WAR INFRASTRUCTURES
Irving Goh: Counter-Disappearance, 'Stealth Democracy, ' Picnolepsy
Apologies foremost for a too delayed and (too) lengthy response to Christina McPhee's post on disappearance and others on blindness...
Counter-Disappearance, “Stealth Democracy,” Picnolepsy
Having written a prolegomenon to a “right to disappear” for _Cultural Politics_, and a short piece calling for figure(s) of disappearance in the second installation of _Under Fire_, I am of course sympathetic to Christina McPhee’s post, especially towards the end, when she makes an appeal for the aesthetic “fugue or palimpsest that develops relative differentials into which images remix, as if they are shadowy residue from the site’s ‘bare life’ ontological condition, invisible, into which they insert themselves and into which they disappear.” Till today, I still find that figure(s) of disappearance, or even the “right to disappear,” figure(s) and right that pose as dis-sensus (Rancière) to any State politics of homogeneity and totality or to any State-determined militarization of world, remain elusive. And yet perhaps they should rightly be so. It is only as elusive that they affirm their already enactment or artifactuality (what I had previously written as the ruse of the double enunciation of ‘I exist, I disappear’) of disappearance, ahead of any academic theorization. To engage with Christina McPhee’s post on disappearance is also to engage with the other posts on blindness, for disappearance goes by way of a certain blindness too. To disappear is on the one hand blinding the other from one’s presence, i.e. the other no longer sees you, or he or she is blind to one’s presence. On the other hand, to disappear is also to be blind to what goes on around oneself, i.e. the refusal to take into account, into sight, the things that are happening outside of oneself. read more
Counter-Disappearance, “Stealth Democracy,” Picnolepsy
Having written a prolegomenon to a “right to disappear” for _Cultural Politics_, and a short piece calling for figure(s) of disappearance in the second installation of _Under Fire_, I am of course sympathetic to Christina McPhee’s post, especially towards the end, when she makes an appeal for the aesthetic “fugue or palimpsest that develops relative differentials into which images remix, as if they are shadowy residue from the site’s ‘bare life’ ontological condition, invisible, into which they insert themselves and into which they disappear.” Till today, I still find that figure(s) of disappearance, or even the “right to disappear,” figure(s) and right that pose as dis-sensus (Rancière) to any State politics of homogeneity and totality or to any State-determined militarization of world, remain elusive. And yet perhaps they should rightly be so. It is only as elusive that they affirm their already enactment or artifactuality (what I had previously written as the ruse of the double enunciation of ‘I exist, I disappear’) of disappearance, ahead of any academic theorization. To engage with Christina McPhee’s post on disappearance is also to engage with the other posts on blindness, for disappearance goes by way of a certain blindness too. To disappear is on the one hand blinding the other from one’s presence, i.e. the other no longer sees you, or he or she is blind to one’s presence. On the other hand, to disappear is also to be blind to what goes on around oneself, i.e. the refusal to take into account, into sight, the things that are happening outside of oneself. read more
Alain Joxe: Weak Discipline or Decentralized Fascism?
