Traces 4: Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference

The Market and the Police: Finance Capital in the Permanent Global War

THE MARKET AND THE POLICE: FINANCE CAPITAL IN THE PERMANENT GLOBAL WAR BRETT N Etl ON One of th mor deplorable a p~ts of the recent inslallm nt of · permanent global war" in Iraq wa the constant mediabanteron tile reac:tion of financial market . The parading of in tant expert, who at once performed the roles of military and financial analyst, seemed almost too consciously to distract (rom that whi h the embedded reportage could not show but also could not conceal: Ihe death and terrori zation of real bodies. Wall Street bets on quick war, unexpected resistance slows growth, mil ilary gains heer Asian markets, buyers show restraint as ground attack begins - the headline lauded the market as at one the privileged regist r of global public entim nl and Ihe moral arbit r of war, albeit one that could turn with th flicker of a sound byte. But within 'hi parti ul." loop of complicity, which eerned temporarily to align networks of state violence, finance, and communication, there were deeper tensions at work, ten ion that th "permanent global war" on all its fronts seeks to rebalance and reorganize. It is no secret that the global financial system, as it evolved in the decade following the first shocks to the FordiSI ~onomy in the 19705, emerged as the symbol and reality of a new order of sover ignty. Decentered, networked, and predicated on cireuIation and mixture, Ihe world miuket served not onIy to override the boundaries of nation- tal , but also to construct a new paradigm of hierarchy and command that took hold in all the zones and regions where the old T RAe ES : 157 Breit Nei lso n imperialism had once flourished. For Ihinkers such as Appadurai, Sa sen, Jameson, Latham, and Lee and liPuma, there exists no more powerful marker of a paradigm shift in the global economic and political orders than thisunification of th world market, which paradoxical ly operates through diversity and diver ification.' The daily irculation of trillions of dollars, the flight of finance capilal from Ihe productive geography of material labor, the objeclification, calculation, and distribution of risk by means of formal quantit"tive operiltions, the tightening of the relation between technology and exchange, the increasing asymmetries in knowledge and control of the economi forces affecting ocieties - all suggest a striving toward totality, th creation of a cosmopolitan culture of unimp ded financial circulation that is somehow unimaginable (rom the perspe tives of the citizen-stale or the national public sphere. How then to understand the daily hedges, the indexed fluctuations that hitched themselves to information gleaned about a war that seemed precisely to occur at the behest of a new imperial nationalism, a sovereign police action that heeded not so much the IOSic of Ihe market lby which any object, regardless of location, can be valued and ordered) as the logic of strategy (by which spatially fixed resources, subjecl 10 calculation ilnd command in the aggregate, arc brought und r control by statist elite who imultaneou Iy propagate home front (antasi s of security and terror)? At stake is neither the subordination of the logic of the market to that of strategy nor vice versa. ven i( prior to and during the war there emerged future markets trading on the likelihood that th Iraqi regime would endure until a certain point in time, the relation of market-based tranSilctions 10 the machinations of material and information warfare cannot be reduced to the probabilistic calculations o( spe ulators' Equally, the motive for war cannot be entirely separated from economiC factors, whether those identified by the popular slogan ~No blood for oil" or those outlined by the more complex ~rgumenls that view the conflict as part of the ongoing bailie between the dollar ilnd the euro for dominance in world currency markeLS.j In the interplay between market and strategy, circulation and geopolitics, war emerges at Once a a mediating and disruptive factor. No longer is it possible to affirm Clausewitz's famous description of war as the continuation of politics by other mean. Far from being an attempt to realize an end that could not be achieved by political mean , the campaign in Iraq had the overt goa l of obtaining somethi ng that wa already being accomplished through the conti ngencies of international politics - the ~T RA C E S:4 Th e Mar ke l. and...