October 27, 2006
Structured Chaos
A "chaos" has now completely, and for years to come, replaced the orderly world of the Cold War. Nonetheless it has a dynamic morphology: an overdeveloped core, zones forming constellations of democracy or free market clusters in circular form, then, further away, zones separated by flexible or ephemeral institutional, economic or military membranes; zones in crisis, zones of barbaric violence, social wastelands and slow or rapid genocide; a surveillance system consisting of observational satellites and of bureaucracies to interpret their observations and databases; a non-hierarchical system of communication, telephone, internet, cyberspace, an infosphere structured as an anarchic, but diversified, space. A system of repression as well: mobile or fixed military bases and stockpiles all in coordination to maintain the logistics of global military intervention; systems of alliances and Euro-American command systems under American control.
This structured chaos follows a fractal model. Its zoning appears at every scale: on the global scale, the continental scale, the regional, national, and provincial levels, and perhaps even at the level of cities, neighborhoods, families or individuals, since the crisis reaches all levels.
Tell me what your cross-fortress is, your social wasteland, your genocide and your logistical means of expeditionary intervention, and I will tell you who you are. Emperor, king, Mafia boss, respected citizen, angry ghetto resident, junkie, madman, suicide victim: this empire of disorder is not a super-state; it imposes itself at every level. --Alain Joxe node
link to discussion "War Infrastructures":
http://underfire.eyebeam.org/?q=taxonomy/term/1 | Underfire
~Can't you feel it? Don't you see it in your neighbors' faces?
[photo from defense link not above links]