Public Fear, Final Discussion; ANY 18; 1997

Ralph Rugoff: .Fear adds a piquancy to urban life thats quite necessary and also provides a binding mechanism for communities. Interventions get the whole cultural life of the city going. Ralph Rugoff: The violent psychopath as the agent of the civilizing process. Anthony Vidler: I dont think that its an accident that the kinds of spaces weve been discussing are dark and brilliantly lit. Because to have dark, you also need brilliant light. Anthony Vidler: Its comforting to be surrounded by darkness when the candle is the light and its throwing a beneficent light. Where the darkness of the baroque is the darkness of a mystery, the darkness of modernity is a darkness of fear because it cannot be erased by light. It is only thrown into contrast by light. Elizabeth Diller: A new site of fearfulness is a site of total illumination. Arjun Appadurai: Immigration provides a clear example of state-mandated compulsory mobility People who say they have come to stay- are actually made to move. It makes you rethink the idea that incarceration is usually for the subaltern and movement for citizens, those who manage. People who actuallly wished to stay were put back into a narrative of movement They were pushed into circulation against their will. Anthony Vidler: .resistance to movement transgresses the modernist law of managed mobility in which everybody and everything has to keep circulating. But immobility is traditional and it is rooted. Immobility has to be managed in an enclave, but if it intrudes in its fixity within mobility, then it becomes a very powerful flashpoint against the great apparatus of managed space As in the Simpson trial every single piece of detection was correct, every single clue was collected, every single trace was marshaled, and Simpson was about to be put in place. But the defense brilliantly mobilized the mobility of space- which ought to have been the privilege of the prosecutorsagainst the prosecution.