The New Frontier
Nice to read of something kind of familiar for a change, like Fitzroy. I’d be interested in reading your next instalment though, because your title and a number of points raised offer much … and leave us waiting for the delivery!
The United States defines the ideology of globalisation and
Corporations are the main catalyst.
Here, I’m not sure. For a start, and as others on ::fc:: have raised
previously with respect to your gun-in-the-head swipes at the US,
your argument is not consistent. If, for instance, national
sovereignty has declined with the onset of globalisation - and this,
I think, is an argument that needs careful theorising and empirical
work - then surely the ‘US’ is a diverse, asynchronous
socio-political entity that is also subject to such changes? What
you’re hedging at is quite specific institutions I suspect, and I
think your argument would do better to name them upfront. It’s
pretty hard to argue that nation-states are defined by hegemonic
unity.
As for Corporations as the main catalyst - this too, I think, needs
to be tempered by considering other forces at work. Castells is one
among many (and indebted too many!) that recognises a prehistory to
corporate power predicated by the internationalisation and history of
communcations media & transport technologies - arguably the hardware
that makes possible the transnationalisation of corporations along,
of course, with that other key catalyst: the mobilisation of labour
and the attendant mingling of cultures.
So, in short, too short a take on what could be called the economic
sovereignty, as distinct from the popular sovereignty, of US
corporations and supranationally governed institutions (UN, IMF,
World Bank, etc).
Capitalism has always been international and relied on
internationalism to expand, but this has entered a new stage.
Here, I’m curious as to how you see the figurations of this ‘new
stage’. And, more than anything, I’m eagerly awaiting how you go
about articulating the historical everydayness of Fitzroy with
globality, beyond the waves of migration outline as characterising
that suburb.
> As Morley argues ?maintenance of national sovereignty and identity
>is becoming increasingly difficult, as the unities of economic and
>cultural production and consumption become increasingly
>transnational?.
Morley, of course, is reiterating a common line (one of many that
make up a close to plagiarised book, if you’re drawing on Home
Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. Try and find a few lines
in there that aren’t a quote or paraphrase! Very handy for his
footnotes and synthesis of debates though.)
And it’s too simplistic a line, in my view. National sovereignty,
in its *modern* form, is closely articulated with institutions of the
state and the territory of the nation. This said, I think it’s
dubious for any post-colonial nation-state to assume ever to have
extinguished the sovereignty of the colonising power. While
currencies, populations, industries, legal systems and so forth may
be regulated by the nation, the residual power of a colonised or
displaced colonial imaginary is not to be underestimated and still
commands considerable authority: the cringe factor has still not
evacuated this nation’s culture. (And as Keating knew so well, for a
politician of this country, the relationship between culture and
economy is a mutually constitutive one.) In this respect, I think
it’s dubious to assume a history of absolute sovereignty for a nation
state like Australia. We still have monarchical rule, after all.
Without having done the necessary thinking or research, and hence
setting myself up for pretty fast invalidation!, I’m inclined to
think national sovereignty is not undergoing a crisis so much as a
transformation, one that indeed has had, as you outline, devasting
affects for many of those under the rule of sovereign power - but
this is different from sovereignty itself having a crisis.
National sovereignty is articulating itself through and with a
different informational and cultural architecture, in both material
and immaterial ways. The media event of the Sydney Olympics
demonstrated that national difference is as important as ever in the
quest to turn the wheels of capital accumulation, which has always
depended upon the differentiation of commodity objects - something
the unity-under-negotiation of the nation has managed to do since its
inception .
So, while the corporations that own the mode of production may have
become subject to transnational corporate usurptation, the identity
representations (if not interpellations - and there, sure, is a bit
of a key difference, though one might argue that representation is
conditioned by the possibilty of interpellation…) are still very
much about national difference. While the nation-state (with the
hyphen) as an entity aligned with national institutions and
geographic territory has lost some of its grasp of sovereignty with
the advent of, as you point out, the floating of the dollar and
corporatisation of public institutions, the sovereignty - as a
‘victory of one side over the other, a victory that makes the one
sovereign and the other the subject’ (Hardt & Negri) - of the
postmodern nation state still takes on national forms. The cultural
life of industries within the imaginary realm of the nation are
still, and necessarily, embedded in the empirical & aesthetic
multiplicity of social practices, and I’d hazzard to suggest a sort
of sovereignty of phenomenology is occurring at this level - or, more
simply, the rule of perception bounded by the materiality of
everydayness.
In the paper I posted to ::fc:: a few weeks back, I was starting
work that sought, in ways perhaps similar to yours, to demonstrate
that sovereignty is something up for grabs, but still something that
takes on figurations within the nation. Processes of deregulation
and so forth have freed up the space of sovereignty within the
nation. It’s what I’d call the materiality of virtuality. Something
that is highly contingent upon the loosening up of otherwise
sedentary variables. This may sound like a neoliberalist apology,
but there are possibilities for alternatives within such a
transformative space. Education is one. The legitimacy granted to
denationalised political subjects at a supranational level might hold
a symbolic authority, but this remains illegitimate until it is
successfully articulated with the symbolic and actual structures and
lives within the nation. The future of representative democracy, if
it isn’t a complete historical farce, is dependent on such processes
of recognition *within* the nation. Herein lies the present
condition for a future democracy, at least in its representative form.