Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2004 04:39:40 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: geopolitics


Nicholas, thanks a lot for your very comprehensive and thorough reply to my and Athina's article on geopolitics.  You obviously know this area inside out, far better than I do right now, which is to be expected I suppose, since I've written half an article and you've written an entire PhD.  There are certainly issues here I need to follow up, although how many of your concerns can be addressed within the framework of a single article is questionable - the project you're proposing is very interesting, but also very large!
 
I think my article is on a very high level of generality, whereas you're doing the more important work of digging down into how power networks operate in terms of specific assemblages of discourse.  How far I'd go with your linking of specific political projects to questions such as the development of biopower I'm not sure (if indeed this is what you're suggesting), but what you're doing sounds very interesting.
 
A couple of points I should maybe address:
 
Closure:  We weren't meaning by the word "closure" to suggest that the Bushites are isolationists or that they want a pre-globalisation situation.  Rather, we're conceiving the world system as itself a closed system, in a Deleuzian sense (it incorporates elements within it, but only conditional on a hierarchic order remaining in place; it attempts to retain this order above all else, and to resist anything which escapes or flees this particular order).  Hence, the response to any escape or excess is either to subsume it within the system or to smash it violently.
 
But yes, we haven't really dealt with the ideology of the neocons; this is a weakness we need to address.
 
Full spectrum dominance, everyone becoming-dangerous, etc. - this seems to me to be a theory of the end-point of strategy, rather than the actuality of its implementation.  In fact in Iraq the US is very much becoming bogged down in friend/enemy binaries and all the rest.  But is this because the end-point is not reached?  Precisely because the full subsumption of existence into the capitalist system is not achieved, the messy conflicts which the powerful would rather avoid - the whole problem of power-centres, friend/enemy binaries, etc. - return as a strategic adaptation to the existence of escapes and of spaces which are not yet subsumed or which resist subsumption.  America would like to privatise Iraqi industry, but most of it isn't functioning because of the ongoing war.  They want Iraq's oil, but the pipelines keep getting blown up.  They've appointed a Saddam stooge and known assassin as the Prime Minister, and basically (according to Ewa Jasiewicz who recently visited Iraq)
 have resurrected the Baathist infrastructure as a way of achieving minimal social control.  Iraqi "democracy" and "capitalism" are actually very reminiscent of South Vietnam I think.  The US leadership have their various fantasies of how it will turn out, but really they're in such a mess that they have to play the crony game and use whatever resources are available.
 
In other words, we don't just need to look at what the US is doing - what fantasies motivate the actions of the leaders and their followers - but also at the power-relations which actually emerge, and how these escape the logics of the dominant fantasy-frame of the US.  For instance, the US would like to fight as a network, but the problem is that its project is centralised (i.e. the continued existence of the world system, of core-periphery relations and western domination) - so maybe the US leaders imagine that they are fighting as a network, when in fact they can only use network methods as subsidiary segments in imposing an arborescent order.  In order to dictate to others that they will act in terms of the pro-US kind of networks, the capitalist networks, they also need arborescent relations to impose this diktat - and so they're back at the problem of trying to fight networks with centralised apparatuses.  Actually I think the US leaders are like fish out of water - it reminds
 me of some stuff I read by Chomsky a while back, about some of the absurdities which popped up in Vietnam - the idea for instance that young people joined the Vietcong because they liked the smart uniforms, so the US army just needed to set up a scout brigade with smarter uniforms...
 
A problem with using Foucault is that sometimes the discourses, assessed on their own terms, come to seem more "total" than they really are, and their implementation is assumed in advance to be effective, which elides the whole question of the conflicts which have to be won in order to MAKE them effective...
 
I may be using a more "classical" version of how the world system operates than you're using, and perhaps I don't see the actually-effective control as going so deep (though of course, the Bushites would LIKE a very extensive control).  I only go so far with Hardt and Negri on the whole "empire-replaces-imperialism" line; in some respects I'm trying to take World Systems Theory and incorporate elements of poststructuralism to explain how the world system is able to operate, and how resistances emerge.  I'm using Baudrillard mainly because of the importance of incommensurability to his analysis; it is not the radical interiority of danger which is crucial for Baudrillard, but the collision between two logics incapable of actually colliding as equivalents, in a straight "war" - a logic of deterrence which is less war than policing (albeit extremely brutal and violent policing), which seeks in everything an absolute clarity where everything is visible to power and every action has known
 and unavoidable consequences, and a logic of fragmentation where meaning becomes indeterminable and where the meaning of power in a sense implodes, or is unable to penetrate.
 
None of this is intended as a criticism of what you're doing, or of the literature you're using (which I'll check out when I get a bit of free time), but just as an explanation for why I'm treading a slightly different course.  Again, thanks a lot - this is the most comprehensive critique I've received of one of my articles in a long time.
 
Andy

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