Asymmetric Geometry of Interregional Relations of Governmentality

The thesis of Hardt and Negri in Empire combines geography and power in a configuration of relations that it is not clear how they in their theorised by them form accommodate dynamic transitions from their one geometry to another. Post-imperial transitions could be such cases that are left undertheorised in terms of their local impact on the larger power constellations. The theoretical calculus of the force relations that apply to a given geographical spot may of necessity be affected by changes as a consequence of events that introduce asymmetry into previous power balances. Post-imperial transitions, such as that of the British Empire or the Soviet Union, introduce asymmetry into pre-existing relations in that far more agency becomes exercised in places that were part of a homologous structure of centre-periphery relations that dominated their larger geography. To various extents, such transitions in what appears to be democratic directions of development have something of a disruptive effects of other exercises of asymmetric power, such as revolutionary movements would. Post-imperial transitions, however, may have held the promise of holding a post-revolutionary chaos at bay, precisely because the changes in the geometry of interregional relations were called for to put their existing governmentality on a new basis, albeit at the price of significant changes on the local level.

Near and Far: Sence of Place vis-a-vis Necessity for Cultural Translation

Against the grain of the more wide-spread belief in globalization as a process that hardly knows any borders at all goes the everyday experience in places that are on the margins of the historical centers of economic, political, social and cultural accumulation. As Ranciere notices, there are preconditions for the distribution of the visible as it presents itself in public space. Taken and read globally, a geography of hot and cold zones of globalization emerges where destination and fly-over cities for cultural events inadvertently map each other with the tight web of relations of recognition and neglect, relevance and irrelevance, and being in touch and disconnectedness. Even vehicular languages have not only their history but also geography of effective use while the latter fractally ramifies all the way down to the smallest elements of urban space. In cities that suddenly became transcoded from protocols of open social access to differentiated economic availability the phenomenon of collective and individual falling out of the networks and infrastructures of the networks of translocal cultural, economic and social access forms urban landscapes anew according to an emergent logic of relations of neo-dependency and post-independence where the hightened value of vehicular media, such as language, internet and institutions, distributes what is visible and invisible in novel ways.

Cultural Re-Mapping of Post-Industrial Cities on a Sub-City Level

A spatial opposite to the development of city-regions as a driving force behind competitiveness seems to be increasingly defined on the level of city neighborhoods that as urban quarters of cultural life appear to independently attract both public and private investment alike. Moreover, in this shift from city to an urban environment on a livable scale the whole map of social relations that used to define what makes a city up begins to change in the direction of city as a plug-in into its everyday experience. How seductively city comes across becomes defined on a block by block basis as a sports arena is no longer seen as an investment that will vouchsafe for its anchoring function as a draw factor for businesses, individuals and media. A deliberative and fickle environment of real-time search engines, instant blog and comment publishing, and buzz, attention and interest economy brings about a reorganization of imperatives that make it necessary to have cultural appeal as an indispensable component of it-cities that not so much instrumentalize cultural and public institutions, such as museums, libraries and community centers, but have the latter re-map cities into hot and not zones that gain and lose appeal in the eyes of investors, officials and consumers on the sole basis of their cultural capital.

Cultural Production vs. Cultural Accumulation in Global Cities

What the current financial crisis shows is that global cities as centers of command and control do not perform their function as their common definition would have it. Apparently as the international interdependence betweeen the processes that make up what is conventionally called globalization grows, a congeries of interrelations that remain largely the same in their definition become unpredictably different in their dynamic effects. It would be difficult to argue that the global financial system has remained the same after the last financial crisis, whatever fuit bear the efforts to regulate its national or international components. Moreover, global cities do not appear to lose their importance even after the crisis that has as its epicenter at least one of them - New York. Not only alternative centers of economic accumulation arguably have a better chance at staking their place in the system of international financial relations, as these of the BRIC countries do, but also Manhattan's Wall Street may be ready for another come-back as a most proficient manager of the post-crisis imbroglio of the old and the new elements of the international economy that the less publicized regulatory measures in the US and elsewhere introduce in their wake. The cultural side of this process of accumulation resides, of course, in the decisions that are made around the world vis-a-vis what essentially is a common and global crisis. While most everything else becomes produced and consumed in an increasingly place-independent way, it is cities, and overwehlmingly for the global economic, cultural, political and social affairs world-important ones among them, that become true difference-makers in times of crisis because of their distinct cultures that they bring to bear on local and translocal decisions made in the past and present.

