Brain Holmes writes:

"Continental Drift

Or, The Other Side of Neoliberal Globalization"

Brian Holmes

[Brian Holmes is offering the seminar “Continental Drift" in September and October, 2005 in New York City in conjunction with the 16 Beaver art group. Autonomedia will publish a collection of Holmes' essays, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms, this winter.]

This seminar is called “Continental Drift,” and it's about the different sorts of regional blocs that are forming in the world and in our heads. Now, the first questions to ask could be these:

Why even talk about regional blocs or continental integration? Isn't that just about the European Union, and its attempt to regain some lost power? Why not pursue the bottom-up theory of the multitude that was launched with the book Empire? Or conversely, why not admit that the real force of globalization is American imperialism? How can the abstractions of geopolitics have any meaning for the ordinary individual? And what does “continental drift” have to do with art, or with activism?What I mainly expect is not to answer these questions, but to make them sharper and deeper and more urgent. In the first place, far from being an exclusively European problem, “continental integration,” or rather, intégration continentale, is a phrase that seems primarily to be used in Quebec, and in Canada. I first encountered it during the protests surrounding the failed Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, in Quebec City in May of 2001. For Canadians, continental integration is a process that goes back to the Free Trade Treaty signed with the United States in 1987, and then ratified by the parliament in 1988 despite massive resistance by what seems to have been a majority of the people, who were afraid of losing not only their political sovereignty but above all, what is distinctive about their society, particularly their social programs.

In the Americas today, the phrase “continental integration” can refer to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that links Canada, the US and Mexico; but also CAFTA, the recently passed Central American Free Trade agreement that will link the US, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic; and then again AFTA, the Andean Free Trade Area, under negotiation between the US, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and possibly Bolivia; and finally, the US-Chile Free Trade Agreement — with the last three being the Bush administration's bilateral replacements for the stalled FTAA, known as “ALCA” in Spanish, which was supposed to extend NAFTA as a universal capitalist compact reaching all the way to Tierra del Fuego.

Now, these free trade agreements, which aim at creating not only a unified American market, but also a unified American production bloc, directed and even controlled by US capital and by the US political elite, are obviously very different from the European Union, even though there is clearly a process of economic integration at work there as well. In the case of the EU, the abolition of tariffs and the rewriting of national regulations has been accompanied by a political debate that has intensified considerably in recent years; there is a European Parliament and a European Court of Justice; internal borders have largely been abolished for citizens as well as goods; and in stark contrast to the North American situation, one cannot identify any single state that maintains predominant control over the others.

At the same time, it can be seriously argued that what the institutional architecture of the enlarged EU tends to create is precisely an integrated production bloc, a vast free-trade area whose parliament and court will only be able to regulate it economically, according to the neoliberal model, without any room for social justice, ecological transformation, or any deep debate about values. And these are the arguments that recently led a decisive percentage of voters on the left, in France, to reject the recent referendum on the Treaty for a European Constitution.

So, continental integration seems at least to be a Euro-American phenomenon. But what does it imply? Does it represent a consolidation of transnational corporate capitalism, an institutionalization of capitalist exploitation at a larger scale, as the example of the American hemisphere suggests? Or does it also represent a defensive reaction against those very same processes?

The second possibility is suggested by the most democratic aspects of the European example, but also by the attempts to relaunch the MERCOSUR agreements in the southern cone of Latin America, and even more, by the efforts of Venezuela to establish regional partnerships under the umbrella program of ALBA: the “Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas,” or simply, “dawn,” which is the literal meaning of the word.

Concretely, what ALBA means today is partnerships around the production and distribution of energy, with Petrosur, an agreement between the state oil companies of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela, and Petrocaribe, a 13-nation energy alliance in the Caribbean; and alliances in heavy industries like shipbuilding, with a major contract for Argentina to supply Venezuela with four oil tankers; and most interestingly for all of us, the establishment of the continental TV station Telesur, conceived as a Latin American rival to CNN (the participating nations so far are Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay and Cuba, with some technical cooperation from Brazil).

The idea that regionalization could represent a defensive process undertaken against the dangers generated by neoliberal globalization is reinforced by the negotiations that have arisen in Asia over different possible forms of monetary cooperation and regulation, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, and in the framework of ASEAN+3, that is to say, the Association of South-East Asian Nations plus China, Japan and Korea. Those negotiations arise within the informal, but very powerful regional bloc that has slowly been constituted by the productive relations between Japan, Southeast Asia, and China.

