There are rules, conventions, pieces of paper, technological innovations that organise the existent according to the needs of production and social management developed by the ruling Power.
There are moments when all this is too suffocating for those who want to blow up this huge prison. Then you need other spaces, abilities and a different dimension in which to learn to move. It is the dimension of secrecy, a series of expedients, relations, projects and actions that allow you to keep your initiative and strengthen your ability of intervention without being identifiable, controllable and therefore locatable. The dimension of secrecy runs parallel to that of the existent as we normally intend it, it penetrates it or moves away from it according to our needs and goals.
– Incognito: Experiences that Defy Identification
In 1878, a British photographer by the name of Eadweard Muybridge arranged several cameras along a racetrack and photographed a galloping Kentucky mare. The resulting twelve photographs, each separated by only a fraction of a second, revealed the motion of a horse. In full gallop, it lifted all four hooves off the ground, resolving a long-lasting debate. This opened up the field of motion analytics, and Muybridge spent the next two decades photographing animals and humans in movement. By reducing each activity to a series of photographic stills, he could analyze and understand it in its particularity. The movements of the galloping horse, of the stalking cat, of the human dancer, were dissected and broken into their component parts. The fields of bio-mechanics, medicine, and ergonomics resonate with his discoveries. So does Frederick Taylor’s dissection of the production process, and the rise of scientific management in the factory. With medicine and comfort come exploitation and work speed-ups. The urge to know is never neutral.
Something else was lost in this inquiry. Not only workers’ agency in the factory, not only the graceful mystery of the galloping horse. Something is lost every time we analyze a subject in its minutiae to explain how it functions. We forget that a body is capable of many things, that we do not know our own limits. The creation of medical conditions and identities has always been a tool of control. We know that operations of power, truth, and violence are required to turn someone into a woman or a man. We know of the many apparatuses that conjoin to create a certain type of subject. And it may seem obvious that all of these operations that conspire to place each of us at the center of a series of identities, that hold us in a spider’s web of subjectivities, also restrict our potential. We are coded into certain permissible behaviors and other impermissible ones. But still, even within all of those restrictions, there is room for movement, play, and subversion. What is lost in the photographing of a horse, dancer, or production process, is the idea that a horse might gallop in a different way, that a dancer does not move only according to a certain schema of human capacity, but in fact subverts movement and profanes the functionality of the body.
Further, this analysis rests on an understanding of bodies as individual, separate, sovereign. Muybridge did not study how a herd of wild horses gallops across dusty plains, fleeing a pack of wolves, but how a single horse, on a racetrack, moves on camera. And as for singular wolves? “How stupid, you can’t be one wolf, you’re always eight or nine, or six or seven.”[1]
~~~~~
A year later, in 1879, a young Frenchman by the name of Alphonse Bertillon took a job as a clerk for the Paris Police Department. Fascinated by the unique qualities of the human body, he began measuring prisoners. Height, weight, the thickness of a wrist or the length of a finger – he suspected that if he could take enough measurements, he would be able to positively identify any individual. When criminals were arrested, he would photograph, measure, and file them, and then check them against existing cases for any matches. He soon built an enormous database, pinning criminals to their identities with the same care that an entomologist takes in pinning and labeling the insects he collects – and the same dispassionate brutality. The information was collected in uniform indices called Bertillon cards. That punched cards for mechanical looms and data storage become popular in the same era is perhaps a coincidence, but a compelling one nonetheless. It was an age of standardization.
Bertillon’s cards reached the height of their allegorical power in 1892. Anarchist terrorism was at its zenith. Everywhere in France the wealthy and powerful trembled at the thought of dynamite and daggers. Mustachioed Ravachol, that uncontrollable anarchist who bombed the houses and restaurants of the judiciary, was on the loose. Shortly after dynamiting the home of a prosecutor, Ravachol was captured in a cafe, betrayed by a waiter who tipped off the police. Upon Ravachol’s arrest, Bertillon himself took the measurements, sorting through his meticulously organized cards. He positively identified Ravachol as Koenigstein, a petty criminal with a sour reputation. The infamous and heroic anarchist Ravachol was pinned to his other identities, tried, condemned, and executed.
Bertillon and Ravachol were contemporaries and enemies: one sought to systematize order and policing, the other bombed judges and prosecutors, changed his identity, and evaded the police until his end. Bertillon went on to found and direct the Department of Judicial Identity and Ravachol’s last words before the guillotine were “Vive l’Anarchie!”
