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. Even if one right, unjust trade policies thrive in the old ilTllf­ interests, regulation, monopoly, although the rules anti-globalization right-Le Pen, Pat Buchanan­ accepts migrants from everywhere. and embracEs rial heartlands on a bipartisan or multiparty basis. are changed from time to time to benefit new who understand the stakes far better. refugees with open anns, there is still the ques­ There is no court independent of imperial power monopolists. Rather, it is that the vectoral rules. Trade and migration remain as significant tools tion of the enclosure that is trade protection­ to which to plead for vectoral justice, and there This is not the era of liberalization, but of vec­ of enclosure, in many other respects, e~closure ism-that policy on which the new conservative is no resisting imperial power by means of a toralization. is becoming less and tess securable. Hence the left meets the old nationalist right. Instead of counter-enclosure, without suffering sanctions Large corporations move quickly to inhabit the understandable frustration of those anarchists discriminating against the bodies of the other, and bombings. In short, at the macro level, expanded enclosures of NAFT A and the EU. who, having backed the wrong side in global­ trade barriers discriminate against what those the free proliferation of trade vectors is checked Merging and purging, they seek to maintain as ization politics, and having achieved nothing any­ bodies produce. The empire these days persists by imperial fiat. The possibility of counter-enclo­ much of the quasi-monopoly power they enjoyed way, resort to trashing 5tarbucks and McOon­ by discriminating against the labor of the peri~­ sure is checked by imperial violence. This is an in a more tightly restricted world of national aIds-but seem strangely more at ease with their ery. The enclosure of the space of the center old story, ~s the periphery knows. enclosure. They exploit vectoral power to cre­ own national brands. preserves the center from flux and change, from But what of the other levels of enclosure' ate production and distribution circuits that The last moment at which the media vector was the inconstancy of veetoral connections-but it What happens to the enclosure of the family' are global in scope. subordinated to enclosure with any success does so always at someone etse's expense. Or the self' What happens to the old discipli­ At the center, politics becomes a matter of com­ was the era of the national broadcasting regimes, Once upon a time, imperialism ruled by attack~ nary apparatus, such as the school, the church, promise between states, corporations, labor move­ first of radio, then (of television. This created ing poor countries with gunboats. Now imperi­ and the clinic? Here the prognosis is not so good ments, and other organized interest groups. spaces within which ~~vector contributed to alism rules by lending poor countries money. The for enclosure. While at the macro level, imperi­ A politics of compromise in which free trade the power of enclosur It extended nineteenth­ gunboats no longer fire blindly at Africa, as alism persists, distorting trade such that it pre­ means the ability to colonize another's market, century nationalism into lh'\ twentieth cen­ in Joseph [onrad·s Hearl of Darkness. These are serves the old enclosures, at the micro level, the not the reciprocal right of the other to trade tury-with sometimes barb.a1ic.Aonsequences. the days of lasers in the jungle. It"s not that veetoral passes through everything, making any­ freely back the other way. So while the vec­ The national space of broadcasting was also the •surgical" strikes are all that accurate-they·re thing and everything relatable to anything else. toral is unfolding its potential. it does so in a national space of marketing. Brands tended to just a lot more "cost effective- than carpet The enclosures of architecture still keep the rain world shaped by the power of· enclosure to have national identities. FIAT is an Italian brand, bombing whole cities. NATO stands for the pro- out, keep your property safe inside, but that's enforce an unequal share of that potential. BMW a German one, and so on. Of course one

34 (Quid buy these goods outside their respective It's the cultural hierarchy of marks of enclosure necessity. The balance shifts, within architecture, It is a structure that has colonized the com­ national envelopes, but those envelopes created that is disappearing. Any and every attractor of rrom the construction of envelopes, to the con­ munication vector very successfully. This is a a seemingly 'natural' set of brands that corre­ identity is becoming communicable and exchange­ truction of planes. defining characteristic of a lot of powerful archi­ sponded to the national space. National brands able. The question is to what extent this will Architects build models that might be buildings, tecture these days. It exists, not for itself, but became part of a third nature of si~s

