________________________________________________________________________________ Mobilization vehicularity, police practice, and a logistics of routine Jordan Crandall For "In Search of Dialogue Spaces" International Biennial film+arc Graz Graz, Austria, 15 November 1997 As Serge Daney has written, the cinematic image has movement, different kinds of movements. But these movements could only be perceived because people were once put into theaters, locked into place before the screen and held in a situation of "blocked vision." These immobile people, held in "seat arrest" and slowly trained how to behave and see, became sensitive to the mobility of the world through the mediation of the screen, including the mobility of fictions (ahead to happier tomorrows), bodily mobility (dance, gesture), and material and mental movements. They became sensitive to the technologically-fabricated illusion of movement, but also an even more complicated movement, which might be called the language or grammar of cinema: the jump from one element to the next, with the underlying theory of editing that "ensured" the transition. Immobilized and spellbound before the screen, viewers internalize the conditions of the representational apparatus, the behaviors that it represents on its screen, and its grammar. (Think of the way Charlie Chaplin internalized the jerky pace of silent movies in his walking style, and the rapid speech patterns of early films.) We might refer to this as a performative corporealization, wherein technological conditions, media norms, and represented actions are identified with, routed through the body, and used to determine acceptable parameters of movement, gesture, and behavior. When enacted repeatedly, as in routines and rituals, these "stored" movements and gestures often no longer occupy conscious awareness: they are performed more or less automatically, as if the knowledge resided in a body part (e.g. fingers), or in physical mobility itself (dancing), rather than in the mind. As Katherine Hayles points out, it becomes difficult to intellectualize or change such habitualized practice: even if one's conscious beliefs might suggest otherwise, one is compelled to accept that which one is repeatedly compelled to perform. This "realm of routine" therefore has political implications. Bourdieu comments that all societies wishing to make a "new man" approach the task through processes of "deculturation" and "reculturation" focused on bodily practices; hence, revolutionaries place great emphasis "on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners," because "they entrust to [the body] in abbreviated and practical, i.e., mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture." Conversely, the representation undergoes its own process of internalization, incorporating the changing perceptual modes and activities of its viewer, as well as the changing conditions of its viewing environment. It does so by harnessing routines in interactive and analytical form. The representation "gets to know you" by opening itself up to realtime intervention, by connecting itself up to forms of surveillance, and by annexing procedures of analysis -- extending both its form and its purview. Gathering information through interactive interfaces and demographic, sociological, or market studies, including technologies of surveillance that make forms of observation and analysis increasingly precise, the image enacts statistics, incorporating the behaviors, conditions, and norms of both its viewers and its viewing "theater." It performs and corporealizes itself by reading its lines off the audience. It then helps to produce, modify, and mobilize that audience. In Bruno Latour's terms, the more representations are able to mobilize and align elements in a network of heterogeneous allies the more they become, the more they "act." (In advertising, the more they "have legs.") The image, then, increases its "acting power" to the extent that it annexes routines, which are translated into useful patterns and profiles that can be sorted according to changing conditions and needs. A matrix of information flow is determined -- advancing toward realtime -- in which bodies are mobilized, oriented, and adjusted. I want to position this matrix of routine as a site of operations. It is a "theater" embroiled in the processes that Daney articulated, though one that opens out into a larger circulatory realm, which advances toward the urban. Each "side" within this matrix of routine internalizes the represented behaviors and conditions of the other. Viewers and representations perform and corporealize themselves in response to what they "see" and "know" through technological mediations, whether in the form of technologies of visualization or of analysis. The scripted and the enacted overlay and entangle; the figured attempts to align with the literal, the real with the virtual; and that which is analysed and that which is actuated jostle. The condition that arises to serve all needs is that of surveillance -- a kind of monitored, formatted, vision-at-a-distance. Fueled by market-driven ideologies of improvement, safety, convenience, and "better living through technology," this surveillance insures that both visualization and analysis operate better, more accurately, and more safely for all parties concerned. It produces its exterior -- that which lurks outside of the confines of the surveilled -- as unruly, inconvenient, undependable, and dangerous. Extending vision in a user-friendly, safe and convenient manner, surveillance increasingly provides the formats and conditions for what counts as "true" perception. It is a mode of augmented seeing that offers dependable access to time-saving conveniences; to continual