Bertillonage soon expanded beyond the identification of new arrestees, and by 1912 was exported to France’s colonies in order to register and identify potential troublemakers, undesirables, and immigrants. Within France, the Department of Judicial Identity began to register vagrants, nomads, and Roma people with the same techniques. What begins as a specific response to crime expands to a generalized treatment of undesirables, and then eventually to entire populations.
As with Muybridge’s photography, there is something intimate lost with Bertillon’s systematization of identity. Agamben tries to illustrate the inseparable link between the particular and the whole of a singular person: “[l]ove is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is.”[2]In love, people are captivated by the intense particularities of the friend or beloved – the arc of a wrist holding a book, the gait and posture of a walk, the angle of one’s head during a difficult conversation. In the cybernetic regime, technicians break people into component parts that are neutral, measurable, commensurate. In this way the eye ceases to be a pool of emotion, whose color changes with the light, becoming fierce with anger or softening with love. We all know the difference between the cold glare of our friends staring down the police and the warm gaze of thoughtful listening, and all of the irreducible degrees and differences between the two. Instead the eye becomes a set of unique, static pixels that positively link someone to a name and an address in a database.
~~~~~
Control functions by capturing identities. It seeks to make people legible, to turn them into subjects (of a sovereign, of the state) and subjectivities (all of our identities, all of our predicates that converge to hold us in place as some stable individual). James Scott writes of the forcible tattooing of subjects in Thailand and Burma during the rise of centralized states: tax- payers, soldiers, and slaves were tattooed with their status and their owner, indelibly marking people as subjects. This was accompanied, of course, by the rise of bounty hunters and enforcers.[3]Codifying people is always also accompanied by violence: either contingent violence in the case of punishment for deviance, or structural violence as in the process of racialization. One need only look at histories of genocides, pogroms, detentions and expulsions to see the realized potential for violence that accompanies registration.
Categorization performs another function, however, one less about discipline than control. Linking people to identity or crafting them as subjects is never just a matter of organizing people according to their existing predicates. It is an active process that con- strains people to a certain type of activity. It is clear that being a man is never simply a neutral identification, but is always accompanied by both pre-scriptive and pro-scriptive statements: this is what a man does, that is what a man does not do. This much is obvious, but it is worth interrogating in the light of cybernetics and social media.
Spinoza knew this about identity. He dismissed the later Enlightenment notion of the atomized individual, seeing instead a confluence of forces, of affects and flows and relations that determine us. We are never free, nor are we individuals. Instead, according to Spinoza, we lead lives of “passionate servitude.” We pursue those things that affect us joyfully, that increase our power and we flee those things that affect us sadly, that deplete us. And our joys and sorrows and passions are not the result of a sovereign decision by some innate self, but the result of all of our past experiences, our future hopes, the passions of those around us. For Spinoza there is no individual ripped out of context, no powerful ego that decides. For him, the central question was always: what is it that we can do? What are we capable of ? Our abilities, our being in this world in the way that we are, is what distinguishes us, not the predicates assigned us. Deleuze sums up Spinoza’s concern neatly:
Knowing what you are capable of. This is not at all a moral question, but above all a physical question, as a question to the body and to the soul. A body has something fundamentally hidden: we could speak of the human species, the human genera, but this won’t tell us what is capable of affecting our body, what is capable of destroying it. The only question is the power of being affected (…) We should notice at this moment that, depending on the culture, depending on the society, men are not all capable of the same affects.[4]
Spinoza revealed a contradiction: we do not know the limits of the body, but we are limited by our imagination. This is not a centuries-old preamble to new age drivel about the power of positive thinking, but a carefully deduced conclusion. “For whatever man imagines he cannot do, he necessarily imagines; and he is so disposed by this imagination that he really cannot do what he imagines he cannot do.”[5]And he did not fail to see the connection between determining someone’s desire and controlling them: “men are so to be led, that they may think that they are not led, but living after their own mind, and according to their free decision (…)For rewards of virtue are granted to slaves, not freemen.” [6]
Frédéric Lordon follows Spinoza in rejecting the dichotomy of consent and coercion, arguing that the autonomous ego at the core of that dichotomy is an empty vessel, a myth. He sees us chained to our desires – desires that are co-created through the interplay with society, with others, with history. What we call consent, then, is not “the authentic expression of a freely self-determined interiority”,[7] but the passionate pursuit of joy. Coercion, on the other hand, is motivated by sad affects – we are faced with a choice between performing a particular task, or facing unemployment, the displeasure of the boss, prison – and we flee those sad affects, choosing the alternative. In this way he cuts through the confused notion of the willing slave, the person who seems to consent to their own exploitation. And, Lordon argues, this relationship exceeds capitalism, and the state, and is instead the basic dynamic of hierarchy. Control, or what he calls “the bossing relationship”, functions primarily by capturing others’ desires and aligning them more or less closely with the desires of the master. This can be achieved through seduction – by presenting one’s own desire as the only way to pursue joy, as the motivational industry does with workers: realize your potential through work! find yourself! – or through fear, the fear of starvation that comes without work and wages, the pleasure that comes with money.
