Turbulence : a cartography of postmodern violence

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Abstract

This thesis maps the end of the millenium in terms of the geostrategic
flux of the post Cold War world system. Using the concept
of turbulence developed in the physics of fluids, and Gilles Deleuze
& Felix Guattari's liquid microphysics of the war machine, a
materialist analysis of violence is developed which cuts through the
binary oppostions of order/chaos, law/violence, war/peace to
construct a cartography of speeds and slowness, collective
compositions and power. Sector 1 defines postmodernity in terms
of cybernetic culture, delineating the distinction between Deleuze &
Guattari's concept of cartography and steering the problem out of
the remit of a juridico/politico/moral discourse telwards physics.
Sector 2 develops a fluid physics of turbulence and connects it to a
materialist analysis of social systems by mapping turbulent and
laminar flow onto Deleuze & Guattari's war machine and apparatus
of capture. A fluid dynamics of insurgency is then outlined with
reference to the geo-strategic undercurrent constituted by Chinese
martial theory. Sector 3 reconfigures social evolution in relation to
the non-linear social physics developed in Sector 2, unmasking the
racism and Imperialism of linear narratives of progress. Instead of
progression from one historical phase to another, the planet is seen
to be composed of a virtual co-existence of modes stretched out on
a continuum of war. This continuum connects the martial modes of
despotic states, disciplinary states and packs. These modes differ in
their degree of compositional laminarization. Sector 4 deploys the
cartography on the emergence of a planetary cybernetic culture and
its relation to a global machinery of war. Postmodern control is
designated as turbulence simulation or programmed catastrophe- a
runaway process of accident or emergency quantizing typified by
implosive turbulence in the core of the world system and its
overexposure. Sector 5 pushes the cartography towards an antifascist
fluid mechanics otherwise denoted as an ethics of speed or a
tao of turbulence.

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