Julian Bourg’s talk, “Of Partisans and Paranoid Experts: How We Came to Think About Terrorism,” was part of boundary 2’s recent conference on The Militarization of Knowledge at the University of Pittsburgh. Bourg is an Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean of the Core at Boston College.
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"Still Ahead Somehow:" Paul Amar’s The Security Archipelago
A Review of Paul Amar’s The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013).
By Neel Ahuja
One of the most widely reported news stories of the 2011 revolution in Egypt involved sexual assaults and other physical attacks on women in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where mass protests led to the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak. Paul Amar’s singular book The Security Archipelago explores, among other topics, the Egyptian military council’s attempt to burnish its own authority to “rescue the nation” and its “dignity” by constructing the Arab Spring uprising as a destructive site of violence and moral degradation (3). Mirroring the racialized discourse of international news media who invoked animal metaphors to represent dissent at Tahrir as an articulation of pathological urban violence and frenzy (203), the counter-revolutionary campaign allowed the military to arrest and incarcerate protesters by associating them with demeaned markers of class status and sexuality.
For Amar, this conjunction of moralizing statism and the militarization of social life is indicative of a particular governmental form he calls “human security,” a set of transnational juridical, political, economic, and police practices and discourses that become especially legible in sites of urban crisis and struggle. Amar names four interlocking logics that constitute human security: evangelical humanitarianism, police paramilitarism, juridical personalism, and workerist empowerment (7). He unveils these logics by constructing a dense analysis of security politics linking the megacities of Cairo and Rio de Janiero.
The chapters explore crisis moments that reveal connections between the militarization of police, the development of urban planning and development policy, tourism, the management of labor processes, and racialized and gendered struggles over rights and citizenship. Such connections arise in crises around public protest, attempts by municipal and national authorities to market heritage (in the form of Islamic heritage architecture or samba music) to tourists, coalitions between labor and evangelical Christian groups to combat trafficking and corruption, the attempts of 9/11 plotter Muhammad Atta to develop a theory of Islamic urban planning, and the policing of city space during major international development meetings. These wide-ranging case studies ground the book’s critical security analysis in sites of struggle, making important contributions to the understanding of the spread of urban violence and progressive social policy in Brazil and the rise of left-right coalitions in Islamic urban planning and revolutionary uprisings in Egypt.
Throughout the book, public contestation over the permissible limits of urban sexuality emerges as a key factor inciting securitization. It serves as a marker of cultural tradition, a policed indicator of urban space and capital networking, and a marker of political dissent. For Amar, the new subjects of security “are portrayed as victimized by trafficking, prostituted by ‘cultures of globalization,’ sexually harassed by ‘street’ forms of predatory masculinity, or ‘debauched’ by liberal values” (15). In this way, the “human” at the heart of “human security” is a figure rendered precarious by the public articulation of sexuality with processes of economic and social change.
If this method of transnational scholarship showcases the unique strengths of Amar’s interdisciplinary training, Portuguese and Arabic language skills, and past work as a development specialist, it brilliantly articulates a set of connections between the cities of Rio and Cairo evident in their parallel experiences of neoliberal economic policies, redevelopment, militarization of policing, NGO intervention, and rise as significant “semiperipheral” or “first-third-world” metropoles. In contrast to racialized international relations and conflict studies scholarship that fails continually to break from the mythologies of the clash of civilizations, Amar’s book offers a fascinating analysis of how religious politics, policing, and workerist humanisms interface in the urban crises of two megacities whose representation if often overwritten by stereotyped descriptions of either oriental despotism (Cairo) or tropicalist transgression (Rio).
These cities, in fact, share geographic, economic, and political connections that justify what Amar describes as an archipelagic method: “The practices, norms, and institutional products of [human security] struggles have… traveled across an archipelago, a metaphorical island chain, of what the private security industry calls ‘hotspots’–enclaves of panic and laboratories of control–the most hypervisible of which have emerged in Global South megacities” (15-16). The security archipelago is also a formation that includes but transcends the state; it is “parastatal” and reflects the ways in which states in the Global South, NGO activists, and state attempts to humanize security interventions have produced a set of governmentalities that attempt to incorporate and govern public challenges to austerity politics and militarism.
