park life by sven lütticken

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72 Open 2004/No. 6/(In)Security

Sven Ltticken

Park Life

The need to keepout the big, bad,unsafe world isgrowing, asevidenced by theincrease in enclosedspaces. Using theconcept of thehuman park intro-duced by PeterSloterdijk in 1999,as well as old andnew examples fromfilm, architecture, artand television, SvenLtticken wonderswhether the new

societal form theseplaces conjure upfor us is in fact safer.

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Contemporary space is quickly becomingless homogeneous. Gated communitiesand other closed, fenced-in spaces areproliferating. This is not, of course,unprecedented. We are dealing with a return of something that modernityseemed to eradicate bit by bit, but thisreturn occurs from within capitalistmodernity (or postmodernity) itself. Themodern age held out the promise of acontinuous space that does away with oldprivileges and restrictions (based on class,religion, property or ethnicity). Duringthe French Revolution, a proposal for anew map of France was drawn, with astructure of provinces that had the shape at least in the first, most ideal drawing of perfect squares.1 The whole of Francewas turned into aperfect grid. Thisproposal, which wassoon diluted until thegrid structure wasbarely recognizable, shows modern,disenchanted, abstract space in a terrify-ingly radical manner. In somewhat lessspectacular ways, this development ofmodern space meant the erasure of theold legal and physical boundariesbetween the town and the countryside, as town walls were torn down andreplaced by a less drastic transition. Butthe current segregationism, which appearsto reverse that process, is in fact an effectof capitalist modernity itself. Geometryand arithmetic take on the power of thescalpel. Private property implies a spacethat has been overcoded and gridded bysurveying and, elaborating on Deleuzeand Guattari, if the scalpel cuts deepenough, the homogeneous, gridded spaceof modernity is cut into pieces.2 The

modern nation state,although it may haveseen internal spatialcoherence and conti-nuity as an ideal, is itself a fenced-in pieceof land that people from other countriescannot enter at will.

Some of the new closed spaces, thoseintended for recreation or leisurely living,take the form of parks. Up to and wellinto the nineteenth century, access toparks was often restricted to a select elite;not everyone was deemed fit for a taste ofArcadia. But the nineteenth century alsosaw an increase in public parks, in theoryopen to all. Before the French Revolution,Marie Antoinette had a little Disney-likevillage constructed in the park ofVersailles, the Hameau, where she couldpretend to lead a bucolic life away fromthe stifling court, but also free fromconfrontations with any real peasants orpaupers. The age of the Hameau seems tohave returned, not so much for individualqueens as for a small bourgeois upperclass. This tendency is reflected in symp-tomatic fictions like Peter Weirs film TheTruman Show (1998), whose protagonist isliving in a small town that is in fact ahuge, domed TV-studio a simulation oflife. The scenes that show this town,Seahaven, were filmed in a real Floridatown, Seaside, a neo-Victorian fantasy forthe wealthy. Seaside, built between 1984and 1991, has also inspired Disneys morerecent Celebration development a towncompletely controlled by the Walt DisneyCorporation, where everything is bannedthat might be a blemish on this idealizedsmall town America. Celebration, likeSeaside, defines the good life in terms of asecession from the rest of society. The big

1. Daniel Nordman, Marie-VicOzouf-Marignier, Atlas de laRvolution Franaise 4: Le territoire(1): Ralits et reprsentations,ditions de lcole des Hautestudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris1989, p. 29-30.

2. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari,A Thousand Plateaus (1980),transl. by Brian Massumi, TheAthlone Press, London 1988, p. 212.


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bad world has to be kept at bay. A theme-park town such as this demonstrates thatthe real and fictional fenced-in spacescannot be kept neatly apart; Celebrationis a phantasmagorical reality. If TheTruman Show is just fiction, and non-Disneyfied gated communities just asocial and political reality, they nonethe-less all function in the symbolic register ofcontemporary culture.

The rationale behind these settle-ments, with their varying degrees offictionality, can be elucidated by the termhuman park, which was introduced byPeter Sloterdijk in his notorious lectureRules for the Human Park (Regeln fr denMenschenpark). At the end of this lecture,given in 1999, Sloterdijk made somereferences to genetic engineering thatwere ambiguous enough for many critics Jrgen Habermas among them toassume that he advocated some sort ofeugenics in order to improve the humanrace. Indeed, Sloterdijk seems to take itfor granted that genetic engineeringmight really control such a complex affairas human behaviour; an assumption thatmight as well be criticized for itsscientific naivet as for its political impli-cations. Sloterdijks remarks aboutgenetic engineering were triggered by hisdespair over the state of the humanisttradition. In his view the humanistSchriftkultur is threatened by theDionysian mass media, which appeal tothe beast in man. Whereas traditionalBildung, with its emphasis on text, hasrepresented a humanizing, civilizingimpulse, image-saturated mass medialoosen inhibitions.

