Commotive Communities,
    Coaccelerant Collectives

This borderless world, however, constitutes a standing invitation for all to become even more orderless as technoeconomic kineformations displace once heavily emplaced social formations. Kindramatics are melting of much what was once locally solid into the global air so that its displaced particles might mix and match with all of the other fluidized particularities speeding along in transnational flows. Eroding in-stated places away into un-stated spaces now guides the neoliberal agendas of globalizing enterprises. As one key architects of these changes asserts, the most rational form of global order will be one of completely un-stated (b)orderlessness. That is, the state apparatus should do nothing to retard global flows. It should instead serve as an active accelerant, changing "so as to: allow individuals access to the best and cheapest goods and services from anywhere in the world; help corporations provide stable and rewarding jobs anywhere in the world regardless of the corporation's national identity; coordinate activities with other governments to minimize conflicts arising from narrow interest; avoid abrupt changes in economic and social is fundamental."23 Here again, the core of digital Fordism reveals itself: value is the ease of access by people who matter to things and time as the speed of things getting from people who do not matter drops. Inequality and powerlessness drive the imagineering of kineformative development as much as, or even more than, technical prowess and economic efficiency.

Fluidized spaces are social sites with material location, cultural content, and social sensibility, even though they often are politically dis-placed or un-stated. The quick cinematic pace of life creates a timely cinematicism with its own brand loyalties or corporate sensibilities as popular tastes are suitably adapted to each particular corporate connection with focus(ed) groups of production and consumption. Deeply emplaced statal points of view in territorialized/centered regimes dematerialize into lightly located corporate viewpoints from decentered and kinedramatic enterprises. Digital Fordism is a regime tied to purposive decentering, intentional unbounding, planned deterritorialization. A world in which Ford works like Cisco or Nike is troubling. It is a place where high-tech automobile production actually reduces industrial capacity, labor freedom, and standards of living at many sites, while not raising them much, if at all, in most other places. Kineformative structures never come to rest anywhere save perhaps only in their trajectories of flight. Hurtling to and from any discrete point of source and reception, like the subsidiary components of finished goods kept permanently within just-in-time flight paths, they are simply the fixed sub-units of unfixed super-units. In a fashion not unlike the proto-parts and sub-pieces of whole Fords prior to their final and full "Fordification" at various assembly plants tying together totalities through the pieces of innumerable disassembly lines, kineformations are shaped and steered by fast telemetries from somewhere for the benefit of everywhere in a way that frequently improves nowhere. Each commodity chain has its own unique in-flight regulations as well as strangely organized attractions of chaos. Modernization always has suggested implicitly something like these rushing flight paths of mobilization/acceleration/intensification in which the biorhythms of ageless customs become infused with kineformative forces. Today's time-space compression, however, is a radical xenotransplantation of energies and motions from fast zones into slow zones, fulfilling in toto Marinetti's notions of Futurism: "with us begins the reign of uprooted man, of multiple man who gets tangled up in iron and feeds on electricity. Let's make way for the eminent and inevitable identification of man with the motor."24

The speed-bodies of transnational living can be tracked and scanned to disclose how their entanglements in kinedramatic events shape the spaces in which building, dwelling, thinking happen. The means of acceleration--material and symbolic--produce differential outcomes for the fast and slow classes whose power, status, wealth, labor, and information vary with their relations of access to, use of, and possession by accelerative forces. Co-acceleration--at fast, slow or stalled rates--generate shared consciousness or brake against mismatched awarenesses as those outside of shared time warps or spatial distortions soon prove either not to be like us or to simply not like us. Indeed, kinedramatic realities are the thought and action of social formations engaged constantly in acts of kineformative conflict or cooperation. Such speed-bodies express the solidarities, identities, communities of commotive agents as well as the divisions, deceptions, disunities of conchronous structures. When Reich asks "who is 'us'?," the answer obviously is simple: everyone "on the go" transnationally, not anyone "stuck in place" nationally. FoMoCo's motto for its SUVs is the essence of this kineformative mode of production: "No Boundaries." Coaccelerants in virtual realities are time-sharing, compression routinizing, and parallel processing in common kineformative sites, while dropping out, breaking away, slowing down disconnects human consciousness from the kinedramatic. Today, for anyone "to disconnect is to disinform oneself."7 Shared speed forms new agents in accelerated states, because these movements in-form the events of informationalized consciousness. Nonmovement represents dis-information, un-eventuality, and kine-nonformation for all those are either codecelerating or simply remaining at rest. Digital Fordism simply remediates these facts in the realm of material production, and leaves those who cannot move that much worse off than before.

Footnotes



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