After reading the impressive intervention of Paul Edwards I admire the brilliance and capacity of English language to shape a poetic formulation of the fading out of centralized systems and birth of a universe built as a web of webs, since the 70' or the 9O' under ruling free transnational business factories and banks. He produces suddenly the concept of "weak discipline" as a jump in a new epistemology outmoding what he calls "70s theorists of capillary power" Foucault Giddens Bourdieu. Capillarity means 'sub-millimetric flows of power' and it is not at all the Foucault’s or Bourdieu's definition for 'basic scale of power relationship' nor Giddens definition of democracy . I think we do not need to create a disordered epistemology to the limited benefit of getting a good empirical grasp on a disordered civilization. The question is not at all psychoanalytically to "free ourselves of Ur-images of closed systems". No human system has ever been closed, even academic disciplines, except in the creeds and deeds of some groups. But all systems of oppressive power has been hierarchical till now. Historically the so called 'weak discipline' is not a new civilization or culture, but clearly —(from the point of view of a historian of low roman empire or middle ages, or baroque modernization),— it is a barbarization and/or feudalization process, called "global privatization of global precocity". Emerging new transnational dominant classes are closer to a type of violent evangelist nobility or are behaving like feudal nobility between the first and the second crusade, unifying low level chivalry and princes dukes and counts, under kings of a new type, with OPA, new type of tourneys, concentrating new type of non geographical feuds, before going to the big new colonial expedition, when, on the contrary, the Pope wanted to send the warriors quickly to mid east war and alleviate the burden of war in Christianity. History is a enormous reserve of multifaceted paradigms. Foucault or Bourdieu was clearly defining power in a new sociology of oppression, posterior to central stateness. Bentham panoptic can be global or municipal targeting. But oppression is never based on a weak discipline but on a strong vertical discipline. Sometime non state- never non violent. The study of violent ordered disorder doesn’t need a "weak discipline" pattern but a strong transdisciplinary epistemology. read more
Alain Joxe: Local God's War Without End
I feel that the piece of Empire of Disorder selected as an introductory tool for this Under Fire was not totally adequate because it looks outdated, as written before the beginning of the Iraq war and the final (?) is purely rhetorical. I send to everybody this « additive conclusion » which has been written for l’Empire du Chaos ‘s Pocket Book a Spanish edition, in 2004, to deal with many questions, created in two years by the American military actions in the great Middle East, and especially in Iraq and available in 2006. The first part is in English and the second in French because time is missing for translation.
Additive conclusion to "Empire du chaos" (2004) Iraq War
I accept the idea that a set of non committments, refusals to send any help, from UNO, Germany, France, Turkey, Latin America (except Honduras), the slow committment process of Japan, the fact that Spain, Poland and others contributed only with very modest military troops, as a whole, means probably a sort of slow fading out of American power (this feeling sounds more like a European than a leftist optimism). But instead of predicting yet (like Emmanuel Todd), a « decomposition of American system », I prefer to keep as a tool a hard pessimistic diagnosis, considering the "American" Empire as a long term, extreme right ambition, altogether a coherent and fascistoïd view of the future, even, if it is absurd from the military point of view. This project is capable to cause enormous destructions and damages, before finally crumbling (like Hitler’s one or Stalin's) under the so called dominant laws of Real-ökonomie or real-strategie. Economy is always determinant in the longterm, but not quite in « short time », actions in time of war, when quick destruction, not slow production, is supposed to be the right measure of power. The question is: is it possible to avoid the third ( or fourth) world war ? Afghanistan’s War, Iraq’s War, and even Israel-Palestine War, which is an indirect US intervention and a much older one, are today, forming a new class of wars,and the US are bound to win them together simultaneaously, if they really want to be fully victorious, in the war lauched against islamist « terrorism » — an ennemy depicted as able, just like the US, to menace all the scales of power in the world. There is now three Empire’s Wars in the Middle East and the three are obviously in a dead end, within and because of a militaristic rigid doctrinary posture of war management, excluding any political version of peace. This is true for US world war and for Israel local war, urbanization process and colonial ethical purification. If the definition of this « world war » is actually romantically defined as God’s war, both by an American President by some Islamist leaderships, and by some Israeli’s religious beliefs, it is in fact to avoid any political definition of such a war and, of course, any democratic definition of peace. But democracy (in greek demo-kratia means control taking by the poeple on the economic and religious power of oligarchy). It is also a deep rooted, long term desire of global humanity, (but not necessarily in th definition which is now accepted in the US). Under this set of considerations, the professional observers of strategic problems should normally demonstrate a deep knowledge of Islam and Christian protestant or catholic, and Jewish theological debates, which is not generally the case. It introduces religious creeds in the evaluation of relations of forces, is also a corollary of a growing limitation of political