Imperial Now-Time

Sloterdijk perceives a similar conflictbetween word and image in ancientRome, where the theatre (by which hemeans gladiators and similar brutal enter-tainments) triumphed over the culture ofthe classical orators, with well-knownconsequences. Taking ancient Rome as anexample of what happens to a culturewhen it becomes decadent may be afamiliar trope of conservatism, butSloterdijk is original insofar as he sees thedecline of ancient Rome in terms of aclash between media the spectacularmedium of gladiatorial fights versus themedium of writing. As the book lost thefight against theatre in antiquity, so theschool could now lose the fight againstindirect forms of violence, in television, in the cinema and other disinhibitingmedia.3 Sloterdijk might have paused tothink whether he didnot project a post-Gutenbergian view ofthe central role of the book on ancientculture, and whetherit is helpful in thepresent situation tocomplain about the decline of writing andaccuse image culture as such of beingdehumanising; it is however remarkablethat the visual culture attacked bySloterdijk actually seems to mirror itself inancient Roman spectacles.

One of the biggest blockbuster films ofrecent times is Gladiator, in which thedecadence of imperial Rome and itsaddiction to cruel spectacles are depictedin lavish detail, resulting in a violentspectacle that Sloterdijk would no doubt

3. So wie in der Antike das Buchden kampf gegen die Theaterverlor, so knnte heute die Schuleden Kampf gegen die indirektenBildungsgewalten, das Gewalt-kino und andere Enthemmungs-medien verlieren, wenn nicht eine neue gewaltdmpfendeKultivierungstruktuur entsteht.Peter Sloterdijk, Regeln fr denMenschenpark, Suhrkamp,Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 46.


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Hameau de la Reine, Versailles, 1783.

Jim Carrey in Peter Weirs The Truman Show (Paramount Pictures, 1998)

Photo Melinda Sue Gordon


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Still from The Truman Show (1998), filmed in Seaside, Florida. Seaside

is an example of a gated community for the wealthy.


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disapprove of. Whereas Walter Benjaminstated that the French Revolution sawitself as the Roman Republic returned, re-actualizing that era in a state of revolu-tionary now-time (Jetztzeit), todays cultureseems to have a privileged link with theRoman Empire rather than with therepublic.4 Our now-time is an imperialnow-time, not unlikethat of the FrenchSecond Empire and of Victorian England:with a mixture ofpride and fear of decadence and fall, thesesocieties and their artists and architectsmirrored themselves in (especially thelate) Roman Empire. This passive anddoom-laden now-time of empire cannotlive up to Benjamins criterion that themomentary link forged in Jetztzeitbetween present and past is transformat-ive, active and revolutionary. But forsome, this now-time of empire can alsogive rise to a new revolutionary now-time, in which the early Christians, espe-cially Paul, appear as contemporaries.5

Although his viewon contemporarysociety is dominatedby comparisons withRome, Sloterdijksconception of societyas a human park has a pedigree leadingback to Plato. But in his discussion of thispastoral take on society, references tophenomena much closer to home seep inas well: Since the Politikos and since thePoliteia there have been writings whichspeak about human society as if was azoo that is also a theme park; from thatmoment on the keeping of people inparks or cities seems like a zoo-political

task.6 Traditionally, parks are pieces oftamed, refinednature, spots wherenature has been madesuitable for humanconsumption. Plantshave been carefullygrouped andgroomed; if there are animals, these areeither domesticated or as in the Tierparkor zoo put in cages. In theme parks,nature and its dangers are tamed by simul-ating them in all sorts of thrilling rides; a visit to a theme park is presented as anadventure, but as safe as a visit to the zooto see lions and tigers. In the humanpark theory of society, society is a kind ofzoo for people, where their dangerousinstincts have to be curbed. Sloterdijk seespeople as animals under the influence ofculture; the guardians of the park have tobe careful to make sure that these influ-ences are beneficiary.7

It was the questionhow stability insidethese parks can bemaintained now theinfluence of the Dionysian mass media isgrowing that led Sloterdijk to his remarkson genetic engineering. The polemicsover this aspect of his speech have tendedto obscure the fact that Sloterdijks text,for all its phantasmagorical aspects orindeed because of them has the virtueof making a pervasive tendency in todaysculture explicit. Sloterdijk may refer toPlato, and his technocratic paternalismmay also remind one of the modern statein its various guises (communist, fascist,democratic welfare state), but his text isabove all marked by contemporary pre-occupations. Sloterdijk is closer to Disney

5. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul.La fondation de luniversalisme,Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance, 1997; Slavoj Zizek, TheFragile Absolute, or, Why Is theChristian Legacy Worth FightingFor?, Verso, London/New York2000.

