McKenzie Wark on Fri, 18 Jan 2002 17:18:51 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Reflections on Globalisation from Below |
Thanks to Molly and others for thoughtful reflections and comments. A quick response: 1. It is not enough to point to the diversity and plurality of the anti- globalisation movement. That is merely pointing to the fact that it joins people together who, if they were to reflect on it, do not share the same interests at all. It means that, among all that diversity, there are people who are misguided, whose thinking is incomplete, and people who are just dead wrong. The process of critique is a process of drawing distinctions. Distinctions, in this case, among what appear to be allies, but may in fact turn out to opposing forces. 2. One obvious difference is the difference between being opposed to 'globalisation', and being in favour of a different kind of globalisation. These positions are not reconcilable. And yet a great deal of confusion results in not drawing clear distinctions. If one is to think globally, one must also think abstractly, for 'globalisation' is nothing more than the historical tendency of the world to become abstract. That process of abstraction has different aspects, only one of which is capitalism. 3. Vectoral power is also a form of abstraction in the world. It is the projection of a smooth space, within which movement is possible in any direction equally. This concept includes *both* communication and military power, which are after all only aspects of the same development, a process of abstraction made concrete in the world. 4. Disciplinary power works in quite a different way, as the *enclosure* of space, and marking and gradation. Foucault's Discipline and Punish is the classic work on it. However, it seems clear to me that vectoral power is of much more significance is shaping the contemporary world. Disciplinary power now works in a reactive way, being assigned to deal with the residue, the remainder, whatever vectoral power leaves behind. Hence its massive deployment to deal with the 'boat people' question. 5. When i presented this paper in Adelaide, it sparked a good discussion on naming. What's the difference between an asylum seeker, a refugee and an illegal immigrant? Its a difference disciplinary power is set to work to discover. Which is why i think we need another way of describing people who are the *global homeless*, who confront states with their movement in defiance of categories. 6. Molly asks "has the penchant for security started to eat its own tail?" Yes exactly! This is the point made by Anthony Burke in his excellent book In Fear of Security (Pluto Press Australia). It is security that is the problem. Each state seeks to secure itself *against* what is outside, including other states, but that just contributes to insecurity. The case of the United States is only too clear. 7. Security is the problem, not the actions of the Howard government. Critique has to go beyond appearances. What Howard is doing is wrong, *I make no apologies for the government*, but Howard is merely making explicit the logic of sovereignty, by which the state secures itself against its others. The sovereignty of the state, the policy of security and the stress put on both by vectoral power is the underlying issue to which analysis must work. 8. Yes, race is a factor, but it *doesn't explain everything*. And it lets the discourse slip into a merely liberal one. Everything is fine if we could just be nice to Arabs and other others. Race is a symptom, not a cause. The accelerated effect of vectoral power on the world, making space smooth, calls into being a disciplinary reaction, an attempt to more ruthlessly police the categories. One of the categories disciplinary power invented and polices is race. ___________________________________________________ http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/ ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ... ___________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net