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Much is made of the difference between 'virtual' and 'actual'. Other
than asserting a distinction between 'unreal' and 'real', the uses of
such oppositions demonstrates a conflict between different approaches
to and mappings of space, as both cyberspace and landscape. The singular
experience of the net consists in manifesting a particular sense and use
of spaceincluding the so-called 'real' space of the world's surfacethat
has no place in officially-sanctioned, or rather petrified, maps and models.
Because even if the content of various sites remains trapped in conservative
and reactionary forms of representation that reproduce norms bequeathed
to us by the French Revolution (according to which 'man' is human, has
human rights, only insofar as 'he' is the citizen of a nation-state),
the experience of the net is otherwise. Moreover, I want to insist, above
all, that what is virtual is preamble, that it exists. The virtual spaces
of cyberspace have a distinctive connection to that which is immanent
and imminent, material and emergent, or better: the net is really, virtually,
that which reveals, and increasingly convenes, an antagonism to authorised
spatial organisation.
Geopolitics
At the end of the 20th century, nationalism had flourished to become
the planetary system, covering every centimetre of the globe, administered
by various inter-nationalisms, including the agencies of the United Nations.
As landscape, space is delimited by nation-states. Migration policies
(border controls) were largely non-existent prior to the 20th C. The consolidation
of nation-states that mostly took place in the 19th and 20th centuriesand
the tyranny of citizenship (always founded on its exclusions) that was
their corollarymeant that the 20th C was fated to be the century
of the 'refugee problem', as the UN and many NGOs prefer to apprehend
it.
Movement in every sense
In the second half of the 20th C, a movement emerged in every sense.
Currently estimated at over 50 million people, very often existing and
moving clandestinely, this is the largest movement in history. Out of
necessity and desire it refuses the cages and enclosures of nationalism
and the pass laws that regulate and control the paths between them. This
creates the greatest challenge to the principle role of the nation-state:
the 'right' of nation-states (whether as one nation or 'united' nations)
to allocate, regulate and control bodies for the purposes of a capitalist
production. It connects to a long line of struggles against the geopolitical
inscriptions of capitalist production: the enclosure of the commons in
England, the laying down of fence-lines for imperial agriculture, the
forcing of indigenous peoples into missions and reserves, and the passage
of 'anti-nomadic' laws, to name only those most familiar to locals.
Previous centuries were marked by the journeys of colonial powers across
the globe as they expanded and consolidated their empires. By contrast,
the second half of the 20th C was significant for inverting this process.
During that time, people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America began moving
in significant numbers, relative to pre-ww2 periods, to Canada, the US,
the EU countries and Australia. It is as a response to these movements
that, by the late 1990s, the US (1996), Australia (1992), and the EU (1997)
all passed some of the most vicious border laws imaginable. Like all border
laws, these were not meant to stop people moving. Rather, they manage
the illegalisation of undocumented workers so they can continue to serve
as a reserve for hyper-exploitation in nations like the US and Australia
in much the same way as if they had remained in, say, Mexico or Vietnam,
as documented workers. Thus the conditions of the global sweatshops (the
so-called 'third world') are recreated in the face of the threat transnational
movement poses to the border controls that are their precondition. The
distinction between 'third' and 'first' worlds increasingly becomes a
distinction internal to countries.
In a broad sense, this movement consists of the undocumented, those without
papers or sans papier. In other registers it, or parts of it, are composed
of 'refugees', 'illegal immigrants', 'asylum seekers', 'economic refugees',
'stateless persons', 'non-persons'. But all these words are categorisations
from the perspective of the nation-state (often formally sanctioned by
the UN) of the degree to which discrimination and exclusion are authorised
in particular cases or of the exact point at which one feels authorised
to perform the role of border cop.
Visibility, media and mediation
Whereas real space was generally visible only by way of official mappings,
of legal routes and national territories, the actual paths of this movement
of flight and escape became visible in cyberspace. This took place in
the forms of, for example, the circulation of stories of the struggles
of those without papers; the chatrooms and emails that connected people
on the move and as they moved (with each other, but also with information,
friends and contacts); or simply as experimentation with a language that
was not premised on national borders. On the net, ideas of space did not
parallel those of national space. Here, those who are juridical 'non-persons'
in a world dominated by citizenship found a media for communication.