Essentially, what has happened over the last thirty years is a meeting between Japanese capital, high technology and organizational methods, on the one hand, and the ability of the Chinese diaspora to act as local mediators for a network of industrial facilities scattered throughout the region, on the other; and this was followed by a vast augmentation of productive capacity occurred as China slowly opened up to the capital and the expertise of this network. The resulting East Asian regional network appears as the great unknown, the great question mark, the place where all the world's manufacturing work is increasingly done, the place that seems to hold the key to the world's future.

But what about the huge region called India, the sub-continent with a billion people, where the conditions of life are changing at such incredible speed? What about the Russian Confederation, which seems to be falling into an authoritarian nightmare, just as fast as India is emerging onto the world scene? What about the Middle East, where the call to Salafi jihad represents an attempt to constitute a new kind of region, by means of a new kind of global civil war? How to make any sense out of all the transformations in the world over the last fifteen years?

I suspect that the slightest reflection on contemporary geopolitics will be enough to make the arguments of the book Empire seem insufficient. But a lot of people took those arguments very seriously just a few years ago, and personally, I am still part of a journal called Multitudes. Why was Empire so compelling around the year 2000? And why do some of its hypotheses appear so out of date today?

Empire was probably the most productive intervention in the debate around the antiglobalization movement, for at least three reasons. First, because it defamiliarized the very idea of globalization, making it appear as a deeply ambiguous process, with an emancipatory aspect that could be made immediately concrete. It did this by considering the world market as a “smooth space” in Deleuze and Guattari's sense, where borders and limits were not pre-established, where power could only be constituted through the extension of networks of immanent social relations that were always open, reversible, malleable by the will and desire of the participants, and never overcoded or dictated in advance by transcendent principles. What's more, in a surprising or even astonishing move, it identified this “constituent power” of globalization with a potentially unlimited extension of the freedoms granted by the US constitution; and in this way it claimed the definitive victory of Woodrow Wilson's internationalism over the colonial adventurism of a president like Teddy Roosevelt – which was another way of claiming the obsolescence of the entire notion and reality of imperialism.

Second, Empire identified the emancipatory struggle of the producers as the motive force behind the creation of the world market, and in this way it resurrected and transformed Marx's notion of the proletariat as the actor of world history. It stressed the transition to a post-industrial or post-Fordist economy, the “cultural-informational economy,” and it proposed the theory of intellectual and affective work, or what was called “immaterial labor,” as the new, hegemonic figure of a concrete productive force that capable of managing its own cooperative relations. The self-organizing capacities of living labor at this stage of development meant it could no longer could be kept outside the sphere of decision-making by coercive or disciplinary procedures, but instead could only be channeled or controlled by the maintenance of conceptual categories, figures of identity, hierarchies of value and units of measure — essentially, what Deleuze and Guattari called “capture devices,” which are ontologically secondary to the primary force of so-called biopolitical production, or the production of life itself and of all its contexts, all its cultural, technological and organizational frameworks. Imperial sovereignty was conceived as the unceasing effort to maintain control over those frameworks, in particular by including all the subgroups, differentiating between them, and managing the resulting conflict.

Finally, in response to Imperial sovereignty, the book addressed the “multitude” as the virtual political subject of the wide-open potential represented by the self-organizing capacities of immaterial labor. It invited people to seize or “reappropriate” the productive energies that they were already putting into operation through their salaried or freelance cooperation, and it asserted that the self-organizing multitude should be capable of directly producing the immanent forms of exchange, of governing its own production, and in this way superseding the sterile and divisive forms of coordination that structure the world market. This was the fantastic promise of Empire. What's more, it seemed possible to realize that promise. As Hardt and Negri wrote on the last page of the book: “Certainly, there must be a moment when reappropriation and self-organization reach a threshold and configure a real event. This is when the political is really affirmed — when the genesis is complete and self-valorization, the cooperative convergence of subjects, and the proletarian management of production become a constituent power.... The only event that we are still awaiting is the construction, or rather the insurgence, of a powerful organization.” When the book came out in the year 2000, the uprising against the WTO had just happened in Seattle — and the idea of networked self-organization seemed to have been embodied with a vengeance, or even better, with a real proactive power for change.

Now, must we really give up such a fabulously ambitious theory? Or more interestingly, what are the basic weaknesses in the conceptual structure of this book, the ones that would have to be overcome in order to pursue whatever useful avenues of thought and practice that it initially helped stimulate?

