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Subject: [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: Precision + Guided + Seeing
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CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 29, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
1000 Days 030 10/01/2006 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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1000 DAYS OF THEORY
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Precision + Guided + Seeing
============================
~Jordan Crandall~
+++
THE SCENE: the hot zone of a busy airport concourse. Late afternoon
sun shining through the atrium windows. Travelers drifting about in a
state of anxious suspension. All around me, it is pure theater. The
star of the show is an impeccably dressed woman, hunched over her
laptop, performing some sort of demo for the man next to her, who
seems to be only marginally interested. She is clicking away with
forceful, jerky motions, causing the computer, which is perched on
her knees, to sway perilously. A pink Post-It, loosened from the
momentum, flutters to the ground.
Curious, I move in for a closer look. She appears to be demonstrating
some kind of search technique. According to her, the technique is
designed to "cut through the clutter" and save time. It allows her to
move across the expanse of the web, telescope in and out as
necessary, and zero in on the EXACT bits and pieces that she needs.
She emphasizes the word "EXACT," as if she's somehow able to tap into
some kind of original hookup between sign and thing. As she says
"EXACT," she stomps her foot (WHOP!), the clap of her shoe precisely
synching with her enunciation. Impressive. I try to sneak a peek at
her screen, but I cannot figure out what she is doing. She is moving
too quickly. She is "flying" the computer like a fighter pilot.
It's an aggressive technique. I admire her extreme physical
engagement with a process that, for most of us, is rather
immobilizing. She's completely charged up by it, as if she's found a
way to seize control of the ship. After typing and clicking furiously
for several more minutes, she pauses for a moment and sits back, as
if to catch her breath (or rather, to refuel). She collects herself,
glances quickly at the man, and then grabs a pencil, preparing to
make a point. She tells him that this search-and-target method is by
far the most PRECISE. She elongates the word "PRE-CISSSE," drawing
out the sound of the "sssss," as she simultaneously thrusts the sharp
end of her pencil toward the computer screen. She seems to propel the
pencil forward with the force of her enunciation, as if the pencil
were a missile hurling toward its target. As if the
precision-pencil-missile could puncture the computer screen itself --
or rather, the abstracting field of language -- to apprehend her
"real" quarry.
I stare at an imagined point of impact on her screen. Is there a
"real" to be captured here, concealed beneath the frames and words?
What is the real object of the precision-impulse? Of course, in its
Lacanian sense, the real cannot be assimilated into the symbolic
order. No matter: she will strive to capture it, as quickly and
efficiently as possible. It is a necessarily illusion: the engine
through which her physical activity is produced.
At this point, with nowhere else to go -- after all, if there were a
real object at the end of the precision-impulse, it would be
vaporized as it was enacted -- she cuts to another device. The
abandoned pencil falls to the floor. When one runs-aground, what is
there to do but to reach for a gadget? She locks her gaze onto her
pocketbook, thrusts her hand inside, unearths a camera-phone, flips
it open, and snaps a picture of the man -- all in one motion. The
man, dazed by her quick draw, was no doubt captured in an
unflattering image, like the unprepared, hapless victim in a slasher
flick who, mouth agape, is instantaneously immortalized by both
camera and killer.
I consider that the precision-woman is showing off her technological
prowess for the elusive man. As she brilliantly juggles devices and
windows, perhaps she is trying to seduce him. The seduction-demo. The
exacting woman seducing the inexact man. After tapping into the phone
and transmitting the image that she just took of him, she explains to
him that the picture will be geocoded -- anchored with GPS
coordinates -- and integrated into a mapping application, which
forever weds image to site. THIS site. Good for the woman, horrors
for the man: a bad picture, not only forever archived in the database
but fixed in place on a map like a tourist attraction. A ghoulish
snapshot suddenly transformed into a wax museum figure. I wonder what
"weight" this image is given, when it is cartograph-ized. By
permanently anchoring it to a material site, does it carry a stronger
trace of the real? Store a more vivid memory, a more embedded
experience, a more affective relation? A more PRECISE and direct link
between mobile representation and ground-level actuality?
Surely, I think, the woman's next step is to do a retinal scan, in
order to further inscribe him in the real. I glance at her purse,
wondering what further devices it may contain. The man, somewhat
uneasily, says he will be right back, and quickly exits the room. I
consider that he will flee out the back exit, running off into the
horizon, toward some other set of landscape metadata. The
precision-woman, wasting no time, pivots back to her computer and
begins to peck away.
I consider her methods. Are they the result of a precision-driven
impulse to wed sign and thing and therefore "capture" the object more
directly and efficiently (cut through the clutter) -- or do they
manifest some kind of deeper, longed-for attachment to the real? In
other words: am I witnessing the drive for an evermore
precision-driven representation amidst the clutter of everyday
information overload, or am I witnessing a longing to jettison
representation entirely, in favor of a more direct relation to the
real object of attention?
The precision-woman suddenly stops and sits back quietly, as if
surrendering her arms, and begins to stare wistfully offscreen. A
momentary lapse in her war on distraction. I sit back, too, and let
my vision drift.
+++
A PRECISION-DRIVEN methodology, which works with technologies and
symbols in order to increase efficiency and accuracy. A longing to
jettison representation entirely, in favor of a direct and unmediated
relation to the real. In every case, technology is central. For it
has already determined, in advance, the manner of approach[1] -- as
part of the larger circuit though which all acts of viewing must
pass.
Let's address this question of "precision" on two fronts: one, as a
technologically-enabled drive toward efficiency and accuracy -- a
drive to augment human capabilities by developing new human-machine
composites, connecting and joining forces with multiple processing
agencies, wherever or whatever they might be; and two, as a
technologically-assisted drive to reduce mediation and offer a form
of direct connection to our real objects of inquiry. We might call
these the effective and the affective. Both aim for the goal of
instantaneous vision: a real time perceptual agency in which
multiple actors, both human and machinic, are networked and able to
act in concert. A real time perceptual agency in which time and space
intervals can be eliminated, reducing the gaps between detection,
analysis, and engagement, or desire and its attainment. A real time
perceptual agency that can somehow touch the real.
