Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.
-Gilles Deleuze
There is a predominant opinion in IR and security studies that networks are little more than operational means rather than an entity ontologically distinct from its components. The network simply being a seemingly less efficient or decentralized means that gains its advantage from its dispersed and redundant organization minimizing targetability and decapitation. However the humanism of this interpretation misses the productive and directive capacity of non-human and even inorganic heterogeneous unities with in the network metaphor. What is present is in fact an assemblage that is not a metaphor but an actual plurality of relays, resonances, and physical interfaces that emerge as something we can metaphorically refer to as an assemblage but which in fact is of an order of consistency unto itself. The assemblage is real.
In their study of network behavior, Galloway and Thacker persuasively make the argument that network architectures are not necessarily more democratic or less controlled than more hierarchical structures as has often been advanced by those who celebrate the supposed democracy of the Internet revolution. In fact this is what marks the transition from disciplinary institutions to societies of control. The network shifts from power or coercion to control, a multivalent, highly graduated continuum of modulation such that interventions can occur at the level of populations and the intimate processes of individuation without the humanism of disciplinary models which require a human or personal element. What Galloway and Thacker refer to as protocols can alter the arrangement and formation of bodies without any-one (in the anthropocentric sense of the term) at the wheel. In fact protocols can even emerge as control structures without having been designed or introduced. In network architectures control can emerge.
Resistance even in its most descriptive sense—the microphysics of power redoubled by the friction or refraction of that power relation by the subject on which power was directed—ceases to have much application. The mobile and elastic nature of the modulation—control protocols within a network architecture—is part of a dynamic equilibrium (a range or average of control with an acceptable and even useful margin of error) that lacks the traction to push back. It is like trying to fight underwater without a bottom to stand on.
However the prerequisite of this mobile, frictionless, protocol of control is a network architecture that accelerates and facilitates flow or movement. Whether that is the flow of desire and enjoyment, capital and bodies, or simply a deluge of information, the axiom of the control society is mobility. To put this in contrast to earlier power dispotifs using the example of controversial or disruptive knowledge, the sovereign or juridical power arrangement would be characterized by the censorship of disruptive or undesired knowledge, a disciplinary dispotif would invest in discourse the language of expertise such that alternative knowledges could be dismissed as backward or naïve, in CS systems knowledge would be replaced all together with more data than can be metabolized by whatever at a given moment is considered the public sphere. Expertise gives way to perspectival overload. Every blogger has a different tidbit of information every news show a new take on the same problem each allowing the news consumer to find the best modulation of the story to fit their specific needs whether that be reactionary, ‘radical’, concerned but complacent, or angry and needing a grounds for decisive revenge. The control society optimizes rather than either repressing (sovereign/juridical) or managing (disciplinary) bodies. The CS is a difference machine with a refrain or protocol of control.
To accomplish this task everything must be rendered surface or exterior; density does not work in a control society. Everything—much like the programming of a three-dimensional video interface—has to be coded. Every wall, doorway, affect, story, identity, street, sidewalk, sexual preference, product and place of exchange, otherwise the network cannot maintain flow instead the attempt to redirect, accelerate, modulate, movement will be confounded by cul-de-sacs, dead ends, or worse yet other control or even anti-control protocols.
Network integrity requires totality to optimize effectively. This chapter focuses on three main ‘failures’ of the contemporary urban network architecture—what I think is a central feature or terrain of the control society. First the slum or ghetto’s cluttered, unplanned, density introduces machines or protocols of anti-control that result in the reintroduction of carceral or even sovereign violence but with the twist of the new aesthetic sensibility regarding flow and the city. Second and related, the lingering persistence of racialized bodies is an obstacle to the dream of perfect optimization—interchangeable bodies and free flowing space are interrupted by raced material differences and its tendency toward spatial segregation. The resonance between the drug war and the terror war point to the fact that race is still an operator or maybe more appropriately a strange attractor in the organization and distribution of violence and surveillance unleashed on the city. Third the incompatibility of CS surveillance techniques and control protocols when the first two failures culminate in the emergence of war.
The two locations for this investigation will be the homologies of the New York “Surge” campaign after September 11th, 2001 and the subsequent “Surge” campaign in Iraq but more specifically in Sadr City. In both cases we find a miasma of the drug war, racism, urban decay, ghettoization, poverty, anti-colonial resistance, revenge, hatred, and technological arrogance colliding into one another. In both campaigns we see a desire on the part of the state to transition from traditional forms of either policing or war to a Control Society model. In the case of New York this is the globalization of its information and data collection including but not limited to the use of foreign operatives, the deployment of warfare techniques and SWAT techniques to create a spectacle of control rather than having to demonstrate actual control.
For the military the movement has also gone in both directions. Increasing the military’s capability of waging urban warfare but also creating new means of control, and ways to refine or direct force more microscopically. The human terrain projects attempts to map the affective tendencies of the population so that the ‘risk’ or ‘alleatory’ nature of urban warfare can be better managed and predicted. As well and best characterized by the new Counter-insurgency Manual, the emphasis is on development and social-actor-network theory for literally building the network architecture so that new means of control can be introduced and will not be undermined by poverty and urban density.
The point of interest is that both New York and Iraq force the state-military apparatus to confront the same three problems. First, Urban sprawl and density afflict both highly developed cities like New York and underdeveloped or in the case of Iraq and a decade of sanctions de-developed urban centers. Second, the problem of race or the problems racialized difference present for cooperation and integration are differences of degree not difference of kind when one looks at the ethnic conflict of Sunnis and Shiites or urban minority populations in the United States. Third, the overwhelming force capacity of the U.S. military and the NYPD become liabilities not assets in the urban environment or what will be discussed in this chapter as the security milieu. The term being borrowed from Canguielhm and Foucault to describe the particular alleatory properties of the urban assemblage which contain living (humans, animals, disease, plants), non-living (hunks of concrete, water, collapsed buildings) , anthropogenic built-environments (buildings, streets), and non-anthropogenic built structures (erosion or tectonic movement). All of which play an active and productive role in the constitution or texture of the milieu.
In short, the slums strike back. The control society reaches its limit. Uneven development and the problems of density and intensity make the discrimination between urban denizens and insurgents almost impossible from the contemporary logic of war fighting and policing. The excessive application of force begins to resemble Samson in the temple. The escalating fight for control or the dream of an optimized future pulls the temple down on the heads of those that desired it and tragically on everyone else.
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