and intelligence capacity, of American or Israeli soldiers, because of their status as occupation troops with no protection duties toward the civil population under their rule military colonial or occupation status is, as such, contrary to political intelligence of local situations. Every old colonial politician knows that. The danger comes when difference between the military and the political understanding of a local war management disappears. This fading out is the root of a philosophical jump into a fascist representation of violence. To make a comparison, without any God’s influence, I feel obliged to add to our middle east class of neo-imperial wars , the Colombian war and central american mexican and carribean tensions, conflicts and fights, clearly localized at the fronteer of world’s developped nucleus, and where no religious identity is at stakes. At least, these wars are totally human or inhumane. No religion war explains the fears and the fortification pattern of ennemity and exclusion. Finally, instead of deciding promptly that European Union or China could as an economical mass, be able to resist a superconsuming indebted Empire, riding a rodeo based on a Disneyland electronics domination, I prefer maintainig a high degree of doubt, mentioning that « we » non-imperial thinkers, class, poeple, nations, lays and clerks, are not yet at the level of a unified strategic and political thinking, able to control in a common debate an extreme right, imperial, American power, driving successfully the world toward new permanent social wars. The global strategic critic of the global american empire is just beginning. It won’t proceed simply with optimism good will and common sense as a californian middle class project. read more
Additive conclusion to "Empire du chaos" (2004) Iraq War
I accept the idea that a set of non committments, refusals to send any help, from UNO, Germany, France, Turkey, Latin America (except Honduras), the slow committment process of Japan, the fact that Spain, Poland and others contributed only with very modest military troops, as a whole, means probably a sort of slow fading out of American power (this feeling sounds more like a European than a leftist optimism). But instead of predicting yet (like Emmanuel Todd), a « decomposition of American system », I prefer to keep as a tool a hard pessimistic diagnosis, considering the "American" Empire as a long term, extreme right ambition, altogether a coherent and fascistoïd view of the future, even, if it is absurd from the military point of view. This project is capable to cause enormous destructions and damages, before finally crumbling (like Hitler’s one or Stalin's) under the so called dominant laws of Real-ökonomie or real-strategie. Economy is always determinant in the longterm, but not quite in « short time », actions in time of war, when quick destruction, not slow production, is supposed to be the right measure of power. The question is: is it possible to avoid the third ( or fourth) world war ? Afghanistan’s War, Iraq’s War, and even Israel-Palestine War, which is an indirect US intervention and a much older one, are today, forming a new class of wars,and the US are bound to win them together simultaneaously, if they really want to be fully victorious, in the war lauched against islamist « terrorism » — an ennemy depicted as able, just like the US, to menace all the scales of power in the world. There is now three Empire’s Wars in the Middle East and the three are obviously in a dead end, within and because of a militaristic rigid doctrinary posture of war management, excluding any political version of peace. This is true for US world war and for Israel local war, urbanization process and colonial ethical purification. If the definition of this « world war » is actually romantically defined as God’s war, both by an American President by some Islamist leaderships, and by some Israeli’s religious beliefs, it is in fact to avoid any political definition of such a war and, of course, any democratic definition of peace. But democracy (in greek demo-kratia means control taking by the poeple on the economic and religious power of oligarchy). It is also a deep rooted, long term desire of global humanity, (but not necessarily in th definition which is now accepted in the US). Under this set of considerations, the professional observers of strategic problems should normally demonstrate a deep knowledge of Islam and Christian protestant or catholic, and Jewish theological debates, which is not generally the case. It introduces religious creeds in the evaluation of relations of forces, is also a corollary of a growing limitation of political and intelligence capacity, of American or Israeli soldiers, because of their status as occupation troops with no protection duties toward the civil population under their rule military colonial or occupation status is, as such, contrary to political intelligence of local situations. Every old colonial politician knows that. The danger comes when difference between the military and the political understanding of a local war management disappears. This fading out is the root of a philosophical jump into a fascist representation of violence. To make a comparison, without any God’s influence, I feel obliged to add to our middle east class of neo-imperial wars , the Colombian war and central american mexican and carribean tensions, conflicts and fights, clearly localized at the fronteer of world’s developped nucleus, and where no religious identity is at stakes. At least, these wars are totally human or inhumane. No religion war explains the fears and the fortification pattern of ennemity and exclusion. Finally, instead of deciding promptly that European Union or China could as an economical mass, be able to resist a superconsuming indebted Empire, riding a rodeo based on a Disneyland electronics domination, I prefer maintainig a high degree of doubt, mentioning that « we » non-imperial thinkers, class, poeple, nations, lays and clerks, are not yet at the level of a unified strategic and political thinking, able to control in a common debate an extreme right, imperial, American power, driving successfully the world toward new permanent social wars. The global strategic critic of the global american empire is just beginning. It won’t proceed simply with optimism good will and common sense as a californian middle class project. read more