As such, Amar’s book offers a two-pronged challenge to dominant theories of neoliberalism. First, it clarifies that although many of the wealthy countries still battle over a politics of austerity, the so-called Washington Consensus combining financial deregulation, privatization, and reduction of trade barriers no longer holds sway internationally or even in its spaces of origin. Indeed, Amar claims that even the Beijing Consensus — the turn since the 1990s to a strong state hand in development investment combined with the controlled growth of highly regulated markets — is being supplanted by the parastatal form of the human security regime. Second, this line of thought requires for Amar a methodological shift. Amar claims, “we can envision an end to the term neoliberalism as an overburdened and overextended interpretive lens for scholars” given “the demise, in certain locations and circuits, of a hegemonic set of market-identified subjects, locations, and ideologies of politics” (236). The Security Archipelago offers an alternative to theories of globalization that privilege imperial states as the primary forces governing the production of transnational power dynamics. Without making the common move of romanticizing a static vision of either locality or indigeneity in the conceptualization of resistance to globalization, Amar locates in the semiperiphery a crossroads between the forces of national development and transnational capital. It is in this crossroads where resistances to the violence of austerity are parlayed into new security regimes in the name of the very human endangered by capitalism’s market authoritarianism.
It is notable that the analysis of sexuality, with its attendant moral incitements to security, largely drops out of Amar’s concluding analysis of the debates on the end of neoliberalism. He does mention sexuality when proclaiming a shift from a consuming subject to a worker in the postneoliberal transition: “postneoliberal work centers more on the fashioning of moralization, care, humanization, viable sexualities, and territories that can be occupied. And the worker can see production as the collective work of vigilance and purification, which all too often is embedded through paramilitarization and enforcement practices” (243). While the book expertly reveals the emphasis on emergent forms of moral labor and securitizing care in the public regulation of sexuality, it also documents that moral crises and policing around the sexuality of samba, for example, are layered by the nexus of gentrification, private redevelopment, and transnational tourism that commonly attract the label neoliberalism. This point does not directly undermine Amar’s argument but suggests that further discussion of sexuality’s relation to human security regimes might engender an analytic revision of the notion of postneoliberal transition. The public articulation of sexuality as the site of urban securitization might rather reveal the regeneration of intersecting consumption forms and affective labors of logics of marketization and securitization that are divided geographically but dynamically interrelated.
The fact that Amar’s book raises this problem reveals the significance of the study for moving forward scholarship on sexuality, security, and globality — as individual objects of study and intertwined ones. As scholars focusing, for example, on homonationalist marriage practices in the global north continue to use the analytic frame of neoliberalism, Amar’s study might press for how the moral articulation of the marriage imperative exerts a securitizing force that transcends market logics. Similarly, Amar’s focus on both sexuality and the semiperiphery offer significant geographic and methodological disruptions to the literatures on neoliberalism, the rise of East Asian financial capital, and crisis theory. His unique method challenges interdisciplinary social theorizing to grapple with the archipelagic nature of contemporary forces of social precarity and securitization.
Neel Ahuja is associate professor of postcolonial studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC. He is the author the forthcoming Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Duke UP).
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Etienne Balibar: In War
At Open Democracy, b2 contributor Etienne Balibar charts a path forward for Europe after last week’s attacks in Paris.
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b2 Conference: The Militarization of Knowledge
On November 13 and 14, 2015, boundary 2 will host a conference at the University of Pittsburgh on The Militarization of Knowledge. This unique event will bring together distinguished scholars from a variety of disciplines. Click here to watch a livestream.
Our talks will take place at the following times, all Eastern Standard Time.
FRIDAY, 11/13/15
2pm – Operationalizing Basic Research and Scholarship: A System-of-Systems Approach for the Military Application of Knowledge, Carey Balaban, Professor, Departments of Otolaryngology, Neurobiology, Communication Science & Disorders, and Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Director of Center for National Preparedness
3:30pm – Terror, Talk, and Political Management, David Simpson, Distinguished Professor of English, UC Davis
SATURDAY, 11/14/15
9:30am – Of Partisans and Paranoid Experts: How We Came to Think about Terrorism, Julian Bourg, Associate Professor of History, Boston College
11am – The Representation of Atrocity, Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
1:15pm – The Militarization of Language, David Golumbia, Associate Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University
2:45pm – Military Aesthetics: Technology, Experience, and Late Modern War, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Southern Denmark
4pm – Summary Discussion, led by Jonathan Arac, Mellon Professor of English and Director, Humanities Center, University of Pittsburgh, and Anthony Bogues, Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory, Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University; Director, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
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How We Think About Technology (Without Thinking About Politics)
a review of N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago, 2012)
by R. Joshua Scannell~
In How We Think, N Katherine Hayles addresses a number of increasingly urgent problems facing both the humanities in general and scholars of digital culture in particular. In keeping with the research interests she has explored at least since 2002’s Writing Machines (MIT Press), Hayles examines the intersection of digital technologies and humanities practice to argue that contemporary transformations in the orientation of the University (and elsewhere) are attributable to shifts that ubiquitous digital culture have engendered in embodied cognition. She calls this process of mutual evolution between the computer and the human technogenesis (a term that is mostly widely associated with the work of Bernard Stiegler, although Hayles’s theories often aim in a different direction from Stiegler’s). Hayles argues that technogenesis is the basis for the reorientation of the academy, including students, away from established humanistic practices like close reading. Put another way, not only have we become posthuman (as Hayles discusses in her landmark 1999 University of Chicago Press book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics), but our brains have begun to evolve to think with computers specifically and digital media generally. Rather than a rearguard eulogy for the humanities that was, Hayles advocates for an opening of the humanities to digital dromology; she sees the Digital Humanities as a particularly fertile ground from which to reimagine the humanities generally.
