[-empyre-] Mediated Matters and design abjections

Fri Sep 26 00:49:16 EST 2014

Hello all - and sorry for the delayed response. I’m thrilled to be participating in this. And by means of participating, I wanted to circulate some reflections I’ve been working on re: what I’m calling ‘datapolitik’ - so here goes:
To begin: the fact of datapolitik requires that we not rely on our inherited intuitions about surveillance: whether Orwellian/totalitarian, or Foucaultian/Benthamite. Datapolitik is not a regime of surveillance in that way, nor is it a configuration of power relations that easily maps onto the scopophilic – as both the Orwellian and Foucaultian models do. There is literally nothing to “see” here. Not because datapolitik is ‘invisible’ but because it is not a domain of politics available to sight. Datapolitik involves algorithms and programming platforms, not visual technologies of the gaze. Equally relevant: datapolitik has nothing to do with our entrenched views about privacy, reliant as they are on the security of walls, barriers, boundaries, and motes. This, because as Wendy Chun has cogently argued, there is an ephemerality to datapolitik whose presence is at once enduring and fleeting. But mostly, datapolitik is not about selves, or people, or persons, or the demos, or identities, or bodies, or organisms. Datapolitik, I want to suggest, is the new real of everyday politics: it is what wins presidential elections in the United States, it is what ensures economic growth on Wall Street, it is what enables the writing of academic research papers and essays (i.e., software). In short, we are surrounded an embedded in code and data; indeed, more than anything else, in the regime of datapolitik humans are data emitting entities.

         So allow me rehearse the four categories for the analysis of datapolitik I wish to briefly elaborate today: 1. Tracking and capture; 2. Dataveillance; 3. Datapresence; 4. Contagion:

1.           Tracking and Capture: Algorithms track and capture data, whether that data is voice conversations (as in the case of the StingRay machine), face recognition information (like Facebook’s “DeepFace” software), and so forth. The classic formulation of the model of capture stands in contrast to the concept of surveillance as articulated in Philip E. Agre’s foundational essay “Surveillance and Capture” (Information Society, 1994). There Agre asserts that “Whereas the surveillance model originates in the classical political sphere of state action, the capture model has deep roots in the practical application of computer systems.” More than metaphorical similarities, then, tracking and capture are practices of non-state predation that, as Gregoire Chamayou has recently shown, belong to a philosophical history of the manhunt (recall here the figure of the sentinel in the first Matrix movie). These are cynegetic powers of predation that a media archeology of information gathering technology shows to be connected to the emergence of the informational subject in the early modern period (humans as bearers and shedders of information that must be tracked, organized, categorized, and stored). This is also connected to the rise of police power as a power of pursuit of “bodies in movement, bodies that escape and that it must catch, bodies that pass by and that it must intercept.” (Manhunt, 90).

2.           Dataveillance: As already noted datapolitik has little to do with our Orwellian and/or Benthamite notions of surveillance – it is not “observational”, as Gary T. Marx has rightly noted (Marx, 2002, 11). Datapolitik is not interested in confinement in the way surveillance is. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Hence the idea of dataveillance that must be understood within a media archeology of the cynegetic powers of the police. The notion of data surveillance, or “dataveillance”, was first formulated in 1988 by Roger A. Clarke. Clarke’s point is simple: facilitative mechanisms and technologies have been in place for some time that enable “the systematic use of personal data systems in the investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons.” (Clarke, 1988, 499) Importantly, Clarke affirms that “rather than individuals themselves, what is monitored is the data that purport to relate to them. As a result there is a significant likelihood of wrong identification.” (Clarke, 1988, 406) Though this may have been accurate in 1988, today identification is paradoxically much more likely to be correct, and even more likely to be irrelevant. (see datapresence below) Rita Raley emphasizes this by noting that even in Clarke’s account, “dataveillance operations do not require a centralized system.” (Raley, 124) The non-necessity of a centralized system suggests something further: dataveillance is not merely governed by the cynegetic powers of predation, it also enables a shift from data as a concrete object to data as a speculative ephemerality. “Data as speculation” Raley notes “means amassing data so as to produce patterns, as opposed to having an idea from which one needs to collect supporting data. Raw data is the material for informational patterns still to come, its value is unknown or uncertain until it is converted into currency of information.” (Raley, 123) Finally, and briefly, a thorough attention to dataveillance requires a concrete engagement with technical objects as autonomous actants in the cynegetic powers of predation – a participation of objects, if you will – including technologies of detection (i.e., software) and data storage.