Yet the drive for the real, as Zizek suggests, always culminates in
its opposite: theatrical spectacle. Why? Because the real is only
able to be sustained if we fictionalize it.[2] To look for the real,
then, is not to look for it directly: it is to look to our fictions,
discerning how reality is "transfunctionalized" through them.[3]
Perhaps the real object of the precision-drive is not only arrived at
through reduction, but through expansion. To look to the object of
the precision-drive is not only to narrow the optic, honing in on the
target of attention: it is to look to the cultural fictions in which
the object becomes lodged. It is to open the optic; theatricalize it.
To accommodate cultural fictions is to acknowledge the constitutive
role of conflict. What aspects of the real are transfunctionalized
through our conflict imaginaries?
It's difficult to acknowledge the necessity of conflict, because we
often assume that selfless cooperation is the norm. When we speak
about the formation of real time perceptual agencies -- which, again,
manifest a distributed processing and storage capacity among humans
and machines, enabling increased efficiency and accuracy (cutting
through the clutter) -- we often assume that cooperation reigns.
We're all in this together, after all, building the utopian dream of
the global village, the wired world, or the global brain. And yet:
competition plays an equal role. We don't necessarily want to see on
a level playing field alongside everyone else. We need to see faster,
better, and more precisely -- whether in the name of convenience,
profit, or protection -- in order to outwit competitor and combatant
alike. We are driven equally by such acquisitive and aggressive
impulses. They are the stuff of our cultural dramas. They derive from
the production demands of both consumerism and warfare -- to the
extent that these become mutually reinforcing components of the same
economic engine. The engine is also a subjective and somatic one.
When, in a competitive consumer-security culture, machine-aided
perception moves toward the strategic, the panoptic, and the
pre-emptive, then we no longer see but track.
+++
TRACKING ARISES as a dominant perceptual activity in a computerized
culture where looking has come to mean calculating rather than
visualizing in the traditional sense[4] and where seeing is infused
with the logics of tactics and maneuver -- whether in the mode of
acquisition or defense. Such processes of calculation, and their
necessary forms of information storage (memory), are distributed and
shared in a larger field of human and technological agency. The
object is dislodged from any inherently fixed position, and instead
becomes a mobile actor in a shared field of competitive endeavor. In
Virilio's terms, the object becomes a traject.
What happens when we track? We aim for a real time perceptual agency,
in a more direct and precise relation to the moving object at hand.
We aim to detect, process, and strategically codify a moving
phenomenon -- a stock price, a biological function, an enemy, a
consumer good -- in order to gain advantage in a competitive theater,
whether the battlefield, the social arena, or the marketplace. The
power to more accurately "see" a moving object is the power to map
its trajectory and extrapolate its subsequent position. In an
accelerated culture of shrinking space and time intervals, tracking
promises an increased capacity to see the future. Leapfrogging the
expanding present, it offers up a predictive knowledge-power: a
competitive edge. It promises to endow us with the ability to
outmaneuver our adversaries, to intercept our objects of suspicion
and desire.
To track is to endeavor to account for a moving object -- which could
be one's self, since we track our own activities and rhythms -- in
evermore precise terms so as to control or manage it, lest it become
unruly, wasteful, dangerous, or unattainable as property. It is to
somehow access the moving object more fully and deeply. When the
suspicious and acquisitive eye tracks its objects, it fixes its
sights on them as targets to be managed, eliminated, or consumed. In
so doing, it inscribes itself in the real, in a process that brings
both object and embodied subject into being.
Tracking necessarily strives to narrow its scope, to move more
directly into the space of the body substrate, as if it could then
fully and completely "own" its object of attention. Through this
process, its subject comes to know itself and "readies" itself to act
-- more quickly, efficiently, safely. It cuts through the clutter.
So the drama goes.
+++
WHILE TRACKING is about the strategic detection and codification of
movement, it is also about positioning. It studies how something
moves in order to predict its exact location in time and space. It
fastens its objects (and subjects) onto a classifying grid or
database-driven identity assessment, reaffirming precise categorical
location within a landscape of mobility.
Rather than being fully about mobility on the one hand, or locational
specificity on the other, tracking is more accurately about the
dynamic between. We might call this inclination-position. Based on my
previous patterns of writing and the literary conventions that it
follows, I am likely to write three more sentences in this paragraph.
Based on previous patterns of keystrokes, I am likely to take a break
at 3:10. Based on previous airport records, my flight is likely to
depart in two hours and eighteen minutes. The tracked object may be
THERE, but it is moving like THIS and will be in THIS future position
at THIS future moment.
This is a landscape in which signifiers have become statistics.
It is how computers think, and how we begin to think with them.
+++
TRACKING EMERGED out of the mid-century demands of war and
production.[5] It emerged through the development of computing, the
wartime sciences of information theory and cybernetics, and the
development of structuralism. It coalesced out of a fear of the enemy
Other, and helped bring a modality of both friend and enemy into
being.[6]
Rather than performing a historical analysis, let us set the stage
for a performance. We begin at the historical tipping-point where
tracking coalesced as a techno-discursive ensemble -- that is, as a
cluster of tools, procedures, and metaphors, which function at the
level of language, materiality, and belief.[7] For as Guattari would
point out, technologies do not merely convey representational
contents, but contribute to the development of new assemblages of
enunciation.[8] These techno-discursive ensembles become stored in
the operational strata of organization and practice.[9] They are
bundled into tracking. Character background. Back-story.
Tracking, then, is not simply a technology or a modality of
perception, but a cluster of discursive orientations. It is through
such discourses that subjects, machines, and institutions are linked.
