Violence against the city is also violence foreign tothe city, with the city posed in its classic Weberian form as the siteof civility, civics, and civilization itself and violence posed as thebarbaric destruction of these and other manifestations of urban culture.Bogdanovic’sessay reintroduced the term "urbicide" into architectural discourse,and much of the subsequent discourse on urbicide has reproducedBogdanovic’s opposition of urban culture and pre-, non-, or extra-urbanviolence, albeit in somewhat more muted terms. Thus, accounts ofurbicide often characterize the city by such descriptors as"heterogenous," "multicultural," "cosmopolitan," or "European" andviolence against the city as "ethnic," "ethnonationalist," "tribal," or"barbaric." In accounts such as these, culture either is reserved forthe city or is regarded as more modern and developed as it is moreurbanized; reciprocally, cultural forms and processes are circumscribedor deleted from violence against the city, which becomes animpenetrable black box of irrationality in the process.Tocapture the complexity of destruction, a second trajectory of discoursehas taken a dialectical position—imputing rationality to destruction.In The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, Robert Bevandescribes "war against architecture" as "the destruction of thecultural artifacts of an enemy people or nation as a means ofdominating, terrorizing, dividing or eradicating it."Bevan describes these means as a series of strategic intentions: ethniccleansing, terror, conquest, revolution, and partition. Other accountsof rational destruction have explicitly posed themselves as correctiveresponses to the inadequacy of accounts based on irrationaldestruction, arguing, for example, that the "purposeful destruction ofcultural heritage is a product of rational, politically motivatediconoclasm rather than purely ignorant and venal impulses."Inthese claims, as in all rationalizing accounts of destruction, intentsare collapsed into effects, with these intents understood astransparent to both their authors and their victims: these accountscomprise, that is, an auteur theory of destruction, with theinvestigation of destruction focusing on the identity of that auteurand the intentions underlying its employment of violence. Anexamination of destruction through the identities and intentions of itsauthors can certainly provide useful information. However, therationalization of destruction reproduces the key problem of theposition it seeks to correct: whether rationalized or irrationalized,destruction is nevertheless denied the autonomy that criticalinterpretation would grant any cultural phenomenon. Reduced to anirrational irruption, destruction is presumed to be unreadable; reducedto a rational instrument, destruction is presumed to be already read.
www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1531-314X.2007.00167.x?prevSearch=authorsfield%3A%28HERSCHER%2C+ANDREW%29