symbol, death and philosophy: insect urbanists,
seditious masquerades, epistolary ideologues, distant dissimulations,
carnivorous installations, forgotten footage, branded revolts, imploding
skyscrapers, sentimental memorials, ad-hoc bunkers, sacred hijackings,
vampire safe-houses, suburban enclaves, big-time proposals, ambient
security protocols, disputed borders-of-convenience, empty research
campuses, and robotic surgery.
In this mosaic we glimpse a future city built with designed violence and
the violence of design. As one ratifies the other, the exception becomes
the ruler.
e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton
Vidokle