In my opinion, there are at least two, and these are the things that maybe we should pay the most attention to. The first weakness of the book is the insistence that all contemporary forms of work tend toward the figure of self-coordinating immaterial labor. I think that description applies, quite precisely, to a growing percentage of people in the so-called tertiary or service sectors of the developed economies, and for those people, for us, the description in and of itself is emancipating. It helps an individual to identify the possibilities of autonomy, and to develop them through cooperation with others. But at the same time, the description of immaterial labor as hegemonic, as potentially the only significant form of productive activity, can encourage a continuing ignorance about the global division of labor, and therefore about the precise conditions under which people work and reproduce themselves, as well as the ways in which they conceive their subordination and their possible agency, or their desires for change. And that ignorance is a major loss, because it eliminates the chance to find out about all the things that separate people within the very element that brings them together, i.e. the world market.

What's needed is a more detailed, qualitative understanding of the global division of labor, and of the cultural divisions that accompany it. Otherwise it is impossible to use the analytic schemas of Empire for any effective political construction that goes beyond the Western or Westernized middle classes that emerged from the mass-education institutions of the postwar welfare state.
For instance, if we speak only about that level of the world economy which is effectively semiotic, or which is articulated around the production and the exchange of images and signs, there is the question of translation: What kinds of immaterial production get translated, into which languages? A very interesting guy named Jon Solomon, who has published in the journal Multitudes, proposes that the multitude could only come into being as such if a “science of foreigners” arose to replace the existing disciplines of the social sciences — and particularly the notion of “area studies” that has been used to extend those disciplines to the global scale. The goal of this “science of foreigners” would be to dissolve the existing one-way regime of translation, which according to Solomon entails the writing and publication of primary work in a few dominant Western languages and primarily in English, with subsequent translation towards other languages, and never any translation from those languages into the dominant ones. In other words, in order to break up the projective apparatus constituted by area studies it would be necessary to institute an ethics of translation that would both demand and permit a recognition and active exchange of the cultural differences that are carried in language. Now that, I think, is an important remark, which picks up certain things that were already said by Gayatri Spivak and probably many others, and which could have served to create a dialogue between some of the excellent research that has been done in the vein of post-colonial studies and the more recent debates about the economic and geopolitical conditions of networked globalization.

Unfortunately, though, that hasn't happened to any significant degree that I am aware of, and it probably won't ever happen through the vector of Empire, due to another weakness of the book.

This second weakness stems more or less directly from the first. It has to do with the interpretation of constituent power, and of the US constitution, as the very foundation of the most recent expansion of the capitalist world-economy since the early 1980s. The US Constitution serves, in Negri and Hardt's view, as a “basis of consensus” that activates a “constitutive network of powers and counterpowers” in “a process of dynamic and expansive self-regulation.” (pp. 162, 166) What this interpretation does is to recognize the United States as playing the leading role in the world economy, but at the same time, to assign immaterial labor the leading role within the framework of a globalized US constitutionalism. This allows Hardt and Negri to to claim that wherever the smooth space of imperial capitalism expands, it brings the constitutive crisis of its inherently inadequate institutions — that is to say, its institutions of value, of measure, its capture devices. As though constituent power, the Constitution, democracy itself, implied a necessary and continuous crisis of capitalism.

Now, in a way, that was a brilliant gesture of encouragement, since it aimed to push the entire Euro-American service-worker class, including the organic intellectuals or so-called symbolic analysts, towards the kind of extremely legitimate and globalizing radicalism that you can very clearly see in operation among the interventionist NGOs and the free software movement, not to mention the more anarchist counter-globalization forces like the Peoples Global Action and so on.

But the price for that brilliant gesture was a certain unrealism, which consists in almost completely ignoring the financial dominant that characterizes this last round of global expansionism. Negri and Hardt don't really give a specific definition of finance capitalism. But that meant almost completely ignoring the predatory nature of finance-led development, downplaying the extent of the resulting inequalities, and skirting around the ugly questions about the role that the military-industrial complex plays in shoring up and actively defending the whole financial expansion, including the growth of the service sectors. In other words, it means ignoring the whole constellation of conditions whereby the United States, in particular, has been able to recover from the crisis of the postwar industrial economy, and discover new ways to concentrate the surplus-values of the world economy.

Worse yet, from my point of view, it means ignoring or downplaying the extremely powerful set of control techniques that operate on a psychic and subjective level to ensure that society's “process of dynamic and expansive self-regulation” remains ultimately coordinated by the logic of money, and of finance, which is the ultimate capture device.

It was possible to make this equation of constituent power and the US Constitution during an age of rapid and seemingly uncontrolled or uncontrollable expansion, when the heightened circulation of fictional capital was giving semiotic workers a lot of leeway in their fantasies, when Clintonian multilateralism was renewing the Wilsonian dream of a fraternity of nations, and when the United States was even talking about paying its dues to the United Nations that it had created as a diplomatic instrument fifty years before.

