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Telegram from Nowhere ...... Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? I"m calling of the colonies. For centuries Europe dumped its here from there. I"m calling night from day. I"m surplus goods on its colonies. Metropolitan indus­ calling summer from winter. rm calling from tries grew at the expense ·of the periphery. The Telegram the other side of the world. Here is how things aristocracy of labor cut a deal (or its share of look from here (therel, looking at there IhereJ. the profits-at the expense Gf workers in the And of course, H1ere is something that connects periphery. For centuries, the peripheral countries from us, connects an us, in between. of the world supplied the means by which-old , To whom does globalization appear to be a new Europe could consider itself the still center, the\ ' phenomena? To those used to living close to historic center, of everything. ~ the center of the old imperial powers. To the A postcolonial Brecht might imagine a worker . Nowhere rest of them lwe others, your others), out in from the periphery, who is looking at the the periphery, globalization is nothing new. monumental splendor of the old imperial capi- History, seen from the periphery, from the for­ tals, who wonders' "Where did the materials come Mckenzie Wark mer colonies. is nothing but globalization. from to make all this? Where did the food and History, seen from the periphery, is nothing but the fibers come from that fed and clothed these the struggle by one metropolitan center after people? Where did the troops come from to the other to distort the growth of contact and defend it? From where were the contents of trade between peoples in such a way as to ben­ these museums stolen?- efit themselves. History is not about time, it Geert Lovink argues that the whole of Europe is about space. is a museum-but a museum of what? A time The irony of "globalization" as it is called in the capsule of what can be built with another's old world, is that, for once, it is a case of cen­ resources. All that changed, really, was that the ter catching up With the periphery. Welcome to United States rose up in revolt against this-and the rest of the world, my metropolitan friends. eventually joined the imperial table. If Europe is Welcome to life on the periphery. Ifs almost, not a museum of the loot of the periphery-the quite but almost, here. It only appears to be United States is a museum of the loot of Europe. about time at the still center, at the swim­ That"s globalization for you. ming edges, everything is about space. All that has changed is the speed of global­ For centuries Europe fought its wars with the ization, but even that is an old story. The tele­ coal and iron ore and flax and woo! and wood graph is the real communications revolution. 30 Since the telegraph, information moves faster itored and measured and tracked and counted resource anywhere something that can be con­ and more complex assemblages of resources. But than people, or goods, or armies. The physical in a third nature of telesthesia. nected to any other. Think of eighteenth-cen­ it merely accelerates, proliferates, mutates, it disposition of things in the world can, since the Telegram for Professor Foucault: Bentham's tury cartography and navigation as a very slow isn·t qualitatively all that revolutionary. telegraph, be organized with far greater com­ Panoptic on was never constructed. The English cruise missile. The enthusiasm of some net artists and some plexity. The movement of things can become the preferred to ship their troublesome populations Telegram for Doctor Heidegger' Technologies do late-comers to media theory not withstanding, object of a continuous logistics. to the colonies. It's how I come to be writing, not en frame. There's no enclosure, other than this is not a pivotal time in media history. Since the telegraph, it is all ·over with archi­ in English, from Australia (I could be writing, in the cryptofascist imagination. There is only Rather, it is a time in which the virtuality of tecture. The beginning of the end for archi­ in French, from Africa, or in Portuguese from the possibility of relation. Technology is matter telesthesia is being released. A virtuality that tecture are those beautiful nineteenth-century BraziLl Disciplinary technologies are a minor and movement. Technology is not framing and has subsisted in the communication vector telegraph offices. Most capital cities have one. aspect of modern power, and increasingly sub­ cutting, it is mapping and connecting. Or at least, since the telegraph, but which has only slowly They are mausoleums to architecture itself, to ordinated to vectoral technologies. this is the characteristic of the technologies that unfolded its potential. that old European idea of enclosing space, of In geometry, a vector is a line of fixed length have prevailed. Or in other words, this is a bad time for making a boundary within which things can be but of no fixed position. It has definite dimen­ In the periphery, vectoral power was always conservatives, whether! they wear the colors of rationally ordered. sions, but potentially could start at any point greater than the power of enclosure. This is the left or the rigK!. What has been slowly Since the telegraph, it is all over for enclosure. whatever, and connect any point within its radius. why history appears as space, not as time. This changing ?~r became harder and harder It is all over not just for architecture, but In epidemiology, a vector is a specific means of is something that is slowly dawning at the to sUbor~nate vJctoral power to the power of for that spiritual enclosure-nationalism. It took transmission for an infection, such as water, air old centers. Imperialism means the ability to enclosure. The~enclosure of the state, the enclo­ a long, bloody struggle, one that is still going or bodily fluids, through which any body could enclose one's own space at the expense of sure of the firm, the enclosure of the family, on, but what we witness now, every day, on be connected to any other body. With technol­ another, whose space remains open to flux, the enclosure of the self, all are just that lit­ the television, is the embalming of nationalism ogy, a vector might be the potential to connect to unequal exchange, of a kind the imperial tle bit harder to secure. Or so it seems, in the in the shroud of telegraph, telephony, televi­ one thing to another, a particular relation, power need not suffer. An imperial relation is old metropolitan centers. sion-telesthesia. but with no specified coordinates. The vec­ closed at one end and open at the other, to For the rest of us, this is just modernity as Telesthesia, or "perception at a distance"-the toral, in other words, is the technics of the the benefit of the encloser. usual, opening and opening and opening. In the tools that, for years now, make it possible to open, of virtuality. Vectoral power is nothing new. Its is as old as antipodes, where ever they are, it was also so. create reason without enclosure, to cause things Disciplinary technologies enclose, they count and the imperial navies of the eighteenth century, The antipodes, the other pole, the other foot, to move and to monitor their movement. Teles­ rank what they enclose. Vectoral technologies when the first accurate maps where produced. always defined by what it is peripheral to­ thesia enables the monitoring of things moving extend their grid out across open space, and It accelerates with the telegraph. The internet always in a passing state between difference even while they are moving. The material project lines of movement across it. From car­ speeds up telegraphy, connects it to the archive, and identity, always being neither here nor there. resources of the natural world, out of which tography and navigation to telegraphy and makes it possible to relate more and more pieces How funny, how strange, that antipodean ambiva­ I, hulll fin inhabitable second nature, are mon- telemetry, the vectoral steadily makes any of data, and thereby relate and connect more lence is spreading in the old centers, • The murmur of the south arrives in the north, tection of enclosure by means of the most about it. In every other respect, the communi­ Misguided "anti-globalization-protesters, mis­ So imperialism finds new means to SEcure enclo­ advanced vectoral power. cation engineers have become the architects. And taking enclosure for justice, merely add their sure. The European Union, which encloses, not So one kind of enclosure is secure for now. what they have designed is a reversal of the support to the status quo, in which the politics one nation, but a bunch of them-but encloses There are still plenty of racists who believe that roles of vector and enclosure. The enclosure is of trade enclosure benefits the imperial trad­ them nonetheless. One Border. One Bureaucracy. Frenchmen or Americans have more right to jobs now subordinated to the vector. ing blocs at the expense of the periphery. One Currency. Might this not be the formula for than Indonesians or Chinese. And as there are It is not so much that the market rules. Free It doesn·t occur to the anti-globalization left fascism perfected' as many of those racists on the left as on the markets are as constrained as ever by special why it finds itself sharing the streets with the Take One Border, for example.
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