[Nettime-bold] Globalisation from Below: Migration, Sovereignty, Communication

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

Globalisation from Below:
Migration, Sovereignty, Communication

McKenzie Wark <mw35@nyu.edu>

For a country that prides itself on its multiculturalism,
the disgraceful treatment meted out to ‘boat people’
who arrive on Australian shores speaks to an
underlying problem in the constitution of the
Australian state. And indeed all states. As I will argue,
the problem is not caused just by an 'opportunist'
Prime Minister exploiting insecurities in the Australian
electorate, as Guy Rundle and others have argued.
While Rundle is quite right to hold Australian Prime
Minister John Howard's behaviour up to a critical
light, there is a much deeper problem, the problem
that the boat person, the asylum seeker, the refugee,
poses to the very concept of national sovereignty.

As Anthony Burke argues in his book In Fear of
Security, the construction of Australian statehood and
nationhood is inextricably linked to the way what it is
outside its borders is conceived.  The construction of
a national history is also the construction of a space of
internal consistency, marked off from an outside. This
outside then appears as that which threatens internal
consistency. We become the opposite of what we
oppose.

We have an excellent emblem of the workings of
power within the state in Michel Foucault's
Panopticon. But as Giorgio Agamben has recently
pointed out, this internalised power of discipline now
appears quite secondary to an externalising power of
security.  To which one can only add: perhaps it
always was. One of Bentham's pamphlets was called
'The Panopticon or New South Wales'. As every
Australian knows, British power took the latter route -
- transportation, not the former, the Panopticon.

A much more profound understanding of the modern
power of security, or what I would call vectoral
power, may be found in Bernard Smith's European
Vision and the South Pacific, where Smith brilliantly
exposes the way in which the British warship
traversed and mapped the open space of the globe.

Perhaps Australian anxiety about 'boat people' stems
from the nagging memory of the fact that most of us
are descendents of boat people. For most of us, our
ancestors followed the vectoral line opened up by
naval power.

It's a paradox of security that the mapping and
navigating of the world not only secures an imperial
state's place in it, but it sets in motion flows of
information, people, goods and weapons that creates
still new spaces, which in turn undermine security and
require still more vectoral power. Thus, the
technologies of vectoral power, from the 18th century
warship to the 21st century Raptor unmanned
surveillance aircraft, experience accelerated
development.

Sovereignty, or the autonomy of a centre of power,
rests on both security, the externalising power, and
discipline, the internalising power. But these are times
in which disciplinary regimes are breaking down, not
least because of the effectiveness of vectoral
technologies in mapping routes of movement and
opening up territories.

The vectoral techniques that have their roots in the
power of security are breaking away from the security
function, and becoming an autonomous power. The
same vectoral technologies that secure lines of
movement for imperial powers also undermine the
integrity of their relations of dominance in the world,
setting loose unmanageable flows and demands for
flows.

I know that the free flows often characterised as
'neoliberalism' are a taboo subject: denounce it first,
ask questions later. But I tell you, we haven't seen
anything yet. The world will become much more
vectoral if it is to become any more just. The boat
people are the symptom of an aporia in left-liberal
thinking on vectoral power.

Illegal migration is globalisation from below. If the
'overdeveloped' world refuses to trade with the
underdeveloped world on fair terms, to forgive debt,
to extend credit, to lift trade barriers against food and
basic manufactured goods, then there can only be an
increase in the flow of people seeking to get inside the
barriers the overdeveloped world erects to protect its
interests. While sovereignty equals self interest, there
can be no security.

The 438 people rescued by the Tampa, their very
presence in this stateless state, was testament to the
absence of effective international justice. Trade
between states, taking place as it is in the absence of
justice, can only produce injustice, which in turn
produces flows of people who come to exist outside
the space of justice. The most telling human critique of
globalisation is not the black-clad protesters in Seattle
or Genoa, it is the still, silent bodies of the illegals, in
ships, trucks or car boots, passing through the
borders. The placeless proletariat. The involuntary
border-hackers.

Those 438 people, which the media for the most part
rendered nameless are a critique of the limits of
sovereignty. Asylum seekers are in the paradoxical
position of being a standing critique of the failings of a
regime of sovereignty, and at the same time totally
dependent on finding a state that will accept their
claims to refugee status.

