as Doug says, there are flaws in the Marxian argument that with the progression of global capital there arises a global civilisation - a flaw that arises from the progressivist attachments of various marxisms to be sure. but I wouldn't particularly pattern it as core and periphery, nor would I argue there is an inability to push deterritorialisation further [1]. there are ways of territorialising a low-wage 'periphery' at the heart of the cosmopolitan 'core', and I think Doug has mentioned sweatshops in NY before. Mike Davis essay on the Mex-Us border is certainly about a way in which criminalisation and the management of movements between spaces is itself a powerful instrument in the creation and maintenance of a low wage reserve [4] and I would add the enhancement of regional competition b/n workers in low-wage (and compliant) biddings where the borders are less porous. (maybe the problem is that we too easily lapse into liberalist conceptions of state power as negative rather than productive, even in supposedly negative moments such as making certain things illegal, and so there is a tendency to think of nation-states as obstacles to global powers when that is hardly the case. maybe the problem is simply that we think of global and national as antithetical terms in the first place.)
but having said that: I think Doug is right to say that capitalism territorialises as it deterritorialises, that enclosures are an integral part of capital's 'progression', not a contradiction with it. I would add that there is another way in which Zizek's analyses are important: that the inherent contradictions of capital will out, but not necessarily in ways which are useful for any anti-capitalist projects. the failures and antagonisms of capitalism will have to be attributed, and for now, they seem to be being attributed to immigrants, the poor, the unemployed, 'other ethnicities'...
as to the question of taking bourgeois propaganda too seriously [3], I don't think this can be easily dismissed: alongside the triumphalism of globalisation there is a generation of people who believe it without exception, that the free movement of money is, or should be, rendered into the right of free movement of peoples - this is a challenge to the new enclosures of people on which the free movement of money relies for its effectivity.... an immanent challenge, but a challenge nonetheless, and certainly one that has the potential to be more combative (or even constitutive of a working class combativeness) than the other immanence on offer (anti-American nationalism). ('do we have anything other than immanentism?' is perhaps a question that drives much of recent theory, including that of Deleuze, Negri.... and I honestly don't think I can see that there is. I'd certainly like there to be...)
but as to Michael's comments on the Empire: (and here I am still leaning toward seeing the current moment as a shift away from US hegemony), isn't there a sense in which each new imperial regime has its own privileged codes and structures? that US dominance brings with it certain substantive elements (its cultural motifs, particular modes of control) that Euro dominance (hypothetically) won't (the emphatic code of Civilisation, civil society, moralism, etc that we have seen amplified during the current war in Europe)?
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au --------------------
[1] Doug wrote:
>You could argue, following Polyani and/or Zizek (see quote below), that the
>construction of the world market produces the very "monsters" that the U.S.
>and its allies end up bombing. So, contrary to the classic Marxian argument
>about the world market creating a world civilization, it inevitably creates
>a cosmopolitan core and an excluded periphery. It may be that you can't
>push capital's deterritorializations further, because capital
>reterritorializes as it deterritorializes.
---
[2] Michael Hardt wrote:
>global order as if it were completely deterritorialized. There are, as
>she says, important territorial obstacles that we should oppose, such as
>national border controls and immigration policies. (I'm reminded of a
>Deleuze and Guattari line that sometimes instead of resisting the forces
>of global capital we have to push its deterritorializations further,
>accelerate the process, to come out the other side.) In any case, I
>recognize this as a problem rather than knowing how to resolve it: how to
>understand simultaneously, as Angela says, the territorialized or local
>forces of rule and the processes of deterritorialization.
---
[3] Michael wrote:
>>are the primary elements of hegemony. And in these regards the US is not
>>predominant and we can begin to imagine an Empire without center,
>>composed on networks of global power.
Doug replied:
>I wonder how much of these ideas of decentered empire come from taking
>bourgeois propaganda too seriously.
---
[4]>[from Mike Davis, "Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City,"
New
>Left Review 234, March/April 1999, pp. 15-16]
>specific, and La Linea, even in its present Berlin-Wall-like configuration,
>has never been intended to stop labour from migrating al otro lado. On the
>contrary, it functions like a dam, creating a reservoir of labour-power on
>the Mexican side of the border that can be tapped on demand via the secret
>aqueduct managed by polleros, iguanas and coyotes - as smugglers of workers
>and goods are locally known - for the farms of south Texas, the hotels of
>Las Vegas and the sweatshops of Los Angeles. At the same time, the Border
>Patrol maintains a dramatic show of force along the border to reassure
>voters that the threat of alien invasion - a phantasmagoria largely created
>by border militarization itself - is being contained.