Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 13:32:11 +1000 From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net> Subject: Re: territorialisation Glen/All, Rosenberg's analysis in the first two chapters has several items of interest which I copy below, including: "This was the expression, in the sphere of material relations, of personal independence based on dependence mediated by things" which is especially interesting. In addition, I agree with his comments on the reification of abstract theory. Also, agree that we humans socialize Time and Space. But humility demands, as genetic science demonstrates, that we consider that human concepts of time and space are limited. These concepts can not be more nor less than the interaction of homo-sapiens' limited (physical) sensibilities with its species-environment. Other species have different species-environments, fish and fowl for example, supposedly navigate global distances by sensing magnetic fields. Our knowledge of "true" concepts of Space and Time are likely to remain problematic. The following Rosenberg paragraphs seem most significant: The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 marked the formal end of the Thirty Years' War, and with it the end too of the wars of religion which followed the Protestant Reformation. By asserting the prerogatives of the German princes against the Holy Roman Emperor, and of secular rulers in general against the interference of the Catholic Church, it registered a heavy decline of the hierarchical and 'transnational' principles which had been central to the medieval geopolitical organisation of Christendom. And it held its place as the major overall legal codification and territorial settlement of European geopolitics for the century and a half leading up to the wars of the French Revolution and the Congress of Vienna in 1815. For international theory, however, (and to some extent in the fields of international law and political theory too) its iconic significance extends far beyond any historical term in which its detailed and highly complicated legal and territorial provisions might have continued to apply. Looking back from the twentieth century world of bordered, sovereign states, Westphalia appears instead as a turning point in world history: the point at which sovereignty (however embryonically conceived or unevenly implemented) began visibly to be consolidated as the organisational principle of a European states-system which would later expand across the planet. Viewed in this light, the Peace of Westphalia reappears as the originary dispensation of geopolitical modernity itself. And the present-day international system, composed as it still legally is of sovereign, independent states, is therefore often referred to as 'the Westphalian System'. Consider, for example, Gallagher and Robinson's famous article of 1953, 'The Imperialism of Free Trade'. The entire force of their argument there was devoted to explaining why the British Empire, from at least the early nineteenth century onwards, could not even be fully seen, let alone understood, using what Scholte defines as a territorialist method. '[I]t would clearly be unreal,' they wrote, 'to define imperial history exclusively as the history of those colonies coloured red on the map.' Such a procedure would be equivalent to 'judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line.' For already, they claimed, a new kind of international power was at work - 'informal empire' - which did not show up on any political map. A very similar argument was later made by Gareth Stedman Jones (though hardly by him alone) about the nature of US overseas expansion. 'The invisibility of American imperialism,' he wrote, was above all attributable to 'its non-territorial character' - reinforced secondarily by its consequent ability to find legitimation through 'a formally anti-imperialist ideology'. >From all this, we may perhaps draw the following preliminary conclusion. Sir Richard Arkwright, cotton-spinner extraordinaire, did not, it is true, invent the communications satellite. But then, the communications satellite, it now appears, did not invent supraterritorial space. We have some empirical grounds for supposing that supraterritoriality is not something which has happened to capitalism as the result of late twentieth century technological advances. It seems rather to be something intrinsic to capitalist social relations themselves. Would it be too much then to suggest that it is rather these social relations which ultimately lie behind the emergence of the commuciations satellite? Whatever else it is, capitalism is, like feudalism, a mode of surplus appropriation. And if we want to get to Marx's analysis of sovereignty, we do have to start with this point. For the Marx claimed that the ambiguities of sovereignty are rooted in the historically peculiar form that surplus appropriation takes in a capitalist society. And what he thought was peculiar to this form was its organisation via contractual relations of exchange (most importantly of labour-power for wages) among formally legal equals. This was the expression, in the sphere of material relations, of personal independence based on dependence mediated by things. So long as sufficient numbers of people, having no alternative means of subsistence, are compelled by circumstances to sell their labour-power; and so long as those who purchase it are able to employ it profitably, meaning that the product (which they own) embodies a surplus (realised through its sale) over and above the costs which they have invested in its production - so long as these conditions apply, the specifically capitalist form of surplus appropriation is being accomplished. First, in order to argue that globalisation is a new process with radically transformative implications for the international system, it clearly helps to have a model of the past in which the inscription of that process in the very constitution of modern international relations has been rendered invisible. Such a model is indeed provided by the 'realist' conception of the Westphalian System, the whole force of which is to produce a definition of the international in terms of geopolitical norms of interaction between states without reference to the 'domestic' level of society, where the transnational relations operate. The ironic consequence of this is that globalisation theory, which prides itself on its intellectual transcendence of 'methodological territorialism' is compelled by the claims it wishes to make about the present, to buy into a quite unsustainably 'territorialist' reading of the past. But this is only the beginning. For secondly, the penalty of this suppression of the standing of transnational relations in the past must necessarily be a misrecognition of their significance in the historical present. If we work with Marx's historical sociological definition of sovereignty, and the conception of the international system which Poulantzas drew out of it, then we would expect a proliferation of transnational relations from the start; we would expect these to grow very dramatically with the rapid material development and geographical spread of capitalism itself; and we would expect the temporally and spatially uneven rhythm of this historical process to generate periodic crises and adjustments in the politics and organisation of the sovereign states system itself, through which this process is collectively, if anarchically, managed. And this incidentally might help us to understand the events of imperialism, world wars, revolutions and the Cold War which have formed such a prominent feature of modern international history, and yet which do not significantly figure in Scholte's global worldview. What we would not expect, however, is that the simple quantitative increase of these transnational relations, however far it extended, would necessarily signal an incipient transformation of the basic character of the international system itself. For as Poulantzas went on to say, perhaps a little formulaically, '[t]hese frontiers. become established as frontiers of the national territory only from the moment when capital and commodities are in a position to break through them.' ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ----- Original Message ----- From: Glen Fuller To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Sent: Monday, January 27, 2003 6:44 PM Subject: Re: territorialisation 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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