Metropolis

The concluding Chap. 12 then reprises the overall conviction animating the book, framed in nomad witness, giving rise to metropolitan culture. Bedouin suffering in conjunction with the 2023 Israeli grotesquery visited on Gaza and Palestine in general, earmarks the “land without a people” deception giving rise to Zionism already in the late nineteenth century. Pastoral nomadism does not fit within the legibility demands of either nation-state insistence on borders or the UN attempt to secure Indigenous rights but rather hints a different land-tenure relationship. Once more tracking from Deloria’s notion of an inchoate “Watching,” haunting topography and intimating no-go zones of wild sanctuary, we trace by way of Kimmerer’s treatment of the Anishinaabe “cannibal myth” and Long’s deployment of Otto’s Tremendum, what happens as those “boundary-omens” are violated. But here we especially focus on the usurpation of such land-watching as the core concern of city-organization seeking to render labor- and crop-production entirely legible and thus taxable, in ever-intensified armatures of extraction and surveillance (a la James C. Scott’s “seeing like a state”). The characterization of this urban monitoring by French scholar/theologian Jacques Ellul—exegeting the Hebrew word for “city,” ‘iyr—as a modality of “Watcher Angel,” embodying both fear and anger from a nomad point of view, anchors the final exposition. It is tellingly supplemented by David Wengrow’s work on ancient urban production of “monster-emblem” seals and statues to “watch over” trade goods and palace buildings. Within such a purview, Luke’s version of “shepherd flock-watching by night” juxtaposed to “Roman census-taking by means of city-of-origin roll-calling” (Lk 2:1-20), gives provocative hint of the historic struggle that culminates in gospel messaging about apocalypse whose ultimate and reiterated counsel is to “Watch” (Mark 13 and correlates in Matthew and Luke)! And John’s book-length version of such a vigilance-keeping going by that very name (“Apocalypse”) deepens the wondering about wandering in forecasting Great City (Babylon) demise brought on by an advent of Horsemen (Rev chapters 18 and 6). The chapter and book concludes in positing that such a comprehension of city-character could further be queried as a kind of incarnation of “evil eye” premonitions whose mobilization of an eviscerating “envy” has now gone global and increasingly irresistible in the social media fetishization of selfies in search of “likes.” The eye is now panoptical in the I-phone, and the metropolitan monster-maw is planet-wide. But if not checked, its final meal will be itself.