[Nettime-bold] the civil wars of Empire

[Tiziana <T.Terranova@btinternet.com>]

I was watching a documentary on British television last night called 'Love
in Oldham'. The documentary is part of a series on racism in Britain and it
focused on a mixed race couple, white and Bangladeshi in Oldham, a town in
England, that, together with Bradford, witnessed some serious racial riots
in the summer of 2001.

The British BNP, the local Nazis, stirred up the fire of racial tension
between the local, white working class population and the large, mostly
Muslim, population of Bangladeshis. The tensions between the two communities
escalated to the point where stabbings, beatings and retaliations became
common day occurrences, culminating, during the BNP demonstration, in
violent clashes between the anti-Nazi league and the neo-Nazis.

In July, at a demo in Naples against police violence in Genoa, the police
nowhere to be seen, but hiding somewhere, ten thousand people marching in
the midst of a palpable fear, an elderly woman (referring to the Italian
government) muttered: "They are going to start a civil war."

Just a month earlier other scenes of sectarian hatred, in a very different
context, dominated the news after the infamous picketing of the Catholic
primary school in Northern Ireland.


 Flows of refugees from the dozens of conflicts active around the globe
force the borders of the West on a daily basis, the Australian episode,
involving hundreds of afghan refugees, just an example. Two weeks later the
WTC twin towers collapse, unleashing the specter of a new global war fought
against the ghostly shadow of international terrorism.

Do you need terrorists to live in terror?

Are we at war? Are we on the threshold of a new type of war? Is there any
relation between all of this? Is it a war between nation states that harbour
international terrorists and those that oppose it? Or is it rather the
diffusion of war at a much finer and local scale, a jump in a continuum that
has been steadily mounting in the shadow of Empire? Isn't terrorism the
diffusion of the civil wars of a globalised planet, the channeling of
'glocal' conflicts into the one-dimensional affect of terror? Is it a
discontinuous, modulated global civil war that we are heading for? Is it
just about Islamic fundamentalists or is it about a crescendo of tension and
dissent that is entering into conflict with the inter-national capitalist
nation states at higher and higher levels of intensity?


In the middle of all this, I am trying to work on an essay on nineties
digital capitalism, specifically the technoscientific interest in turbulence
and the non-linear, stochastic interaction of large numbers of variables.
Throughout the last decade, technosciences such as artificial life, the
sciences of complexity, catastrophe theory have been exceedingly preoccupied
with how to understand and control fluid environments, perched between order
and disorder, whose very productivity lies in the uncanny unpredictability
of decentralized, multiple interactions. From where we stand now, the other
side of the threshold marked by the towers' collapse, it all sounds very
utopian and very American.

The dissolution of the masses into a distributed space of proliferating
connectivity, ruled by positive feedback loops, was idealistically supposed
to generate only profitable difference. The question was only how to channel
emergence so that it won't become too unpredictable, therefore potentially
crossing the threshold where the self-organizing system dissolves or dies.
This is, within artificial life, the function of the probe-head and that of
the Reaper, the program in charge of eliminating unwanted variations.

With the benefit of hindsight it looks like the digital capitalists
completely underestimated the power of turbulence to create the truly
unpredictable, the event that crashes and pushes the whole experiment truly
beyond control, onto another plane.

Surely there must be way to deal with this intensification of conflict and
its emergent phenomena (the re-organization of the digital economy into a
war economy; the attack on civil liberties; the re-constitution of a
christian dialectic between good and evil as a simplistic and dangerous way
to organize the chronic state of conflict in which the whole planet now
officially lives, including the isolated giant, the territory of the USA).

 Surely there must be resources accumulated in years of debate and action
against poverty, racism, and exploitation that can be brought to bear on
this new plane, the plane defined by diffuse, global conflict, always on the
verge of terror, and by the powerful return of the State in the wake of the
near-collapse of rampant, digital and branded capital. Surely it cannot be
just a a question of finding out what the sides are and sticking with yours.
Is there a creative way to evacuates all sides?

This is definitely as 'out of control' as 'out of control' goes...


Tiziana Terranova
Dept. of Sociology
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
CO4 3SQ
tterra@essex.ac.uk




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