Design (in fact, the real subject of this book) here means the structuring of the world in reaction to an accelerated decay and in projective anticipation of a condition that is now only the ghostliest of a virtual present tense. This is a design for accommodating (or refusing to accommodate) the post-whatever-is-melting-into-air and prototyping for pre-what-comes-next: a strategic, groping navigation (however helpless) of the punctuations that bridge between these two. This geodesign— the work of the blur and for the emergence within the emergency — is the congealing and uncongealing of the equilibria-that-were from the equilibria-to-come. If so, what enforces design when “ sovereignty and territory increasingly lead separate lives ” ? <sup>9</sup> Lodged here is not just political design or politically intelligent design, but rather the redesign of the geopolitical, including the possible conclusion to scrap it outright as an operational concept. While the objectivity of our common planetary position is far more self-evident than in the eighteenth century when the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, we should also be far less certain that it can serve as the determining model of metajurisdictional scale. As platforms grow, they diverge and converge with equal ease, and as regional differences are absorbed by them, primordial social distinctions are globalized and revitalized by those very same platforms, just as new forces also appear and evolve from novelty to norm. These may be constitutive of new social-systemic realities, but only because they can occupy multiple scales simultaneously, at once subpolitical and suprapolitical. They seem to sit still for Russian doll jurisdictions and equidistant equatorial-cylindrical projection maps only when we transpose them through filters full of errors. They are not well described by the partitioning of public from private sectors, of civil from martial societies, progressive from oppressive policies, or even finally humans from nonhumans, atoms from bits. In response, our geodesign still draws from (and into) its specific planetary situatedness, but does so by overwriting itself again and again in the same space. When there are no single fixed conditions of inclusion and exclusion, it may not even be proper to refer to its deliverables as territories and geographies as such. What then? Can planetarity still be at once a cartographic image and a pregnant machine, both less and more than a single backdrop? We do know that in the interfacial calculability of sensations and events, borders do everything but vanish, but that in their simultaneous proliferation and dissipation, liquefaction and fortification, their interfaces become pervasive. If counterterrorism discourse can dare to even say “ imagine no lines, ” thinking that “ the front ” is everywhere, then it is because already everywhere is skin and geopolitics is epidermal . This makes the design of the conditional interfacial exception, drawing the interior versus the interior over again many times a second, into both the icy calculation and the bloody siege for any platform that hopes to persist for very long.
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The Black Stack