Julian Reid: RE: Open Source Destruction, Weak Discipline, War Infrastructure
The War on Terror is defined by a growing concern with the protection of what is described as the 'critical infrastructures' of liberal regimes. In the US, Bush has provided a series of presidential directives in response to the attacks of 9/11 for the development of a National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP). The response to the directive is expressed in The National Plan for Research and Development in Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection published by the US Department of Homeland Security in 2004. In Europe, the European Union is pursuing a European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection (EPCIP) 'to enhance European prevention, preparedness and response to terrorist attacks involving critical infrastructures'. The United Nations is seeking meanwhile to identify the critical infrastructure needs of liberal regimes globally, as well as continuing to explore ways to facilitate the dissemination of best practices with regard to critical infrastructure protection.
In the European context critical infrastructure is defined as 'those physical resources, services, and information technology facilities, networks and infrastructure assets, which, if disrupted or destroyed would have a serious impact on (the) health, safety, security, economic or social well-being'. In the United States it is defined similarly as the 'various human, cyber, and physical components that must work effectively together to sustain the reliable flow of goods, people and information vital to quality of life'. Others point also to the importance of critical infrastructure for the maintenance of the 'good governance' of societies. The defence of critical infrastructure is, therefore, not about the mundane protection of human life from the risk of violent death at the hands of terrorists, but a more profound defence of the combined physical and technological infrastructures on which global liberal regimes have come to depend for their sustenance and development in recent years. 'Quality of life' is deemed inextricably dependent in these documents on the existence of critical infrastructures. Terrorism is a threat to these regimes precisely because it targets the critical infrastructures which enable the liberality of their way of life rather than simply the human beings which inhabit them. read more
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. read more
John Armitage: On Alain Joxe's Stuctured Chaos
Joxe's depiction of the twentieth century, of a 'free world' and a 'communist world' with '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' seems eminently sensible - on first reading. The problems, however, at least for me, begin with the idea that 'the tripartite world of bipolar nuclear stand-off seemed to disappear with the end of the Cold War' and that it was 'it was believed that the earth would finally become peaceful, or at least conform to the order outlined in the UN charter'. I suppose I wanted to know who it was that believed the Earth would finally become peaceful. Or orderly? Moreover, since when has the UN Charter been taken seriously, even by itself? This week, for instance, sees Hungary commemorating the 50th anniversary of its 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union, which ordered tanks into Budapest to crush it. Budapest's public buildings are still pockmarked by bullet holes. Yet where was the UN Charter or the UN itself when this national trauma was unfolding, when the Hungarian revolution was being brutally put down, and when, for two dramatic weeks Hungarians tried to resist their Soviet jailers? The Hungarians failed, of course, but they failed in large part because the UN stood by as the tragedy unfolded and the radio stations, the only means of communication, were shut down, one by one, by the Soviet Union, and at the cost of over 3,000 lives in the streets of Budapest. Nor was I clear how much courage the US and its allies needed to attack a weak Iraqi dictator after his invasion of Kuwait or, more recently, in the Iraq War. As I wrote in a recent article, 'The Elite War on Utopia': read more
Paul N. Edwards: Open source destruction, weak discipline, war infrastructures
The end of the Cold War was also the end of grand systems theories (cybernetics, systems analysis, operations research, and their children), and the closed world discourse they inspired. In their place have arisen network discourses -- very many of them, proliferating at an astonishing rate along with their technical substrates, which include not only the Internet but corporate supply chain management, military "netwar" doctrines and tools, social software, six degrees of separation, and thousands of other formulas and formulations of the node-link architecture of the post-Cold War, post-post-modern world. This ultracomplex, infinite and indefinite architecture could be the framework of Alain Joxe's structured chaos and the enabling technology of Saskia Sassen's embedded bordering.Network discourses move us from hierarchy to intricate mesh, from topography to topology, from closed to fractally open, from determinism to chaos and complexity, from control to monitoring and statistical analysis. Within them, traditional notions of power as domination from above become much harder to sustain. What, then, has power become in the world-network -- or much more accurately, the world as exponential internetwork, a network of networks of networks without end?