As tracking mediates between viewer, screen, and world, it generates
the tactical mindsets, communication modes, and sensorial and somatic
adjustments that are appropriate to it. It provides a scrim through
which relevant data is historically selected, systems of address and
command determined, and human and cultural sensoria differentiated
and re-integrated.
+++
THE LEAD ACTOR in this historical performance is the military
command, control, and communications system known as SAGE.[10]
Developed in mid-twentieth century wartime, SAGE was a system that
automatically processed digitally encoded radar data generated by
linked installations around the perimeter of the U.S., and then
integrated this with other communications and cartographical data. It
integrated abstract information about position and movement and then
superimposed it upon schematic maps. If a hostile incoming object was
detected, jets could automatically be directed to intercept it.
Within the matrices of SAGE, tracking emerged as a form of
machine-aided, calculated seeing, studying movements of objects in
order to prepare for their possible interception.
The conditions of the scene are well told by Heidegger. To represent
something is to put ourselves "into the picture" in such a way as to
take precedence over our object. We put ourselves into the scene: we
enstage ourselves as the normative setting in which the object must
thereafter present itself. We become the representative of that which
has the character of object.[11] We attest to it, normalize it. The
user is pressed into the mold of the real by the fact and act of the
system: brought into a direct relationship with it, as something that
could only heretofore be intuited. Technology sets the conditions for
the approach.
What we see is defined within the discursive paradigm of such
technologized seeing. Subsequently, we begin to see ourselves in
these terms. We internalize the classificatory logics. Worlds and
bodies are tagged, annotated, and anchored within a new
symbolic-material landscape, providing models for thought and
identification. They affect how we speak, perceive, and move. They
set in place a calculus of ontological division, which presses both
subject and object into service.
A vigilant seeing arose through the mechanisms of SAGE, accompanied
by a demand for "preparedness," both in terms of one's own body and
the collective machine-body of the military: an individual and
collective alertness-on-the-edge-of-action. An analytical perception
combined with an incipient mobilization. New patterns of
organization, vigilance, and action took form: new modes of awareness
and perceptual activity that could enframe and make sense of the
volumes of abstract information that were suddenly at hand. A new
landscape of preparedness coalesced, which traversed individual body,
nation, and culture alike, generating a myriad of cultural effects.
Duck-and-cover drills. Bomb shelters. Detective fiction.
We are not only speaking of a technology, but of a subjectifying and
socializing technique, which impacts on language as well as the
entire sensorium of the body.
+++
STRATEGY GAMES also play an important role in this historical drama.
Especially during the Cold War, increasingly powerful modeling and
prediction technologies were needed in order to reach into the future
and anticipate events, since actual weapon technology could not be
used. This fueled an orientation of pre-emptive seeing: a form of
vision that was always slightly ahead of itself, which not only
anticipated probable events but, in some corner of the imaginary,
seemed to mold reality to fit the simulated outcome. Simulated worlds
paralleled real worlds, and beliefs about each were reflected in
both. To be prepared was to anticipate the worst, and the worst could
only be modeled. Once modeled, it was introduced into reality.
Assumptions, beliefs, and mind-sets arise out of the
technical-semiotic machinery of simulations as they are practiced, as
such orientations in turn get embedded in its operational strata. A
mechanism of training, or rehearsal, in new forms of movement,
combat, and identification.
From mid-twentieth century onward, the systematic, logical rules of
computing helped produce the sense that everything -- ground
realities, warfare, markets -- could be formalized, modeled, and
managed. Reality was figured as mathematical and "capturable"
through a formal programming logic. The world became predictable,
pliable; the future controllable.[12] Again, this is not something
that military technology alone produces: it is bound up in a much
larger historical enunciative field -- in this case, a field of
structuralist orientation, where reality began to be seen as
determined by linguistic codes, and attention turned to the codes
and conventions that produce meaning.
One could suggest three intersecting conditions, descending from this
wartime technical-discursive ensemble, that are bundled into tracking
from the start. First, the perpetuation of an idealist orientation
where humans have no access to unmediated reality and the world is
actively constructed in terms of relational information systems. Here
the world is scripted as inherently controllable, filtered through a
scrim of information that modifies both system and materiality.
Second, following from the first, is an emphasis on data patterns
over essence: an ever-greater abstraction of persons, bodies, and
things, and an emphasis on statistical patterns of behavior, where
the populace is pictured as a calculus of probability distributions
and manageable functions. Third, a fundamentally agonistic
orientation, deriving from a world built on confrontation and
oppositional tactics, of tactical moves and countermoves.
These conditions form part of the operational strata of all
contemporary media. Particularly with television and Internet, the
media viewer is infused with an artificial sense of control over the
machine and an exterior world represented on the screen. Reality is
subsumed within the dictates of the interface. An unruly or
unproductive situation is dominated, over and through the technology,
and a de facto power relation is established between observer and
observed.
The stage is set. Moving through a world of information and
communications technology, information is increasingly seen as more
essential than that which it represents. Pattern is privileged over
presence.[13]
+++
THE SUN IS slipping below the horizon outside the airport,
backlighting the cluster of planes gathered outside. The
precision-driven woman lowers her computer screen in synch with the
diminishing light. With the click of the laptop's closure, the sun
vanishes.
Perhaps she has had enough computer time. I watch as her eyes drift
hazily around the concourse. I have caught her in-between media
inputs, it seems -- her attention momentarily adrift, her
subjectivity suspended. I think of the extent to which consciousness
and attention are effects of media technology -- effects of storage,
computation, and transmission systems. Kittler would see this woman
in terms of different states of information storage and transfer, an
embodied subject coalescing around a circuit of perceptibility.
I think about her precision-driven methodology, and her embrace of
technologies of positioning. Surely, she is aware of the trade-off:
her technologies are those that aim to increase productivity,
agility, and awareness, yet they vastly increase the tracking and
data-mining capabilities of the corporate sector. Tracked, she
becomes a target: a consumer-citizen pinpointed with ever-greater
accuracy within the worlds of marketing and state surveillance.