Still, it was a risky tactic, and now it has become definitively untenable. Just as it is necessary to understand the global division of labor in the world economy, so it's necessary to understand the hierarchical structure of power in the world political and financial system. In other words, to use an expression by a guy named James Mittelman, it is necessary to understand the “global division of labor and power.” And beyond just understanding it, we have to find ways to act, within it and against it, which was the obviously the strong point of Empire, whatever tactical mistakes may have been made in its theoretical construction.

Later on, I will try to map out the way that American power has transformed over the latter half of the twentieth century, as a way to begin understanding the geosocial and geopolitical relations of the present. But for now I would just like to ask the very simple, very basic question that has been formulated a thousand times, but that the discourses of the antiglobalization movement, in particular, have never been able to answer. The question goes like this: “What was the impact on the world of the three planes that hit the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001?” Or in other words: “What did we learn on that day when everywhere in the world it was morning in New York City, and the sky seemed to be falling down on our heads?”

The idea I want to explore is that September 11 was an overpowering experience of social perception. But as in any overpowering experience, most people didn't know exactly what they had perceived. That non-knowledge spread out in waves from its epicenters in Washington and New York, gradually undermining the inherited certainties about the world, and in that way fulfilling the transition that had begun a decade before, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Second World no longer existed, and the former Third World had exploded at the heart of the First. The compass lost its cardinal points.

The memory of the explosion now constitutes the core of something like a geopolitical unconscious that continues to produce symptomatic effects, despite the years that have gone by and the increasing level of knowledge that people have gained. The event itself, September 11, could have acted as an interpretative key to open up a better, more useful understanding of these unconscious effects, which have deeper causes than the attack itself. But instead the mediated memory of the event has served as an ideological lock that makes it impossible to know what's going on. As intellectuals, I think we have to try to analyze the underlying causes of all the dangerous symptoms that are now unfolding. And as cultural producers, I think we should also try to intervene in the realm of perception, of sensibility, to reconfigure the affective maps that keep certain aspects of contemporary experience underground, unseen, unconscious, unspoken.

In order to work in that direction, the specific hypothesis I'm going to develop is that the various regional constructions one sees developing around the world mark the outset of what the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi calls a “double movement.” This refers to the process whereby a laissez-faire or free market economy — what we now call “neoliberalism” — begins to attack the very foundations of the society from which it springs, giving rise in turn to counter-movements that seek to protect society, but can also be just as dangerous in their own right as the processes they seek to counter. To introduce you to this idea, I will read a passage from Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation:

"For a century the dynamics of modern society was governed by a double movement: the market expanded continuously but this movement was met by a countermovement checking the expansion in definite directions. Vital though such a countermovement was for the protection of society, in the last analysis it was incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself.

That system developed in leaps and bounds; it engulfed space and time, and by creating bank money it produced a dynamic hitherto unknown. By the time it reached its maximum extent, around 1914, every part of the globe, all its inhabitants and yet unborn generations, physical persons as well as huge fictitious bodies called corporations, were comprised in it. A new way of life spread over the planet with a claim to universality unparalleled since the age when Christianity started out on its career, only this time the movement was on a purely material level.

Yet simultaneously a countermovement was on foot. This was more than the usual defensive behavior of society faced with change; it was a reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric of society, and which would have destroyed the very organization of production that the market had called into being."

The reaction to which Polanyi refers is fascism; or rather, it is the whole gamut of protectionist regimes ranging from the American New Deal to the Soviet Five-Year Plans by way of the national back-to-work programs and military discipline of 1930s Germany, Italy and Japan. All of these represented specific forms of a generalized retreat from the free-market economy; and together, these protectionist regimes marked the end of the gold standard that had served to articulate the amazingly dynamic world-economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Polanyi's book is a history of the constitution, then the self-destruction of the gold standard; a process of destruction that he interprets as the underlying cause of the two World Wars. But behind the story of the demise of the gold standard lies the idea that basic social continuities — the stewardship of land, the health of living labor, the coherency of a system of exchange — cannot be maintained when land, labor and money itself are treated as commodities, and relentlessly bought and sold without any regard for the complex social ecology that assures their reproduction. So Polanyi's central insight is that economic functions are embedded within a larger society; and that the liberal concept of the self-regulating market is incapable of measuring and accounting for all the interactions and solidarities that actually sustain it and make it seem to work in the short run. The tragic aspect of the story he tells is that the solutions proposed to crisis of capitalist society in the 1930s were in most cases worse than the problem — even though some form of solution was absolutely necessary.

