Part II: Edges and Coda

                                                               Part II: Edges

The Datum of Cura I

            The authors discuss similarities between computer viruses and biological epidemics within the context of how they are displayed. Forced to “care for the most misanthropic agents of infection and disease, one must curate that which eludes the cure” (p. 106) for if the disease was cured, there would be nothing left to display. Therefore, the best curator would necessarily be the most careless, the one incapable of exacerbating the virus. Caring for the virus vs. caring for those infected. The political economy in the 1700s (see Ricardo, Smith, and Malthus) was based on a correlation between the health of the population and the wealth of the country. Today’s public health has moved toward the idea of caring for health information and ensuring that “the biological bodies of the population correlate to the informatics patterns on the screen” (p. 107). Statistics, rather than bodies, are central.

The Datum of Cura II

            Foucault notes that curating entails a form of governance- caring for oneself would also benefit others through self-transformation. Becoming the best individual you can be will undoubtedly benefit society (so long as the best you can be is good- what about people’s whose best still sucks?). Yet, self destruction is inherent with self-transformation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/28/gustav-metzger-auto-destructive . Liu calls this “viral aesthetics” where the distinction between production and destruction are blurred. In the above link, an exhibit of Metzger’s work involves the demolition of an automobile. Its destruction becomes the art. Curare (Latin for to care) is the point where control and transformation intersect. “Is there a certain ‘carelessness’ to curare?” (p. 109)

Sovereignty and Biology I

             In politics, the body is often used as a metaphor for political organization. For Plato, the primary threat to the body politic was the move from concerns about justice to those “of wealth (oligarchy) and concerns of appetites (democracy) (p. 109). The excess of these concerns results is disease of the political body, similar to excess bile and phlegm in the physical body. Lawmakers must work to avoid these symptoms altogether but in the event they appear, should eradicate them “cells and all.” Our knowledge of the physical body has changed since the time of Plato, so does this mean that our understanding of the political body has also changed? Should it change?

Sovereignty and Biology II

            The model of sovereignty proposed by Hobbes in Leviathan, where citizens constitute the body and the sovereignty the head raises a fundamental question of political thought: can a political collectivity exist without transferring its rights to a supreme ruler? One of the ways that sovereignty maintains political power is through the continual identification of biological threats. In doing so, the sovereignty can justify enacting stronger controls over citizens by protecting them from threats to the health of the population. The medicalization of politics oversees the  behaviors, conduct, discourse, desires, etc. of biology occurs where discipline and sovereignty meet, a place which challenges the between the good of the individual and the good of the collective.

Abandoning the Body Politic

            The body politic has two states: (1) Constitutive- where the body politic is assembled through the “social contract” based on securing life (2) Dissolution- chaos, a return to the “state of nature,” sovereignty of the people, the dark side of the constitutive body. These two states feed into each through war.  “Peace is waging a secret.” Abandoning the body politic means deserting the military foundations of politics and also opening the body to its own abandon. “What is left is an irremediable scattering, a dissemination of ontological specks” (p.111).

The Ghost in the Network

            Heterogeneous network phenomena can be understood through the identification of commonalities in shared particular patterns- “a set of relations between dots (nodes) and lines (edges) (p. 112). Thus, organization gives shapes to matter and serves as a means to inform (in-form). The living network can also be viewed in political terms. There is not a central node that sits in the middle and monitors/controls every link and node. A single node cannot break the web. A scale-free network is a web without a spider. For politics to be viewed in a natural sense, networks need to be seen as an unavoidable consequence of their evolution.    

Birth of the Algorithm

            An algorithm is a type of visible articulation of any given processor’s machinic grammar.

Political Animals

            Biology is a prerequisite for politics (Aristotle). If the human being is a political animal, are there also animal politics? Vocabularies of biology retain the remnants of sovereignty: the queen bee, the drone. But, what about swarm intelligence where there is no centralized power, but only an instance of self-organization?

Sovereignty and the State of Emergency

            “Modern sovereignty is based not on the right to impose laws but on the ability to suspend the law, to claim a state of emergency” (p.115). Both sides in a state of emergency rely on network management- either in destabilizing key nodes or fortifying them.

Epidemic and Endemic

            The distinction between emerging infectious disease and bioterrorism based on cause: one was naturally occurring, and the other resulted from direct human intervention has been muddled if not fully abandoned. In its place, the U.S. government has developed an inclusive approach to biopolitics. Regardless of the context, the role of the government is to alert and respond to biological threats. What matters most is what is at stake, which is always, life itself. To achieve this aim, “medical security” seeks “to protect the population, defined as a biological and genetic entity, from any possible biological threat, be it conventional war or death itself” (p.116). The biological threat is always present.

