Financial liquidity and debt loading are the means of modern sovereign power. A logistical sovereignty of flows superseding borders and national communities[1]. Less a global village, more a mass containerisation where the elements of economic sovereignty (a national currency, bond markets, capital investment, the regulatory environment) are commoditised and exchangeable. The banality of globalisation as a homogenising force is a well-worn tale, whether as global inevitability or a horizon that empire-states are beginning to overcome.

The late 20^th century was the ushering in of a new era of politics beyond politics. The post-political and post-historical consensus that great ideological conflicts were at an end and governments could settle into the administration of people and things. The shift to governmentality as described by Foucault, “an art of managing things and persons, concerned with tactics, not laws”[1] in which sovereignty, as the distinction of a state to mark an exception, is sublimated. A technocratic, global architecture of international law and institutionalisation sits atop this post-political landscape. As the state is decentred as the locus of power, international institutions step in to set the limits and decide the rules of the game.

“The Khmer Rouge command had ordered the evacuation of all cities and towns to the countryside (an estimated 20,000 people died of snap executions, hunger and disease in the emptying of Phnom Penh alone); the liquidation of anyone who had served the pre-revolutionary government; the abolition of money and markets; and rapid, forced collectivisation”[1].

Metropolitics as a phenomenon is a convergence of various trends and forces: international urbanisation and the development of a vast precariat class between and within cities; the growth of telepresence technologies and vast networks centred around social media and cloud computing; international security architectures like the Five Eyes as well as private surveillance structures; the logistical revolution; and cosmopolitan culture as a growing element in socio-political cultures i.e. the development of a post-national ethic.

“Metropolitics, a rootless, placeless and increasingly timeless politics concerned with the dissolution of barriers to speed”[1]. Virilio describes a new mode of politics within the modern city as a post-Leviathan beyond the space of the nation-state. Metropolitics is a politics in the tradition of the friend-enemy distinction, yet its enemy is abstract. Barriers to speed constitute its primary locus of action, being the means through which these are sped up or eliminated altogether.

The office has become the defining workspace in late modernity. While administration and bureaucracy have been ubiquitous features of all forms of economic activity historically, the central position of the office as the coagulating core of such activity has become especially important in post-industrial landscapes and trade hubs that link an interconnected globe. Coagulation is more than just a metaphor here. The distinct feature of the modern economy is the extent of flows and processes that intersect and define socio-economic activity, from workplace relations to governing structures. The office complex acts as a solidifying feature both architecturally – as office space becomes the prime form of urban building and city administrations clamber to create vast expanses of office parks, skyscrapers and glass facades to house business activity – and economically – as commercial real estate is foundational for city taxation and central for employment growth in economies dominated by the service and administrative sectors[1].

“Logistics is the beginning of the economy of war, which will then become simply economy, to the point of replacing political economy”[1]. Logistics, the flow of goods, information and wealth beyond the space of the state and the temporality of the human. Constant movement emerging as an autonomous force that recircuits and undermines spatiotemporal institutions. Sovereignty, as the essence of spatiotemporal configuration through territorial contiguity and temporal-institutional solidity, is revolutionised and fractured into these flows. A duality emerges, concatenating in antagonism sovereign power and logistical flow.

“Under the Hum, pylons were transformed. We looked up and saw sacred geometry. We looked up and saw holy angles”[1]. The electric flow of the landscape permeates everything as a contiguous energy, scything through land from substation to generating station along the grid. “Electric leys” express an interconnection with older energies and animistic beliefs – “the belief that natural materials/landscapes – water, wood, soil stone etc, were animated and imbued with the spirits of ancestral forebears”[2]. Emerson conceived these relations as an autonomous function of nature, both within and beyond human understanding as through the over-soul. “Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtile. It is undefinable, unmeasurable, but we know that it pervades and contains us”[3]. It is interpretable as an immaterial energy, imbued with emotional and theological spectres that take it beyond a simple dialogue of conceptualisation. Animistic energies are classifiable only by the linguistic markers and meanings put upon them. Whether thought of through its components or in the wider abstraction of “nature”, it goes beyond the dialogic into the intuitive, conceived through feeling at its basest levels as the “independency of those limitations”[4] are met.

“An oceanography of alternative codes and semiotics, where the new lifeworlds are below the surface of our view”[1]. In contrast to the map and the land, the ocean was an unpredictable expanse known for its destructive potential and illimitable depth. The Hereford Mappa Mundi depicts the oceans as mysterious outer seas, possibly being linkages to biblical lands and the afterlife. Hitler found the limits of blitzkrieg at the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean. “According to Nazi doctrine, strangely enough, there is just one element: the lithosphere, the earth, blood. Despite the war in the air and under the sea, the offensive of the first space weapons, the atmosphere and the hydrosphere remain foreign to Hitlerian ideology”[2]. It is in the map, in the explicitly understood landscape of Europe where Hitlerian ideology remained, a vestige of a limited nomos that only saw a land empire (and a land army) as the primary forces of conquest (despite the irony of Nazi innovation around rocket technology and air-based warfare). The Lebensraum enveloped the Nazi’s institutional cartography, with the sea as its limit, much as the early cosmographers saw the outer seas as liminal places, unpredictable in their potential.

Everyone assumes they speak the same language in their interconnected sphere of activity, whether in the literal sense or in the way they share particular linguistic markers. Shared patterns and norms are the mechanisms through which financial markets become institutionalised, and through which specialisation develops. “A capital market entails security of property rights”[1], or as Ayache theorises in the moment of the conversion of credit to equity, the market entails a move away from a finite social process of start-stop exchangeability to an asocial process of contingency through continuous exchangeability. The processes of debt and credit are “past and passive”, while the development of convertibility (into bonds or stock) is an “infinity of processes”[2].