In a previous essay, on the recent
electoral fates of Alberta and Scotland, these respective
subaggregates were analytically isolated within and across their
respective superstate aggregates, but precisely in the moments, or
sequences, immediately following the oil price crash of late 2014.
This was called 'syncrisic' [σύγκρισικ] analysis, or parallel scrutiny, insofar
as its objects were two situations whose commonality lay in their
transmutation under irregular conditions of global liquidity, their
ossified or obdurate asset based political arrangements and the
breakdown of these arrangements in similar ways upon the collapse of
the asset class due to global overproduction. The consequences of the
oil crash were, considered abstractly, the end of the forty-four year
long dynasty of the Progressive Conservatives falling to Rachel
Notley's New Democratic Party in the case of Canada, and the end of
Labour's dominance in Scotland at the hands of Nicola Sturgeon and
the Scottish National Party in the case of the UK, as well as an
exacerbation of the semi-peripheral characteristics of both, but why
did this happen? And why did it happen to both when it did? It was
contended, briefly, that no methodology of comparative political
science is sufficiently capable of grasping the geometries of these
situations and sequences – qua situations and sequences, i.e.
scenes - across regional subaggregates functioning separately, nor
are they capable of capturing how these geometries give rise to an
'open situation,' i.e. a situation in which there is substantively
more opportunity for political transformation than there otherwise
had been beforehand, precisely when it did. Thus it was both said
that “national aggregates are porous to the tempo of political
transformation within their greater superstate aggregations and
across them,” and that “social fibrillation by financial capital
exacerbates semi-peripherality, the relation of local cores to local
peripheries, not necessarily according to distributions of national
sovereignty, but according to logistics chains and regional systems.”
Indeed, very much the same could be
said of the situations of, on the one hand, British Columbia with
respect to several proposed infrastructural projects, notably the
Transmountain pipeline, and, on the other, several States, including
Turkey, Greece, and Macedonia, arrayed around the Black Sea with
respect to the proposed Turkish Stream pipeline. The syncrisic comparison of
the social fibrillations of Alberta and Scotland looked at sequences
pertaining to political transformation in the aftermath of asset
class failure due to a latency between the asset classes as a veil
for, or manifestation of, global liquidity, on the one hand, and its
actual overaccumulation as global stock, on the other, precisely at
the geographic sites of that asset's accumulation, and precisely at
the moments of this latency's collapse (the oil crash, the 'death of
OPEC,' etc.), whereas the syncrisic comparison of British Columbia
and those States arrayed around the Black Sea concerns, rather, a
parallel scrutiny of architectures of transit: the striation of space
in between the nodal sites of energy's origin and the site of its
ultimate consumption. That is, it concerns extractively liminal
space, space that is primarily relevant geopolitically insofar as it
is traversed, striated by the logistical dictates of its most
proximate superstate aggregate.
At the height of oil prices, strategic
infrastructural development could proceed under a veil of autonomous
economic development, as thin in the case of the 'blue-eyed sheiks'
of Alberta as Putin's oligarchs, but nonetheless enough so as to act
as a catchment for excess liquidity that facilitated the strategic
infrastructural ambitions of certain States. In the aftermath of the
oil crash, however, these infrastructures and logistical chains have
been robbed only of their immediate claim to economic legitimacy,
revealing that certain elements of these assemblages are, and always
were, politically determined, irrespective of their economic legitimation. In spite of the recent election of the
NDP in Alberta, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is still, with respect
to Kinder Morgan President Ian Anderson, and the proposed
construction of the Transmountain pipeline, as Vladimir Putin is to
Gazprom Chairman Alexey Miller and the proposed Turkish Stream
pipeline, in that they both want to ensure access to markets for
their supplicant, irrespective of the current price of energy. Harper
had hoped to secure a deal which would have seen Athabasca tar-sands
oil sent south for refinement through the proposed Keystone XL
pipeline, thus far stymied State-side, as Putin would ultimately
prefer to have simply utilized the older Soviet pipeline
infrastructure through Ukraine, no longer politically certain, thus
Transmountain represents the same kind of bypass to Ottawa as Turkish
Stream represents to Moscow. For Harper, Albertan bitumen heads west
through a Chinese currency hub, thereby eliding the U.S. itself, and
for Putin gas heads south, eliding the U.S.'s endeavours in Ukraine.