Network Being

          Information networks are often described as a “global village” or a “collective consciousness.” These references to networks somehow being alive bring up questions of what being actually means. The authors posit two questions: At what point does the difference between “being” and “life” implode? What would be the conditions for the nondistinction between “being” and “life”? They recognize two problems with the distinctions: (1) Life sciences are faced with anomalies where living organisms cross species barriers and questions of what it means to be alive, as in the case of a virus. For Heidegger, ‘life” and “being” are separate from but dependent upon each other. In network science, however, the concept of “being” is arrived at from a privative definition of “life.” In this sense, all networks form the same animal: a graph or a network. In turn, network science can study all networks as the same type of being. The impact of this view of network being is confused. Does the experience of being in a network constitute network phenomenology (where occurrences are shared)? Does it mean the existence of properties that differ across networks? The only “life” that is specific to networks is their “being” a network.

Good Viruses (SimSARS I)

            Network-based strategies are being developed on all levels. Computer security uses network solutions to address network threats in the world of online viruses. This behind the scenes war is invisible to most users but is in constant motion. Similarly, epidemiologists understand how infectious diseases are spread effectively through a variety of networks. Public health agencies in turn, use these same networks as instruments of awareness and prevention. Caution must be exercised in utilizing these networks to avoid widespread panic or political hype. In the post 9/11 United States, infectious disease and bioterrorism are inevitably linked. In doing so, questions of a new biopolitical war or a new medical terror are raised. “Good” viruses introduced to combat emerging infectious diseases are administered through the same networks as the disease, but will only succeed if its rate of infection is greater than the bad virus.

Medical Surveillance (SimSARS II)

            Developments in medical surveillance are representative of the intensive nature of networks. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is working to develop “syndromic surveillance” where the goal is to implement a real-time, nationwide system for detecting anomalies in public health data which could signal a possible outbreak or bioterrorist attack. In this case, “an information network is used to combat a biological network” (p. 121). Similar the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network works to insure that potential threats (either naturally occurring or intentionally caused) are quickly verified and information shared through the Network. Medical surveillance in itself is not problematic, but could become controversial when what constitutes “health data” is disputed. “In the informatic mode, disease is always virtual (p. 122) which creates a permanent state of emergency. Disease is always looming but kept just out of reach.

Feedback versus Interaction I

            Two models typify the evolution of two-way communication in mass media. In the first model (feedback), information flows in one direction- from the public to the institution. Two-way communication (interaction) is seen in the second model. Here communication occurs within a system of communicative peers where each peer can physically affect another.

Feedback versus Interaction II

            Feedback and interaction also correspond to two different models of control. Feedback corresponds to the cybernetic model of control where one party is always the controlling party and the other is the controlled party (television, radio). Interaction corresponds to a networked model of control where decision making occurs multilaterally and simultaneously. The authors argue that “double the communication leads to double the control” (p. 124) through surveillance, monitoring, biometrics, and gene therapy.

Rhetorics of Freedom

            Technological systems can either be closed or open. Closed systems are generally created by either commercial or state interests (profit through control and scarcity). Open systems are generally associated with the public and political transparency (innovative standards in the public domain). Rather than focus on the opposition between open/closed, the authors examine alternative logics of control. Open control logics use an informatic (material) mode of control, while closed logics use a social model of control. From this perspective, informatic control is equally as powerful (if not more so) than social control.

A Google Search for My Body

            One is either online and accounted for or offline and still accounted for. The body becomes a medium of constant locatability surrounded by personal network devices. For an example, think of how your Facebook page tracks your internet habits. How many people have disconnected the chat function on Facebook or other Instant Messengers because they do not want others to know they are online?

Divine Metabolism

            Life-forms are not merely biological but include social, cultural, and political forms as well, but not all of these have an equal claim on life. Networks are the site where control works through the continual relation to life-form.

The Paranormal and the Pathological I

            Conceptions of health and illness have changed from a quantitative approach (illness as a deviation from the norm) which requires a return to balance to a qualitative one (disease is a different state than health) where medicine’s role is to treat symptoms of the disease. However, the third transition, “disease as error,” is the most telling. In this conception, disease is viewed as an error in the organism. It does not manifest itself in testimony from the patient or in signs expressed on the body. Rather, the disease exists only in itself. It is everywhere and nowhere. Disease is an informatic expression that must be mapped and decoded.