Hayles is an exceptional scholar, and while her theory of technogenesis is not particularly novel, she articulates it with a clarity and elegance that are welcome and useful in a field that is often cluttered with good ideas, unintelligibly argued. Her close engagement with work across a range of disciplines – from Hegelian philosophy of mind (Catherine Malabou) to theories of semiosis and new media (Lev Manovich) to experimental literary production – grounds an argument about the necessity of transmedial engagement in an effective praxis. Moreover, she ably shifts generic gears over the course of a relatively short manuscript, moving from quasi-ethnographic engagement with University administrators, to media archaeology a la Friedrich Kittler, to contemporary literary theory, with grace. Her critique of the humanities that is, therefore, doubles as a praxis: she is actually producing the discipline-flouting work that she calls on her colleagues to pursue.
The debate about the death and/or future of the humanities is weather worn, but Hayles’s theory of technogenesis as a platform for engaging in it is a welcome change. For Hayles, the technogenetic argument centers on temporality, and the multiple temporalities embedded in computer processing and human experience. She envisions this relation as cybernetic, in which computer and human are integrated as a system through the feedback loops of their coemergent temporalities. So, computers speed up human responses, which lag behind innovations, which prompt beta test cycles at quicker rates, which demand humans to behave affectively, nonconsciously. The recursive relationship between human duration and machine temporality effectively mutates both. Humanities professors might complain that their students cannot read “closely” like they used to, but for Hayles this is a fault of those disciplines to imagine methods in step with technological changes. Instead of digital media making us “dumber” by reducing our attention spans, as Nicholas Carr argues, Hayles claims that the movement towards what she calls “hyper reading” is an ontological and biological fact of embodied cognition in the age of digital media. If “how we think” were posed as a question, the answer would be: bodily, quickly, cursorily, affectively, non-consciously.
Hayles argues that this doesn’t imply an eliminative teleology of human capacity, but rather an opportunity to think through novel, expansive interventions into this cyborg loop. We may be thinking (and feeling, and experiencing) differently than we used to, but this remains a fact of human existence. Digital media has shifted the ontics of our technogenetic reality, but it has not fundamentally altered its ontology. Morphological biology, in fact, entails ontological stability. To be human, and to think like one, is to be with machines, and to think with them. The kids, in other words, are all right.
This sort of quasi-Derridean or Stieglerian Hegelianism is obviously not uncommon in media theory. As Hayles deploys it, this disposition provides a powerful framework for thinking through the relationship of humans and machines without ontological reductivism on either end. Moreover, she engages this theory in a resolutely material fashion, evading the enervating tendency of many theorists in the humanities to reduce actually existing material processes to metaphor and semiosis. Her engagement with Malabou’s work on brain plasticity is particularly useful here. Malabou has argued that the choice facing the intellectual in the age of contemporary capitalism is between plasticity and self-fashioning. Plasticity is a quintessential demand of contemporary capitalism, whereas self-fashioning opens up radical possibilities for intervention. The distinction between these two potentialities, however, is unclear – and therefore demands an ideological commitment to the latter. Hayles is right to point out that this dialectic insufficiently accounts for the myriad ways in which we are engaged with media, and are in fact produced, bodily, by it.
But while Hayles’ critique is compelling, the responses she posits may be less so. Against what she sees as Malabou’s snide rejection of the potential of media, she argues
It is precisely because contemporary technogenesis posits a strong connection between ongoing dynamic adaptation of technics and humans that multiple points of intervention open up. These include making new media…adapting present media to subversive ends…using digital media to reenvision academic practices, environments and strategies…and crafting reflexive representations of media self fashionings…that call attention to their own status as media, in the process raising our awareness of both the possibilities and dangers of such self-fashioning. (83)
With the exception of the ambiguous labor done by the word “subversive,” this reads like a catalog of demands made by administrators seeking to offload ever-greater numbers of students into MOOCs. This is unfortunately indicative of what is, throughout the book, a basic failure to engage with the political economics of “digital media and contemporary technogenesis.” Not every book must explicitly be political, and there is little more ponderous than the obligatory, token consideration of “the political” that so many media scholars feel compelled to make. And yet, this is a text that claims to explain “how” “we” “think” under post-industrial, cognitive capitalism, and so the lack of this engagement cannot help but show.
