i think that this economic situation is revealing a basic problem for the nation-state---and by extension ways of thinking that center on location or place--both have been supplanted by flows, and these flows intertwine entities in ways that are more significant than are the ways in which they are separate one from the other. it's an interesting situation.
for example, what exactly does aig mean? it's defined more by its activities than by its statutes or physical location. aig is tightly intertwined with any number of other firms and governments, so when it was threatened by implosion, it affected far more than just a legal entity (the firm) and it's physical spaces.
this has always been true to an extent--activities and interconnections between firms or nations are different from and bigger than the entities themselves. but this seems to me different, maybe as a function of the speed of communications and thereby of flows themselves. space is being dissolved into pattern, movement and repetition...it's disorienting.
you could see almost the whole of neoliberal thinking as centered on an obsession with the reassertion of space, of the discrete as over against the intertwined. you could see the iraq debacle as the theater of this obsession in its neocon variant. it's hard to say what would have happened had that not turned out to be a disaster, because it did turn out to be a disaster.
i think the implications of this extend to legal frames within nation-states, but it's not at all obvious yet what they'll result in.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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