Some asylum seekers demand access to CNN and the
internet. It is the vectoral flow of information around
the world, along ever proliferating vectors, that
creates the possibility of seeking this leave of absence
from the space of the nation and the state. The
overdeveloped world feels free to advertise its charms
-- and yet withholds access to the trade in the very
goods it advertises through its domination of the
trade in images.

The Australian state takes a hard line against asylum
seekers so as not to encourage others to test their
borders. But it is the rule of the border in general that
the refugee challenges. Every state seeks to secure
itself at the expense of other states. While the
Australian government deserves special
condemnation for its callous disregard for suffering, it
is not the only state that stands accused by refugees
of a foreclosure of justice. It is the justice of national
sovereignty in the abstract that the body of the asylum
seeker refutes in particular. The asylum seeker is a
force in revolt against the privileges sovereignty
grants us.

Many who put themselves in the way of globalisation
-- the so-called anti-globalisation movement -- do so
in the name of some local and particular demand.
These demands are not always just. Why should
French farmers have more rights to grow food for the
French than Brazilian farmers? Why should American
steel workers have more rights to make steel for
Americans than Polish steel workers? But that is what
the return to protectionism that many anti-
globalisation protesters demand would amount to. A
demand for more local and particular privileges.

The asylum seeker, who is outside the state, rather
than the local interest, inside the state, is the body that
calls upon the absence of a global justice, who calls for
it. Those who seek refuge, who are rarely accorded a
voice, are nevertheless the bodies that confront the
injustice of the world with a total critique of it. They
give up their particular claim to sovereignty and cast
themselves on the waters. Only when the world is its
own refuge will their limitless demand be met.

That may be a utopian demand, but the possibility of
what Hardt and Negri call "global constitutionalism"
are now firmly on the horizon.  It is evolving out of
particular interests. Clearly, a global regime of trade is
far more strongly developed than a global regime of
justice. Global trade without global justice ends up
being unfair trade, trade that tries to strengthen the
sovereignty of interests within some states at the
expense of others. Global justice without global trade
merely secures the interests of the overdeveloped
world against the interests of the rest. However, these
limitations to global constitutionalism are precisely the
reasons to push further, to demand a global justice
adequate to the challenge posed to it by the figure of
the asylum seeker.

In his famous work on postmodernism, Jameson calls
it an "effacement of the frontier".  It was the frontier
between high and low culture that he was referring to
in that context. But as is clear from his writings, this is
not the only frontier that disappears in the shift from a
modern to a postmodern sensibility. The frontier
between inside and outside, on which sovereignty is
founded, is also the faultline where it founders.

While theory works out the end game of modernist
fables of inside and outside, the boundary has already
imploded. It's simply not helpful to call it hybridity,
when there's no way of assigning origins to any of the
elements in cultural formations in the first place. We
no longer have roots, we have aerials. Its not helpful
to propose extension to the logic of the Panopticon,
when it is not the disciplinary apparatus of
internalising an external potential for observation that
is the dominant form of power. We no longer have
origins, we have terminals.

Vectoral power, which is forever exceeding the limits
of the inside/outside boundary, has been the
dominant form of sovereign power from Botany Bay
to Afghanistan. What those in the old world think of
as modern power, disciplinary power, was always a
subsidiary institution built on the back of the
expansive and expanding vectoral power, of which
we in the antipodes are the direct product.

As September 11th makes chillingly clear, vectoral
power has broken away from its origins in regimes of
security. Even counter-powers to an emerging regime
of global constitutionalism take a vectoral form. Even
totalising negativity has become globalised. This is the
great paradox of Osama Bin Laden -- how much his
anti-western rhetoric appears to mimic very western
forms of anti-modern reaction, but couple it with
vectoral technology.

So what is the progressive position in all this? These
are times when two hypocritical positions face off
against each other. The right wants to open the
borders to flows of goods, but close them to flows of
people; the left wants to open the borders to flows of
people, but close them to flows of goods. Both
positions rest on attempts to secure an inside against
an outside, and both partake of curious new rhetorics
to achieve it.

But at the end of the day, neither position is coherent
or consistent. It makes no difference whether one
discriminates against the passage of the body of
another across one's borders, or the passage of the
efforts of his or her labour. Both are discriminations,
and both are, prima facie, unjust. Thus the argument
between right and left in Australia, as elsewhere,
comes down to an argument over the mode of
discrimination that secures interiority and sovereignty.
Neither is a progressive position.

