Over 30 years of strategic reconfiguration, Global Cities have proven
themselves productive of metropolitan oligarchies of various hues
that dominate the territories of their respective states. Set against
the ‘ecological contradictions’ of historical capitalism, the article
presents the Global City formation as a historically particular postdisciplinary
technique in the capitalist world-system bound into
the ecological contradictions of that system entering into a period
of chronic crisis in the twenty-first century. This idiomatic
technique is conceptualised in geo-historical terms as a distinct
‘Geotechnic’ modulation of control, through which the Global City
is constituted as a geo-machinic assemblage in the historical
technics of capitalist civilisation. Through a critical human
geography, marxist political economy, and post-structuralist
governmetnality studies, the adequacy of the Global Cities
research agenda is challenged, and the emerging role of the
World-City Archipelago in historical capitalism explored. In a
constructive critique of Wolfgang Streeck’s ‘end of capitalism’
thesis, the aim is to present the ‘geotechnic city’ as an emergent
modality of global discipline in historical capitalism, whereby the
latter’s strategic contradictions are contained, resolved, displaced,
sublated through a particular genre of spatio-temporal fix, and the
future of the capitalist totality is secured through a new political
idiom of metropolitan oligarchy.