From Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 415-417

State sovereignty is usually conceived of as a monopoly of authority in a particular territory. Today it is becoming evident that state sovereignty articulates both its own and external conditions and norms. Sovereignty remains a systemic property but its institutional insertion and its capacity to legitimate and absorb all legitimating power, to be the source of law, have become unstable. The politics of contemporary sovereignties are far more complex than notions of mutually exclusive territorialities can
capture.

The question of territory as a parameter for authority and rights has entered a new phase. State exclusive authority over territory remains the prevalent mode of final authority in the global political economy. But it is less absolute formally than it once was meant to be and prevalence is not to be confused with dominance. In addition, critical components of this authority that may still have a national institutional form and location are no longer national in the historically constructed sense of that term. One way of deciphering some of these issues and opening them up to a research agenda is by singling out the capability represented by the power of the geographic border in the modern nation-state project.

We are seeing the formation of global, partly territorial alignments that incorporate what were once protections encased in border regimes. Insofar as the state has historically had the capability to encase its territory through administrative and legal instruments, it also has the capability to change that encasement -- for instance, deregulate its borders and open up
to foreign firms and investment. The question that concerns me here is whether this signals that the capabilities entailed by territoriality, a form of exclusive and final authority, can be detached from geographic territory. Such detachment is conceivably partial and variable, depending on what is to be subjected to authority. This in turn raises a question about how the issue of borderings can function inside the nation-state.

This detachment today assumes two forms broadly speaking. One is that the border is embedded in the product, the person, and the instrument: a mobile agent endogenizes critical features of the border. The other is that there are multiple locations for the border, whether inside firms or in long transnational chains of locations that can move deep inside national territorial and institutional domains. Global cities account for a disproportionate concentration of such border locations; the latter are
mostly institutional locations that assume a territorial correlate, for example, the large concentration of international banking facilities in New York City. Institutional locations in principle need not have territorial correlates. The locations of bordering capabilities are in a phase of sharp unsettlement, which opens up a whole new research agenda. If there is one sector where we can begin to discern new stabilized bordering capabilities and their geographic and institutional locations it is in the corporate economy.

Thus, rather than conceiving of the much noted new mobilities as a function of globalization and the new information and communication technologies, I argue that these new types of mobilities also arise from a third criticaldimension: the fact that state border capabilities centered on nineteenth and twentieth-century geographic concepts of the border could switch into nongeographic bordering capabilities operating both transnationally and subnationally. In this process, particular legal protections get detached from their national territorial jurisdictions and become incorporated into a variety of often highly specialized or partial global regimes and thereby often become transformed into far more specialized rights and obligations. I also see in this dynamic capabilities jumping tracks and becoming lodged into a novel organizing logic. One example is the bundle of rights granted by host states to foreign firms under the WTO which unsettles older national regimes. Many of these rights and guarantees derive from what were once national rights and guarantees used precisely to distinguish national firms from foreign firms; these rights and guarantees were also one critical component in the building up of the state's exclusive authority over its national territory.

Such shifts from geographic borders to embedded bordering capabilities have been far more common and formalized in the case of major corporate economic actors than they have, for example, for citizens and migrants. Firms and markets have seen their advantages shift toward new types of institutionalized protections while for citizens this has not been the case. The international human rights regime is a weaker system of protections than the WTO provisions protecting the cross-border circulation of professionals.

It is also weaker, through far broader, than the specialized visas for business people and the increasingly common visas for high-tech workers. As national states are directly and indirectly involved in both the human rights and these business regimes, one question this raises is how much divergence in critical regimes a system can accommodate. read more

There was once, in the past century, the 20th, a "free world" and a "Communist world," each obeying its laws, its images, its lies and its idols, and a "Third World" which attempted to separate itself from the two others thanks to its size and despite its weakness. When the tripartite world of bipolar nuclear stand-off seemed to disappear with the end of the Cold War, it was believed that the earth would finally become peaceful, or at least conform to the order outlined in the UN charter. This belief buoyed the courage and conscience of the nations allied against the Iraqi dictator after his invasion of Kuwait. But the illusion did not last long. Why?

The World has by definition retained its "shape," but the UN must bow before the whims of its leader. The United States is determined to shape the world in its own image. It is a world united by a principle of disorder, a world-chaos, which is nothing like an orderly French garden. It took ten years for this project to take shape in the United States and spread across the earth, with its own particular debates, truths, stakes, methods, vocabulary, myths and lies.

A "chaos" has now completely, and for years to come, replaced the orderly world of the Cold War. Nonetheless it has a dynamic morphology: an overdeveloped core, zones forming constellations of democracy or free market clusters in circular form, then, further away, zones separated by flexible or ephemeral institutional, economic or military membranes; zones in crisis,
zones of barbaric violence, social wastelands and slow or rapid genocide; a surveillance system consisting of observational satellites and of bureaucracies to interpret their observations and databases; a
non-hierarchical system of communication, telephone, internet, cyberspace, an infosphere structured as an anarchic, but diversified, space. A system of repression as well: mobile or fixed military bases and stockpiles all in coordination to maintain the logistics of global military intervention; systems of alliances and Euro-American command systems under American control.

This structured chaos follows a fractal model. Its zoning appears at every scale: on the global scale, the continental scale, the regional, national, and provincial levels, and perhaps even at the level of cities, neighborhoods, families or individuals, since the crisis reaches all levels.