7. Zum Credo des Humanismusgehrt die berzeugung, dassMenschen Tiere unter Einflusssind das dass es deswegen uner-lsslich sei, ihnen die richtige Artvon Beeinflussungen zukommenzu lassen. Ibid., p. 17.

4. Walter Benjamin, ber denBegriff der Geschichte (1940), in:Rolf Tiedemann, HermannSchweppenhuser (eds.),Abhandlungen: GesammelteSchriften, vol. I.2, Suhrkamp,Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 701.

6. Seit dem Politikos und seit derPoliteia sind Reden in der Welt,die von der Menschengemein-schaft sprechen wie von einemzoologischen Park, der zugleichein Themen-Park ist; dieMenschenhaltung in Parks oderStdten erscheint von jetzt an alseine zoo-politische Aufgabe.Sloterdijk, op. cit. (note 3), p. 48.


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than to Plato, though Sloterdijks visionand Disneys urbanism of exclusion canboth be seen as the return of a past thatwas never really superseded. The newcomes in the shape of a return of theancient. With Celebration, the WaltDisney Corporation has created a resid-ential theme park where the disintegrat-ing tendencies of a society that is seen tosuccumb to Dionysian Enthemmungs-medien are locked out as much as possible.And Celebration is not unique: it is justone famous example of a new kind ofurbanism in which towns are created as a refuge from a larger community, fromsociety. If the big human parks that usedto be called nations have become unman-ageable, than smaller, safer human parksmust be created for those who want tolive a quiet life. However, reality has away of kicking in, and Celebration hashad its share of crime.

Jurassic Park

In the nineteenth century, a new concep-tion of the park was born in the UnitedStates: the National Park, where a largearea of nature is placed under protection.In this kind of park, it is no longer manwho tames nature and hence protectshimself from the wilderness; it is rathernature which is protected from humaninterference. The park is, however, inprinciple open to the people, as long asthey follow certain rules. This kind ofpark has become ever more dominant;nature has to be left untainted and pure,and if there is none left it has to becreated (like the areas of pseudo-authentic new nature being created inHolland). In his writings from the late

1960s and early 1970s, Robert Smithsonattacked the nature park ideology, thengetting a new impetus from the counter-culture. In his view, conservationiststraded one myth (the myth of progress)for another (the myth of untouchedwilderness). Smithson advocated a dialect-ical approach to parks, in which thehuman and the natural, the modern andthe ancient co-exist and interact.Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator ofCentral Park in New York, was the masterof this dialectical landscape. Central Parkis an artificial creation, a wasteland turnedinto a superior new nature which keptevolving through the decades. Smithsondescribed how in the early seventies thepart of the park which is called TheRamble with winding paths intendedfor thoughtful walks teemed withhoods, hobos, hustlers, homosexuals,whom he apparently regarded as theequivalents of wild animals: Olmsted hasbrought a primordial condition into theheart of Manhattan.8 Whereas commun-ities like Celebrationare be based on thepremise that societyas a whole (the bighuman park) hasevolved into a scary place full of hoods,hobos, hustlers, homosexuals, Smithsondelighted in a dialectical park that was farfrom well kept.

Smithsons critique of the ideology ofprogress in postwar American culturewent hand in hand with a fascination forthe primordial, the prehistorical. Thekitschy dinosaur paintings by Charles R.Knight were as compelling to him asanything in official modern art (Noteimpressionistic treatment of water).9

8. Robert Smithson, FrederickLaw Olmsted and the DialecticalLandscape, in: Robert Smithson,The Collected Writings (ed. JackFlam), University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1996, p. 169.

9. Robert Smithson, A Museumof Language in the Vicinity ofArt (1968), in: ibid., p. 85.


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Picture postcard with a painting by Charles R. Knight from the collec-

tion of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, reproduced by

Robert Smithson as an illustration in his A Museum of Language in the

Vicinity of Art, 1968.