Yet at the same time, she's in the driver's seat, shaping her arena
of visibility. I think about the forms of maneuver and masquerade
that she engages in: blogs, friendship networks, phonecams, Flickr. A
pervasive web of shared resources that offers boundless opportunity
for identity refashioning. For her, no doubt, the challenge is not to
resist the gaze of tracking, but rather to channel it to her own
advantage, maneuvering productively within its matrices of
visibility. In a database-driven culture of accounting, one needs to
appear on the grids of registration in order to "count." To be
accounted for is to exist. Yet appearances are contradictory,
constituted in multiple, polyrhythmic forms and paths.
Appropriating the technical-discursive ensemble of tracking, I shape
my own horizon of objective identity. Internalizing it, I
self-identify. Tracking is also a technology of the self.
Gradually, out of the corner of my eye, I notice an enormous jet
gliding by through the concourse window. Its fuselage is the same
shade as the dark sky outside, and the illuminated passenger windows
seem to hover in the void. One by one the expectant travelers,
cropped identically, slide by as if frames in a filmstrip. They stare
straight ahead in the direction of takeoff; I stare straight ahead in
the direction of the precision-woman. They sit immobilized in their
vehicle; I sit rigid in mine. Yet my vehicle does not move.
The plane suddenly revs its engines, sending a deep roar through the
concourse like an earthquake. The vibration shakes my seat and jolts
me into awareness of my own body, as if someone abruptly grabbed my
shoulders and shook me. I am thrust onto the stage, acutely
confronted with the fact of my own embodied presence and my own
subjective status as observer -- but I'm unaware of my lines. What
role am I playing, here and now, within this script? Where am I
located in this matrix of observation? What is my own subject
position vis-a-vis my tracked object?
The nature of my voyeuristic gaze now stands revealed. In scanning
the movements of the precision-woman, I have positioned myself at the
fulcrum of control, establishing a power relation through which I am
reinforced. The precision-woman exists for me and for me alone,
within a contained world that prohibits reciprocation. She is but an
object or a conduit, which anchors my gaze or channels it. If she
were to look back at me -- if her eyes were to meet mine -- the
entire world-system would vanish.
I gradually realize how, in this way, tracking silently incorporates
its own erotic economy, shaping its own enclosed, libidinous,
predatory world -- a world built on desire and the impossibility of
its satisfaction. If I adopt the gaze of the tracker and thereby
preempt the possibility of reciprocity, then my tracking-gaze becomes
something on the order of a stare: the cold, unflinching stare of the
machinic apparatus that sees with me, through me. It is a look that
is uncomplicated with human subtleties, unfettered with the
complications of the flesh and of social decorum. It neither
registers embarrassment nor flirts. It is not constituted in a subtle
dance of revealing and concealing, or of availability and withdraw.
Lacking a sense of reciprocal play, it does not know when to look
away. It cannot "see" or modulate socially; rather, it can only
study, aim, and own.
The precision-driven woman has demonstrated her research technique; I
now must demonstrate mine. What is the real object of my
precision-impulse?
Abruptly, I turn away from both the thought and the woman, as if the
precision-woman constituted my own unsustainable Real. My only
recourse is to avoid, or rather, to expand: widening the scope to
reveal the larger matrix of tracking in which we are both ensnared,
the shared stage upon which we both now act. I allow the
media-technological institution to catch us, objectivize us, and the
analytical to give way to the theatrical.
+++
ACCORDING TO Virilio, the real time interface has replaced the
interval that once constituted and organized the history and
geography of human societies. Problems of spatial distance have been
supplanted with problems of the time remaining.[14] Again, tracking
is motored by the need for an instantaneity of action, where time
delays, spatial distances, and "middlemen" are reduced through
computational systems that facilitate the sharing of human and
machinic functions. A combinatory field of perception arises within a
distributed field of shared functions, and a new form of agency
emerges, spanning spatial distance and merging information from
multiple sources.
Consider the new generations of post-SAGE actors: "network-centric"
warfare systems, which aim to develop a worldwide satellite, sensor,
and communications web geared for panoptic global oversight and
instantaneous military response. The goal is a wireless, unified
computing grid that can link weapons, systems, and personnel in real
time, making volumes of information available instantly to all
military and intelligence actors. According to one major player in
this industry, such a system will allow every member of the military
to have a "God's eye view" of the battlefield.[15] Through such a
system, the military predicts that it will be capable of "finding,
tracking, and targeting virtually in real time any significant
element moving on the face of the earth."[16] Tracking as the
ultimate panoptic ideal, propelled by a sense of divine right, could
not be more explicitly stated.
This integrative history -- a history of prosthetic extension --
belongs to military and mass media alike.[17] The intertwining of
human and machinic capacity, in the generation of a combinatory field
of perception, is the history of popular media itself.
Consider that the spectator and the cinematic apparatus are mutually
dependent in the act of conducting representation. One must be
trained to behave and see in accordance with the conditions of the
device. The viewer is immobilized and sensitized to a language of
movement through which an extensive world is understood. The human
becomes reliant upon the apparatus that populates its field of
vision, adjusting to the rhythmic codes of its conveyance. A
perceptual capacity and a signifying apparatus emerge through an
integration of human and machine.[18] Consider, too, the extent to
which television integrates the viewer in a shared machinic circuit.
Reflecting the viewer's own thought process, it develops its own
conventions of simulated deliberation, absolving the viewer of the
labor of decision-making[19] -- as when a laugh track allows one to
maintain a relaxed composure while the machine assumes the labor of
chuckling.
In any spectatorial situation, a subject is distributed within a
larger circuit of engagement determined through technological systems
of communication, storage, sorting, and retrieval, contoured under
the social and institutional construction of knowledge. A viewing
subject is linked or inserted into larger networks of seeing and
linguistic meaning.