self-improvement; to action at a distance; to protection from a dangerous outside world; to reliable data. SAFETY IN NUMBERS This New York Stock Exchange ad indicates that its surveillance systems "are scrutinizing more than 385,000 transactions a day to ensure investors everywhere a fair marketplace." Promising safety, civility, and convenience, surveillance systems offer rich, sortable data derived from actual proceedings rather than speculations, therefore seeming to be more trustworthy. Fed into various formats of compilation and analysis, they seem to allow processed numbers to surface unscathed from interpretive biasing, just as they seem to allow safe, harm-free passage through "dangerous" urban streets and public places. Surveillance-derived data is used to generate safe and reliable manoeuvres through such perilous informational or urban flows. It provides a conduit between registered behavior and projected behavior; between past and immediate future; between the statistic, the social group, and the embodied consumer. Recording the routines of a subject and routing them through analytical procedures and formats, it seeks to re-mobilize that subject along a continued, redirected, safe, reliable, "improved" path. Reading up the NYSE ad, we can trace one of these paths as it flows outward from the NYSE through three companies and into a little girl's heart, ending in a lyrical ballet twirl. A surveilled flow runs from VimpelCom in Moscow as it expands Russia's first PCS network; to Daimler-Benz as it develops "an electronic system that automatically steers and controls cars for their drivers"; to Compaq Computer Corporation as it ships its 34,000,000th personal computer; and finally to St. Jude Medical as it embeds its "world's smallest pacemaker" within a 6-year old girl's body as she is poised to be mobilized about the rehearsal studio. A little cyborgian figure in a tu-tu, the girl is ready to begin the routines. Notice that she no longer belongs in the cinematic theater with which we began. It has been replaced with a new metaphor, that of the rehearsal studio. We all know that the body is in the process of being unleashed from its captivity to the screen, and that new metaphors are required to account for this newly mobilized body, which in a sense kinesthetically pulls the image from its frame and turns with it on the dance floors of urbanity. Perhaps, in fact, this field of dance offers possibilities for articulation: it can generate a semiotics of the mobilized body, meshing together representation and materiality in nonpolar, hybrid forms, suggesting a way to link kinesthetic systems to those of visual representation -- and as Jane Desmond suggests, foregrounding the choreographic nature of daily life in its function as a theater of power. Norman Bryson points out that in the West "the analysis of movement into abstract fields of force has played a central cultural role since at least the time of the Industrial Revolution. Already in the plates of the Encyclopedie are found detailed descriptions of mechanical processes and their human operations, in which the movements to be performed by the machine and the movements to be performed by human agency unfold, without differentiation, within the same framework of applied kinetics and mechanics." Industrialization requires the coming together of at least two great systems of abstraction: an economic system, in which the contribution supplied by human labor can be homogeneously quantified at material cost, and "a technical system, in which tasks to be performed can be broken down through scientific mechanics into abstract units of force (weights, vectors, horsepower, ergs); building a machine of any kind assumes that all of its motions, internally and externally, obey a kinetic calculus. The meshing together of economic and kinetic abstraction in industrialization represents, in anthropological terms, an epochal change in the history of socially structured movement and in the human object world; over a course of three centuries the Western vision of industrial movement gradually imposes itself on a global scale." Routines generate potential and enacted cycles of both corporeality and representation. They consist of the impulse to action-sequence as well as the trace of performed action-sequence. Embodied and encoded routines contest and cohere in performative corporealizations. It is no secret that the economic-technical system in which contemporary mobilization occurs is no longer that of the Industrial era, but one which obeys an informatic calculus with its own mechanics of analysis. To enter into this rehearsal studio is to "open up" to the forces of globalization, which unite these abstractions under the reign of the Network. The mobile, productive body is inserted into its fields, subject to its protections (especially under the watchful eye of financial markets), and accessible to (as well as having access to) its technologies -- a kind of "coming into being," an insertion into the materializing grid. What performative corporealizations contest and cohere here, in the form of this NYSE girl who stands in preparation to run the routines? She is learning, watching herself go through the moves in the mirrored projection. She stands for the numbers, humanizing the statistical and monetary flows of the NYSE with lyrical pirouettes. She is the flesh at the end of the vector, the vector that "performs" the body whose life it has literally saved. Baptized by the flow, she now performs for it within the representational hall of mirrors, or hall of formats. These mirrors do not reflect in the usual sense: they are part of flows that displace reflection as any kind of figure for identity-formation. They tie together flesh and fact. But body