Dubai-Scale Urbanism as an Indicator of Lager Shifts

What commentators on Dubai's much reported woes do not miss to notice is that the scale of the transformation it has gone through to become a thoroughly newsworthy city is and remains tremendous. Rather than an imitation of other more historically auratic cities, Dubai erases the difference between the copy and the original by building rather than signifying skyscraper skylines, professional ski slopes and luxurious mega-hotels. Especially given the modernity of what goes on in Dubai, since hardly another Western city can compete with it in terms of the scale or scope of its urbanist vision, the materials, the standards, or the aesthetics of what it offers as a built environment do not fall short of any of their historical prototypes that in terms of how modern they are may have to give way to what happens in UAE and elsewhere in Asia. The unheard-of dynamism of the infrastructural transformation that Dubai goes through in purely urbanist terms makes its urban space into a part, and probably only a small one, of a larger shift of the nerve centers of global modernity, since it is the more modern environments that have historically pulled to them people, capital and ideas. Think of New York, the historical pull of which no one, however rich, powerful or famous, could resist in the twentieth century. One can argue about whether the contemporary configuration of global modernity represents a genuine break with the historical norms or regularities of what modernity used to mean or one can relativise the perspective from which the preceding narrative of modern development has been told as some of the commentators implicitly propose by telling that world has returned some six hundred years back in terms of the configuration of its leading urban centers of power, capital and culture. Asian come-back may herald a culture and future shock of once a millennium proportions.

From Capital/Labour Dichotomy to Diversification of Capital Forms

Historically the cities that Marx and Engels have encountered in industrializing Europe were built on a dichotomous relation between labour and capital that in the structure of their respective ownership organized urban space in accordance with the power relations that followed from it. In other words, the transition from pre-industrial towns to industrial cities did have something do with with the emergence of capitalism. However, as capitalism has made a transition from capital-holder to share-holder power-structure the ensuing managerial revolution has apparently introduced new forms of capital into the traditional opposition between capital and labour. It seems that the position within a more general power structure of particular groups makes them into possessors of particular forms of capital able to find independent valuation. From this perspective even labour becomes a form of capital as an embodied capital, as from photomodels to CEOs to consultants it is more general relations of economic, cultural and social exchange that set the price point for the investment of effort that these groups make to claim return on their aesthetic, institutional or educational capital. Capitalism producing manual labour as wage labour, as it sunders self-sufficient communities out their sustaining relations, can apparently produce other forms of labour within the constantly changing relations of economic, cultural, social and political exchange. The explosion of forms of capital, as, for example, highly speculative capital of future home equity valuations exemplifies, foregrounds their sites of reflexive assembly. If industrializing capitalism found in shop-floors its foundational topos, post-industrial capitalism may have its spatial counterpart in spectacular urbanism of overnight neighborhoods. It is difficult to overestimate the role of information technology not only in commodification of economic risk over the last two decades, but also in self-reflexive assembly of old, new and improved forms of capital and its accumulation.

From Use Value to Space to its Spectacular Value

What has caught my eye in an Australian newspaper article on the relations between contemporary artists from Australia and Japan is how graphically the urban space of the former has played a key role in promoting relations of cultural exchange between the two countries. The uneven balance of economic relalations that defines how Japan relates to Australia is apparently offset by the effect that the urban spaces of Australian cities have on promoting the media visibility of Japanese artists. Not being able to financially contribute to joint art projects on the same scale as Japan, Australia has successfully leveraged its urban spaces in order to provide an effective foil for the works of its and Japanese artists. It did not appear that the success of these art initiaitives hinge exclusively on the use of museum premises. Its nexus of relations at play apparently feeds on urban, regional and global interconnections that allowed the value of urban spaces in Australia to be translated into something akin to a spectacular value. The latter I construe as capability to become integrated into urban spectacles of various kind, such as art biennials, open-air concerts, cultural festivals. The global component that goes into making Australian urban spaces spectacular, as opposed to Japanese, may be a decisive one since it is Australia's relation to European and North American strategies of cultural accumulation that differentiates it from Japan. The rise of China in this respect poses a question of global shifts in the centers of cultural accumulation as its cities possess developmental, spatial, and populational density that is hardly matched internationally. This probably explains the networking of art biennials in East Asian and ASEAN regions to each other. This wave of cultural networking reaches also Australia as it starts prmoting the rise of Australasian cultural initiatives.