The Bio- and Geopolitics of Rooms ; La bio y geopolítica de las habitaciones

Abstract

In analyses of the relationship between literature and geopolitics I have turned on more than one occasion to a chapter in Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel where he contrasts the literary geographies in Jane Austen's sentimental ("Silver Fork") novels with Sir Walter Scott's historical novels. Moretti points out that Austen, whose novels focus on a class-based marriage market, confines her geography to "a small homogenous England" (Moretti, 1998, p. 14). Her novels' ideological perspective on space are unconcerned with the process of nation-building, while in contrast Scott, whose novels are mainly concerned with nation-building, constructs a much larger UK, one involved in a process of expansion, "the incorporation of the internal periphery into the larger unit of the state" (p. 40). The presumed methodological implication of Moretti's contrast is that novelistic and other textual contributions to knowledge of geopolitics is afforded through expansive perspectives on space. The political geographer Peter Taylor challenges that implication in his analysis of "World Cities." His investigation, which emphases the flows that shape much of global political economy, articulates a reduced rather than enlarged geographical perspective. In an inquiry that relies on what he refers to as "office geography data" (Taylor, 200, p. 5), Taylor's spatial focus is on rooms. Moving on from analyses that shifted the "metageography" from the "mosaic of states" to the "networks of cities" (p. 11). In earlier inquiries, Taylor down-shifts to a still smaller space and analyzes the work in offices that contain some of the main protagonists in global political economy. In an analysis of "the global reach" of "networks of offices" operating in "world cities" (p. 11) his focus is on rooms filled with people involved in finance, accountancy, and legal services. If we imagine a distant future in which the files (both material and electronic) from those offices are recovered, the yield would be a mapping of the loci of control ...