The debate is further muddled by the existence of a
clearly more reactionary position, one that would
secure the borders and assert a radically secured
interiority against flows of both goods and bodies. By
pointing to a more reactionary position, both the right
and left obscure their compromises.

One can map these three positions as a diagram: two
are progressive on one count, and reactionary on the
other; one is reactionary on both counts. But where is
the position that would count as progressive on both
counts? That is in favour of a just and open
globalisation, of flows of people and flows of the
products of their labour?

Slavoj Zizek has called for the building of
"transnational political movements and institutions
strong enough to constrain seriously the unlimited
rule of capital and to render visible and politically
relevant the fact that local fundamentalist resistances
to the New World Order, from Milosevic to Le Pen
and the extreme right in Eruope, are part of it."  But
this doesn't go far enough to addressing the critique
that the asylum seeker poses to national sovereignty -
- the total critique of a privileging of the insider over
the outsider -- a privileging of which the trans-
national anti-globalisation movement is not entirely
innocent.

As Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, say: "perhaps
the flows are not yet deterritorialised enough, not
decoded enough...". Perhaps one needs "to go
further". Globalisation as it exists may offend the
reactionary left as much as the reactionary right, but
"the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet."

What if we have not thought far enough down the
road to what Deleuze and Guattari call
deterritorialisation? This is the call to which I would
like to answer, and that I think the body of the asylum
seeker calls us. Where can the asylum seeker actually
find asylum? She or he cannot find it where they seek
it. It is surely better to be admitted to the country than
to languish in detention, but there is no guarantee of
security even if one gets inside the border. In the US,
Arabs, even Sikhs, have been assaulted, even killed,
over the panicky need to police the interior of
sovereignty.

It is right and necessary to draw attention to the racist
dimension in these attacks. But race, as left-liberals
understand it, is no longer an adequate category for
understanding injustice, either within the space of
sovereignty, or without.

The deployment of race is changing. What the asylum
seeker confronts everywhere is what Balibar calls
"racism without race". The global constitution as it
stands recognises states as sovereign, but no longer
associates the state with a nation as a one to one
relationship.

One of the perverse developments in cultural practice
around the world is the rarity with which racism is
now explicitly argued in terms of race. Even racists
have understood and adopted the social
constructionist critique of the essentialism of race.
Now almost everyone is agreed that differences are
socially and culturally constructed -- even racists. The
difference now is between those who see differences
as something that can coexist, and those who don't.

Race is not the problem; sovereignty is the problem.
Sovereignty purged of its racist baggage, sovereignty
with a culturalist, even multicultural rhetoric, is still an
obstacle to justice. This is a big problem for the
Australian left -- seeing through its complicity with
sovereignty, critiquing the form in which it
understands multiculturalism, and thinking instead of
a global justice.

As Michel Feher argues, a striking characteristic of the
(non) responses to the Bosnian and Rwandan crises
on the part of a would-be system of global justice is
the extent to which policies of inaction were justified
in culturalist terms.  Due to the supposedly
intractable historical roots of cultural differences in the
Balkans, there's nothing one can do but sit on one's
hands. One simply takes at face value the claims and
counter claims of competing cultural groups, one acts
as a 'peacekeeper' for a non-existent peace, and by
default lends support to the more aggressive party,
by virtue of treating the parties as equal -- but
different.

The monstrous policies of NATO powers in the
Balkans faced only a very incoherent and inconsistent
critique from the left. On the one hand, when they
failed to act, the western powers would be accused of
neglecting genocide. On the other hand, when they
did act, they were accused of acting like imperialists.
There were exceptions, but all too often, what one got
was hardly a consistent critique of modern
sovereignty.

The world won't wait for politics any more than it will
wait for theory. Whether one backs intervention --
let's say, in Afghanistan -- or opposes it, either way,
the "effacement of the frontier" proceeds apace. Either
there are interventions in oppressive states, thus
challenging their sovereignty; or there are flows of
asylum seekers, thus challenging ours.