36 will be~ a very brief period of time. (See for that made you possible was already vanishing, the nation and family, a nostalgia in its place immovable fulcrum with which to block the rolling instance, Diller + Scofidio's Brasserie restaurant, long before you noticed, long before you for Europe and the museum. Critique, in other stone of modernity. The good life might be a in the basement of Mies's Seagram building in were born. You were a late bloomer of the words, has not critiqued its own implication in matter of appreciating, on an everyday level, New York.! imperial world. the desire for the dominance of enclosure. that vectoral flux and change is ontology itself. If architecture is dead, killed by the vector, The irony of the avant gardes of the center is It has not critiqued its own implication in an One's enclosures are temporary, and if built as so too, ironically enough, is the media. Broad­ that they always arrive too late. Only now, at imperial history. such, one need feel much less anxiety about casting, it turns out, was an aberration. Com­ the turn of another century, is there a move­ In the best museum shows, in all the new their passing. But then such is life in the periph­ munication is most usually narrow-casting. It con­ ment beginning to grasp what should have anthologies, the other is allowed to be put on ery, as always, the periphery being defined pre­ nects rather than encloses. The key communi­ already been clear a hundred years ago. The display, exhibited as a spectacle, exposed to a cisely as those places where enclosure fails, cation technology for understanding its general avant garde has to place its bets on the multicultural fascination, even embraced in new where space was always subordinated to the properties is not television, but the telephone. most advanced form of the ve.li:toral at its talk about justice. But not in talk about fair­ flux originating elsewhere. Media studies that took broadcasting as its par­ disposal. The rise of net.critique finally signals ness. The other will still be denied equal eco­ Justice and fairness, in such a conception, might adigm now casts about for tools to think the that we are leaving the twentieth century, nomic rights. Rather than seek fairness in inter­ mean a world in which force cannot be used postbroadcast world. but leaving it too late. Who need ever have national trade on a case-by-case basis, adjudi­ to secure enclosure at another's expense. Where Where televiSion encloses audiences in identity, inhabited its enclosures in the first place? cated by a fair and independent tribunal, eco­ whatever possibilities for enclosure of a tem­ telephony relates dispersals of connection. Think Perhaps no movement, political or aesthetic, that nomic space in America or Europe is to be porary nature may exist are equitably -distrib­ of the space of the city, and how it was trans­ arises within the enclosed space of a viable enclosed at an other's expense. uted, Seen in such a light, the attempts, at formed by the telephone, Its underground net­ empire can ever be entirely free from the lin­ The vectoral prevails on the micro level, but not the highest levels of ethical thought in Europe, work threading inside and outside together in gering appeal of enclosure. So while the most the macro level. The ebb and flow of the to construct a philosophical ethics devoid of unprecedented ways. Think of the historic avant creative intellectual work in Europe now takes veetoral becomes, if not second nature, then at a commitment to an open economic fairness, gardes, from the fringe romantics to the sur­ the internet as its given means of communica­ least a third nature, within the enclosed space may be yet one more evasion of responsibil­ realists to the situationists. They exist in the tion and exchange, the degree to which the vec­ of Europe, opening up everyday life's little enclo­ ity for imperialism. space of the city as if telegraphy and then tele­ toral is a comfort zone even for advanced sures one by one. And it turns out, contrary to Or so it might seem, looking on from elsewhere, phony had not already transformed it. They thinkers is surprisingly small. the apocalyptic anti-modern rhetoric of critique, communicating through this vector, about what meet in the space of the city, they roam the And there were those who would '(urn even this not to be the end of the world. The axis shifts, the vector has yet to become. city, they record its life as a plane rather than vector into its opposite. Critique, or the nega­ but one does not fall off the edge of the world. an enclosure, but they miss the main means tion of the veetoral in the name of enclosure, So perhaps, just perhaps, the vectoral is a of its transformation-telephony. flourishes even on the internet. Everywhere, the process that really will work from the bottom Telegram for Guy Debord: Your melancholy was lingering nostalgia for the dominance of enclo­ up. The good life would then be a matter of not just on your own account. The very space sure over the veetorat. If not a nostalgia for abandoning critique's desire for an eternal,

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