Stills from Steven Spielbergs Jurassic Park, 1993


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Stills from the Robert Smithson film Spiral Jetty, 1970


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Smithson did not so much oppose theancient to the contemporary as try toshow how and when the presentbecomes posthistorical, postapocalypic.He wanted to identify points where thelimits of the conventional view of histori-cal progress are exceeded, so that a post-historical state is created that becomes one with itsopposite, prehistory, which is also outsidethe bounds of conventional history. Theindustrial monuments of Passaic, NewJersey, provided examples for thisapproach: River Drive was in part bull-dozed and in part intact. It was hard totell the new highway from the old road;they were both confounded into a unitary chaos. Since it was Saturday,many machines were not working, andthis caused them to resemble prehistoriccreatures trapped in the mud, or, better,extinct machines mechanical dinosaursstripped of their skin.10 In Smithsonsview, oppositesalways converge andno enclosure canensure purity whether it is pure natureor an idealized reconstruction of small-town America.

The last decade has seen the rise of awidespread fascination for amalgams ofhigh tech and nature, of cutting edgetechnology and the primeval. However,this development has been marked moreby the dream of a perfect convergencethan by Smithsons insights into complexand messy co-existence. The Biosphere 2complex, a system of linked greenhouseswith a variety of climates, became a hugemedia hype when a group of scientiststries to live there autonomously in theearly 1990s, without contact with the

outside world. When it became apparentthat there were difficulties and that thestrict criteria (for instance with regard toventilation) could not be met, the pressturned against the project and its backer.Matters only calmed down whenColumbia University took over the plantand promised to run it by strict scientificstandards (recently, the universityannounced the end of the project).Whatever may be the scientific merits ofBiosphere 2, it captured the mediasattention because it was (also) somethingmore than science: it was a phantas-magorical New Eden, the promise of ahealthy, balanced ecosystem. If it werepossible to create a stabile ecosystem ingreenhouses, in an enclosed, park-likespace, then perhaps it does not matter somuch if the real biosphere the globalnature park, which mankind has managedrather badly goes to the dogs. Newparadises could be created on otherplanets once this one is defunct. The idealhuman park in the age of ecologicalawareness would have to be a nature parkas well: Paradise Regained.

The ultimate fictional nature parkof the last decade is Steven SpielbergsJurassic Park (1993) and its sequels.Smithson would probably have beenmesmerized by this film, written byMichael Crichton: after all, the themepark entrepreneur in Jurassic Park usesadvanced technology to re-createdinosaurs from their genetic material.Instead of creating peaceful inhabitantsfor the human park, as Sloterdijk hoped itwould, the genetic revolution results in anew prehistoric age. This theme park ison an island, because the dinosaurs mustunder no circumstance leave their park

10. Robert Smithson, A Tour ofThe Monuments of Passaic, NewJersey (1967), in: ibid., p. 71.


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(the inhabitants of, say, Celebrationwould not be amused if a T-Rex stalkedthrough their town). Of course the islandsoon becomes a deadly trap for thepeople on it, as the dinosaurs startbreeding and take over their theme park.The park management has screwed up,and Spielberg can stage a virtualbloodbath which would probably havethrilled the Roman audience in Gladiator.Since dinosaurs first became the subjectof science and of the popular imaginationin the mid-nineteenth century, they haveoften been used to comment on humansociety; hence it is hard not to see JurassicPark as a human park in disguise.11 Afterall, the dinosaursvoraciousness andgreed is matched bythe ruthless parkdirector and his financial backers. Theyare true creatures of capitalism. And howcould new nature created by humans beanything else but a human park?

A Franchised Free State

For a few months in 2001, the free stateof AVL-Ville existed in Rotterdam. AVL-Ville was founded by Atelier VanLieshout, the art/design/architecturestudio headed by Joep van Lieshout. Themain part AVL-Ville was the studiocompound in the Rotterdam harbourarea, which was sealed off by a wallconsisting mainly of containers. On thelot itself there were various structuresscattered around in a rather haphazardfashion including a field hospital and acar turned into a chicken coop. Therewas also a farm nearby, called AVL-Ville2. After less than a year, AVL-Ville was

closed because the town of Rotterdaminsisted that the buildings and restaurantin AVL-Ville met its regulations (thusmaking explicit the fictional status ofAVL-Ville as a state). Drawing from thebag of radical theoretical concepts, onemight opt to characterise AVL-Ville as aheterotopia, one of the divergent, marginalspaces that Foucault contrasted with theabstract, homogenizing space of capital-ism or as a TAZ, the TemporaryAutonomous Zone posited by HakimBey.12 But for all the differences betweenthese notions, bothheterotopias andTAZs are in thisabstract space, a partof it; they introducedifference, but they are not closed off.The fact that Van Lieshout envisaged anetwork of AVL-Ville franchisesthroughout the world could be linked toFoucaults conception of a network ofheterotopias, but by staging a secessionfrom society in the form of a free state,Van Lieshout effectively copied the logicof gated communities and other humanparks.

