File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0301, message 164


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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