Beyond the Map? Available to Purchase

The coda discusses the changing scale and speed of warfare to reconceptualize spatial models beyond the limiting imaginaries that have so far prevailed in political geography. Ushering in a complete rupture in the body/state isomorphic relation, new organizational models based on other biological architectures are privileging alternative kinds of bodies, eliciting new corporeal metaphors. The model of the swarm in particular, giving precedence to autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning, defies the fiction of the body as organic, natural, and unitary. Yet, through its fractured and dispersive nature, the swarm reflects a psychoanalytical view of the body as always and already fragmented, thereby dispelling the fiction of the body as discrete and singular. Embracing such fragmented and dispersive models may thus help reconfigure metaphors of the neoliberal state in line with its actual spatiality and modes of operation, no longer resorting to qualifiers or exceptions, and jettisoning the Westphalian myth.