The automatic response of those who came of age in the Cold War is to see networks as systems in disguise, the creations of shadowy sovereigns -- capital, multinational corporations, the CIA, Osama bin Laden -- who work the strings from invisible positions behind the scenes. Even the most profound of the 1970s theorists of capillary power -- Foucault, Lukes, Giddens, Bourdieu -- could not free themselves from Ur-images of closed systems, of hierarchical control, of institutions as locales, where all-seeing sovereigns lay hidden, shadowed, but still ultimately governing even if indirectly through the astonishing techniques of discipline and surveillance. There is still truth in this view; networks have not, of course, replaced systems. The institutions of Foucault's carceral society - schools, clinics, hospitals, prisons, armies - remain potent and central. But sociotechnical networks increasingly penetrate, overlie, and fracture the borders of closed disciplinary institutions. Through them knowledge leaks out and with it, power. The decline of the closed disciplinary institution, and its replacement by distributed organizations, open source production, and other network forms of sociotechnical structure, reflects a modality of power I want to call weak discipline. read more
Brian Holmes: Re: Structured Chaos
Greetings to all, I'm Brian Holmes, my simplest self-description is probably freelance writer and culture critic; I'll be posting mostly from Chicago and Paris.
I'm glad to be part of this latest forum that Jordan and his many partners have organized. As in each chance at world-wide communication and debate there is a hope to really get somewhere, not just interesting, but useful, vital for those of us participating and perhaps even for others, if we can reach insights that are enabling, that can be shared widely and that can help constitute a new common sense and a new constructive rationality, based on principles of inter-cultural respect quite different from the disastrous patterns of exploitation and conflict that now hold sway in the world.
The excerpt we've just received from Alain Joxe's book "Empire of Disorder" (2002) speaks of the "dynamic morphology" imposed on the world-system by the USA since 1989. From Joxe's perspective the world map looks like this: "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."
From my persepctive in Chicago right now, I find it important to stress that the overdeveloped core and the free-market constellations he mentions do not necessarily equate with democracy anymore. We can see this immediately in the USA, since the Military Commissions Act has been signed into law just a few days ago, suspending both habeas corpus rights and aspects of the Geneva Convention against the use of torture for anyone arbitrarily designated by the Eecutive branch (and particularly the Department of Defense) as an "unlawful enemy combatant." What has been most worrying here is the relative lack of protest or palpable shock and concern at a development which constitutes a major step toward a new kind of fascism, what I call "liberal fascism" due both to its reliance on the rhetoric of freedom, and to the highly individualized nature of the repressive technologies whereby it claims to insure individual security. Why this lack of effective public outcry in the USA? read more
I'm glad to be part of this latest forum that Jordan and his many partners have organized. As in each chance at world-wide communication and debate there is a hope to really get somewhere, not just interesting, but useful, vital for those of us participating and perhaps even for others, if we can reach insights that are enabling, that can be shared widely and that can help constitute a new common sense and a new constructive rationality, based on principles of inter-cultural respect quite different from the disastrous patterns of exploitation and conflict that now hold sway in the world.
The excerpt we've just received from Alain Joxe's book "Empire of Disorder" (2002) speaks of the "dynamic morphology" imposed on the world-system by the USA since 1989. From Joxe's perspective the world map looks like this: "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."