Universities across the country are collapsing due to lack of funding, students are practically reduced to debt bondage to cope with the costs of a desperately near-compulsory higher education that fails to deliver economic promises, “disruptive” deployment of digital media has conjured teratic corporate behemoths that all presume to “make the world a better place” on the backs of extraordinarily exploited workforces. There is no way for an account of the relationship between the human and the digital in this capitalist context not to be political. Given the general failure of the book to take these issues seriously, it is unsurprising that two of Hayles’ central suggestions for addressing the crisis in the humanities are 1) to use voluntary, hobbyist labor to do the intensive research that will serve as the data pool for digital humanities scholars and 2) to increasingly develop University partnerships with major digital conglomerates like Google.
This reads like a cost-cutting administrator’s fever dream because, in the chapter in which Hayles promulgates novel (one might say “disruptive”) ideas for how best to move the humanities forward, she only speaks to administrators. There is no consideration of labor in this call for the reformation of the humanities. Given the enormous amount of writing that has been done on affective capitalism (Clough 2008), digital labor (Scholz 2012), emotional labor (Van Kleaf 2015), and so many other iterations of exploitation under digital capitalism, it boggles the mind a bit to see an embrace of the Mechanical Turk as a model for the future university.
While it may be true that humanities education is in crisis – that it lacks funding, that its methods don’t connect with students, that it increasingly must justify its existence on economic grounds – it is unclear that any of these aspects of the crisis are attributable to a lack of engagement with the potentials of digital media, or the recognition that humans are evolving with our computers. All of these crises are just as plausibly attributable to what, among many others, Chandra Mohanty identified ten years ago as the emergence of the corporate university, and the concomitant transformation of the mission of the university from one of fostering democratic discourse to one of maximizing capital (Mohanty 2003). In other words, we might as easily attribute the crisis to the tightening command that contemporary capitalist institutions have over the logic of the university.
Humanities departments are underfunded precisely because they cannot – almost by definition – justify their existence on monetary grounds. When students are not only acculturated, but are compelled by financial realities and debt, to understand the university as a credentialing institution capable of guaranteeing certain baseline waged occupations – then it is no surprise that they are uninterested in “close reading” of texts. Or, rather, it might be true that students’ “hyperreading” is a consequence of their cognitive evolution with machines. But it is also just as plausibly a consequence of the fact that students often are working full time jobs while taking on full time (or more) course loads. They do not have the time or inclination to read long, difficult texts closely. They do not have the time or inclination because of the consolidating paradigm around what labor, and particularly their labor, is worth. Why pay for a researcher when you can get a hobbyist to do it for free? Why pay for a humanities line when Google and Wikipedia can deliver everything an institution might need to know?
In a political economy in which Amazon’s reduction of human employees to algorithmically-managed meat wagons is increasingly diagrammatic and “innovative” in industries from service to criminal justice to education, the proposals Hayles is making to ensure the future of the university seem more fifth columnary that emancipatory.
This stance also evacuates much-needed context from what are otherwise thoroughly interesting, well-crafted arguments. This is particularly true of How We Think’s engagement with Lev Manovich’s claims regarding narrative and database. Speaking reductively, in The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), Manovich argued that under there are two major communicative forms: narrative and database. Narrative, in his telling, is more or less linear, and dependent on human agency to be sensible. Novels and films, despite many modernist efforts to subvert this, tend toward narrative. The database, as opposed to the narrative, arranges information according to patterns, and does not depend on a diachronic point-to-point communicative flow to be intelligible. Rather, the database exists in multiple temporalities, with the accumulation of data for rhizomatic recall of seemingly unrelated information producing improbable patterns of knowledge production. Historically, he argues, narrative has dominated. But with the increasing digitization of cultural output, the database will more and more replace narrative.
