Re: [-empyre-] mobile media debate + RFID

[Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>]

Dear Empyreans,
I'd like, briefly, to take up on a theme introduced in Heather Corcoran's
excerpt from Armin Medosch's "The Spychip Under Your Skin":

"Ironically, the frequent business flyer and the would-be 'immigrant' are
both part of the 'avant-garde' of RFID deployment."

It interests me that Armin Medosch couches this bipolarity - of frequent
flyer and (im)migrant - in terms of deployment, deterrence (the arms race),
of biopolitics and, as finally a matter, of survival. Paul Virilio paints a
similar picture, referring, perhaps more generally, but no less
deliberately, to the war-like and (bio)political ramifications of
instantaneous communication and mobile media.

The general mobility of populations (under, say, globalisation)transforms
the privileged - frequent flyer - into a resident of everywhere, since the
connectivity that replaces relations defining home and work, the
telecommunications network, travels with; it transforms, on the other hand,
the migrant worker or refugee - whose relations have not been upgraded by
the power of connectivity to being virtual - into the resident of nowhere.
The territory won by the first category of resident is indeed threatened by
the second, the nomad.

We have then two types of identity, one increasingly static even in its
mobility, concerned with the convergence and concentration of identity
technologies to ensure its security; against/and the other, increasingly
mobile and, not simply 'sans papiers' but, digitally paperised,
identikitted, whose, if I may, ontological status is defined by exclusion:
Because - in the sense I take from Virilio's notion of the disappearance of
bodies - this second type is unable to disappear.

A note in addition: Virilio uses the term 'phagocyte' - flesh-eating - to
describe what Medosch in his title calls the 'microchip under the skin',
that is RFID. To secure identity in order to win the territories of a
utopian technoscience, for instance, to accede to the mobility of media,
annexes the body, entails its gradual but categorical disappearance, along
with anything that may be called a 'biopolitics'. Ethereal residency is a
function, if you like, of the invagination of the mediascape! (Although,
Virilio calls this 'neocolonisation'.)

(The book predominantly drawn from here is Crepuscular Dawn, Paul
Virilio/Sylvere Lotringer, trans. Mike Taormina, Semiotext(e), 2002.)

Yours,
Simon Taylor