3.           Datapresence: this notion refers to the transformation of humans from identity-bearing subjects to data-emitting subjects. There is datapolitik because we acknowledge ourselves as informational subjects whether we like to admit to it or not. Indeed, most of our daily activities are data-generative. Crucially, what this means is that “meaning” (as a marker of humanness) has lost practical relevance. Software code is indifferent to content, which means that datapolitik is indifferent to identities. It doesn’t matter who or what we are, the thick or thin content of our selves, and so forth. These traditional philosophical categories for humanities and social science research are being supplanted by what – in sympathy with Mattew Fuller – I want to call our “data-flecks”, the data dandruff that we shed on a second-by-second basis and that constitutes our bit-ness (i.e., think here of GPS coordinates on our smartphones: they are constantly shedding data, and if they’re on, we’re traceable). In short, “the electronic file has conquered self-aware consciousness.” (Critical Art Ensemble, 95: “The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net”).

4.           Contagion, not persuasion, is the principal mode of influence for datapolitik. Ask yourself – why a culture of zombies today? Why are we so immersed and surrounded by the figure of the zombie as an archetype of our era? Several answers con come to mind. The easiest and least convincing is the old scientific Marxist answer: we are all “living-dead” subjects of capital. A more probable answer is that we are living in a time where contagion and swarming are THE forces of influence and affectivity. [CLIP] Not cause and effect, not linear causality: swarming and contagion. The zombie is viral, it is fractal, and it swarms: datapolitik is at once highly controlled and algorithmic, and it is rhizomatic. (see Haggerty and Ericson, 2000, “The surveillant assemblage”) Its tools are those of the war machine: Trojan horses, malware, and other viral algorithms that spread, contaminate, and affect influence through contagion – just like the zombie.

Best,

Davide

***********
Check out my new book: Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity
**********
Davide Panagia
Associate Professor, Political Science
UCLA
Co-Editor, Theory & Event

On Sep 23, 2014, at 12:15 PM, John Hopkins <jhopkins at neoscenes.net> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks Johannes for that reference and your comments...
> 
>> < Forms of Life as commodities
>> 
>> The society of the spectacle undoubtedly complies with technology-based,
>> post-industrial capitalism, its logic of production as well as the modern
>> logic of representation: it is the outcome of hyper-technologization and
>> functionalization, codifying life and prescribing processes of
>> subjectivation, which are nothing less than forms of subjugation. The new
>> model up for debate, as it surpasses the model of developed modernity,
>> introduces a completely new commodity to the game: the forms of life itself.
>> In reference to Debord’s definition of the society of the spectacle, one
>> could define this new model as “capital accumulated to the point that it
>> becomes a form of life”.
> 
>> The new model thus takes over the ‘un-producible’, totalizing the range of
>> the market....
> 
> I'm constantly amazed at the humanistic clinging to the idea that humans
> actually think they control something that they cannot ultimately explain the
> existence of -- that is, *life*. The human (mental) process of abstracted
> objectification (& subjectivation!) seems so helpless in the face of a cosmos of
> the unknown. We pretend that we can 'manage change' at all scales. (Not only
> that, but manage it 'rationally'. Hah!)
> 
> This may sound incredibly cynical, but springs from a genuine sense of
> curiosity: with what I've seen/experienced in life -- across science, art,
> politics, culture -- I would very much like to be around for the collapse of
> human systems in the world -- the collective hubris of our present time is
> really nauseating at times! Yeah, The Market, pffff! Between the total abstraction of money (see http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/archives/1199) and the absolutely counter-reality of constant growth, what are people thinking??
> 
> Cheers,
> jh
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
> grounded on a granite batholith
> twitter: @neoscenes
> http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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