McKenzie Wark on Tue, 11 Mar 2003 22:15:43 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Re: There is no America and Europe |
The Untied States McKenzie Wark The vectoralization of power produces a split in the powers of empire. Empire is not unitary. It is a dual power. On the one hand, the vectoral class has its (neo)liberal wing. It is committed to the accelerated vectoralization of world trade, and the consolidation of its own power through a global regime of intellectual property, aided and abetted by the monopolization of the means of the realization of information as value -- media and communication. But the vectoral class has another faction, more dependent on the national state, not least in its capacity as military procurer. It is less interested in the commodity game of the vector, more interested in the strategy-game of the vector. It conceives of vectoralization not as a regime in which any object, regardless of location, can be valued, ordered, and brought into the marketplace. Rather, it is interested in spatially fixed resources, which it views as subject to calaculation and command in the aggregate, under a regime of strategy. While it may seem that oil is the classic 'old economy' staple, it too has been subject to a vectoral transformation. The vector puts all resources on the same plane of calculation. The control over resources is much more about the control over the relevant information, allocation management and so on. Now, what is significant is that these two forms of vectoral power are not necessarily in agreement. And neither are they synonymous with 'America'. They are, if anything, what is tearing the United States apart. They are the forces that prevent it from becoming a 'normal' state. And so there is an additional reason to think the argument Franco Berardi makes is pertinent. In his terms, not only is there no 'Europe', there is no 'United States'. One might rather speak of the Untied States. Rather than imagine that the new movements confront "the dynamics of a profiteering world system", as Brian Holmes suggests, what might be more to the point is to realize that this too is a totalizing, dialectical figure. It too can blind us to the internal dissonance within the regime of empire itself. It may be time to look for ways to leverage a whole series of contradictions. Between the two aspects of the vectoral empire, for a start. Between the vectoral class in either of its guises and the interests of the American people. Between the vectoral class and other states. Between these other states and their peoples, whose interests are hardly captured by those states, as Berardi and Holmes point out. ___________________________________________________ http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ... ___________________________________________________ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net