The Great Transformation was published in 1944, but it is incredibly timely today, both as a description of what we are going through, and above all as a warning of situations that might develop from the crisis of the present. To take only the most obvious examples, it seems to me that contemporary American nationalism, xenophobia and religious bigotry can already be interpreted as a defensive reaction to the acceleration of change brought on by capitalist globalization, and particularly to the breakdown of social stability caused by the flexibilization of labor since the early 1980s, which of course is exactly when the neoconservatives first came to power.

The rise of racism and neofascism in the European Union can be explained in similar ways. In the future I hope we can collaborate on a study of the ways that the political power of the neoconservative movement is based on an appeal to two of the very constituencies — that is to say, the traditional working class and the evangelical Christians — who are most shocked by the neoliberal economic policies that the same political elite has helped put into operation over the past twenty-five years. In other words, I think it is neoliberalism itself that provokes the reaction of neoconservatism.

But that's not the only paradox. I also think that Islamic fundamentalism can at least partially be understood as a defensive reaction to the particularly violent way that the global division of labor and the global hierarchy of power has been imposed on the Middle East. Polanyi's double movement is all around us, you can see its destructive effects at work in the laissez-faire neglect of the infrastructure in New Orleans and the racist scorn people living there, it has literally undermined the human ecology of the United States, and worse yet, of the world. In particular, the negative reinforcement of Christian fundamentalism by the Islamic variety, and vice-versa, now appears as the single most dangerous social dynamic of the present.

But if we do not succeed in understanding both of these religious revivals as counter-movements in response to the social stress of neoliberalism, then we will probably be powerless to do anything about their continuing development.

I think the regional blocs are now the best frameworks both for the analysis of these questions, and for cultural interventions that seek to make them more perceptible and tangible. On the one hand, the very formation of these blocs, at the macropolitical level, shows how the neoliberal utopia of a so-called “free market” on a world scale, articulated by regulatory institutions such as the IMF and the WTO, is impossible to constitute and can only provoke resistance. But much more interestingly, on the micropolitical scale, the formally constituted regional blocs allow us to see how the centers of capitalist accumulation continually internalize their contradictions, while negotiating them in a much more violent way wherever the significant border lines are drawn. This is particularly clear in the case of the European Union, with its emerging hierarchy of “core countries” — by which I mean Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Italy and Spain — followed by the internal periphery, which includes the ten recent entries from the former Soviet bloc, then the external periphery, outside the borders of the EU properly speaking, which ranges from countries like Romania and Serbia to others like Turkey and Morocco.

I speak of a micropolitical level with respect to this hierarchical structure, because in fact, you can go to the border areas, or perhaps even more clearly, you can just pay attention to the social composition within the core areas, and then you will directly experience how the geopolitical divides are played out in daily life, according to the rankings assigned by skin colors, accents and cultures, and also according to the resistances to those rankings, and the subversions and surpassing of them.

The same holds for the border between the United States and Mexico, in particular, and more broadly, for the types of relations that are developing between Latino Americans and Anglos all across the hemisphere, which of course are very complex, diverse relations, of the kind that ultimately can only be known by direct experience, and can only be hinted at by the best art and literature and sociology. But that is the kind of art and literature and sociology that we can be most usefully interested in here.

Where the arts are concerned, I think that for the last 25 years — that is to say, over precisely the time period in which global capitalism has been developing on the neoliberal model — there has been a fairly successful, if still minority attempt to use the description of intersecting or clashing cultural borders as a referential framework in which particular expressions are perceived and understood. In other words, in what has been known as cultural studies, postcolonial studies, multiculturalism and identity politics, there has been an effort to replace the old paradigm of art criticism — where you are supposed to judge a particular work according to the refinement, novelty or rupture that it brings with respect to the state of the art at that particular time — with a new paradigm, where the aim is to understand and participate in an intervention that redefines the relations between cultural groups, either by comparing the results of that intervention with some description of the inherited cultural norms, or by just using the intervention as a chance to readjust the norms, to achieve if possible a better fit between the others and your own experience and desire.

What might be the most urgent thing for criticism, right now, is to add to those older practices of cultural framing a new understanding of the kinds of barriers that are determined by today's global division of labor and power. And at the same time, I think it's urgent to use an awareness of the critical maps in order to create interventions that can really retrace and transform the cartographies of social and intimate relations, both in our minds and bodies and feelings, and also at the objective borders and limits that are fixed by the law, and above all, by the exercise of coercive force.

This is what I'm basically trying to get at: the interplay between coercive maps and transformative cartographies. Or in a more metaphorical language, the interplay between continental intergation and continental drift.

[Recent report and details of the next continental drift event can be found at http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.internet. nettime/949".]