File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0301, message 163


From: steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 15:20:00 -0000 (GMT)
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_territorialisation?=


Glen/All
rough thoughts for a monday...
I haven't read the Scholte text - though having read the Rosenberg text I
suspect that I'm more likely to agree with Rosenberg's Marxist position than
  the partial appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari that Scholte engages in.
I was surprised that you were so positive towards the Scholte text -
especially given the problematic 'quotes' in the review you forwarded. It
may be the context of the quotes but in themselves many are simply wrong. 

Rosenberg is not denying that technological changes have an impact - rather
that this is an inadequate justification for imagining that our social and
political relationships have dramatically changed as a consequence of
technological developments. Rosenberg's argument, which seems more
sustainable than Scholtes position is that the social and economic system
has been global since at least the early 19th C. 

In other words I do not think that the evidence that the 'compression of
space/time' being generated by the telecomms technologies is as strong as a
technological determinist would argue - rather the compression has taken
place because of the nature of the economic system and it is as a result of
the latter that the telecoms technologies have come into existence..

Technological determinism is never very convincing, especially to a
technologist...

regards
steve

> Steve/All,
> 
> I found the first two chapters of Justin Rosenberg's book online, and
> includes the Scholtes' chapter
> (http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/012rosenberg.htm). Rosenberg's
> critical analysis of Scholtes' thesis is a bit melodramatic, like a
> used car salesman's spiel! And he seemed to want to pig-headedly refuse
> to pursue the possibilities and effects of the compression of
> space/time that the revolution to current telecommunications
> technologies have allowed. I found this troubling. Maybe Rosenberg has
> not read D&G or Virilio? As I think this compression is essential in
> understanding the effects of deterritorialisation (and hence paradigmic
> shifts in the relationship between social relations and spatio-temporal
> referents (territorialisations)), what do you think? 
> 
>>From such compression causal relationships are enabled to be remade
>>from top-down hierarchial structures into feedback and feedforward
>>systems involving multiple fields of interactivity... Surely the move
>>from Fordist to Post-Fordist manufacturing techniques exemplifies this
>>shift?
> 
> (Rosenberg appears to have a grounding in IR, which in this context
> stands for International Relations, but at my local universities stands
> for Industrial Relations...Anyway, he seems to want a structuralist
> definition of social relations that take part on a 'global' level.
> Maybe he is trying to fend off academic faculty creep, that is, other
> social sciences impinging on his specialist area? Perhaps I am being
> too skeptical...)
> 
> One secondary text
> (http://www.emory.edu/SOC/globalization/reviews/scholte.html) was
> critical of the way Scholte tackled culture. This would be my main
> interest in the text. As part of my PhD studies will involving
> 'tracing' the relationships between different subcultural forms from
> different national contexts and their importation/exportation, and
> media representations of such subcultural forms in the new 'home'
> nation.  
> 
>>From what I understand of Scholte's thesis (from Rosenberg's
>>'treatment' and other secondary texts I found) he defines it along
>>spatio-temporal lines, involving "transborder exchanges without
>>distance" (49). I can live with that definition, but what about the
>>local then? Is that some pre-globalised territorialised milieu? Or is
>>it a material instantiations (of various durations) in which the
>>supraterritorial comes 'home'?
> 
> At any rate, I will hunt down the actual text.
> 
> Glen.
> 
> PS One of his chapters (in part 3) is called "Globalization and
> (In)Security". Which I find a remarkable coincidence as I talked about
> a subcultural (in)security for Hoons in my honours thesis, however, I
> was drawing on Hebdige's notion of an (in)subordination. I wonder how
> similar our arguments are regarding what (in)security is? I mainly drew
> on social welfare theory as outlined in a number of chapters in the
> (Foucaultian) book Govermentality, and inversed the 'insurer logic'
> that created 'risks', and argued that Hoons (intentionally aggressive
> drivers, normally young males) generated an (in)security that was
> central to borders of cultural difference. 
> 
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: steve.devos 
>   To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu 
>   Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 4:59 AM
>   Subject: territorialisation
> 
> 
>   Glen/All
> 
>   I'm reading Justin Rosenberg's text The follies of globalisation
>   theory.  The section entitled Scholtes Folly is extremely pertinant
>   to our discuission on local/global - he use the term
>   deterritorialisation but detaches it from the re-. For Scholte - who
>   defines globalisation as the having only one acceptable meaning,
>   denying the relevance of notions such as liberalisation,
>   internationalisation, westernisation and so preferring instead to
>   equate globalisation with - Deterritorialisation which " alone
>   identifies something which is historically new, which has no real
>   causal significance that is irrduciable to the others, and which
>   therefore merits the use of a new term..."  The strange but rather
>   interestingly a seemingly reactionary use of Deleuze - appearing to
>   remove the problems and issues that globalisation generates which D&G
>   would never have done, through the slight of hand that occurs when
>   the other side of the binary pair is not invoked and we are left
>   adrift in the flows of capital... If for Negri the
>   deterritorialisation of globalisation enables him to propose out
>   reterritorialisation in 'Empire' with Scholtes we are left adrift in
>   'supraterritoriality'....(a term through which everything that makes
>   up my everyday life is seperated from morderity and post-modernity
>   and placed adrift in the flows of space and time...
> 
> 
> 
>   Check it out I think you might like it Glen,  Scholtes -
>   Globalisation: a critical introduction.
> 
>   regards
>   steve
>   Globalization: A Critical Introduction  
>   Jan Aart Scholte  Our Price: £16.99 



   

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