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Concept
http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/nanostate
Preliminary to formulating and implementing desiderata of good planetary energy transfer practice, the Secretariat considered appropriate the drafting of a working paper setting out a) the salient structural features of the present political regime
regulating the global exploitation of available energy resources and their mutual articulation; b) provisional observations regarding the mode of insertion within this system of the determinate indeterminacy and chronotopical (topological) innovations of the
jurisdictional boundaries and interior of the Nanostate (N); c) a view on theoretical practices which might be appropriate to N exergics (N-ergetics) as regards the very large scale processes of irradiational energy transfer to the terrestrial biosphere
and energy conversion and transfer within it. A possible theoretical projection may usefully situate the N-biosphere nexus as an "event" within the Noosphere.
The paper is prefaced by an indicative global view of the politico-energetic system qua system. A systemic approach is relevant for several reasons:1) the Nanostate is fundamentally constituted as a systemic concept: while itself fully an RPE, in
respect of the ensemble of RPEs it is semiotically a "secondary modelling system", somewhat as works of art in
given media (poems, performances, paintings) are secondary modelling systems of the larger signifying ensembles to which they belong (natural language, social behaviour, pictorial (iconic) representation); 2) coherent energy strategies will follow only when
they issue from consideration of the systemic totality of the planetary energy field, a very small portion of which is represented by energy extracted from currently (technologically) available energy resources; 3) the systemic unity of the Nanostate
concept presupposes the unification of its macro-geography (it is everywhere) with its micro-temporality (it is there for a transcendently brief instant), inviting a homology or mapping with on one hand global macro-energetics - quantitative homeostasis
(energy budgets, energy transfer etc), on which a valuable, regrettably as yet underinvestigated literature exists (Vernadsky, Miller, Smil et al), and on the other hand the ensemble of micro-energetic events at sub-molecular levels (photosynthesis, ionization
etc) which embody energy conversion and processes wich form the material substratum of the biosphere, in a long perspective offering a theoretical model of Noosphere functioning; 4) the radically different alignments and functioning modes of extractive
agencies on one hand and regulatory agencies on the other are best thought as a forming a skewed systemic unity, having a quasi-rectilinear relationship, in which the focus of the former is inherently partial, and "tunnelled" towards a single resource, where as
the gaze of the latter, for historical, ideological and other reasons, more diffusely embraces the totality of energy resources (forests, fish biomass, fossil fuels, human etc) "held in trust" for the nation, even while criss-crossed by the extractive
geometrical traces of direct foreign investment etc.
[here a "BOX"?: an illustration of some of these points is the siting of the Sunkar oil rig in the Kashagan oil field in the territorial waters of Kazakhstan in the north Caspian. The wells of the field are
being drilled by a consortium of major oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalFinaElf, and Agip, who have pooled the concessions (exploitation rights) granted to them individually by the Kazakhstan RPE. The Caspian has no cleansing, scouring
tides and no depth to disperse spills which would threaten (the north Caspian average depth is 3.3 metres), the habitat of the unique Caspian seal and (in the Volga delta) the main breeding grounds of the sturgeon. The rapid fluctuations in depth caused byhigh winds from the Kazakh steppe is regarded as a problem or "curse", rather than an energy resource by the consortium, concerned with oil extraction. The moderate Kazakh official Daukeyev, governor of the jurisdiction covering the Kashagan field will
pursue claims against the consortium for ecological damage. The harder Galina Chernova, director of a Kazakh NGO, the Centre for Ecological Legal Initiatives is trying to stop the Kashagan, which is also seeking to build artificial rock islands in the Caspian
to reduce operating risks in drilling. Here Kazakh institutions function to exercise an ecological, "global" trusteeship, while the consortium ("Okioc") maintains a sharply-focused non-systemic approach to energy production.
Implicit in the perspectives here being developed is cognisance taken of the fact that the superimposed lattices constituted by on one hand the ensemble (domain) of political unities or points (mainly nation states, hereafter Real Political Entities,
RPEs) and agencies exploiting (through extraction, drilling, piping etc) technologically available resources (mainly transnational corporations, hereafter TNCs) are in a geopolitical sense largely disjunct. (Electricity generation is a partial but
increasingly less significant exception, given the secular trend of transfer of public resources to the private sector.)