As always, time is of the essence. For both the military and the
civilian observer, there is little time for reflection. In the
military realm, reflection adds time and space in which the target
might slip away. It expands, not lessens, the gap between detecting
and intervening, sensing and shooting. In the popular realm, slowness
-- the stuff of reflection and deliberation -- is to be avoided. In a
real time media landscape, there is no time to think.
+++
TRACKING IS, again, not simply conducted through abstract data about
position and movement. It is conducted through forms of
computer-aided visualization. It is conducted through sophisticated
graphic information systems, formatted according to geographic or
other spatial paradigms, oriented for the humans who must interpret
it and transform it into actionable intelligence. These visual
interfaces function in terms of the tradition of
cartographic-representation as well as the tradition of simulation:
while the former maintains a strict division between viewer and
image, the latter complicates that divide, embodying users in a
virtual, immersive space, which reorients or replaces the actual
space in which they are located.[20]
These graphic systems have not developed in isolation. They have
developed in conjunction with film and television. They reflect the
conditions of popular news and entertainment media, as in turn, these
media embody the conditions of computer visualization. There is a
constant flow back and forth. To a large extent, tracking has been
integrated into a regime of networked spectacle that no longer heeds
media distinctions. It has helped generate a landscape of
preparedness that traverses media forms and civilian-military bodies
alike.
According to Friedrich Kittler, what we understand as media are
increasingly mere effects on the surface of a much more comprehensive
digital base. As the general digitization of information and
information channels increases, the differences between individual
media are erased. Since any algorithm can be transformed into any
interface effect, media are becoming mere interfaces within the
(increasingly globalized) information circuit.[21] To understand
tracking, we are compelled to look broadly, at the combination of
media forms, agencies, and rhetorical modalities that it registers.
In many ways it is the entertainment industry that has led the
charge. Following the end of the Cold War, the Department of Defense
-- which has been the major source of funding for high-end computer
graphics, visualization technologies, and network infrastructure for
decades -- has become increasingly reliant on commercially-available
items and components, many of which are developed in the videogame
market. In terms of ideas, personnel, and products, there is a
continuous exchange between the military, commercial designers, and
the entertainment industry. Military planners work closely with
industrial partners in team fashion. Research work for high-end
military products is seamlessly integrated with systems in the
commercial sector.[22]
Consider the extraordinary successful genre of "serious games,"
developed by the military in the commercial realm, which serve as a
combo of entertainment, military recruitment, training, and public
relations. One such game, ~America's Army~, ranks as one of the most
popular games in history. As military simulations are adapted to the
commercial game market, so, too, are commercial videogames adapted
for military purposes. Once it was the military that drove the
development of graphics and processor hardware. No longer: it is now
the commercial videogame market that drives it. In much of the
developed world, the game industry is reaching the level of film and
television in its importance as a popular entertainment medium.
One could suggest that film and television are fast on their way to
becoming integrated within a much larger hybrid simulative field.[23]
In a sense, programming like FX Channel's "Over There," which is
about soldiers fighting in Iraq, is already a simulation: it is the
first American television drama that has tried to process a war as
entertainment while it was still being fought. In such a media
landscape, perhaps simulation is becoming less a modality of
representation than a mechanism of translation: a form of incipience
or potentiality that moves across various stages of enaction.
The desire for realism in tracking does not derive from military
applications alone. It derives from film, television, and fiction.
Developers of videogames and military flight simulators alike have
been influenced by popular films and novels.[24] The world of the
military and the world of entertainment are both driven by a cultural
imaginary, which is a composite of multiple narratives whether fact
or fiction.
+++
SUCH ARE the theaters in which tracking must be situated. It is part
of a vast production machinery that is hungry for content, realism,
and compelling narrative. Back-story is key, requiring the
development of databases of historical and geographical data. The
drive for compelling narrative development in simulations -- whether
from imagined or actual warfare scenarios -- influences popular news
and entertainment programming. One could in fact suggest that the
latter are driven by the demands of simulation.
Consider the relentless 24-hour machinery of contemporary news. It is
a profit center that demands ever-new, constant dangers for reportage
and commodification. It fuels a constant battle for attention-space,
where the whole of reality is transformed into a dramatic stage for
alluring catastrophe. There is no time to remember, because the next
crisis -- always imminent -- demands our full vigilance. Battle
simulations, television shows, and interactive games inhabit a
mutually reinforcing system of marketable threats, enticements, and
protections. A disaster imaginary takes hold, which traffics across
the worlds of fact and fiction, promiscuously borrowing its parts and
depositing them across a wide range of cultural phenomena. The
phenomenon of "news gaming" is one obvious manifestation -- though
the term is redundant, since news has already been structurally
absorbed within the entertainment machine, with gaming one of its
primary engagement modes.
We are here in the territory of the "logistics of perception
management"[25] -- the realm of spin and "reality control," where
facts, interpretations, and events are mutually shaped to conform to
strategic doctrines; where reality is positioned as something that is
inherently pliable; and where the public becomes a surface for the
production of effects. There is nothing outside of this system, and
especially as it is increasingly able to tap into the affective
dimension, where danger is eroticized. It produces a subject who is
prepared for both disaster and desire, as both are subsumed into a
larger cosmos of affective stimulation: a citizen indoctrinated to
"be ready," in both a physical and cognitive sense, for any call to
action.
A citizen inscribed in the real.
+++
THE SKY OUTSIDE the airport is now ominously dark. The overhead
spotlights have transformed the concourse into an enormous stageset.
More flight delays have been announced (including my own). Travelers
have become agitated and morose. Children are screaming, arms aflail.
Adults hover menacingly.