Manovich’s dichotomy of media has been both influential and roundly criticized (not least by Manovich himself in Software Takes Command, Bloomsbury 2013) Hayles convincingly takes it to task for being reductive and instituting a teleology of cultural forms that isn’t borne out by cultural practice. Narrative, obviously, hasn’t gone anywhere. Hayles extends this critique by considering the distinctive ways space and time are mobilized by database and narrative formations. Databases, she argues, depend on interoperability between different software platforms that need to access the stored information. In the case of geographical information services and global positioning services, this interoperability depends on some sort of universal standard against which all information can be measured. Thus, Cartesian space and time are inevitably inserted into database logics, depriving them of the capacity for liveliness. That is to say that the need to standardize the units that measure space and time in machine-readable databases imposes a conceptual grid on the world that is creatively limiting. Narrative, on the other hand, does not depend on interoperability, and therefore does not have an absolute referent against which it must make itself intelligible. Given this, it is capable of complex and variegated temporalities not available to databases. Databases, she concludes, can only operate within spatial parameters, while narrative can represent time in different, more creative ways.
As an expansion and corrective to Manovich, this argument is compelling. Displacing his teleology and infusing it with a critique of the spatio-temporal work of database technologies and their organization of cultural knowledge is crucial. Hayles bases her claim on a detailed and fascinating comparison between the coding requirements of relational databanks and object-oriented databanks. But, somewhat surprisingly, she takes these different programming language models and metonymizes them as social realities. Temporality in the construction of objects transmutes into temporality as a philosophical category. It’s unclear how this leap holds without an attendant sociopolitical critique. But it is impossible to talk about the cultural logic of computation without talking about the social context in which this computation emerges. In other words, it is absolutely true that the “spatializing” techniques of coders (like clustering) render data points as spatial within the context of the data bank. But it is not an immediately logical leap to then claim that therefore databases as a cultural form are spatial and not temporal.
Further, in the context of contemporary data science, Hayles’s claims about interoperability are at least somewhat puzzling. Interoperability and standardized referents might be a theoretical necessity for databases to be useful, but the ever-inflating markets around “big data,” data analytics, insights, overcoming data siloing, edge computing, etc, demonstrate quite categorically that interoperability-in-general is not only non-existent, but is productively non-existent. That is to say, there are enormous industries that have developed precisely around efforts to synthesize information generated and stored across non-interoperable datasets. Moreover, data analytics companies provide insights almost entirely based on their capacity to track improbably data patterns and resonances across unlikely temporalities.
Far from a Cartesian world of absolute space and time, contemporary data science is a quite posthuman enterprise in committing machine learning to stretch, bend and strobe space and time in order to generate the possibility of bankable information. This is both theoretically true in the sense of setting algorithms to work sorting, sifting and analyzing truly incomprehensible amounts of data and materially true in the sense of the massive amount of capital and labor that is invested in building, powering, cooling, staffing and securing data centers. Moreover, the amount of data “in the cloud” has become so massive that analytics companies have quite literally reterritorialized information– particularly trades specializing in high frequency trading, which practice “co- location,” locating data centers geographically closer the sites from which they will be accessed in order to maximize processing speed.
Data science functions much like financial derivatives do (Martin 2015). Value in the present is hedged against the probable future spatiotemporal organization of software and material infrastructures capable of rendering a possibly profitable bundling of information in the immediate future. That may not be narrative, but it is certainly temporal. It is a temporality spurred by the queer fluxes of capital.
All of which circles back to the title of the book. Hayles sets out to explain How We Think. A scholar with such an impeccable track record for pathbreaking analyses of the relationship of the human to technology is setting a high bar for herself with such a goal. In an era in which (in no small part due to her work) it is increasingly unclear who we are, what thinking is or how it happens, it may be an impossible bar to meet. Hayles does an admirable job of trying to inject new paradigms into a narrow academic debate about the future of the humanities. Ultimately, however, there is more resting on the question than the book can account for, not least the livelihoods and futures of her current and future colleagues.
_____R Joshua Scannell is a PhD candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His current research looks at the political economic relations between predictive policing programs and urban informatics systems in New York City. He is the author of Cities: Unauthorized Resistance and Uncertain Sovereignty in the Urban World (Paradigm/Routledge, 2012).
Back to the essay
_____Patricia T. Clough. 2008. “The Affective Turn.” Theory Culture and Society 25(1) 1-22
N. Katherine Hayles. 2002. Writing Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press
N. Katherine Hayles. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Catherine Malabou. 2008. What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York: Fordham University Press
Lev Manovich. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lev Manovich. 2009. Software Takes Command. London: Bloomsbury
Randy Martin. 2015. Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative. Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Chandra Mohanty. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Trebor Scholz, ed. 2012. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge
Bernard Stiegler. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press
Kara Van Cleaf. 2015. “Of Woman Born to Mommy Blogged: The Journey from the Personal as Political to the Personal as Commodity.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 43(3/4) 247-265