Tell me what your cross-fortress is, your social wasteland, your genocide and your logistical means of expeditionary intervention, and I will tell you who you are. Emperor, king, Mafia boss, respected citizen, angry ghetto resident, junkie, madman, suicide victim: this empire of disorder is not a super-state; it imposes itself at every level. read more

In the coming weeks, underfire will launch into its analyses, queries, interventions, polemics. Challenges and critiques. Retorts and rebukes. Participants will throw around words and expressions like these – without the quotation marks (which is the very downfall of their argument: keep the marks there!): “the West”, “the Islamic World”, “the Middle East”, and a whole parade of others. There will be plenty adjectivised versions of human entities, there will be acquiescence to dominant conceptual frameworks, there will be plenty of free marketing and advertising for a whole bunch of systems of belief or movements by continuous discussion of their pretty dismissable tenets and foundations. Landmasses and geographical bodies will bear the names given to them by their most recent conquerors, and folks will be “writing” with much evocation of the various rights and wrongs in/of nation states and systems.

I, prelude-man, in this my soliloquy, in the prelude not just to underfire but to the Manifestoes, would like nothing more than to give myself the right, I, Parsa The First, Parsa I, ushering in the Death of my Authorial Self and the Sacrificing of my Literature for the Purpose of the Clear Communication of Ideas, to just outlaw some these practices and lay down the laws, oh yes that would be sweet, lay down the Laws Governing the Discussions. That, though, is just not my style! And so in lieu of that, I want to share with all of you a totally stunning but real scene that I experienced a few months ago in what we would call a war zone.

Truly an unforgettable spectacle, an intervention of the most flabbergasting kind – the one that lets you not only not forget it, but lets you not go on without an examination of your practices, especially those that have to do with the use of words, and of writing in general. It was in a geographical region that shall go unnamed – it doesn’t really make any difference, as you’ll see. I did chance upon the scene as I was just snooping around, my freelance self. After the witnessing, I ran to my hidden abode and just put some notes down in a, well, notebook. I wrote it in the present tense, to capture its immediacy. I want to just relay those notes, without embellishment. Just to set the scene: this was a pretty much ruined part of town, ashes, burnt-out components of a whole variety of objects (and perhaps people), devastation, utter numbness on the part of anyone who would venture those ways. You could occasionally hear rockets, gunfire, rounds, somewhere out there, hopefully far from where you were. No downpour of bombs, not again, not yet. And so the quick venturing out, and then the quick venturing back. Armed conflict: its very presence, its traces, its din, its horror, its stench. I am not, forgetting that underfire is all about armed conflict. Again, this is a true story – and I urge all to ponder its many layers of meanings and challenges to any scriptoral practice. read more

Long ago, long long ago, friends and colleagues, and a very very very long time ago it was: I made up my mind, resolved a critical issue, fashioned a response to one of my central preoccupations:

It was in the coffeeshops of Vienna: among the elderly folks bent over comatose reading their papers, the aroma of their coffee, the heaviness of old-world establishments implanted in their concepts and world views, almost blind to all that surrounded them, in a metaphorical fogginess, not to mention the literal, enveloping the place, I, a young directionless lout in a corner booth reading my Kafka and my Nietzsche, in the corner booth I was saying, feasting on a cheese sandwich, all I could afford, taking one bite out every few minutes, to make the sandwich last, as long as possible, and, in fact, paying less attention to the books under my eyes than the eyes of the people around me, and their gazes, their untold tales, their sadness and their daze (the story of my life!); it was in the cafes of Paris: so long removed from the mythological people and events that surrounded them: with the cliché but o so true brooding poet across, the students and their perfectly lined notebooks, the philosophers – yes, there is a place where philosophers are a breed, and hang out, and read, and: are not considered fools; it was in the diners: of where else, but of the city, New York version: next to the New York football Giants’ fans and the Jets’ fans and the Mets’ fans, with the good people of the nypd and the attorneys and the workers on their breaks, blaring above us, behind us, all around us, the unbearable blasts of the all-news channels and their tickers, making these same good people comment on ‘them terrorists’ and ‘those damn idiots’ and the rest; it was in the recollection of a day in Tehran, one, only, when I sat in a long-lost coffee shop, where, supposedly, other scribblers of decades-ago had also sat; before the ocean in Samana, on the Eastern coast of la Republica, Dominican version, seeing before me the great expanse of ocean, green-blue and the sky, cyan and purple, under the palm trees, by the hammock (and not in), it’s true, not a sound around, not a soul around: I had resolved, this I had done, in these corners of the world: I had resolved: read more

Under Fire is an ongoing art and research project for the analysis of war and political violence. It explores the organization, representation, and materialization of armed conflicts: their structural, symbolic, and affective dimensions.

The next Under Fire will take place during the period 16 October - 10 December 2006, as a project for the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville.

At the core of this project is an online forum. We invite you to subscribe to the forum and participate in the discussion. To subscribe, send a blank email to: underfire-join@underfire.eyebeam.org

In structural terms, Under Fire is a programmatic zone that allows for three different modes of engagement: discussion, enaction, and assembly. Each of these modes involves varying degrees of materiality, incorporating both online and onsite locations. A continuous flow of discussion runs through the core of the project, yet this discursive material gets assembled and enacted in varying forms and rhythms to meet very specific conditions of reception -- whether in terms of geographical context, media environment, or social setting. Each enaction and assembly provides a vital platform, to help synthesize the material and bring it to a new level of organization, as well as to catalyze new relationships between participants.

What emerges is a communications ecology of actors, intensities, and rhythms both synchronous and dissonant. It is a communications ecology that connects people in very real historical circumstances, who participate from different cultural locales and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from the humanities to the social and political sciences to journalism and activism. It allows for the manifestation of agencies, identities, and drives and the development of interdisciplinary, cross-cultural social networks, cultivating new forms of assembly.

This instantiation of Under Fire is a project for the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (http://www.fundacionbiacs.com). read more