archive : s0metim3s

Mike Hill and Tom Cohen, “Black Swans and Pop-up Militias: War and the ‘Re-rolling’ of Imagination”, Global South, 3:1 2009:

The key strokes and strikes by which we introduce an open dossier on “war” in its visible and invisible dimensions will also, clearly, be those of the typographic “key”—of the writing of tele-polemeology codes, war machines, and in the wars latent in critical impasses today, as a certain mutation has begun for which the global credit collapse may be, at once, mere catalyst and symptom.

War, today, involves writing, encoding, the technesis of perception, the stupefaction of citizenry, the apparently suicidal orders of hyperconsumption and so on. This riff within the visible as well as between it and its others seems to assign a double discourse to that of “war” today—an account of the military vision and strategies of always past and future wars, and the logics by which this new, totalizing order, appears installed aesthetically, mnemonically, archivally. Hence two typographic dossiers, inter(in)dependent, not to say at war with one another or themselves (italics, here, will do to shade this switching of voice). In the present collection the topos of “war” plays a conceptually viral rather than descriptive role. It seems, in the twenty first century, the “global” exists simultaneously with three other realities: first, a post-global order has become too visible which is the underbelly of what now looks like a twentieth -century chapter of geopolitical and hyperindustrial culture; second, a retreat from the anthropic models and humanism that attended that episode before the mutations of climate change, global warming, extinction events, etc.; and third, a bizarre relation to futurity, in which diverse geomorphic consequences for current and past depredations appear calculable, some cataclysmic in implications. It is a recently suppressed report by the US Department of Defense on “climate change,” after all, that predicts water and resource wars, some local and nuclear in nature, in tandem with a regression to more or less feudal techno-states.1 In this environment, war has morphed into strangely totalizing forms. Having moved beyond war with an enemy, with anthropomorphic doubles (including, however faceless, the “terrorist”) one now hears in credible tones of a war against animals, or against “life” itself that has become inertial, driven by mediacracies and hyperfinance.

Some more fragments from the same edition of Global South:

Robert P. Marzec, “Militariality”:

In the stratocracy the environment itself is transformed biopolitically and co-opted for militarization: the ecosystem has now achieved visibility in the military problematic on the basis of its problematization as a potential target of terrorism (Little 1). This is made manifest in the sudden attention that war footing proponents now pay to the environment, an area of concern that until recently was completely demarcated in conservative circles as a “liberal cause.” War footing proponents now directly attempt to transform the public’s relation to the environmental crisis. The signifiers that disclose the truth of the many threats to the planet’s ecosystem are being overwritten and erased by the single conservative allotrope “US Energy Security.” 2005 was the year that we saw the beginning of “Green Patriotism,” and the development of close ties between the military and environmental activism, or what should more properly be termed “environmentality.” Now organizations such as the Green Patriots and the Set American Free Coalition can urge American companies to develop more hybrid vehicles on the grounds that we thereby avoid, by cutting off our dependence on foreign oil, the funding of foreign terrorists. […] Reconstellated in the new stratocracy, environmental activism becomes environmentality. The land and its inhabitants, the human and the non-human, now come to presence as a military problem.

Jody Berland, “Animal and/as Medium: Symbolic Work in Communicative Regimes”:

can a society be said to “choose” to destroy itself? The “we” posited in texts such as this one echoes the “we” constructed in the discourse of “banal nationalism,” or even “banal terrorism,” defined by Cyndi Katz as the commonsense construction of a “homeland” that is “porous and perforated” and needs more than ever to be defended against external threat (Katz 350). The “we” invoked in the fight against global warming is so perforated that it has become its own threat, creating a space in which a new mobilizing rhetoric can emerge. This perforated social sphere’s failure to connect is one of the most challenging obstacles to halting the marathon of global destruction. […] The recurrent appropriation of animal representation by the telecommunications industry parallels the appropriation of environmentalism’s anxiety about and attachment to nature by the discourse of security known as “soft power.”

Warren Montag, “War and the Market: The Place of the Global South in the Origins of Neo-liberalism”:

Our own time has shown with remarkable clarity that the concerns of neo-liberal theory necessarily call into question the boundaries of the nation state. The military power of the state so vital to the maintenance of the market and to the preservation of the property relations that alone make the market possible is necessarily globalized. It must be applied to those recalcitrant states whose governments or populations resist the freeing up and development of the natural wealth with which they merely co-exist and therefore the natural necessity of the market out of fear of the destitution that such development brings. Contrary to many recent theorists it is these movements that have brought the question of biological or “bare life” into a realm in which paradoxically it was declared to have no place in a struggle to wrest life from the operations of what we have every reason to call the global necroeconomy.

Randy Martin, “The Twin Towers of Financialization: Entanglements of Political and Cultural Economies”:

Today we see the national economy subtended by a trinity of subject positions that jostle in unholy alliance. The citizen channels the foreigner, the immigrant, those who are dispossessed of a prior way of life. The consumer liberates alienated labor to the dream of the future. The investor privileges risk capacity for myriad schemes of arbitrage. Each of these three identifications refer to a regulatory regime, a way that the state calls upon and organizes population so that some will flourish and others will be left behind. Under financialization people are invited to treat their lives as if spreadsheets parsed out and recombined bits of their activity. Some things will be consolidated and others dispersed. The social principles wrought are organized around the processes of securitization and the derivative—the former a delocalizing assemblage of equity and debt, the later a dispersal of value through disparate moments of production and media of exchange. Finance thus picks up the potent thrust of mutual association that capital has always depended upon but been unable to abide, the laboring masses—enclosed, dispossessed and forced together–now supplemented by interweavings of financial decision and risk. What was until recently a hallowed site of consumption, of passive accumulation, is now placed in circulation, as the domestic sphere becomes a scene of round-the-clock speculation with the home itself its first prize. A second shift emerges that demands attention to financial workings and profanes the haven of leisure and time for idle dreams of the future. Applied and perpetuated unevenly, finance cooks and gestates in a stew of volatility that wrecks a jagged geography upon sediments of inequality and exploitation.

Jason Groves, “The Ecology of Invasions: Reflections from a Damaged Planet”:

Not without a strong ideological basis is a large component of invasion biology devoted to the practice of conservation: by attempting to preserve a very particular distribution of plants and animals within a given community, invasion biology actively refuses the transience—the historicity—of nature. This refusal is countered by the recent turn in the physical sciences away systems tending toward stability and simple equilibrium and towards “unpredictable transmutations, fusions, irruptions, and disappearances” (Clark 2000: 13). Rather than ecologies of war, whose fields of study are the battlegrounds where illegal aliens are subjected to governmental controls and violent eradication, the explosive landscapes studied by invasion biology also point toward a new understanding of ecosystems as open systems marked by instability and ongoing changes of state. Finally, the persistent resistance to, and outrage at, the accelerated immigration by new species into existing plant and animal communities cannot be accounted for on merely scientific grounds. This resistance cannot be the beginning of knowledge, unless it is the knowledge that the concept of nature that gives rise to this resistance is untenable.

Along with my oikopolitics piece.