ABSTRACT
It has become a commonplace that any economy may include both real and imaginary elements, and that the boundary between the two is often difficult to draw. The imaginary may well inform the real, or in some cases displace it. This is nothing new, and may be observed in many different locations. It defines postmodern accounts of arguments about the changing nature of the global economy, specifically the shift in developed world economies from economies based around the manufactured goods, to services, made up of, in large part, the representation of those things. The chief exponent of this world-view, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, saw the world increasingly tilted towards representations, hence the high value he ascribes to the sign (Baudrillard 1988). The first Gulf War, he argued, didn’t happen but was a media event (Baudrillard 1995).1 So it is with most economies of urban violence, the subject of this chapter. Here the real and the imaginary find themselves linked in the most profound and sometimes surprising ways; imaginary violence has a striking capacity to inform the look of cities. As Geoffrey Kantaris observes elsewhere in this volume, cinematic violence may feed into reactionary fantasies, which in turn affects real behaviour (see Chapter 3). Numerous studies of Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s describe the de facto militarization of an otherwise liberal urban landscape, with armed patrols, hi-tech surveillance, and defensive mechanisms appropriate to wartime conditions – all out of largely imaginary fears. This was Mike Davis’ hyperbolic, but still striking, argument in City of Quartz (Davis 1992). LA had become, in his words, a ‘fortress’, protected against all manner of enemies. As Ecology of Fear, Davis later treatment of LA made clear, however, the imaginary violence was increasingly detached from the real, cinematic, and literary representations it. The militarization of southern California, in other words, was as much a response to the possibility of an invasion by Martians as it was a response to high rates of burglary. In situations such as this, imaginary violence can go on to dominate the real if it is in effect a city’s defining culture. In New York, under mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, real violence declined to the point at
which the city was among the safest in the US.2 Meanwhile the most powerful cultural representations of the city, notably in film, were dominated by acts of imaginary or symbolic violence. It could be argued, therefore, not entirely in jest, that New York’s economy of violence has become increasingly post-industrial, played out less on the streets and more on the cinema screen.