The 'virtualisation' of the movement against the enclosures doesn't mean
it's not real. Rather, it's a result of a history of figuration and the
processes by which movements are designated, recognised, given stamps
of approval as oppositionalor not. There are those who refuse to
acknowledge that it is indeed a movement, those who can only recognise
movements when they are designated as such by the media or the self-appointed
officials of mediation. Indeed, for a long time, since the Bolsheviks
in 1920 adopted Woodrow Wilson's inter-nationalist doctrine of the 'self-determination
of nations'since, that is, they became little more than ambassadors
for various nation-states (pro-China, pro-Soviet, pro-Cuba, etc.), in
turn regarding flight from such states as traitorousmany could only
imagine struggle as the struggle for more nationalisms. In short, many
would only recognise movements if they appeared in the form of their opposite:
i.e., as enclosure rather than movement, as capture rather than freedom.
In doing so, they had a deft hand in the invisibility of this movement,
or at best, could only approach it as latter-day missionaries seeking
out converts among the dislocated, or as another means to prove their
indispensability as mediators between the state and the insubordinate.
But aspirations to mediation are difficult to sustain on the net, not
least because if one accepts a version of communication and media such
as that operating on indymedia, it is all but impossible to assure the
delimited, fixed and mediatory model that claims to representation rely
on, and which remain the format of, especially, mainstream news media
outlets. The net makes any equation between media as communication and
mediation as representation, and the expectation of integration implicit
in the latter, difficult to sustain. This is not unrelated to the very
possibility of the net making manifest a movement that, since it has no
leaders or representatives, would otherwise be characterised as mindless
bodies in search of missionaries and representativesthe 'non-persons'
of juridical space re-figured as the non-agents of political practice.
(Even so, I'm not suggesting that the net is solely responsible for the
de-coupling of mediation from media. The end of mediation is a historical
moment, some refer to it as neo-liberalism, where the trade-off between
integration and concessions was no longer possible, reducing mediation
to a moment of repression and little else. This is why, for instance,
the question of discipline overwhelms all other conditions for claims
to representation. Self-styled representatives of detainees or 'refugees',
for instance, are asked whether they can ensure their ostensible constituency's
pacification. If they cannot, they are expected to denounce the actions
of detainees. Alternately, they may inaugurate their claims to representation
by insisting on the need to 'integrate' detainees, as if the problem stems
from detainees being too far outside the circuits of representation. In
any case, mediation is no longer, if it ever was, capable of granting
concessions or relief.)
Nomadic and netactive
Chiapas was increasingly subjected to all manner of transnational
influences. During the 1980s and early 1990s, it became a crossroads
for NGO activists, Catholic liberation-theology priests and Protestant
evangelists, Guatemalan migrants and refugees, guerrillas coming and
going from Central America, and criminals trafficking in weapons and
narcotics. This exposure to transnational forces was stronger and more
distinctive in Chiapas than in two other nearby statesOaxaca and
Guerrerothat were often thought to be likely locales for guerrilla
insurgencies (and had been in the past). And this helps explain why
Chiapas, and not another state, gave rise to an insurgency that became
a netwar.
Rand Corporation
www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR880/MR880.ch16.pdf
The Rand Corporation commentary, cited above, indicates something of
the relationship between the experiences of movement and netactivism in
generating the particular strategies of the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Rather
than echoing Microsoft's publicity dream of a borderless world without
dissension, where the exploitation of bodies is made invisible, the net
has seen the emergence of a language and subjectivity that is antagonistic
to the enclosure of the commons. In both landscape and on the net we have
seen the emergence of trading posts and routes that are neither officially
sanctioned nor reducible to exchange and calculation, where open source
meets open borders and undocumented meets techno-nomadic. Here, there
is antagonism to the ways a fantasy of a world without bodies (Microsoft)
masks a world where bodies are distributed according to pass laws and
confined by borders. More importantly still, there is the possibility
of a practice that doesn't assume it is 'our' role to grant intellects
to mindless bodies.
By way of a conclusion
Some projects which give a sense of some of the above more fully:
border='0' location='yes' make-world.org
teleportica www.teleportacia.org
bordercartograph
www.moneynations.ch/cartographes/eng/index.htm
online action against deportation
go.to/online-demo
stop-depclass.scene.as
xborder
antimedia.net/xborder
For an indication of proposals to draft conventions for cyberspace that
re-assert national boundaries, see Sea, Space, Cyberspace: Borderless
Domains, V. A. Cebrowski, 1999, US Naval Military College, at www.nwc.navy.mil
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