British Columbia Premier Christy Clark,
moreover, is syncrisically akin to Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan in their having both positioned sovereignty over their
subaggregate as the substance of such bypasses. As Bulent Aliriza
noted at a recent panel on the Turkish Stream pipeline, proposed
after the cancellation of the South Stream pipeline in 2014, Turkey
is acting “in the firm belief that in addition to its commercial
benefits, of involvement in the transportation of energy to market,
the multiplicity of pipelines traversing its territory would enhance
Turkey's importance in international relations, and Turkish stream
fits naturally into that narrative whether it comes into being or
not.”1
Turkey is, in other words, as Aliriza points out, positioning itself
as a mediator and interlocutor between Washington, Moscow, and
Berlin. By playing the divergent interests of these forces off one
another and, by turns, allowing its territory to function as a site
of strategic transit by one or another, Turkey seeks to leverage its
geographic monopoly. In like manner, Christy Clark has positioned
herself between Ottawa and Calgary, on the one hand, and Bejing and
Kuala Lumpur, on the other. As Deleuze & Guattari write, “the
State itself needs a hydraulic science. . . [but] the State needs to
subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes, embankments, which
prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to
another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes
the fluid depend on the solid, and flows proceed by parallel, laminar
layers.”2
As Maristella Svampa writes, “the return of the state as regulator
installs itself within a space of variable geometry, which means
within a multi-actor scheme (marked by a complexification of civil
society through social movements, NGOs and other actors), but at the
same time in tight association with multinational private capitals,
whose weight in national economies is growing more and more.”3
In many respects, also, the ethnic
divide between the Orthodox Christian Slavs and the Muslim Albanians,
in those states arrayed around the Black Sea, is exacerbated by such
infrastructural ambitions, and mirrors the divide between coastal
First Nations and the Canadian government, in that such developmental
aims on the part of governments, like those of Macedonia's Nikola Gruevski or Canada's Stephen Harper, are deeply implicated in a
rectilinear proliferation of norms, and indeed both Gruevski and
Harper have played upon sectarian tensions and paranoia and fostered
security-state apparati for political advantage in advancing their
State infrastructural ambitions. As Sandro Mezzadra and
Brett Neilson write “territory is not necessarily or not
only associated with the sovereign space of the state. . . rather, it
is seen as a political technology for organizing social and economic
relations that has both spatial and non-spatial elements.”4
Indeed, as the recent political crises in Macedonia and the open
confrontation between Burnaby RCMP and protesters over Kinder
Morgan's text drilling for Transmountain last fall demonstrate, as
Deleuze & Guattari write, “the State itself has always been in
a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that
relationship,”5
that is, they continue, “the outside of States cannot be reduced to
'foreign policy,' that is, to a set of relations among States.”6
Thus, as Mezzadraand Neilson argue, “mapping the global landscape
of extraction confronts us with a wide array of peculiarities and
changing economic as well as political circumstances.”7
The State less and less appears as a transcendent hegemon and more
and more as simply an superempowered node in its own right, whose
armatures extend outwards towards other superempowered nodes and
through nodes like Vancouver, Ankara, or Skopje, who become
geopolitically important purely in virtue of the complicity and
collaboration of their ruling classes with the logistical imperatives
of the imperial nodes they are suspended between and their logistical
constellations. As Mezzadra and Neilson write:
“The legal unity of territory is
challenged and exploded by not only the multiplication of resource
extraction ‘enclaves’ but also the proliferation of partial legal
regimes, technical standards, ‘best practices’ and sectorally
limited normative arrangements. In the mining industry, the relations
of transnational companies with indigenous and other local
populations are altered by protocols of corporate responsibility that
stipulate the parameters within which the place-bound business of
mineral extraction can deal with environmental, cultural and even
religious contestations. This is often not sufficient to eliminate the
production of violent struggles on the ground, but it means that
corporate entities have to enter into unstable alliances and often
negotiations with public institutions and other actors to adapt to
contingencies to enable the resource extraction to go ahead. Power is
not merely chanelled in to territory from above but assembled in
haphazard and often enduring ways.”8
Western Canada and the states arrayed
around the Black sea are centres of socio-political transformation
right now, intense sites in which the most profound urban
transmutations cross with the most weighty of geopolitical energy
concerns, and are hence analytically important insofar as they
demonstrate how the logistical chains of late capital are not diffuse
but nodal, and that these transmutations and concerns assume the form
of “schizoid situation[s],”9
or schizoid-sequences, in which those transmutations and concerns
play out, and in which those transmutations and concerns may be
contested. In each case political contestation over the node is
inextricably also a contestation of the social and material
organization of, first, the node itself, the forms of life and labour
that are sanctioned therein, and then, as well, the manner by which
such a node articulates to others within broader logistical
constellations. The former, that is, the forms of life sanctioned or
disavowed in the proximate terrain of one or another node, within the
constellations of contemporary capitalism, is in part determined by
the latter, the manner in which those with political control over the
node cause it to act with respect to other nodes within the same
logistical sphere, i.e. certain comportments on the part of the
ruling class of one or another node toward the organization of social
and economic life facilitate participation in the broader imperial
logistical chains, certain victories on the part of social forces
foreclose such participation and open onto other lines of flight.
*******************************
1
Bulent Aliriza at “After South Stream: Turkish Stream?” Center
for Strategic & International Studies, February 2, 2015.
2
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Capitalism & Schizophrenia:
A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1983), 363.
3
Maristella Svampa in Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, "Extraction,
Logistics, Finance" Radical Philosophy, 178, 2013, 12.
4
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “Extraction, Logistics,
Finance” Radical Philosophy, 178, 2013, 9.
5
Deleuze & Guattari, Capitalism & Schizophrenia: A Thousand
Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 360.
6
Ibid, 360.
7
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “Extraction, Logistics,
Finance” Radical Philosophy, 178, 2013, 11.
8
Mezzadra and Neilson, “Extraction, Logistics, Finance,” 9.
9
Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War tr. Alexander Galloway & Jason
Smith (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2010), 34.
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