ABSTRACT

In a still very recent past, the idea of globalization somewhat naturally tended to conjure up visions of integration and continuous flows on a planetary scale. Understandably, such expectations inspired much joyous optimism and much critical defiance. And for good or bad, they were not entirely unfounded. Within a few years, a number of entrenched and notorious antagonisms, along with their institutionalized as well as spatialized demarcations, became obsolete: the end of the apartheid regime, the fall of the Berlin wall certainly constituted emblematic moments in this respect. The dismantling of the Soviet Union, the subsequent reinforcement and expansion of the European Union, and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in China further gave this trend its formidable amplitude. These gigantic political and economic developments also had their technological and cultural counterpart; the growth of the internet seemed to hold the promise of an unprecedented imagined community coextensive with the world itself. In this context, it seemed that the state-form itself might lose some of its historical relevance. Meanwhile, deconstruction and postmodernist hybridity became central concerns in academic discourse. A generation or so later, this powerful sense of convergence and integration has not slowed down or even stopped. It has been inverted. Among the multiplicity of events and developments that may underpin this assertion, four appear to be endowed with special significance here: the erection of walled partitions between the United States of America and Mexico; between Spain-Europe and the African continent; between communities in Baghdad; and between Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Two of them aim to contain illegal immigration from the South. Two of them aim to contain what remains terrorism for some and armed struggles for others. The four of them, although each certainly has its own specific context, are charged with the same global significance: both the United States and Europe still control most of the economic, financial, political, and military forces of globalization, and mean to carry on doing so against intensifying competition from the emerging economic powers of the global south. Meanwhile, much of the world’s future could depend on the tiny

region east of the Mediterranean where much of today’s global tensions are both synthesized and exacerbated. With these four walls, a contradictory logic has literally surfaced and

materialized whereby the global disorders of capital must be met and temporarily stabilized through particular territorial re-orderings. In the way they exacerbate whole ranges of pre-existing demarcations, these partitions reveal much more pervasive patterns of particularization and separateness which probably deserve to be traced all the way to the recent proliferation of states as cultural-political concretions at one level, or of gated urban areas at another. This contribution will return to some of these issues. But they will form its

outcome rather than its point of actual departure. The initial concern here is far removed from the Gaza Strip or the US-Mexican border. It is located in the diffuse order of everyday experience as centred on work (taken here in the restrictive sense of paid work) with the assumption that the set of relations which shapes the work process and orders the workplace is pivotal to the understanding of the wider social configuration where labour is stored and reproduced. In other words, what happens to, in and at work, being the everyday life of capital, centrally informs what goes on elsewhere in the social world. On that basis, the main argument here will be the following one: the transformations of work in the recent (post-Fordist) period are at the same time transformations of the real and symbolic spaces of the collective as well as intimate sense of who we are.1 And in that sense, the issue of work cannot be dissociated from the issue of language which, it will be argued, does not “come later.” Thus, the theoretical and historical insistence of the following pages on the molecular interactions of work and language; these molecular transformations themselves involve processes of dislocation and re-stabilization of pre-existing orders of subjectivity, experience, and culture. As such, they will be further understood to constitute the grammar governing other similar processes at wider (no-longer molecular) social and political levels, with the idea that every disorder and new invasion resulting from the mobility of capital produces a corresponding – real and/or imagined – territorial crystallization often articulated in the language of the “authentic community.” Thus, the present contribution should be understood as illustrative of one

of the general contentions of this book, namely, that beyond direct territorial markings, for example Asia/Orient, Europe/Occident as colonial instrumentality and legitimization, one needs to turn to the internal logic of differentiation2 and violent reconfigurations inherent in capitalism. This logic is central to the critical analysis of the forms of geographical imagination and commonsense in which the Orient, sharp Europe-Asia distinctions and their multi-layered culturalized connotations, become key categories. One emphasis here, however, is that familiar, commonsense geography is itself a particular and culturalized instantiation of that “internal logic” of capital itself more formally understood as a re/de-territorializing drive of a non-topographical nature. That particular and culturalized instantiations sometimes become

particularist and culturalist, robed in the discourses of neo-romantic nativism steeped in reified terroirs certainly constitutes a problem in itself, and of a thoroughly political nature at that. This is where, incidentally, Vasant Kaiwar’s concluding chapter may be said to start from, before repatriating this paraphernalia to the set of relational patterns constituting the non-topographical locus and powerhouse of constant differentiation and recombination of the interacting “residual,” “emergent,” “dominant” and “archaic”3 levels and temporalities of social practices. The border that is then crossed is not between Europe and Asia, but rather, between two profoundly incompatible versions of “difference.” To a large extent, the said locus is where the present chapter wishes to start from, thus the attempted emphasis on something like the intimacy of capital. Two brief clarifications may be necessary then. First, the authentic com-

munity will generally be understood to function as a cultural fix whereby centrifugal forces of dislocation, at whichever level they circulate, stimulate more or less effective and plausible agendas of communal stabilization, thus momentarily regenerating a sense of the knowability of the world and deferring threats of open class antagonisms. The idea of a cultural fix is clearly derived from the “spatial” or “spatio-temporal fix” with which David Harvey conceptualizes the deferment of crises of overaccumulation inherent in capitalism.4 Here, however, “cultural fix” seeks to interpret the production of “authentic communities”5 of substitution in our own historical moment when the material capacities for working-class self-activity and collective resistance to capital have been – if only momentarily – globally weakened in the core countries of imperialism. It is generally assumed, besides, that this weakening itself involves a weakening of the capacity to envisage “radical difference” as unrealized possibility anticipated along the axis of time: in other words, as a radical New projected in a thinkable and alternative future and presupposing a break from the present mode of production and its increasingly stagnant and reductive equation of culture with inherintance or patrimoine. Secondly, such initial assumptions might require further discussions of the

category of determination and the nature of the totality (“expressive” or “structural”) thus determined. Suffice it to say at this stage that the present chapter hopes to suggest how distinct historical regimes of determination may need to be identified. This discussion largely rests on the conviction that if there are such things as relatively autonomous institutions, spheres of social practices and so forth, indeed their autonomy is relative in a historical sense. In other words, I would like to try and suggest something of the historically relative intensity of the economic last instance’s orbital pull. At this stage, it should be enough to observe that the emphasis on work

also derives from its revived currency, along with the reactivation of the critique of imperialism, in the contemporary period. A first section will look then at the coincidental revival of the debates on imperialism on the one hand, and work on the other, seeing both as symptomatic of our own transitional phase from the short-lived age of the “global village.” I will then turn

to the work and production-centred paradigm to look at the conditions and consequences of its decline and more recent re-emergence. We will see that in both cases, the historical and theoretical situation of language (as “superstructure” and “immateriality”) forms the pivotal dimension of the analysis. These discussions will then provide the framework for the evocation of further cases of disintegration-reordering and their corresponding territories.