In the Secretariat's view the formulae: "decline of the nation state" and "irrelevance of state frontiers", represent serious misapprehensions, both from top-down (jurisprudentially informed regulation of access to oil fields, claims to oceanic resource etc.)
and bottom-up (foci of self-consciousness of primary (human) energy resources) perspectives. RPEs are major players with respect to
issues of energy transfer but the modality of their relationship is discursive rather than technological, and is asserted by force only in the final instance. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the
bound or outward circumference of Energy" holds good also on earth, but the functional relationship of the body of fossil fuel and other resources with the circumferential reasoning process devoted to jurisdictional demarcation intensively being pursued by
the apparatuses of international jurisprudence is more complex. A barrel of oil may be legally pumped from a field within an area of national jurisdiction remote from its main land mass (Kazakhstan etc), and transported across several jurisdictions
(Azerbaidjan, Turkey, Armenia etc), consumed in other jurisdictions (Macedonia etc) and its residue of wealth "repatriated" (USA etc). The Secretariat will wish to consider the feasibility of the 3-dimensional surface modelling of symptomatic flow paths of this
kind showing energy embodied in extraction, transfer and transformation (production/consumption, distribution/concentration, consumption/production)
While national patrimony is no longer geographically coincident with its territorial circumscription in a
simple or "local" sense, it is significant that ever greater intellectual and institutional resources are being deployed in the rigorous specification of transforms mapping the latter into the former, in N terminology their metricization (on this see
especially NPv1, Arts 7,9), importantly through the establishment of a body of customary international law by the International Court of Justice, the UN Law of the Sea Conventions, bilateral and multilateral treaties between RPEs, fiscal and economic
restructuring programs promoted by the World Bank, IMF and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the regulation of embodied energy flow (goods, services and intellectual property) by the instruments and tariff schedules of the World Trade
Organization, finally confirmed in special cases by enforcement agencies such as NATO. In further pursuance of the Nanostate's application for Observer status to the WTO submitted September 1999, the Secretariat is examining*******
It puts forward a view of the shifting mode of articulation linking energy producing and consuming agencies with the system of jurisdictional unities, mainly nation states (hereafter "Real Political Entities" or "RPEs") covering most of the planetary land mass,
and, significantly, at present rapidly being extended oceanwards by geopolitically driven juridical process. The agencies referred to importantly but not primarily include transnational corporations (TNCs), in particular those engaged in the exploitation of fossil fuels. The
view is developed that in view of the highly visible acceleration of these articulatory shifts, involving spatial displacements and ongoing jurisdictional redefinition on the seabed or land-based, the Nanostate (N) is an RPE which, while classically retaining
the demarcational and spatio-temporal parameters of RPEs, is, unclassically, their theorization (for this generally, see the Nanostate Protocol, Volume 1, NPv1), and thereby as a lived construct is increasingly pertinent to the processes underlying these shifts.
In particular, the energetics of N's provisional retention but strategic annulment of solid/void antinomies (see NPv1, Arts 8,9,10), thence the substantiation/charging of (time)-space, finally the erasure of the disjuncture between the transactional
and discursive realities of the political process and the ontological (physical and energetic) realities of energy conservation and conversion (production/consumption) will be addressed. N can be thought as an RPE asymptote or limit point, and its
domain the noosphere.
As a planetary RPE, N-ergetics sees as critical the distinction within aggregated total energy, of ("bound") energy which is presently or potentially utilizable given available technologies and its complement(the larger, "free" portion)
within the aggregated total.
The latter includes energy undergoing conversion within the biosphere (through photosynthesis, ionization etc) but the primary existence mode of both is radiant energy; "not only the biosphere but the whole of accessible or
conceivable space is penetrated by irradiations of the energetic environment...around and through us, always and everywhere, constantly altering, overlapping and colliding, pass waves of radiant energy, whose wavelengths range from 10 millionths of a
millimetre to those of the order of kilometres (20th century geobiochemist V I Vernadsky, originator of the concept of the Noosphere). Vernadsky's view that "the constant replenishment and suffusion of space by this irradiation crucially distinguishes the
real, non-material cosmic environment from the ideal, abstract space of geometry" is relevant to the development a space-time energetics proper to the interior of the Nanostate (see below and NPv1, especially Arts 9, 12, 15), in regard to which the concept
of energy transfer acquires interesting global implications.
With respect to bound energy, N positions itself in relation to energy resourcing agencies in modes distinct from but critically overlapping those normal within the prevailing RPE system.
