<nettime> Escape from the Dual Empire

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>]

Escape from the Dual Empire
McKenzie Wark <mw35@nyu.edu>

   15.
What confronts the world now is a dual empire,
not a unitary empire. The military-industrial complex
of the cold war era has been replaced, not by a
juridical empire of global law and trade, but by a new
duality, a military-entertainment complex. The two
aspects of this empire, its commodity-space and
strategy-space, overlap and contradict one another.
Both are driven by the same imperative – the
vectoralization of the world. The vector is what
produces the world as such, as a space of property
and strategy, a plane upon which things are identified,
evaluated, commanded. Both empires emanate from
the United States, but are not identical to it. They are,
if anything, what are tearing the United States apart.
The stress of this dual empire upon the fabric of
American democracy and society is what prevents
it from becoming, if you will, a ‘normal’ state. …

Complete audio version of this text available at:
http://www.criticalsecret.com/n10/McKENZIE%20WARK/

Paper presented at the Précarité-instabilité colloque
http://www.criticalsecret.com/n10/

organized by criticalsecret, Paris, December 2002
http://www.criticalsecret.com/

Panel: Philosophie prospective et représentations
With: McKenzie Wark, Véronique Bergen, Mehdi Belhaj
Kacem, Dolorès Marat, Jean Baudrillard

Moderated by Henri-Pierre Jeudy

Special thanks to Aliette Guibert


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                   ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ...
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