Keller Easterling: Subtraction
Jordan Crandall asked that I provide a few side bar comments this week from a book of mine that came out this year: Enduring Innocence: Global architecture and it Political Masquerades. The book looks at spatial products that incubate in several species of zone-outlaw enclave formations or "parks" not unlike the zones about which Alain Joxe writes. The book focuses on the instrumentality of duplicity, the preference for manipulating both state and non-state sovereignties-for alternately releasing and laundering power and identity to create the most advantageous political or economic climate. It follows transnational forces as they seek out relaxed extra-jurisdictional forces (SEZs, FTZs, EPZs etc.) while also massaging legislation in the various states they occupy (NAFTA, GATT). Various enclave forms with various legal parameters, merge and hybridize to create new legal habitats like free trade knowledge villages and special economic tourist zones. They are the aggregate unit of many new global conurbations and the mechanism for a mongrel form of exception. Many, calling themselves "cities," sport a civic enthusiasm associated with entry into the global marketplace. Others occupy a hidden lawless area offshore, operating just on the safe side of engineered criminality. Other head-quartering corporations see themselves as global leaders worthy of quasi-diplomatic immunities. In their parastate capacity they may provide the support and expertise for transportation and communication infrastructure, relationships with IMF and the World Bank, or mercenaries in a global war.
Jordan invited me to offer something from one of those stories-a story about the global demolition industry and its mergers with both global defense and entertainment industries. In the story, a company, CDI, implodes buildings. For instance, it implodes dysfunctional high-rise housing, a building type that sponsored its own demolitions in both its inception and occupation. The company is asked to create urban spectacles when imploding those Las Vegas towers that must be recast for the most ephemeral marketing wrinkle. It performs explosions and demolitions for Hollywood special effects. Since the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 implosion (by others), the company has worked for the State and Defense Department on blast-proof building, urban warfare and security.
I suppose it is a story of Total War par excellence-a clear moment when it is difficult to find no boundaries in the infrastructure of war and militarization of culture.
And yet, while the story hopefully provides a grace note to your discussion of war infrastructures, I also wish to follow a contrary train of thought. While nourished by theories Total War, one naturally resist their purity and sometimes their swagger. The discussion (your discussion) has advanced so far beyond something like Virilio's "I am read seriously by the French military." (A zero-hour claim to relevance cum Gilbert and Sullivan lyric.). Still there is another research of infrastructures and their violence that does not conform to the suppositions of Total War-a research of the phantoms and contradictory information outlying the epistemes of war. These political phantoms are not so easily taxonomized or moralized by either the left or the right. One wants to train the mind to also look the other way, to find those duplicitous forces of infrastructure building that, like pirates, avoid war at all costs because it is bad for business. Among the grand strategies and vilified motives are stray details that may actually cause a cessation of violence, a shift in sentiment or a turn in economic fortunes that is not predicted by political orthodoxies. I am also curious about the levers and toggles of this indirect political ricochet.
> Keller Easterling