… a global port authority?
Port Authority ? Global ?
A Port Authority?
The concept of Port Authority is lifted from the betwixt
phenomenon of ‘Port Authorities’. PAs are a very interesting module in the arts of Extra State Craft – a spell initiating a kind of souvereignity about ports, acknowledged to be social connexes, in a world that cannot be fully compartmented or tiled up by ‘nation’ and other artificially and forcefully bounded state-machines.
Initially set up against the sweeping enclosures of public lands and the subsumption of social structures of connectivity by the railway tycoons (- every age has their tycoons -) port authorities morphed into a strange institutional complex, sourced from the circumstantial, opacity of a higher degree, hyperbolic self-authorization, and the constructive use of grey legality.
Just think of the success of the – also self-appointed – ISO-organization, nowadays setting ‘quality’- and process-standards worldwide endued with quasi-legal force, and you get at what the GPA wildly aspires to in carnevalesque and trespassing spirits – knowing from the Eternal Book of Ports that the port mycelium doesn’t allow for any central ‘authority’ beyond the souvereign (self-)connection of the ports themselves.
Why Global?
The GPA allways roamed the Globe. It is here, there, nowhere, and wherever needed or summoned. In this sense it is ‘global’. The same goes for the characteristics of ‘ports’, as the GPA shares the ancient and future knowledge that ports are as much airports, seaports and harbours, space ports as any place assembled to connect what is otherwise not connected, and to allow for the secure movement of souls and other cargo between two dimensions of any sort. Ports are sites of anspecific global encounter.
But the GPA also has to deal with what has been labeled the ‘globalization’ of capital, infrastructure and with the weaponized portssystems of ‘globalism’.
While it could also be the ‘Planetary Port Authority’, or the ‘Cosmic Port Authority’ – it chose to keep these dimensions as perspectives and within the GPAs inner eyes – quite like a beam of a lighthouse: as something to shine a guiding light on the demise of any worthwhile ‘global’ vision, as on the downfall of the illusory and hollow ‘cosmopolitanism’ of a globalist modernity which not only devoured ‘us’, all the living and moving, the planet – but finally also itself.
While we now see ports shut down (even more), used as landmarks of overdevelopment (even more), as logistic fortresses of extraction and colonization (even more), as gigantic malls of consumerist bling-bling culture (even more), as hyperlocal bordertowns (even more, and as logistical prisons – while we can see and bemoan all that, the GPA wants to open ports, re-vitalize them as places of translocal experience, encounter and connection. And, as the deserve to be that: as places of culture-making on theor own.
Because: all culture comes through the ports.