The precision-driven woman has boarded her flight. Surely, she is now
following her plane's trajectory on the onboard GIS. Even though she
is gone, I continue my awareness of my own subjective position as
tracker -- if only to more fully inhabit the drama, probe my role in
the script, stay in the game. I aggressively look for new objects of
study. Suddenly, I hear all-too-familiar address over the intercom
system, compelling me to report suspicious persons. Action! I heed
the call, and adopt a position of dutiful vigilance: the
citizen-detective. Eyes narrowed, I scan the concourse for suspicious
behavior. I secretly wonder what kind of suspicious activity I should
be looking for, and what could possibly compel me, were I to locate a
person displaying it, to scurry over to Security to report them.
I glare at a woman who has stopped abruptly in the main corridor. She
stands idle amidst the flow, the rush of passersby nearly tumbling
over her. (Suspicious deviation in normal patterns of movement-flow.)
I cast a wary glance at a man in a green sweatsuit as he fondles an
object of concern, concealing it from public view. (Deviant
repetitive movement and suspicious level of transparency-avoidance.)
I stare at a man who repeatedly pads his pocket nervously.
(Suspicious level of agitation.) I spot a solitary bag. (Unattended
object.) A book. (Dangerous ideas.)
Across the concourse, a wayward child points in my direction.
Suddenly, I realize the most insidious part of the drill: What about
ME? With this realization, I am transformed. I am the person at
Sartre's keyhole, caught in the act, who knows that he is seen at the
moment he sees. I have now become an object for the gaze of another.
Looked at, I look at myself. My awareness of my subjective position
as tracker has now shifted to that of my objective position as
suspect. I modify my actions accordingly, submitting myself --
subjectively and bodily -- to this normative performance-machine. My
posture straightens, I look at my watch, and I am "back on track."
The unobtrusive traveler who, edges smoothed, blends seamlessly into
the crowd.
This performance-machine, however, when inhabited fully, does not
necessarily end up reinforcing norms. Rather, it produces deviance
from them. It's only a matter of time. To internalize the gaze of
suspicion is to eventually find wrongdoing in oneself, even if it has
to be self-generated. Guilt is produced, to be denied or accepted
into the calculus of identity.
In this shifting matrix of tracking, it is but a short distance
between tracker and suspect. Or more accurately, there is no distance
at all: for to track in one context is to become target in another.
If the voyeuristic position of the tracker is the key subject
position for a new consumer-security culture, then perhaps the target
is its key object position, which always overlaps with it.
+++
IF TRACKING moves toward an instantaneity of action -- eliminating
time and space intervals and connecting multiple actors, human or
not, as if they were one -- then in the extreme case, as Virilio
would have it, this real time arena is one in which "coincidence"
takes the place of communication [26], and the emphasis shifts from
the "standardization of public opinion" to the "synchronization of
public emotion."[27] In a real time world where there is less and
less time to act, or where action plays out in barely-measurable
fractions of seconds, interpretive attention must turn away from
exterior movements and instead toward "interior" states: dispositions
to act that accumulate just at the horizon of the visible.
We are talking about incorporealization not representation.
Implication, not objectivity. Bodily intensities, not linguistic
mediation. A domain that is occupied with qualities of movement and
rhythm, rather than calculi of symbolic positioning. A domain that
traffics in motivating power, rather than in meaning or rational
logic.
Rather than that of the effective, this is the domain of the
affective. What is the difference? If we follow Deleuze's description
and understand affect as a modality of perception, then it is one
that ceases to yield an action and instead brings forth an
expression. It is a movement that is not engaged outwardly (with
visible effects) but rather absorbed inwardly -- a tendency or
interior effort that halts just this side of doing. It is about how
one experiences oneself as oneself, or senses oneself from the
inside:[28] the perception of one's own aliveness, vitality, and
changeability, which can be sensed as "freedom."[29] It is the body's
sense of the aliveness of a situation, which also moves across the
intercorporeal world,[30] generating a sense of coincidence between
subject and object. As such, it allows us to further toggle between
the positions of tracker and target, to the extent that these
distinctions blur.
This is a contradictory domain, where scopophilic pleasures and
surveillant anxieties cohabit. "Morbid curiosities" flourish.
Violence is both horrific and pleasurable. To acknowledge this domain
is to admit danger and conflict as constitutive elements of
attraction -- manifest in the unpredictable, perilous web of intrigue
that pulls us into the narrative world, and which compels us to
inhabit the drama. In the next moment, we could be the victim. The
tracker could be target. We do not know what danger lurks ahead, but
we must continue at our peril. At any moment, desire could meet its
constitutive other -- death. As Bataille would remind us, what
compels us is the possibility of union.
This is a domain that brings us closer to the real. We will try to
track and capture it, as quickly and efficiently as possible -- as I
do within the paragraphs of this text. I try to put my finger on it,
touch it with precision, press it into the service of argument. Yet
it cannot be assimilated. It cannot be incorporated into the symbolic
order of language or into the domain of shared images. It is however
a necessarily illusion, for without it, our entire apparatus of
signification would crumble. Tracking would cease to exist.
Which is why, when we consider the real object of the
precision-impulse -- a technologically-enabled drive to augment human
capabilities by developing new human-machine composites, or a
technologically-enabled drive to reduce mediation and offer a form of
direct connection to our real objects of inquiry? -- we must
acknowledge the extent to which these effective and affective
dimensions are complimentary.
Hence the embodiment of the dynamic in this essay.
+++
ANALYTIC or performative? Objective or implicated? Onstage or off?
+++
THIS AFFECTIVE space-time of bodily awareness, disposition, and
readiness is one that has become increasingly measurable and
analyzable[31] through new technologies of tracking and filtering.
These technologies are able to probe into the intimate and nearly
instantaneous states of bodily movement, orientation, disposition,
and mood; array them as calculations, statistics, and simulations;
and cross-reference them with databased records of consumer or
citizen behavior. This produces a newly constituted body of
measurable states and functions -- a new ontological state -- whose
inclinations to act are quantifiable and understood as predictable.