These are characteristically distanced, disjunct, mediating, legislative, regulatory and (generally) passive; they are discursively rather than technologically engaged in energy production (the word here taken in its normal usage, energy being a constant
quantity). The following points commenting this system are towards clarifying N's relationship to RPE engagement with energy resource exploitation. (It will here be useful to bear in mind that N's relationship to the RPE system is twofold: it is fully
(honorifically) itself an RPE; in respect of the ensemble of RPEs it is semiotically a "secondary modelling system", somewhat as works of art in given media (poems, performances, paintings) are secondary modelling systems of the larger signifying ensembles to
which they belong (natural language, social behaviour, visual representations)). 1. There is general agreement that national etc boundary demarcations are historically becoming more permeable due to financial, economic and technological globalization. The
geographical location of resources no longer unambiguously coincides with their territorially circumscribed proprietorship. National wealth (patrimony) in many of its most significant manifestations is situated elsewhere, especially in the case of
industrially developed RPEs. Boundaries however are acquiring ever-increasing significance. Precise jurisdictional control and trusteeship of resources is needed to secure well-regulated wealth creation, even when, as typically, an RPE to whom a given energy etc
resource jurisdictionally appertains is distant from the site of wealth accumulation. Boundaries also are valuable as part of regulatory and enabling mechanisms in the efficient deployment (education, health, transport, penalization)
Nanostate energy and exergy polity and remarks regarding its implications for possible forms of energy transfer are usefully prefaced by reiterating some salient parameters, particularly with regard to their energy implications, of the (transactional and ontological)
reality mode of the Nanostate (hereafter "N"), both as regards its prototypical homology with existing nation states (replicating their structurally essential postulates: boundary, jurisdiction, spatiality), as well as its modality as a
"point of singularity" within geopolitical time-space (these parameters are more fully elaborated in the Nanostate Protocol, Volume 1, hereafter "NP1").
Questions addressed by N as RPE concerning RPE exploitation and importantly conceptualization of energy are
1) jurisdictional (political) claims on energy resources appertaining to individual RPEs (given globality, this is not straightforwardly a matter of proprietorship of resources within individual RPE jurisdictions - precision in territorial demarcation may be primarily
of vital concern to wealth accumulation within distant RPE jurisdictions rather than local RPEs or those "hosting" transference, as is typically instanced in the case of Middle East and Caspian oil.
The practical thinking of Nanostate space (time)
looks likely to retain its relevance as constitutive of N processes and activities, as well as functioning as N's internal energy drive. N-users are by now well acquainted with its relational or bi-polar nature, shared with most modern states or other entities
(hereafter "Real Political Entity" -"RPE"), these generally existing as an overlay of contested, superseded or pro tempore displaced jurisdictions.
Note here is taken of the several species of thus intersected or "stressed" spaces as having special relevance to the way in which the postulational realities of the RPE discursive universe,
particularly N interventions therein, bear on the physical realities - technological, ecological, irradiational - of energy production and transfer. (The interface between
the jurisdictional( honorific) realities of geopolitical (RPE) discourse, the economic and technological realities of energy resource exploitation, and the physical realities of biospherical and ultimately radiant energy is classically instanced by
agreements amicably arrived at regarding exploitation by Gulf Oil, Aminoil and others of the oil field straddling the Neutral Zone separating Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the non-amicable insistence by the UN on the compensation by Iraq to oil companies' loss in
energy production taking precedence over facilitating domestic recovery in human energic capability (medical supplies etc), agreements between the four Indochina nations regarding communal exploitation of the large energies of the Mekong River. etc.).
page Nanostate Energy Secretariat (NES). Draft Working Paper
This presentation addresses issues concerning modes of energy transfer available to a Real Political Entity (RPE) of hybrid Nanostate (N) . It proceeds from a broad brush overview of the
geopolitical framework within which mainstream energy production/distribution takes place, outlines salient features of their functional relationship, and concludes with some considerations pertinent to a theoretically informed Nanostate energy practice
( N-ergetics). The discussion is prefaced in recalling some features of the Nanostate (for these generally see the Nanostate Protocol Volume 1, hereafter NPv1) relevant to energy flows, and then moves to considerations of a systemic order regarding:
1. the (RPE - N) system qua system;
2. circumscription by the interlocking RPE jurisdictional circumference or epidermis of the metabolic processes of the energetic body;
3. the energy system as a globality of inputs and outputs, with stress on a categorial distinction between energy and technologically exploitable, or bound
energy sources.
The Nanostate has been fully extant as an RPE since its institution in 1999, as stated in its constituting instrument, the Nanostate Protocol, the point of departure
and initial affirmation of its ontological status and the transactional or willed mode of its being. The historical dialectic within which the inception of N is inscribed, the mode of insertion within global RPE systemics, and the laws of its trajectory as
these bear on the immanent processes of energy transfer inhering within the N chronotope are commented below in sections 2 and 3.
In anticipation of that discussion, some fundamental statement was felt called for and needed by the Secretariat regarding the logico-philosophical and ontological status (real stuff) of the Nanostate, albeit summarily and metaphorically. Although fully an RPE,
existing in relation to the RPE system, it does so paradoxically
N is typologically hybridand an embodiment of Russell's paradox, an RPE which does not belong to the class of which it is a member.
This paradox fundamentally arises from its explicit conceptualization and lived affirmation of the implicitly disavowed temporal realities duration, velocity)
of the prototypical RPE in its current mainstream manifestation (a member of the international community).
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