THEORY STRIP Consider the mystification of the world system and of globalization when it is described as a simultaneously transnational and non-national system in which imaginary capital flies above the earth -- aided by technology and by the immateriality of capital -- somehow free of the regulatory efforts of the nation-state (imagined as diminished or "post" in this formulation). Although this description has a basis in Marx’s Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, it can result in the kind of siteles globalism that Deleuze and Guatarri imagine in the "deterritorializing of the State.” Freed of any site and somehow both "supranational" yet "multinational" an ungovernable mass circulates among us (starring Sigourney Weaver). In a dematerialized globalism, there appears to be no agent in history, no agency through actors within capitalism. The effect of imagining globalization as a series of semi-autonomous flows which are able to slip through borders in a speed-driven and technologically enhanced articulating rush is to render globalism (the thing) as siteless. And the result, the sitelessness of globalism is the effect of ideology, specifically the ideology of globalization. The dynamism of globalization is not its immateriality, but its movement via a network of articulation and disarticulation --of linking and delinking discourses and effects, economies and modes of production, culture and economy, space and senses of time. This movement of globalization -- its progression as a continual reshaping -- is predominately defined in terms of flows, metaphorized into a liquidity and porousness. Yet, it would be a mistake to see this process of articulation and disarticulation as producing the same effects in different sites or of having an even application or development across the world. Globalism materializes in different forms in different sites and it renders varied effects in these sites. The image of globalization as a homogenizing force (or ”Americanization” in earlier terms) does not adequately account for how globalism is used, transformed or resisted at the local level -- a truism of cultural studies at this point-- but also this imagining of globalism obscures that it is not evenly applied or forced in all sites. Globalization, in its role of articulation, joins the series of global and the local into a new configuration which is mediated by revamped roles of the nation state, and of cities and urbanism. The most common linkage identified within the discourse of globalization, or the articulation accruing the most attention and agreement, is of the global, the national and the local. These three linked terms appear to give coherence to the movement of culture, goods, capital and bodies through the world system. That they are so easily articulated, so seamlessly joined is perhaps a triumph of the discourse of globalization -- a discourse which performs the inevitability of globalism. Resistance is not only futile, but it is temporally located in the past, leaving only the continuous present of globalism. Or, as the triumphant Forbes.com banners across from the Flatiron Building in New York says: “Capitalism: served fresh daily.” TEST STRIP Culture emerges with a new connective or articulatory role within this returning look at the cultural and the economic, the national and the global, the subjective and the structural which globalization is forcing. No longer imagined as being semi-autonomous or autonomous on its production, culture is presented the challenge of understanding the newly forming connections and its function within them. It’s not that culture is given a renewed pedagogical role -- to instruct, to construct taste as culture -- but rather cultural production can take on a present ideological role. A more modernist role for the cultural would be to find sites and moments that are outside of globalism -- either spatially or temporally. This is the modernist literary project of imaging a world to live in. But, if the ideological effect of the discourse of globalism is to cause a “misrecognition” of the form of globalism itself, then the cultural is presented with a role of showing what is obscured, of showing what has been disarticulated and what has been rearticulated. So not how to imagine a Utopia, but how to simultaneously understand the present the way it is being proposed through the inevitable discourse of globalism and to understand its potential forms. This articulatory role for the cultural is materialized in the urbanism and architectural works by Bitter and Weber. A close reading of “Almere.txt,” “splitting & stacking,” as well as Border 0” and “Framing Location” could show how through the repetition of architectural forms, a questioning of the social logic and the social determinants of architecture and urban planning is materialized or how a social collectivity is proposed through architecture. But a close reading of such works tends to make them static materializations of social phenomenon and relations rather than theoretical (and -- always --social) speculations. Rather I would propose these works as problematics in themselves because they articulate social relations and formations to urbanism and architecture. If -- to return to globalism and a role of the cultural -- globalism tends to simultaneously obscure certain articulations and disarticulations through which it proceeds while foregrounding others, Bitter and Webers’ works insist on particular articulations. The problematic of social housing and single family dwellings is reiterated textually (almere.txt) and actively (splitting & stacking), reiterated until the problematic is recognizable. The construction of place in Framing Location follows the logic of the seamless joining of sites within the discourse of globalism. Through a repeated merging, new sites emerge, but lose specificity (historical, geographical, etc.) to become nonplaces in a seamless sequence (perhaps this is the transition from history to “market”). These works are a tactical insistence on revealing links, on a relational conceptualism which does not seek clarification through a careful separating of elements but poses problematics by critical linkages. Jeff Derksen, Vienna/New York 2000 published in kursiv TALKING CITIES 06/00 Symposion and Exhibition, MUWA Graz, A a shorter text version was published in springerin Band VI Heft1/00	.