The theatrics of contemporary city marketing were thus put into the service of the political symbolism of the West-and French republicanism in particular-yet they remained fundamentally ambiguous due to the unstable, fickle nature of light, its profuse functions and semantics.Ī similar phallic darkening had taken place earlier that same week, on Monday, January 2, in Cologne, Germany, when the lights at the famous cathedral went off in another administrated statement of discontent and enforced urban communality. 2 As if this interruption of electric current transposed into GIF-like loops to be consulted at need or desire were the ultimate sovereign act, some powerful sign of control over image and infrastructure, a somber middle finger to Islamicist terror and the forces of darkness.

1 Somewhat quirking the equation of light and truth, the world was called upon to “See the Eiffel Tower Go Dark in Honor of Paris Attack Victims,” preferably in short online clips. This disastrous outcome notwithstanding, switching off the lights at a public landmark was considered a gesture of collective grievance and resilience in the face of acts of violence that not only destroyed lives but touched at core values remaining from the great project of Western Enlightenment-namely, freedom of expression and secularism, scientific reason and the rule of truth, each emblematically associated with, well, light. When the lights at the Eiffel Tower went off, the gunmen were still on the run, and a third terrorist was about to kill four hostages in a Jewish grocery store in Vincennes on Friday, January 9. On January 8, 2015, at 8:00 p.m., the Eiffel Tower was stripped of its spectacular illumination for six minutes following the orders of the Paris town hall, or someone in the higher ranks of the French nation’s government, who had decided that dimming the lights of the “iconic” monument in the “City of Light” would be an appropriate response of memory and mourning in the aftermath of the killings in the offices of Charlie Hebdo the day before and the killing of a police officer that same day. The glistening, glittering, blinking structure turned into a skeleton of blackness, with only a few lights remaining in the picture.

Destroy the tidiness of the city