Inclination-position scripts an object that is already ahead of
itself, a shadow future state that exerts a strong gravitational
pull. It plays out in new systems of production that aim to narrow
the intervals between conception, manufacturing, distribution, and
consumption -- shrinking the delays between detecting an audience
pattern and formatting a new enticement that can address it. It plays
out in pre-emptive policing and warfare systems that aim to close the
gap between sensing and shooting. And it plays out in videogames,
where one doesn't look at the moving target directly so much as
anticipate its future position.
According to John Armitage, the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security's "Be Ready" campaign operates on this space of imminent
mobility. The "readiness" it promotes has no real object, and is
simply perpetuated in a kind of self-generating machine. Yet it is a
profoundly operational space, where the individualized "desire for
mobility" -- the consumerist impulse -- is recoded and displaced onto
the theaters of embodied threat.[32] Desire and fear cohabit here, at
the threshold of action, as such concepts as "freedom" do double
duty, promoting a freedom of mobility as well as a sense of freedom
that can only result from "defending our way of life" -- that is, the
right to own and consume. Buying, then, functions as both pleasure
and defense: a form of bodily and social enhancement, and a form of
defense against that which would threaten it.
This is an interlocking mechanism of acquisition and defense that
becomes the very condition of mobility -- a "freedom of mobility"
that is about defending the right to own and circulate objects, to
constitute oneself as an object to be marketed, to defend these
objects from harm, and to forge new pathways within unruly,
"dangerous," or adventurous market territory. It is a process of
defining the self in terms of an unbounded menagerie of attractions
and fears, which leaves it forever lacking. Through an interlocking
mechanism of selling and consuming, looking and buying, acquiring and
defending, one grazes along endless arrays of enticements offered up
for the desirous and protective eye -- enticements that are aimed at
the replication of desire in the eyes of others, or of drawing the
groundlines of defense.
+++
"READINESS," then, probes the embodied dimension of the perceptual
mode of tracking. It is a useful analytical concept because it
de-privileges the visual, or concepts of the perceptual that do not
fully engage the affective dimension -- as we find in the
ocular-centric discourses of visual studies. It maintains a dimension
of pleasure, ignored in many theories of contemporary power. For it
is not simply repressive in a disciplinary sense: it is also
excessive.[33]
Through the scrim of readiness, we can understand tracking as
characterized by a shift toward real time engagements and continuous,
heightened states of alertness and preparedness, in such a way as to
generate an embodied state of receptivity for both conflict and
libidinous consumption. It produces the body as a receptive site for
both fears and attractions, integrating combat and commodity.
What is needed in order to address this landscape is not only a
biopolitics but, as Nigel Thrift suggests, a microbiopolitics.[34] If
new technologies of networking, speed, and tracking have opened up
this site of the micro -- the affective space of intimate bodily
awareness, disposition, and readiness -- then this is a space that
can be politicized.
+++
A LARGE BODY of theoretical work has focused on the delocalizing or
deterritorializing effects of real time technologies. They are often
regarded as having contributed to the evacuation of geographical
space, overriding the specifics of place and distance. Virilio, for
example, has often suggested that real time technologies and their
accompanying dimension of "liveness" have prompted the disappearance
of physical space -- in other words, that "real time" has superceded
"real space." For him, such deterritorialization can only lead to
inertia.[35]
What we are witnessing today, however, is not a one-way
delocalization or deterritorialization, but rather a volatile
combination of the diffused and the positioned, or the placeless and
the place-coded. Perhaps nowhere has this been more apparent than
with mobile GIS and location-aware technologies. These technologies
and discourses are serving to weave together degrees of temporal and
spatial specificity. They are helping to generate an emerging
precision-landscape where every object and human is tagged with
geospatial coordinates: a world of information overlays that is no
longer virtual but wedded to objects and physical sites.
Communication is tagged with position, movement-flows are quantified,
and new location-aware relationships are generated among actors,
objects, and spaces.
Tracking has played a primary role in this shift. Its landscapes of
inclination-position fuel the geospatial interfaces -- such as
evidenced in Google Maps and the C5 GPS media player[36] -- which are
becoming important modes of access to any phenomenon. As media become
contextualized with geospatial data and become interoperable, the web
is transformed into a real time atlas of sorts. The geospatial web
browser emerges as a primary interface. Reading and researching, in
this case, is transformed into a search-and-target mission -- a
cut-through-the-clutter, precision-driven viewing experience that, as
always, is both fueled and delimited by media-technologies and their
institutions. These technologies and institutions determine specific
rules that circumscribe how we search, speak, and write. Within their
matrices, actors, objects, and sites coalesce. New cartographies
arise.
With its instantiation in location-aware media, has tracking helped
inscribe us in the real, or has it, following Zizek, culminated in
its opposite -- theatrical spectacle? To what extent does conflict --
whether in terms of competition, war, or drama -- provides its
necessary friction?
+++
I BOARD MY FLIGHT at last and enter a new arena of performance. The
cabin lights dim, the engines roar, and the plane accelerates. The
man across the aisle from me -- a blurry mass of anxiety and pleasure
-- grips the armrest, thrusts his head back, and opens his mouth in a
wild grimace. Fear or delicious exhilaration? A roller coaster ride
or a dance with death?
The plane levels off, and the cabin springs to life. A chorus of
gadgets lights up across the aisles: seat-mounted monitors, DVD
players, laptops, videogames. A carnival of media inputs, bathing the
cabin in the glow of otherworldly distraction. All passengers are
absorbed into a world of entertainment: a spectacular nonplace that
is everywhere but here. I consider for a moment that tracking --
precision-guided seeing for a mobile, competitive, and accelerated
consumer-security culture -- is fast absorbed into a much more
constitutive mode of engagement.
What is that mode?
My seatmate plugs into her game console, as I type the cliffhanger
for this act.
+++
Acknowledgements ------------------------------
With special thanks to John Armitage.