Our problem is not that of the stifling and regimented consumer society that inspired the revolts of the 60s.[8] Nor is it, exactly, the strict categorization that accompanied early state-making. We aren’t tattooed as slaves or tax-payers. Instead we identify ourselves in our particularities, in the very desires that were liberated by social movements a half-century earlier. There is a two-fold process in cybernetic management: first our desires, our relations, our identities are studied, broken down into component parts; second, they are sold back to us, or used to motivate us to participate in some project, to align our desires with some master desire of capital or control. We are made legible, as whatever we appear to be, rather than being forced into certain boxes of pre-determined identity. We communicate, we are made communicable. In that freedom, however we are taught to desire what capital desires, to become self-motivated, self-caring entrepreneurs who pour our lives and emotions into our work and into crafting our selves.
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At MIT, a computer program seeks to train people with social phobias how to interact ‘normally’. An animated computer personality engages in a conversation with the patient, tracking their body language, eye movement, facial expressions, and choice of words. Afterwards they receive feedback on their conversational skills. They can review the session with a host of analytics: nod/shake, voice tone, eye contact. There are two operations at play here. The first is an advancement of Muybridge’s project: the total dissection of movement, this time applied to emotion and speech, the idea that the whole can be understood by slicing it into small enough component parts. The second is perhaps more troublesome: that humans are learning to be human from computers.
This is an advancement in the project of cybernetics and control. While in the past cybernetics sought to understand everything, now it seeks to force everything to be understandable. By giving feedback based on variables that can be understood by computers, it teaches us to act only in ways that can be understood, traced, and ultimately manipulated. If habits, etiquette and social norms in the past served to craft people into certain types of citizens or subjects, at least these rules were not codified, and there was room for the eccentrics, the rebels, and the non-conformists. Now we are being taught, from the first time that toddlers handle the glossy screen of their parents’ smartphone, that the only ways in which we can interact with the world are those ways that can be mapped and understood by sociologists and computers. In contrast to Spinoza’s dictum that we don’t even know what a body is capable of, the technologists answer by creating people about whom every capability is known. We could now say that, increasingly, we don’t know that we are capable of anything except that which is measurable.
~~~~~
Facebook employs a cadre of sociologists, casually called their “Trust Engineers”, whose job it is to study human relations on Facebook. They seek to make it more civil, more trustworthy, more democratic. Last year, they noticed an increase in requests for photos to be taken down. The primary reason was that the photos were embarrassing. Ever seeking to encourage sincere human relationships, the trust engineers created a new form allowing users to request that their friends take photos down, but had only limited success. Deducing that it is awkward and uncomfortable for people to have conflict with friends, they decided to make the job easier. Now, when you ask to remove a photo, you are given an array of options to choose from – does it violate the terms of service? is it pornographic? is it embarrassing? If the last, then you are taken to another page, with a pre-written message asking your friend to take down the photo. The message is edit- able, but most people don’t edit it. They are content to let Facebook resolve the conflict for them. The so-called trust engineers claim that this is designed simply to help people start conversations. We know it is the opposite. It is to place conversations inside our mouths, to speak through us. Here is how you deal with conflict in a civil way: you can choose this, or that. Facebook chooses for us, and we don’t have to think. The result is the most incredible curtailing of our power and of the different ways in which bodies can interact, as well as the most fitting analogy for democracy. You, citizens, are all equal. We will help you to resolve conflicts in an appropriate way, and together we will all act civilly.
For a more physical perspective, consider Google Maps and real-time traffic updates. There has always been power in mapping: in naming territories, in placing cities on the map or leaving them off, in determining what is visible and what is not. Map-making accompanies state-making. Now this process is accelerated, ripped away from the inflexible state form and given over to cybernetics, but the effect is the same. Following directions from Google Maps determines what is physically real. In the 1800s the flaneurs of Paris would drift around the city, encountering people and scenes, seeking to be inspired and affected without any direction. Now, travel exists only to move bodies from one point to the next. What is between is incidental, and what does not lie along your path does not exist at all. Already we avoid car accidents and traffic jams. Thanks to Google we no longer have to see the death and dysfunction that accompanies highways. And if the central mandate of Google’s traffic control is to keep things moving, to avoid interruption, what else will we miss? Certainly, those demonstrations and riots that seek to disrupt business as usual will remain in the background, seen only through our computer screens as Google redirects us and we read after the fact of some minor disruption or vandalism. It won’t affect us.