From my persepctive in Chicago right now, I find it important to stress that the overdeveloped core and the free-market constellations he mentions do not necessarily equate with democracy anymore. We can see this immediately in the USA, since the Military Commissions Act has been signed into law just a few days ago, suspending both habeas corpus rights and aspects of the Geneva Convention against the use of torture for anyone arbitrarily designated by the Eecutive branch (and particularly the Department of Defense) as an "unlawful enemy combatant." What has been most worrying here is the relative lack of protest or palpable shock and concern at a development which constitutes a major step toward a new kind of fascism, what I call "liberal fascism" due both to its reliance on the rhetoric of freedom, and to the highly individualized nature of the repressive technologies whereby it claims to insure individual security. Why this lack of effective public outcry in the USA? read more
Naeem Mohaiemen: Artists as Chocolate after War
Excerpts from various notes I posted on SHOBAK during the invasion of Lebanon.
August 11, 2006
Those Left Behind
I woke up this morning wondering what will happen next. When war ends? Peace breaks out? Or reap the whirlwind? Will it take forever to heal the anger?
Will people still wonder "Why Do They Hate Us/US?"
Fareed Zakaria will probably still be around to explain all this to us. Look for the anniversary NEWSWEEK cover story any time now.
Robert Fisk predicts: " A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11".
For some reason, a penultimate sentence from Bret Easton Ellis' wilfully meta novel LUNAR PARK (an elaborate mea culpa for AMERICAN PSYCHO) is stuck in my head:
"From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams."
August 8, 2006
Henri Levy & Rockets
War is settling into a nice comfortable groove. A double shot of espresso please. Tired of rapidfire news updates, endless UN resolutions, US arm-twisting, vapid platitudes, impotent OIC maneuvering, street rage, intense blogs. As if anything moves the dial.
Bernard-Henri Levy loses the plot in this weekend's Sunday NYT Magazine. Forget the pain of others, Levy thinks the world is actually biased in favor of Arabs.
Here's the clincher:
"Maybe we shouldn't say "rocket" anymore. In French, at least, the word seems to belittle the thing, and implies an entire biased vision of this war. In Franglais, for example, we call a yapping dog a rocket, roquet; the word conjures a little dog whose bark is worse than his bite and who nibbles at your ankles. ... So why not say "bomb"? Or "missile"? Why not try, using the right word, to restore the barbaric, fanatical violence to this war that was desired by Hezbollah and by it alone? The politics of words. The geopolitics of metaphor. Semantics, in this region, is now more than ever a matter of morality." read more
August 11, 2006
Those Left Behind
I woke up this morning wondering what will happen next. When war ends? Peace breaks out? Or reap the whirlwind? Will it take forever to heal the anger?
Will people still wonder "Why Do They Hate Us/US?"
Fareed Zakaria will probably still be around to explain all this to us. Look for the anniversary NEWSWEEK cover story any time now.
Robert Fisk predicts: " A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11".
For some reason, a penultimate sentence from Bret Easton Ellis' wilfully meta novel LUNAR PARK (an elaborate mea culpa for AMERICAN PSYCHO) is stuck in my head:
"From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams."
August 8, 2006
Henri Levy & Rockets
War is settling into a nice comfortable groove. A double shot of espresso please. Tired of rapidfire news updates, endless UN resolutions, US arm-twisting, vapid platitudes, impotent OIC maneuvering, street rage, intense blogs. As if anything moves the dial.
Bernard-Henri Levy loses the plot in this weekend's Sunday NYT Magazine. Forget the pain of others, Levy thinks the world is actually biased in favor of Arabs.
Here's the clincher:
"Maybe we shouldn't say "rocket" anymore. In French, at least, the word seems to belittle the thing, and implies an entire biased vision of this war. In Franglais, for example, we call a yapping dog a rocket, roquet; the word conjures a little dog whose bark is worse than his bite and who nibbles at your ankles. ... So why not say "bomb"? Or "missile"? Why not try, using the right word, to restore the barbaric, fanatical violence to this war that was desired by Hezbollah and by it alone? The politics of words. The geopolitics of metaphor. Semantics, in this region, is now more than ever a matter of morality." read more
Saskia Sassen: From National Borders to Embedded Borderings
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
> Saskia Sassen
Alain Joxe: Structured Chaos
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