and fact do not align. The registration marks are off. That which jars these registrations is the political. POLITICS, POLICE PRACTICE, AND A LOGISTICS OF ROUTINE The matrix of routine is embroiled in "police practice." Building on Jacques Ranciere, I take this term to indicate the categorization and management of social groups and functions according to demographic, sociological, or market analyses, along with the development and implementation of techniques for insuring precision and effectiveness. Again, these involve inventive forms of information-gathering as surveillance, the necessity for which is insured through the production of un-surveilled reality as dangerous, unpredictable, uncivil, unclean, or unsafe. On the other hand, police practice involves self-policing, as individuals and groups define themselves through the conditions and categories enabled or provided by the formats. In either case, ensembles of groups are figured with a calculus of interests, behaviors, and opinions. The social body is seen in terms of manageable statistics and functions -- an ever-expanding mesh of networked, calculated abstractions -- which the actors dutifully perform. Politics begins when the subject that enters into the surveilled field of view no longer aligns with the subject as enacted in practice. The analysis does not account for this unrepresented subject. It no longer matches up. What we have is an "a/counting" - an identity-by-the-numbers that cannot account for "gaps," cross-categorical articulations, intersubjective coherencies. Such political agencies and articulations contest simplified discourses of fragmentation, destabilization, connectivity, and mutability -- especially in the capacity of these discourses to culturally justify the flexibilizations demanded by economic forces. Across fields of mobilization the social actor is destabilized, dispersed, and paced, its distances evacuated, strengthening globalized regimes of flexible accumulation while rendering the development of political agency and cohesive group action increasingly difficult. The job of political practice is to ventriloquize these agencies into the field. These agencies are neither interactive and authorless nor are they essentialized: they are forms of hybrid group articulation and action that can span the provisional mobilizations, realtime systems, and flexible agents wrought by the economy. The various subject positions that one inhabits in hybrid corporeal and telecommunicational environments, for example, must be articulated in provisional unifications in order to generate political agency and prompt cohesive social action. Such political practice calls for the development of nonessentialized, provisional coherencies. The smooth, policed matrix of routine with its clean, safe surveilled flows erupts into a field of enormous struggles. These are "invisible" struggles for the terms of communication, materialization, and "mattering." These are the battles in which we are deeply engaged but of which we are largely unaware. Since we not want to fall into the trap of privileging the visual, or verbal textuality as such, but instead emphasize the routined as defined here, we can position, alongside Virilio's "logistics of perception," a logistics of routine, whose "ground" would not be visualization but mobilization. In place of the visual object we might locate Virilio's trajective. THE VEHICLE Now I want to suggest a new metaphor. The metaphor of the rehearsal studio, while a step in the right direction, is ultimately unsatisfactory to account for this logistics. A new figure is required to replace that of the cinematic theater -- a metaphor that begins to de-emphasize the visual field and instead emphasize procedures of mobilization within the condition of the policed. The figure I will use is that of the vehicle. Consider the Vehicle Information and Communication System (VICS) already in operation in Japan. Supported by the Japanese government and numerous companies, it utilizes a computer linked to the GPS satellite system to precisely locate the position of a moving car. It displays the car's position as a mobile dot on a dashboard LCD panel loaded with city maps. It indicates traffic jams and congested roads, suggests alternate routes, and estimates travel times. Daimler-Benz and other organizations are developing more sophisticated two-way systems that allow users to request more customized information, such as the latest travel updates, weather, fishing reports, airline information, restaurant locations, and schedules of events. As mentioned in the NYSE ad, Daimler-Benz has even larger plans -- an electronic system that automatically steers and controls cars for their drivers. Ensconced in a mobile bubble, safely removed from the messy, unreliable world outside, surveillance offers a condition of protection as the vehicle moves one through a landscape, whether in a corporeal or virtual sense. The viewer-navigator internalizes the routines of the image through the agency of a vehicle and is trained to "drive" as such. The image - a frame within the "globalized cinema" of interconnecting visual media - internalizes routines of the viewer-navigator through the monitoring agency of a vehicle. The image, in strengthening its analytical matrix, "learns" what the driver does, how it moves, what it wants, down to the smallest increments, eventually the tiniest eye flickers, the tiniest vacillations of desire. Armed with this knowledge, the vehicle mobilizes or "transports" an occupant through a landscape and normalizes this procedure. As one ceases to rely on the non-monitored and non-processed reality "outside", the vehicle "protects" the occupant from the dangers of this unsurveilled reality, which always