Notes on the Terroritorium (1)
Afterword on work submitted for Territorium Tijuana July 2019
Catalogues & Archives 05/11
The word territorium, territory in Latin, recalls the territorium of Imperial Rome – from the time when all roads led to Rome. To imagine territorium today as a sort of twinning of Tijuana and London is to lay bare the reality of the contemporary “post-Imperial” territorium.
The twinning is an exercise of surrealist montage, Tijuana-London. It can be seen as a territory transversing exercise drawing from Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic. Gilroy was deterritorialising the nineteenth century Imperial territorium that grew with the traffic of human bodies for indentured labour from the colony to the Imperial state; “capitalism with its clothes off” as he called slavery. For his notion of a de-territorialised modernity, Gilroy “settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol”. This was in the high seas far outside the centres of the Imperial state.
Against this deterritorialising modernity of black and post-colonial writers, the territorium instead now comes to signify a reversion. By which it marks the return of an Imperial territorium from colonial time yet in a neoliberal version of “capitalism with its clothes off”. Why this reversionary territorium is unsurprising can be understood through Carl Schmitt, as referenced in my photo-essay terra nullius on the destruction of the Calais Jungle, the migrant and refugee settlement with its ten thousand people.
Schmitt states in his opus The Nomus of the Earth that the colony is “the basic spatial fact of hitherto existing European international law” and raises the coming question of Earth and territory on Earth without the colony. The question is of the nomus as an universalised structure of law but in the future absense of the colony. The question arises because it is the colony that gave rise to the nomus and the legal instruments of modernity. The colony and the nomus are in the foundation of the constitution of modern rights, the rights of property, of labour, of citizenship and statehood. Thus to take away the colony is to take away the birthrights of the modern State.
And so the old nomus endures. How the territorium re-establishes the nomus can be seen in the open letter presented by the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos in the indigenous Chiapas region of Mexico when rejecting the Free Trade Deal with the USA. Drawing a jigsaw of the new world order (for a counterterritorium), the Zapatista describe the “new, abstract power centres - megapoles of the market, which will be subject to no control except that of the logic of investment”.
The third piece of the Zapatistas' jigsaw named 'vicious cycle' is enforced migration for those, an increasing mass of humans, who do not fit the globalisation jigsaw. In that such humans exist and migrate to exist, a vast evolving apparatus of control designed purely for them gets more and more advanced with each decade. That's what we see today, "a ring of terror" as put in the Zapatistas' open letter. What is clear is that migration in the global age becomes a driver of terror that parallels the terrors of the nineteenth century human traffic.
Presenting the Zapatista letter John Berger asked, Could this 16th century vision of hell by Hieronymous Bosch be a chilling prophecy of life today?
It's one illustration of how terror becomes synonymous with the nomus of a contemporary territorium - as the terroritorium. But we do not recognise the terroritorium in the territorium because the seeing is itself a function of the nomus. The territorium as nomus relentlessly extracts every means of seeing in how things can become visible in it. We are all free to see but everything we see refracts through the nomus.
Technology augments the nomus across the visual spectrum. From distant disaster zones to the metropolitan centres, the nomus integrates all ways and means of seeing, the human eye being augmented by CCTV, thermal imaging, facial recognition software, and so on.
In the neoliberal territorium, the technologised eye is synced with the naked eye. In a dissection of neoliberalism's all-seeing, a critical note to draw is from Jonathan Crary on the 24/7 eye and how we become observers and not only spectators. It is how our seeing becomes necessary for a redefining of social territory. So in London, when we step into public space, we hear the injunction “See it. Say it. Sorted.” The watch becomes our watch - for any irregularity, any difference, anything other. The climate this creates, cultivates and reinforces is how the different, the other and terror are integrated in a narrowing focus.
Consider the 'Go Home' vans that roamed certain London neighbourhoods, touring flagships that draw out the new political laylines of territory to be (at last) made clear. It is as though the ships of the Black Atlantic are being remapped, re-narrated yet again right within the metropolitan heart and inner city. Here the migrant is the defining figure, the “central organising symbol” for the territorium. Then through it, territory and terror can converge in one single body to identify and help focus an entire arsenal of seeing.
Terror today so becomes a project of embodiment and of self-realization, terror essentialised for what the Zapatista call the “mental climate imposed on the world”: to maintain it as it were. The burden of its maintenance is fully democratised as the calling of each and every available pair of eyes. The territorium anywhere everywhere becomes as dependent on this democratisation of seeing with the naked eye as with its surveillance architecture. To be socially sustainable this twinning or marriage - of technology and the naked eye, as of the old nomus and digital media - also becomes the real reality show of our times.