The Paranormal and the Pathological II

            Because disease can occur as a mass phenomenon, includes modes of transmission and contagion, and exists between bodies, it is necessary to evaluate diseases as networks. If the processes that lead to an outbreak have no center and are multicausal, how can they be prevented? Epidemics are both medical situations and political ones. If epidemics are networks, the problem of multiplicities in networks is the tension between sovereignty and control. Compounding this problem is sovereignty found in the supernatural.

Universals of Identification

            Once universal standards of identification are agreed upon, real-time tracking technologies will increase. Space will become rewindable and archivable; the world will exist as a giant convenience store. See these videos about gunshot tracking technology to get an idea of what that world will look like or how it is made possible:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBxqUBA_br8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HENmGHId6vU

RRCOO1b: BmTP

            Molecular biology laboratories employ (at least) two networks to encode, recode, and decode biological information: the informatics network of the Internet and the biological network. The Internet allows for uploading and downloading of biological information and brings together databases, search engines, and specialized hardware. The biological network occurs in-between DNA and an array of other proteins.

Unknown Unknowns

            From Donald Rumsfeld: “Because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” The unknown unknowns bring forth visions of death, fear, and terror, the end of humanity.

Codification, Not Reification

            The new concern for political problems is the extraction of abstract code from objects. The process of bioprospecting, whereby unique genes are harvested for their informational value has reduced individuals to digital forms, ignoring their lived reality. Today’s impoverished populations are expected to give up their labor power as well as their bodily information. “The biomass, not social relations, is today’s site of exploitation” (p.135).

Tactics of Nonexistence

            “The question of nonexistence is this: how does one develop techniques and technologies to make oneself unaccounted for?” (p.135). Nonexistence is tactical for anything that wishes to avoid control.

Disappearance; or, I’ve Seen It All Before

              Disappearance is the by-product of speed. As technology gets faster, one’s physical and biological self disappears amid a plethora of files, photos, video, and a variety of Net tracking data. Bey proposes that nomadism is the response to speed. A “temporary autonomous zone” (TAZ) is a temporary space set-up to avoid formal structural control. Move before the cultural and political mainstream knows what happened.

Stop Motion

            “The question of animation and the question of ‘life’ are often the same question” (p.138). Graph theory begins from the classical division between node and edge and in doing so privileges space over time, site over duration (p.139). Networks can only be thought of in a different way if animation (movement) becomes ontological or a universal right.

Pure Metal

            Cultural constructionism focuses more on the way that gender/sexuality, race/ethnicity, and class/status form, shape, and construct a self than with the innate self or identity. The human subject is decentralized in the process. What about the nonhuman? Regardless of views on the nonhuman (incorporating or discorporating), it continues to be negatively defined. The human is always the starting point for comparison. How then are nonhuman elements that run through or found within humans classified?

The Hypertrophy of Matter (Four Definitions and One Axiom)

            Definition 1. Immanence- the process of exorbitance, of desertion, of spreading out

            Definition 2. Emptiness- the space between things; an edge

            Definition 3. Substance- the continual by-product of the immanence and emptiness; a node

            Definition 4. Indistinction- the quality of relations in a network

            Axiom 1- “Networks have as their central problematic, the fact that they prioritize nodes at the same time as they exist through the precession of edges” (p.143)

The User and the Programmer

            “User” is a synonym for “consumer.” Programmer is a synonym for “producer.” Most legal prohibitions are migrating away from the user model (being) toward programmers (doing). Anyone can be a programmer if he or she chooses. More and more threats to programming are seen in everyday life. Future politics will focus on use over expression.

Interface

            The authors define interface as “an artificial structure of differentiation between two media” (p.144). Differentiation occurs whenever a structure is added to raw data. Data does not appear fully formed and whole but instead gets its shape from social and technical processes. Interface is how dissimilar data forms interoperate.

There is No Content

            Content cannot be separated from the technological vehicles of representation and conveyance that facilitate it. “Meaning is a data conversion” (p.145). There is not content, only data.

Trash, Junk, Spam

            Trash is the set of all things that have been cast out of previous sets, all that which no longer has use. Junk is the set of all things that are not of use at this moment, but may be of use at some time, and certainly may have been of use in the past. Spam is an exploit. “Spam signifies nothing yet is pure signification” (p.146).

CODA: BITS AND ATOM

Networks are always exceptional, in the sense that they are always related, however ambiguously, to sovereignty.