Either way, social forces are emerging that push
against the limits of sovereignty. Two kinds of social
forces are abstracting themselves from local and
contingent ties, and may have an interest in a new
global justice. One does not do so entirely by choice.
The asylum seeker runs out of options, and while he
or she chooses flight, it is hardly against the
background of a wealth of choices. Nevertheless, the
asylum seeker is a social force that challenges the form
of the nation state. The asylum seeker is an objective
challenge to sovereignty, a vectoral challenge.
Nothing depends on the asylum seeker's identity,
only on his or her disposition.

There is another social force that breaks out of the
bounds of national sovereignty, but unlike Negri and
Hardt I don't see it as a resurgent mobilisation of the
labouring and multiple masses. Marxists always say
that the concept of class will make a comeback -- and
for once I agree. But in much of the 'overdeveloped'
world, the labour movement cut a deal with capital
within a protected national market. While the
envelope of the nation appeared relatively secure,
people worried instead about the envelopes of
communal or self identity. The cultural politics of
racism without race emerges out of the shelter of an
historic compromise between labour and capital,
which lasted from the 40s to the 70s.

With the class compromise secured, other differences
became points of antagonism. But in the 80s and 90s,
class is back on the agenda, partly because of the
success capital has enjoyed in breaking out of its
national compacts, and decamping to the newly
industrialising world. But also in part because of new
developments, as yet barely understood.

Deleuze and Guattari once argued that "it is capitalism
that is at the end of history, it is capitalism that results
from a long history of contingencies and accidents,
and that brings on this end..."  But there is a tension
in their historical thinking between the notion of
capital as the end of history, and the possibility of the
world becoming still more abstract.

I would argue that the abstraction of the world is a
process without end, but one that has taken a
significant leap beyond the abstraction of capital
already. First land, then moveable property, then
information have formed the basis of regime of
commodity production and accumulation.

Let's not forget that in much of the underdeveloped
world, accumulation based on land as property is still
going on. Its conflict with the overdeveloped world
accounts for two of the great global struggles of our
time. Agricultural accumulation seeks to open the
markets of the overdeveloped world, against the
stubborn resistance of the state-protected farmers in
Europe, America and Japan.

The other great movement for land based
accumulation is resource based. Here the
overdeveloped world acts to secure its interests at the
expense of the sovereignty of the underdeveloped
world. One great exception is the OPEC cartel, which
succeeded in securing a rent from a partial resource
monopoly, but at the expense of the arrested
development of the commodity economy of the oil-
dependent states.

Accumulation based on capital as property is --
curiously -- migrating out of the overdeveloped
world, into the newly developed world. If you buy a
car or a computer, chances are a lot of it was made in
Korea or Taiwan. If you buy sneakers or a sweater,
chances are it was made in Indonesia or China. The
brand name might say Honda or Nike or Sony or
Apple, but increasingly the wealth of these
corporations is invested in the intellectual property it
commands -- its trademarks, patents and copyrights,
not in the making of things, which is of so little
strategic importance to these companies that it can be
contracted out elsewhere.

So what does the accumulation of wealth in the
overdeveloped world increasingly rest on? Not land
or capital as property, but information. And not just
on intellectual property, but on the capacity to realise
its value, in other words on communication vectors,
on a vectoral power breaking free from regimes of
security.

But media vectors have gone beyond troubling the
boundaries of self and community, and now trouble
national boundaries just as much. The proliferation of
ever faster, cheaper, more flexible media vectors with
a more and more global reach makes possible the
colonisation of more extensive spaces by commodity
relations. The national space, and the national
compromise between labour and capital comes
undone. So too as the international space, as a space
governed by rival national sovereignties.

This shifts the anxiety toward one of two options.
Either towards a resurgent nationalism, or towards a
resurgent class awareness. Either one fends off one's
anxiety about the permeable borders of the nation,
community, and self by hardening the national
boundary against the other. Or one follows the
vectoral line that traverses self, community and nation
and discovers the class interest that potentially forms
along it. One either demands more boundary, or one
starts to question who owns and controls the vectors
that both traverse and incite the boundary.

This is the problem that bedevils the 'anti-
globalisation' movement which, even on the left, falls
into anxiety about borders rather than seeking a New
Deal for the vectoralisation of space, one that
abandons the dialectic of inside and outside and takes
up instead an embracing of the vector. An open world
with plural forms of ownership, not just private
ownership, in which justice and well being has a place
alongside profit and 'productivity'.

