BouldMonsters vs. Empire
Mark Bould
on june 18, 2018, President Donald Trump took everyone by surprise. In
the midst of remarks about U.S. and German approaches to immigration,
he was suddenly directing “the Department of Defense and Pentagon
to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as
the sixth branch of the armed forces” and banging on about achieving
“American dominance in space” and “expand[ing] our economy.”
Despite Trump’s seemingly abrupt change of topic, there is no actual
disjuncture—indeed, there is a rather obvious continuity—between the
fear of otherness and the fantasy of control, between discussing ways to
restrict the movement of “undesirable” people and fantasizing about Space
Invaders—space being, after all, the final frontera. There is, moreover,
no contradiction between fixing borders ever more firmly in place/space
and finding ways to transform the limits to capital into barriers for it to
overcome. And there is no conflict between the interimperial rivalry of
nation-states—both China and Russia recently demonstrated their ability
to shoot down satellites—and the global Empire of transnational capital.
In fact, since Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal refashioning of the U.S.—and