lies just beyond the vehicle's enclosure. This sense of enclosure need not be material, but can be induced through insertion or implantation. Think of the remote control device, the wireless communicator, or the augmented reality headgear as part of vehicular apparatus. This protective enclosure, a "bubble" of subjectivity, becomes the condition for presence itself - defining (and resolving) an "in here" versus an "out there," a here against a there, or a now against a later, between which its occupant is physically, mentally, or virtually transported. It resolves disparities between the small and the colossal and allows for the incorporation of other times and places within the here-and-now. It is a figure for a condition of protected intimacy cast against a larger condition of the urban. It helps to define the contours of the body that in/habits its confines. The vehicle is a figure for technologically-mediated mobilization, as it encapsulates the body in a bubble of immediacy and shuttles it about. The vehicle engages a capacity or sensitivity to the mobilities of the world, transports, and prompts materializations. Its function is to simultaneously hold and mobilize the subject, reorienting it through a complex of interlocking mechanisms that participate in producing bodily faculties and awarenesses. It endeavors to produce an adequate occupant. It fits a subject with molded parts and arrays of components, which define parameters of movement through a performative corporealization of increasing precision and effectiveness. But it is also produced through embodied practices, and its components bear the impressions of the routined use-patterns that inform them. It's where technology rises up to meet the body and the body pushes back, the surface in between molded by this interaction, the tension painted over in the guise of choice, comfort, convenience. Acclimating subject and representation within a technology of transport, it is a routined network of co-determining currents, cycles, codes, and channels, many of which, as we have seen, operate "below" perception. In contrast to the cinematic theater with which we began, we now have a complex, monitored space comprised of overlapping and competing vehicularizations, enmeshed in procedures of mobilization. The matrix of routine is infused with complex nets of materializing impulses. The vehicle operates through consolidation and dispersion. Consider a recent ad for Tivoli enterprise systems management software, which "gives you the power to manage all your systems, networks, and applications from a central point." We are invited to imagine our "whole company as responsive as a high-performance automobile." Tivoli promotes a "single-point control" that works across diverse platforms, giving one "The Power to Manage. Anything. Anywhere." On the other hand, consider the proliferation of wireless technologies and mobile computing platforms, which disperse the central point view. Vehicles scatter into arrays of mobile peripherals to the tune of market-driven discourses of "ubiquitous computing," which promise us that even the most insignificant of objects, like one's toaster, will soon be wired into the net. Consider this scenario from the New York Times Magazine: called "Life as We'll Know It," the article displays a catalogue of household items being developed by graduate students and professors at M.I.T.'s Media Laboratory, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Laboratory for Computer Science. "The technology that keeps our homes and offices running smoothly will look very different in the future - that is, when it's visible at all" the article reads. "Much of this technology is already in place; the rest will come from giant but anticipatable leaps forward in automation, miniaturization, virtual touch, voice recognition, and other refinements of digital wizardry." Running late but can't find your keys? The "Intelligent Room" - outfitted with monitors, video cameras, microphones, speech recognition and 30 software agents - will tell you where they are. If you lay down to take a nap, it will dim the lights and close the blinds. "The Intelligent Room even learns your behavior": it will keep up with your changing tastes in television programming, for example. Such friendly surveillance will no doubt also keep you and your home safe -- a cocoon protected from the increasingly dangerous world outside. Other features are embedded chips in such objects as coffee cups; ubiquitous, even wearable computing; online custom tailors; smart toys; and new shopping mechanisms such as the "Phantom Haptic Interface" -- a "freely rotating, thimblelike object attached to your computer, [which] allows you to feel the contours and texture of the merchandise." Notice the window shopper in the upper right hand corner who fondles the Phantom Haptic Interface while gazing at a statistical chart of clothing orders with his own monitored image, outfitted in the clothes, above it (in the "virtual changing room," which of course already knows all of his measurements). Surveilled, captured, and outfitted, juxtaposed with an image of the urban city and with reliable statistics -- market research served up as daily fodder, as "news" -- he engages in a process reminiscent of the activity once called "reading" or "viewing." Ensconced in the safety, comfort, and convenience of his home, he is transported through the new city, already figured as a shopper, a conduit for the merchandise and a subject inserted into the statistical order, a line of "tailored" pixels on the graph. Notice the gestures and movements illustrated here, embroiled in unseen struggles and procedures. What better illustration of the logistics of routine that this peculiar rehearsal