But we need a new concept of class to grasp
vectoralisation. Marxists still think only of the force of
production, steel and concrete, as being material. The
forces of communication -- media vectors -- are also
material. And like the forces of production, they and
their products can be turned into property --
intellectual property. If commodification starts with
the enclosure of land, continues with the accumulation
of capital goods as private property, its next phase
grows out of intellectual property.

The commodification of information, which begins to
accelerate with the invention of the telegraph, has two
dimensions, a technical and a legal one, both form the
basis of a new regime of accumulation, and, arguably,
a new kind of ruling class. No longer a pastoralist
ruling class, extracting rent from landed property, no
longer a capitalist class, extracting profits from
fungible things as property, but what I would call a
vectoralist class, whose accumulation of wealth is
based on ownership and control of information.

If the asylum seekers are globalisation from below,
then the vectoral class is most definitely globalisation
from above. With its rise to power within the ruling
block, the ruling block as a whole frees itself in an
unprecedented way from all local and contingent
constraints. The vectoral ruling interest provides the
means for other branches of the ruling class to extract
themselves from national compacts with subordinate
classes. It is not quite, as Ghassan Hage says, the
capital becomes transcendental, rather it is that a
vectoral class-power transcends the limits of capital,
abstracting commodification still further.

Pop open the back of your television, and you will
find components from Ireland, Nigeria, Indonesia or
Peru. Pop open a television of the same make made a
year later, and the same components may be from
Hungary and China. The sourcing of components may
be based on nothing more than fluctuating exchange
rates, or slight variations in the spot markets for
capacitors. Either way, it's the technologies and
services of the vectoral class that create the imaginary
'global' space within which these components are
traded.

Australians as a whole have done pretty well out of
this vectoralisation of the globe. In the 19th century,
the country grew rich as an agricultural exporter, in
the 20th, as a mineral exporter. In this dependent part
of the world, the pastoral class long dominated the
ruling block. In the late 20th century, Australia
experienced a crisis in its relation to the world. Its
security appeared to be threatened by the declining
terms of trade in its primary commodity exports.

Ironically, just as the proliferation of peripheral states
which faced the world as primary producers
undermined Australia's trade with the world; the
proliferation of peripheral states that faced the world
as secondary producers is restoring the terms of trade.
Manufactured goods are now also falling in price. The
falling prices for Australian primary exports is offset
by declines in falling prices for manufactured imports.

However, both primary and secondary producers in
the peripheral world confront the overdeveloped
world of Europe-USA-Japan which secure their
internal class compromises at the expense of
peripheral states. Peripheral states also confront a
new global ruling class, which uses its monopoly over
intellectual property as a form of imperial leverage.
And the peripheral world also confronts what one
might call the undevelopable world -- those states
now left out of all pretense of incorporation in a
vectoral space of trade and security.

Part of the challenge for the left-liberal position is to
put the illegals in the context of these three linked
developments, to prevent the collapse of the issues of
globalisation into the demand for a new disciplinary
response for the illegals, who are just an element of
this larger pattern of development. Punishing the
bodies who are globalisation from below does nothing
to address the inequities posed by globalisation from
above. But ultimately, the refuge-seeker poses just as
much of a challenge to left-liberal discourses that have
not thought through their investments in sovereignty.

Notes:
1.  Guy Rundle, 'The Opportunist', Quarterly Essay, No 3, 2001

2.  Anthony Burke, In Fear of Security, Pluto Press Australia,
Sydney, 2001

3.  Giorgio Agamben, 'On Security and Terror', 0/Yes: Make World
Festival, October 2001, p2

4. Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, Oxford
University Press, Melbourne, 1961

5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University
Press, Cambrdige, 2000, p7

6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism, Verso, London, 1991, p2

7. Slavoj Zizek, 'Against the Double Blackmail', The Nation,
24th may 1999, p22

8.  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp239-240

9. Michel Feher, Powerless By Design, Duke University Press,
Durham, 2000

10. Anti-Oedipus, p153

11. Ghassan Hage, 'The Shrinking Society', 0/Yes: Make World
Festival, October 2001, p12


[This paper was originally given at the Nation/States conference,
University of Adelaide. Thanks to Catherine Driscoll for the
invitation.]


___________________________________________________

http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/
                   ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ...
___________________________________________________


_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.

_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold