Long Live the Pirate Metropolis

Many of you know I'm a high school debate coach.  Last year's topic focused on economic development of the oceans, and one of the arguments I most enjoyed developing was a critique of a particular policy action that would map the United States' exclusive economic zone.  The argument, based largely on the work of Antonis Balasopoulos, wasn't focused on the instrumental questions of mapping, nor on how the mapping of territory facilitates imperial control and resource extraction.  Instead, it centered on the symbolic effect of taking an unknown space and bringing it under the hegemony of ordered knowledge.

Balasopoulos took it for granted that efforts to map the ocean would not be the crucial logistical battles to propping up imperial order; we can all recognized how entrenched all of our modern institutions are.  The significance of ocean mapping, from his perspective, lie more in the Ocean's power as a symbol, a referrant that exists in opposition to the fixed structures that define modern political units.  Consider the shifting terrain of the rolling waves to the fixed arrangement of mountains and valleys, or the overlapping jurisdictions that govern human behavior in our terrestrial lives versus the lawlessness of international waters.  Indulging in a blend of historical anecdote and fiction, Balasopoulos spins tales about pirate metropolises that existed outside the laws of states and espoused egalitarian, anarchist frameworks for organizing their micro-societies.

Perhaps such places never existed, but there's something about the open Ocean and its inviting possibilities that calls to our imagination, and Balasopoulos argues that the imaginative act of envisioning such a society and contemplating its potentiality could provide such a shock, such a tremendous juxtaposition against our status quo, that it could inspire us to challenge contemporary political orders and reject utilitarian argument for constantly pursuing the unknown in the name of quantifying it and exploiting its measurable value.

I can't say exactly why this argument found its way back into my head, but I think it has something to do with the synergy it expresses with my entry from last week, The Imagination Cycle.  I'm enchanted by the idea that our creative mind is something that we can cultivate and harness to motivate meaningful changes in the world.  Balasopoulos is arguing that certain spaces have unique value because of the analogical role they play in that creative process.