            This ambiguity informs contemporary discussions of networks. Hardt and Negri describe the multitude as a “multiplicity of singularities,” a collective group that remains heterogeneous (the one and the many, sovereignty and multitude). Virno recognizes that the multitude does not clash with the One; it redefines it. Unity is not the State; rather, it is language, intellect, communal faculties of the human race. The fact that the multitude is not “One” is its greatest strength, giving it flexibility that centralized organizations lack.

Contemporary analyses of “multitude” share significant affinities with Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s analysis of “netwar.” In this intersection, political allegiances of Left and Right tend to blur into a strange, shared concern over the ability to control, produce, and regulate networks.

            According to Arquilla and Ronfeldt, “netwar refers to an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of military warfare, in which the protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age” (p.151). Netwar can be waged by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ actors as well as through peaceful or violent measures. The diversity and complexity of netwar makes them an emerging form of political action. It takes a network to fight a network.

Despite their political differences, both the concept of the multitude and the concept of netwars share a common methodological approach: that “the ‘unit of analysis’ is not so much the individual as it is the network in which the individual is embedded.

            The authors believe what is missing from Hardt and Negri and from Arquilla and Ronfeldt is a “new future of asymmetry” (p.152). Resistance IS asymmetry. Formal sameness may bring reform, but formal incommensurability (having no common basis) breeds revolution. “Open” or “free” networks exhibit power relations regardless of the power held by the individuals who comprise them.

At this point, we pause and pose a question: Is the multitude always “human”? Can the multitude or netwars not be human and yet still be “political”? That is, are individuated human subjects always the basic unit of composition in the multitude? If not, the we must admit that forms such as the multitude, netwars, and networks exhibit unhuman as well as human characteristics.

            These questions relate to the nature of constituent power in the age of networks. Not all networks are created equal and often display asymmetrical power relationships. But if no one controls the network, how do we account for such differences and asymmetrics?

Our suggestion may at first seem perplexing. We suggest that the discussions over the multitude, netwars, and networks are really discussions about the unhuman within the human.

            The word “unhuman” does not mean against human or antihuman. Rather, the use of the term is designed to ponder whether these emerging forms go far enough in comprehending the portions of ourselves that are not fully human.

Difficult, even frustrating, questions appear at this point. If no single human entity controls the network in any total way, then can we assume that a network is not controlled by humans in any total way? If humans are only a part of the network, then how can we assume that the ultimate aim of the network is a set of human-centered goals?

            At both the macro and micro levels, it is easy to recognize elements in networks that inhibit total control or total knowledge—computer viruses, infectious diseases, viral marketing or adware, unforeseen interpersonal connections on social networks, and various other biological and man-made phenomena

In fact, it is the very idea of “the total” that is both promised and yet continually deferred in the “inhumanity” of networks, netwars, and even the multitude.

            Networks are constituted by the tension between the agency of individuals within the network and the abstract “whole.”

The network is this combination of spreading out and overseeing, evasion and regulation. It is the accident and the plan. In this sense, we see no difference between the network that works too well and the network that always contains exploits.

            Another perspective, however does see a great difference between successful networks and networks that fail. These differing viewpoints are part of the reason why Internet viruses and infectious diseases evoke such fear and frustration. Networks show us the unhuman in the inhuman and illustrate that individual human subjects are not the basic unit of network constitution.

For this reason, we propose something that is, at first, counterintuitive: to bring our understanding of networks to the level of bits and atoms, to the level of aggregate forms of organization that are material and unhuman, to a level that shows us the unhuman in the human.

            Networks operate through continuous connections and disconnections, but at the same time, they continually posit a topology. They are always taking shape but remain incomplete.

The unhuman aspects of networks challenge us to think in an elemental fashion. The elemental is, in this sense, the most basic and the most complex expression of a network.   

            The central concern of networks is no longer the action of individuals or nodes in the network. Instead what matters more is the action throughout the network, a dispersal of action that requires us to think of networks less in terms of nodes (information) and more in terms of edges (space)—or even in terms other than the entire dichotomy of nodes and edges altogether. “In a sense, therefore, our understanding of networks is all-too-human…” (p.157).

Discussion Questions:

1.      The videos of gunshot tracking give us an idea of how surveillance can be incorporated into society. How could a program such as this be used to track biological happenings? What type of universals would have to be agreed upon?

2.      On page 118, the authors assert that network science “seeks a universal pattern that exists above and beyond the particulars of any given network. For this reason, network science can study AIDS, terrorism, and the Internet all as the same kind of being—a network.” What are the similarities between biological and man-made networks? Are there differences?