AVL works like the Atelier des armes etdes bombes (a shed for making bombs)have led critics to comparisons with thereactionary American Militia movementas well as with the Unabomber: deludedattempts to stop the permanent revolu-tion of global capitalism and to recreatesome normal, stabile society. AVL-villehas also been compared to DavidKoreshs compound in Waco, Texas another secession from society, and aparticularly ill-fated one. At the openingceremony AVL-Ville turned out to bemuch more festive and friendly. But as a

12. Michel Foucault, Of OtherSpaces (1967), Diacritics 16, 1 (1986), p. 22-27; Hakim Bey,T.A.Z. The Temporary AutonomousZone, Ontological Anarchy, PoeticTerrorism, Autonomedia, NewYork 1991, p. 95-134.

11. On the dinosaur in modernand contemporary culture, seeW.J.T. Mitchell, The Last DinosaurBook, The University of ChicagoPress, Chicago/London 1998.


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small settlement that takes the form of ademarcated compound, AVL-Ville is,however closer to Waco than to, forinstance, Constants New Babylon projectfrom the 1950s and 1960s, which tookthe form of plans for immense structuresthat would have done away with theneed to stay in a fixed place. Constantsvision could not be further away fromSloterdijks view of society as a humanpark which has to be kept in order,although Constants Roussauist view ofhuman nature may be as problematical asSloterdijks conservative one: Constantforesaw a nomadic homo ludens engagedin a perpetual drive. Between NewBabylon and AVL-Ville, something funda-mental has changed: models for socialreform (or revolution) are no longeraimed at society at large, but at smallsecessions from this society.

In the final analysis it is not Waco thatcomes to mind in the case of AVL-Ville,but Celebration, as incompatible as VanLieshouts libertarianism may be withDisneys paternalist social vision and asmuch as it may be inspired by communeexperiments of the late Sixties andSeventies, which also followed the logicof secession. Both Celebration and AVL-Ville are small human parks that havesplit off from a society that is seen although for different reasons as a largehuman park that is run in an unsatisfact-ory manner. Both use the status of privateproperty in the modern state to split apiece of land off from the state, to turn itinto a micro-state. The concept of fran-chises is also obviously derived fromcorporations such as Disney, who caneffectively blackmail national govern-ments, because they can always hop to

the next countries. Multinationals areafter all the true nomads; in the pastdecade it has become clear that perhapsonly capital lives up to Deleuze andGuattaris romantic theory of nomadism;only capital is always on the move,without any definitive reterritorializationtaking place. In Asia, this has led to theestablishment of free-trade zones wherenormal law is suspended: in these zones,corporations (or rather their contractors)can pretty much do what they want(which includes barely paying theirworkers).13 A discussion of AVL-Ville inthis context may seemstrange, as AVL-Villewas not about exploit-ing workers or evading taxes. It tried touse the human park approach to societyagainst its aims, but it did not actuallybreak with this approach. It was a humanpark dressed in the garb of a pirateutopia.

Even more than books, films or inhabitedtheme parks (whether by Disney or byVan Lieshout), it is the medium of tele-vision that has exploited the fact that wehave come to think of society as a humanzoo. One successful reality TV formatwas a show where a group of carefullyselected people live with each other onan uninhabited island, a Jurassic Park forhumans. In the even more popular BigBrother, the human park was beenreduced to tiny dimensions: one housewith cameras everywhere. It is theultimate secession, the private home,turned into a peepshow. Meanwhile,reality soaps about Ozzy Osbourne andothers reduce boredom by focusing onbizarre and famous individuals, rather

13. Naomi Klein, No Logo,Flamingo, London 2000, p. 195-229.


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General plan drawing of AVL-Ville, Rotterdam, Atelier Van Lieshout, 2001


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AVL-Ville flag, Atelier Van Lieshout, 2001. Photo D.J. Wooldrik

AVL-Ville, Atelier van Lieshout, 2001. Photo D.J. Wooldrik


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than on assorted nonentities. Having lostthe faith in the manageability of societywe watch how, in this microcosm, peoplejust barely manage to get along; wewatch how the secluded little human parkturns out to be just as complex andunmanageable as the big human park thatonce used to be called society. As inJurassic Park, the enclosed space turns outto be a trap rather than a way out.

This essay previously appeared inthe New Left Review, no. 10,July/August 2001, p. 111-118 andhas been specially revised for Open.


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park life by sven lütticken

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