In the past, good citizens were sometimes warned not to drive through the “bad part of town.” Now, we don’t even know that the bad part of town exists to be avoided. It is simply invisible. This is a perfect physical analog for the human regulation at play at MIT and through Facebook: only these paths, this type of human, these types of relationships exist. Debord’s warning about the Spectacle rings truer than ever: “That which appears is good, that which is good appears.”
The study of how things work, of how ecosystems function, of how people move, conspires not only to identify us and make us legible to power, but to restrict our own potential, to create a menu of options that we can choose from. Some anonymous friends recently put it differently: “Categorization is not the naming of things. It is the transformation of names into prison ships.”[9]By studying us as individuals, sociology creates the individual. By studying our motion, only a certain type of motion becomes possible. By tracking the identity of criminals and then including everyone in the database of fingerprints and biometrics, everyone is treated as a potential criminal. And now, through the study of our relationships, sociology and cybernetics render only a certain type of relationship possible. It is the most extreme limiting of what a body can do.
This process is accelerating to overdetermine all of our activities, our relationships, our affects, our potentialities. What we see now with Facebook and social media is a vast expansion of mundanity. Even as sociologists use the enormous amount of data available through social media to analyze our behavior, they also code our behavior into a set of options. On Facebook, you can “like” something, or ignore it. This flattening of affect to a binary choice – like or ignore – removes even our capacity for enmity, let alone hatred, joy, pity, envy, or emotions unnamed. There is no room here for waging war in defense of a friend, or in destabilizing our identities through friendship. There is only the horizon of a calm, stable future in which we all get along.
~~~~~
From Muybridge to Bertillon, from cyberneticians to trust engineers, our enemies seek to restrain our abilities at every turn. They pin us to display boards and teach us what it means to be a citizen or a human. They hide political decisions about the lives we could lead in the built infrastructure of our world, in our environment and the tools we use. In pinpointing our presence as such a person in such a place, performing such an action, they render us only more absent from our own lives and capacities. And we are happy to comply, seduced by the easy life of phones that learn our routines and decide for us. We constantly record our own activity through Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter. Our sense of self becomes wrapped up in what has been recorded about us, and we become our own Bertillon and our own Muybridge.
Muybridge’s project has more secrets worth unraveling. His photographs do not only capture movement, they eradicate motion. Muybridge didn’t only look at the individual frames in sequence to deduce his results. He invented a primitive movie projector, a disc on which his photographs were arrayed in sequence. By spinning his zoopraxiscope and viewing through a fixed lens, he could emulate motion. But there is no motion there. Like Zeno’s paradox, his dissection rendered motion impossible, and he was left with a series of static frames turning in an endless circle. And when motion is impossible, so too are lines of flight and routes of escape. Our only remaining movement is an endless re-tracing of prescribed paths through the mapped and permitted world.
The zoopraxiscope also imposes a rhythm. It turns, regularly, like a record, repeating the same image in the same place with every rotation. This, too, is a form of control: Barthes argues that “the first thing that power imposes is a rhythm (to everything: a rhythm of lie, of time, of thought, of speech).”[10] Rhythm is metronomic, regular, discrete. It can be imposed from above, as in the forced march of an army. It can also be self-modulated – our FitBits track our heart rates and tell us when we reach our own personal goal. In either case, it is a digital, discrete measurement. Whether we march to a military cadence or to our own self-imposed goals, we are still marching, measuring.
In opposition, Barthes fantasizes about idiorhythmy, different rhythms, “a rhythm that allows for approximation, fit for imperfection, for a supplement, a lack, an idios: what doesn’t fit the structure, or would have to be made to fit.”[11] He also calls this swing, a deviation from the metronome. Tying free jazz to the Black Power movement, Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comoli ask “[i]n a world of finely honed scenarios, minutely calculated programs, spotless scores, well-placed options and actions, what blocks, what lingers, what stumbles and limps?”[12] What breaks the rhythm? What interrupts the spinning, allows something to escape, or to go unnoticed? They argue, optimistically, in favor of the frailty of human bodies which are “not yet well regulated by the law of commodities.”[13]
Negative as always, Frank B Wilderson, III follows Fanon in calling for a ‘program of complete disorder’, ” a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm.”[14] For him, if there is something outside the cybernetic regime, some site of resistance, it is the ‘absolute dereliction’ of the Black body, upon which all of civil society is built. “Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation), but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.”[15]
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The present is bleak. We are frozen in static images of ourselves. Our ubiquitous digital presence hides a very real absence from our own lives, from relationships of intensity, from motion. And the function of producing identities and categories is becoming more diffuse. We are hemmed in on all sides: by the categories of states and police, by the social networks that identify us, by our own self-creation of identity in our profiles, by those activists who consolidate identity in order to seek recognition and power.
