[-empyre-] Critical Dromology - and terror, capital

[KUMAR, NAVJOTIKA X]

Hello,
 
I am reminded by Gabriela's observations about his writing on various governments' use of surveillance technologies to wage war on their own civilian populations of Hasan Elahi's project "Tracking Transience." Elahi, then a professor and conceptual artist at Rutgers, and now at San Jose State, was detained upon his return to the US in 2002 shortly after 9/11 at the Detroit Airport by the FBI and extensively interrogated based on the suspicion that he was a terrorist. After numerous subsequent interrogations and 9 polygraphs, as well as the knowledge that he was being constantly watched, he started carrying a GPS device that enabled anyone, anywhere, to track his location and activities online at all times. He also began posting numerous digital photos of these locations and activities, including the toilets he used at different places, the different meals he ate, the airports he passed through etc. This ongoing project of interrupting governmental surveillance by self-surveillance, or of enacting a mock complicity that overloads the system with excess information/ transparency, is ongoing at www.trackingtransience.net and receives many hits (including, it seems by the FBI and even the executive office at the White House). His exhibition "Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project" of course reveals that Elahi's manner of presenting all this information is ultimately designed to subvert his stated objective of collaborating with the government/FBI as usually years are missing from dates provided on photos, photo grids of similar locales and meals are created that blur information about specific locales and times, and so forth. Is this assumption of "guerrilla tactics," or the enactment of an artistic insurgency that may be deemed what Deleuze called “diagrammatic,” the only viable means of resistance in “societies of control”?
And how does the assumption of these tactics intersect with students putting all their information online as noted below? While they do seem unafraid of surveillance, or of sharing private information, does the storing and availability or archiving of this information online represent a potential threat in the future given that employers and others can potentially access their photos and information later on, etc?   
 
Navjotika Kumar
Kent State

________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Gabriela Vargas-Cetina [gabyvargasc at prodigy.net.mx]
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 10:57 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Critical Dromology - and terror, capital

Hello.  I've been lurking through this great conversation, but if I may I
would like to address this last comment.  From his work of the last five
years or so, since he started writing about GPS as a military technology
that turns the world inside out, since the local are the points on space
where satellites find themselves, and the global are the points on the earth
where satellite signals converge, he has been writing that governments (and
I get the feeling that by "governments" he means those in the United States
and in a few European countries, particularly France) are using the new
surveillance technologies to wage war on their own civilian populations (I
think he started working on this idea with The Information Bomb).

To me this does bear out from his earlier writings on speed and politics,
since we seem to have at present living conditions that, from his point of
view, have led us to the ultimate frontiers of terror, and terror of a known
unknown, since surveillance has become so complete and it is not known when
something will bring on repression from what watchful instance.  This all
seems to be true, sometimes more than others, in today's societies as we
know them.  Maybe this is full dystopia, and we are to continue in it for
ever more.

But there is something he did not anticipate: young people are not afraid of
surveillance.  I discussed this with Tim before: our students put everything
about themselves on facebook, MySpace and on their cellphones, they use any
internet connections they find un-WEPed and they all know they are being
watched in anything and everything they do or refrain from doing.  But they
don't care.  Maybe after ultimate terror comes ultimate utopia: you can do
whatever you want because everything is potentially and maybe even actually
transgressive.  You are free to the extent that you are always suspect of
transcending boundaries you cannot even comprehend, anticipate or even know
in any precise manner.

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina
http://antropuntodevista.blogspot.com


On 11/17/08 1:37 AM, "simon" <swht at clear.net.nz> wrote:

> I apologise in advance for introducing a small eddy into the
> conversation. Near the banks, maybe. But perhaps I can segue via the
> notion of flows - from the slowest of the flesh to the fastest of the
> codes of capital:
>
> Virilio invokes another spectre, along with that of the analogical
> consciousness positively haunting and doubling what is, with its
> negative. It is the transistor bridging terror and capital, in the
> synthetic medium of pure speed.
>
> I bring this new capital of terror up as tropic because I recall from my
> reading somewhere in Virilio a writing drawing terror as the 'next
> phase' of capital ... and yet nothing beyond this tantalising,
> terrifying glimpse, connexion.
>
> My question to the partners in this empyrean conversation is: what is
> the revenance of my partial citation ... ? I retrace my steps and still
> I can't find where he put this clue.
>
> And I apologise for the trainspottery - because, on the face of it, I'm
> simply looking for the source in Virilio's texts ... however, to
> reconstruct the image, analogon, of the argument in the future: terror
> achieving not exactly escape velocity but certainly the terminal
> velocity of capital ...
>
> I hope not too vague and off-topic.
>
> Best,
>
> Simon Taylor
>
> www.squarewhiteworld.com
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre


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