studio? A woman gazes and gestures toward nothing in particular, the screen having vanished. The visual and perceptual are "outflanked" in favor of the signal conduit and its frequencies, beats, and rhythms, which do not necessarily translate into external visual codes. None of these objects operate in a traditionally representational sense but through other ways of behavioral pacing, which affect the body more like music that compels one to "feel the beat" and move accordingly. After the implosion and/or evacuation of the vehicle's representational field, such pacings become powerful navigational modes, like sound devices that "see" for the blind. And one might as well be blind: the police-practiced "Intelligent Room" does one's seeing for one. (Interestingly, many of these devices are similar to those designed for the handicapped.) As with the Daimler-Benz vehicle, the body is driven and shuttled about as a conduit for the surveilled systems. At the bottom of the page is the author's credit line, which gives us a curious bit of historical information. It says that "Elizabeth Royte wrote about women who survived the Rwandan genocide for the Magazine in January." Much more than the screen has disappeared in this utopic scenario. The unrepresentable haunts the picture, jarring its registration marks: through a ventriloquization, something uncapturable has entered into the analysis, for which none of its vectors can account. What field has replaced that of the cinematic screen, and, after Serge Daney, what is its language, its grammar? By focusing on a logistics of routine I want to define an alternate realm of operations beyond or below the visual, because the visual field is either disappearing or becoming something of a decoy, depending how you look at it. It is disappearing by imploding (miniaturizing) on the way toward direct insertion into the body; or it is disappearing by expanding outward to take over the whole of reality itself - which is the condition of immersion. The culture industry -- that vast prepatory field for the forces of globalization -- has stepped in to supply the distance-denying ideology that immersion requires. It celebrates the narrowing of distances between production and distribution (the realtime corporation); between users and computers; between geographical locations; and between representations and places. The distance between urban structures and images has undeniably narrowed: urban environments seem to arise spontaneously out of representations as representations construct urbanity. The impulse to conflate representation and place is none other than that of VR. But perhaps above all the culture industry celebrates the evacuation of the distances required for reflective thought itself. Who needs critical reflection when we have the epistemology of Technology? There is no time for reflection -- there is no longer time for the image: as Arthur Kroker has pointed out, the media are "too slow." Jameson writes that we read our subjectivity off the things outside. The urban is what compels one to move and to invent new forms of movement to "keep up" with its demands. If there is no longer time for distance, then what is required is a stacked, dense, layered perception; time along the z-axis. It involves the stacking of temporality and the interpolation of subjectivities and movements, as sedimented into the "multitasked" body, as a process of performative corporealization. Such movements are instituted at the cost of new restrictions. Such im/mobilities exist in the context of a "still more complicated movement" which might be called the "language" or grammar of the post-representational. What is it? How is one being made fit to atune to it? How is it conversionally linked to the built environment, the urban? And finally, where are the gaps, the misalignments, the eruptions, the in/coherencies, the a/countings, that open up possibilities for political intervention? BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Serge Daney, "From Movies to Moving," documenta documents 3, pp. 76-83 (english and german). N. Katherine Hayles, "The Materiality of Informatics," in Configurations 1 (1992): 147-170. The Bourdieu citation is Hayles's, from Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 94. Bruno Latour's work is described by Felix Stalder in a paper posted on nettime, 6 September 1997, and available by request from the author at stalder@fis.utoronto.ca. Relevant work in the emerging field of critical dance studies -- in which dance can be regarded in a larger field of "socially structured human movement" -- can be found in Jane C. Desmond, ed., Meaning in Motion, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), particularly Norman Bryson's essay "Cultural Studies and Dance History" (pp. 55-77). Jacques Ranciere's concept of police practice is described in "The Political Form of Democracy," an interview with Jean-Francois Chevrier and Sophie Wahnich, in Documenta X - the Book (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz-Verlag, 1997), pp. 800-804. The VICS device is described in "In Japan, a New Way to Play in Traffic," The New York Times, October 6, 1997, p. D1. The "Intelligent Room" is presented by Elizabeth Royte in "Life As We'll Know It," New York Times Magazine, September 28, 1997, pp. 82-93. Photograph by Fred R. Conrad. For related issues of vehicularity and its connection to television see Margaret Morse, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television," in Kathleen Woodward, ed., Logics of Television (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 193- 221. http://www.thing.net/~xaf/mobilize/ ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 1999 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org