“a coordinated infrastructural ensemble” – mammoth // building nothing out of something

“a coordinated infrastructural ensemble”

In a great little piece for Domus, Geoff Manaugh looks at what the “critical foreign dependencies” cable says about the nature of the contemporary nation-state:

“The sites described by the cable—Israeli ordnance manufacturers, Australian pharmaceutical corporations, Canadian hydroelectric dams, German rabies vaccine suppliers—form a geometry whose operators and employees are perhaps unaware that they define the outer limits of US national security. Put another way, the flipside of a recognisable US border is this unwitting constellation: a defensive perimeter or outsourced inside, whereby the contiguous nation-state becomes fragmented into a discontiguous networkstate, its points never in direct physical contact. It is thus not a constitutional entity in any recognised sense, but a coordinated infrastructural ensemble that spans whole continents at a time.”

In other words, not only is Wyoming in Los Angeles; but America is in Canada, or Canada is in America, or both at the same time.

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