Notes ---------------
[1] Martin Heidegger. "The Age of the World Picture," reprinted in
Timothy Druckrey, ed., _Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual
Representation_, New York: Aperture, 1996, p. 49. For an important
discussion of the contemporary relevance of Heidegger's work see
Arthur Kroker. _The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism:
Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx_, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2004, especially "Hyper-Heidegger: The Question of the
Post-Human."
[2] Slavoj Zizek. _Welcome to the Desert of the Real_, London: Verso,
2002.
[3] Ibid.
[4] This insight is that of Lars Spuybroak, cited in Mark B. N.
Hansen. _New Philosophy for New Media_, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004,
p. 123.
[5] One could begin with the development of radar during World War
II, or even much earlier. But my emphasis is on computer-enabled
tracking. I will understand tracking here in its computer-assisted,
rather than earlier analog, forms
[6] Peter Galison. "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Weiner and the
Cybernetic Vision," _Critical Inquiry_ 21:1, Autumn 1994, pp.
228-266. See also Peter Galison, "War Against the Center," _Grey
Room_ 04, Summer 2001, pp. 6-33.
[7] Paul N. Edwards. _The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of
Discourse in Cold War America_, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996, pp. 1-15.
[8] Felix Guattari. "Regimes, Pathways, Subjects," in J. Crary and S.
Kwinter, eds., _Incorporations_, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992, p18.
[9] Felix Guattari. _The Three Ecologies_, London: Athlone Press,
2000, p48.
[10] For a comprehensive analysis of the history of SAGE, see Paul N.
Edwards. _The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse
in Cold War America_, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.
[11] Heidegger, pp. 57-58.
[12] Edwards, pp. 1-15.
[13] N. Katherine Hayles. _How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics_, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 19. This book is essential reading for
anyone who wants to understand the privileging of information over
embodiment, across the wartime sciences and cultural products of the
twentieth century.
[14] Paul Virilio. _Open Sky_, trans. Julie Rose, London: Verso,
1997, pp. 10, 19, 30.
[15] "A Network of Warfighters to Do Battle in 21st Century
Conflicts," New York (AFP) Nov 13, 2004, from SpaceDaily.com, 15 Nov
2004. Thanks to Irving Goh for this forward.
[16] General Fogelman, speaking to the House of Representatives,
cited by Paul Virilio in _Strategy of Deception_, London: Verso,
2000, pp. 17-18, from an article by F. Filloux entitled "Le Pentagone
la tete dans les etoiles" in ~Liberation~, 20 April 1999.
[17] For a brilliant discussion of this integration, see Ryan Bishop
and John Phillips. "Sighted Weapons and Modernist Opacity:
Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics," _Boundary_ 2, 29:2, 2002, p.
158-9.
[18] Sean Cubitt. _The Cinema Effect_, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
[19] Eliane Scarry. "Watching and Authorizing the Gulf War," in
_Media Spectacles_, Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L.
Walkowitz, eds., London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 57-73, as cited in
Margaret Morse. _Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and
Cyberculture_, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, pp.
36-67.
[20] This definition is from Lev Manovich. _The Language of New
Media_, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
[21] Friedrich Kittler. _Grammophon, Film, Typewriter_, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999.
[22] My discussion of the integration of the military and
entertainment industry owes a huge debt to Tim Lenoir's pioneering
research. See Tim Lenoir. "All But War is Simulation: The
Military-Entertainment Complex," _Configurations_, Fall 2000. Tim
Lenoir and Henry Lowood. "Theaters of War: The Military-Entertainment
Complex," in _Kunstkammer, Laboratorium, Buhne--Schauplatze des
Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert_, eds. Jan Lazardzig, Helmar Schramm, and
Ludger Schwarte, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Publishers, 2003, pp.
432-64.
[23] This statement makes reference to Lev Manovich's statement that
"Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only
in the end to become a particular case of animation." Manovich. _The
Language of New Media_, p. 302.
[24] Tim Lenoir. "All But War is Simulation: The
Military-Entertainment Complex," _Configurations_, Fall 2000.
[25] John Armitage. "Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio's
Hypermodern Cultural Theory," in Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, eds.,
_Life in the Wires: The CTHEORY Reader_, Victoria: CTHEORY Books,
2004, pp. 354-368. Paul Virilio. _War and Cinema: The Logistics of
Perception_, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: Verso, 1989.
[26] Paul Virilio. _[CTRL]SPACE: Rhetorics of Surveillance from
Bentham to Big Brother_, Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter
Weibel, eds., Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002, p. 112.
[27] Paul Virilio. "Cold Panic," _Cultural Politics_, Vol. 1 Issue 1,
2005 p. 29.
[28] Hansen. _New Philosophy for New Media_, pp. 134-5.
[29] Brian Massumi. cit. in Nigel Thrift, "Intensities of Feeling:
Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect," _Geografiska Annaler_ 86 B
(2004), p. 61
[30] Nigel Thrift. "Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial
Politics of Affect," _Geografiska Annaler_ 86 B (2004).
[31] Ibid, p. 65.
[32] John Armitage. "On Ernst Juenger's 'Total Mobilization': A
Re-Evaluation in the Era of the War on Terrorism," _Body & Society_,
Vol. 9(4), 2003, p. 204.
[33] J. McKenzie. cit. in Thrift, p. 64.
[34] Thrift. p. 69.
[35] Paul Virilio. in John Armitage, ed., _Virilio Live_, London:
SAGE, 2001.
[36] http://www.c5corp.com/projects/gpsmediaplayer/index.shtml
--------------------
Jordan Crandall (http://jordancrandall.com) is a media artist and
theorist. He is Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University
of California, San Diego. His current project _Under Fire_,
concerning the organization and representation of war, is sponsored
by the Bildmuseet in Sweden and will launch this winter at the
Kunst-Werke, Berlin. Vols. 1 and 2 of Under Fire were published last
year by the Witte de With center for contemporary art, Rotterdam.
Crandall is also currently completing a new video installation
entitled "Homefront", which explores the psychological dimensions of
the new security culture.
_____________________________________________________________________
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