Boundaries, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial

A screen grab from the Guardian on-line (November 28th).  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/north-korea-claims-spy-satellite-has-photographed-white-house-and-pentagon

Recently, North Korea boasted that it had successfully launched a spy satellite into orbit. The Guardian newspaper on-line (November 28th) reports that it has ‘sent back “detailed” images of the White House, the Pentagon and US nuclear aircraft carriers that have been viewed by the regime leader, Kim Jong-un.’ The Guardian published the photograph at the top of today’s post. Hilarious, isn’t it? The T-shirts sported by the science wonks are priceless. I want one!  I imagine the piece of paper they’re holding shows Scarlett Johansson sunbathing beside her pool in her USD 3.88 million home in Los Feliz, recorded while the satellite was passing over Los Angeles.

It would be comic, except the news has now brought us one step closer to war. Again. Life near the DMZ has just gotten fractionally more insecure. Am I just imagining it, or are there more live fire-drills taking place? More troop movements? It may be a ruse. After all, they have already failed twice. But the suspicion is that Russia has recently provided much needed technological support, and in return, North Korea is providing Russia with thousands of artillery shells. What a diabolical marriage made in Hell!

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I was struck by the chance juxtaposition in the media of this advanced extra-terrestrial surveillance technology with what’s currently going on in Israel/Palestine: the contrast between two relationships to the world - between attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil and having panoptic access to the entire world.

In Israel/Palestine what we see playing out in terrible  detail via the media is a crisis brought on by a fundamental human orientation to land and territory. Strife and war between humans have historically always been about appropriation of land.  A sense of being at home in a particular place is axiomatic. The securing of a particular area of land through migration, colonization, and conquest leads to the setting up of social order and the organization of economic life of society.  Only by dwelling somewhere do we feel truly human. This also meant that because societies are historically grounded in the occupation of a particular area  of land, the construction of boundaries is absolutely necessary.  

So, what is happening in Israel/Palestine is an ancient struggle for the appropriation of land, one that in spite of all the huge changes that have occurred over the past one hundred years remains central to human meaningful existence. Two peoples claim the same land as their own.

And yet, at the same time, thanks to globalization, a thoroughgoing deterritorialization of human existence has occurred. In fact, this process began long before the period usually described as ‘modern’. The uniquely iintimate link between being human and dwelling on the land was destroyed over 500 years ago when the oceans were systematically opened up.  From this point onwards, human society ceased being land-based and lost its status as the connection to specific area of the Earth.  Humans were no longer earth-bound. With the development of maritime technology - improved ship construction,  the  invention of the compass,  the science of mapping -  Europeans spearheaded the subjection of the entire planet to appropriation and control which had begun millennia before. when humans first developed boats that could carry them across the oceans. The general assumption became that by the end of the twentieth century, globalization meant the struggle between humans for the appropriation of land was over.  Humanity had spread all over the entire globe, across land, sea, and space, and there was nowhere else to go.

The North Korean’s launching of a spy satellite is in line with the logic of modernity in this sense. It is part-and-parcel of the process through which humanity has detached itself from its terrestrial bonds and manufactured a god-like view which bestows upon it immense power. It is this technologically-assisted extension of human perception that dominates our experience of the world – at least those of us who live in the developed world, and those who seek to maintain their security in relation to this world – nations like North Korea, for example.  To ensure a secure boundary for appropriated land entails the production of technologies that will deter others from making a grab for it. In this sense, the spy satellite is a contemporary standard form of boundary establishment generated on a global rather than terrestrial scale.

Meanwhile, in Israel/Palestine boundaries of a more ancient kind were erected. Israel constructed a fence to pen in the Gaza Palestinians. But this fence proved catastrophically inadequate. This was not because of sophisticated technological subversion, however, but rather because of the violent invasion of land by humans.

In this sense, the conflict in Israel/Palestine brings together the pre-modern and modern, the post-terrestrial and the terrestrial. Israel’s folly has been to attempt to live like a globalized nation in a region that is still trapped in a feud over land, trapped in a way of dwelling on earth - of being human - that is ancient, and has been kept alive through the bungling of modern leaders.

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But however awful the conflict in Israel /Palestine is, in a weird sense it is actually reassuring on a certain level, in the sense that it is enacting a very familiar kind of struggle over the appropriation of land based on historical precedent, religious justification, and political compromises. With climate change, the conflict between the global and the local will become even more tense. It is transforming the land upon which people dwell, forcing many of them to migrate and causing perpetual conflicts over dwelling rights. We will be seeing lots more violent struggles over land use because of the pressures of climate change, but they won’t be rooted in evident history like the one in Israel/Palestine.

As Bruno Latour writes in Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, , in order to effectively confront climate change we need “to be able to succeed in carrying out two complementary movements that the ordeal of modernization has made contradictory: attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil on the one hand, having access to the global world on the other. Up to now…. such an operation has been considered impossible: between the two, it is said, one has to choose. It is this apparent contradiction that current history may be bringing to an end.’

NOTES

The Guardian article can be accessed at:  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/north-korea-claims-spy-satellite-has-photographed-white-house-and-pentagon

The Bruno Latour quote is from Down To Earth. Poltics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity, 2018), p.12