If combat is possible, it will take the forms which the present attempts to destroy: opacity and uncertainty, evading recognition, becoming present with each other and absent in the eyes of cybernetics and states. It implies movement outside of prescribed routes and channels, and alliances formed in unlikely places. Our points of departure are those experiences where identity and recognition become murky and uncertain. We seek experiences that destabilize our own sense of self, that make us uncomfortable, that unsettle us. It is possible that a politics of friendship and enmity might point towards an escape from this static life, an elaboration of intense and bold friendship and relentless hostility, of putting ourselves at stake for and with one another. It is also possible that a politics of friendship formed on the basis of what exists between us now will only create new cliques, that despite our intentions it will re-form our identities and preclude new encounters.
We don’t know what it is that might allow us to escape the endless spinning-in-place of the zoopraxiscope. The human body seems too malleable, too flexible, to impose some sort of natural limit on cybernetic speed-ups – or, at least, the breakdowns and neuroses that accompany acceleration can also be incorporated into a responsive management of crisis. If there is no unmeasurable human essence, we must constantly look for different exploits, for different smokescreens to throw up to cover our movements. We might think fondly of the shuffling, stumbling walk that allows desert travelers to escape the giant worms in the science fiction novel Dune, a constant introduction of idiorhythmy that hides repetitive patterns. Or, perhaps, to cryptography: what escapes the cybernetic gaze needn’t be an ineffable mystery, but simply the addition of random sequences, of complete disorder. Civil war, then, but a civil war that is incomprehensible, irreducible, nonsensical.
We can venture some guesses about what will not work. We can be sure that pursuing friendship through the technologies that control us will never result in real friendship. We can be sure that affirming our identities and seeking recognition for them will never destabilize the production of race or gender or any category. We can be sure that limiting our knowledge of movement through the physical world to directions from a mapping program will never let us escape surveillance or find new worlds. And even if a politics of friendship are no guarantee, we can be sure that anyone calling themselves a trust engineer, anyone teaching us how to be sociable, and anyone questioning us about our identity in order to determine our legitimacy, is an enemy. If nothing else, we know who our enemies are.
“…we have not given the enemy the state of our political orientation, at no moment have we reproduced before the enemy any detail of the debates and instructions over which subcommissioners tenaciously excited themselves in the secret sections of their subcommissariats, we have permanently spooled false childhood memories, unusable biographies, nesting stories that abash and frustrate the enemy, that reveal nothing, that lead their specialized dogs astray, we have skimmed images of childhood at inopportune moments, we have inserted accounts of dreams where our spokespeople wanted confessions, we have not acted in accordance with the enemy’s schedule…. We have always talked about something else, always.”[16]
[1] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1987),29.
[2] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1993), 2.
[3] James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, (Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 2009), 93.
[4] Gilles Deleuze, “Lecture on Spinoza.” http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.ca/2007/02/on-spinoza.html, accessed 1/8/2016.
[5] Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, III, 28. trans R.H.M. Elwes (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/989/989-h/989-h.htm accessed 1/8/2015).
[6] Baruch Spinoza, A Political Treatise, trans. R.H.M. Elwes, (Dover: Mineola 2004), 382.
[7] Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza & Marx on Desire, (Verso: London & New York, 2014), 55.
[8] If boredom is counterrevolutionary, as the old situationist slogan went, then certainly today we are all revolutionaries, constantly stimulated, entertained, and distracted by our endless field of digital possibilities. Certainly the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs see themselves as revolutionaries, the neoliberal heirs of Bakunin’s destructive urges.
[9] HERE: At The Center of the World in Revolt
[10] Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (Columbia University Press: New York, 2013), 35
[11] Barthes, 35.
[12] Philippe Carles & Jean-Louis Comoli, “Preface to the 2000 edition: Free Jazz, Off Program, Off Topic, Off Screen.” in Free Jazz/Black Power, trans. Grégory Pierrot (University Press of Mississippi, 2015).
[13] Carles and Comoli, Free Jazz/Black Power.
[14] Frank B. Wilderson, III “The Prison Slave as Society’s Silent Scandal.” Ill Will Editions, 16.
[15] Wilderson, 17.
[16] Antoine Volodine, Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, trans. J. T. Mahany, (Open Letter: Rochester, 2015), 43-44.