the wherewithal

The day after the British government raised the UK terrorist threat level to severe, foreign secretary David Miliband came onto the Andrew Marr show to tell him that—in respect of the threat posed by Al-Qaeda ‘the danger remains very real’. He went on: ‘You’ve seen this week that the Home Secretary has thought it right to raise the threat level back to the level it’s been for most of the period since 9/11…It remains the case that we need to be extremely vigilant.’ At more or less the same time, I was reading Massumi’s essay on the US system of colour coded terror alerts (currently sitting at a relatively becalmed yellow (for ‘elevated’), I note).¹  (If I had more time and I wasn’t just a little intimidated, I would be tempted acquiesce to the shouty instruction on www.terror-alert.com to ‘PUT A REAL-TIME TERROR-ALERT WARNING ON YOUR WEBSITE’). Given this serendipity, what has Brian Massumi to teach to David Miliband?

Massumi opens with a Bushism: ‘The future will be better tomorrow’. Says/said Bush. (Except that it is likely he didn’t and that Dan Quayle, as Massumi notes, did. But that…is not the point.) For Massumi, this mangled bit of syntax speaks to the particular relationship to the future that these alerts have. They address not only the British/American citizen, but also the future. They address the future by promising a better tomorrow, that might one day progress gently from yellow to blue. And maybe, just maybe, one day from blue to green (the sylvan world of a ‘low risk of terrorist attacks’). But, argues Massumi, in so doing they also bring the future into the present. The future becomes a (Deleuzian) ‘virtual cause’—an effect of which may be—but not necessarily is—fear. The future, populated by not yet to be’s and possibly might happens, is invited to act in present, but–in all its colour coded vaguery—retains more than enough ambiguity/indeterminacy for the general public to be unable to respond in any meaningful way (what, for instance, might being extremely vigilant practicably involve?). As Massumi says, ‘A threat is unknowable. If it were known in its specifics, it wouldn’t be a threat. It would be a situation—as when they say on television police shows, “we have a situation”—and a situation can be handled. A threat is only a threat if it retains an indeterminacy.’

It is precisely this indeterminacy that David Miliband both invokes and struggles with in his interview with Marr. He—presumably—knows more than us, having access to some of the intelligence that has informed the raised threat level. He of course can’t convey this to us/Marr. But even so, this intelligence is still ambiguous. Even with his likely access to a wealth of intelligence information, for Miliband, the indeterminacy of the threat differs only by degree. Perhaps nothing will happen, but perhaps it will. Perhaps the intelligence is wrong, or perhaps he doubts it. Or perhaps plotters will bungle, or perhaps they will attack somewhere else. But all he has to give to Andrew Marr is the threat level. And a face set to stern. And the danger that remains ‘very real’.

Of course, this latter invocation of the hyper-real is something of a tautology: dangers are inherently real; they differ only by the amount of danger, not their reality. Swimming in a flood of doubt, Miliband strikes for reality, but finds it insubstantial, leaving him foundering to find another, realer version.

But rather than judge, perhaps Milliband and Massumi might be made to agree. Miliband evokes a real that not only transcends what we know, but also what he knows. A real that is a part of/immanent to, yet beyond what it is possible to know. Where Miliband finds the very real is perhaps where Massumi also might find ‘the virtual’, that realm of sheer potential, folding together pasts, presents, futures, with what could and should have been. Either way, such a meeting of minds is entirely in this spirit; after all, as Massumi says, ‘The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect.² That being the case, Massumi: meet Miliband.

Interesting to note the rise of credit card liabilities as a potential major issue for US financial services companies. Bank of America’s recently announced figures reveal that it is the credit card division that has trumped other losses in the business - including that incurred by having to pay back the US government some of its bailout money. This raises the question: is unsecured credit default the sting in the tail of the secured credit crisis?

Just a quick addition to the previous reflections on topology. I have just been rereading Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual, and his distinction between Euclidean and non-Euclidean topological forms seemed particularly appropriate to the differences between networked and recursive topologies. The following passage, from a section titled ‘Notes on terminology’, certainly helped me clarify my thinking. He writes (the full chapter is also available on his website - I have also added a few relevant links):

“Topology” and “non-Euclidean” are not synonyms. Although most topologies are non-Euclidean, there are Euclidean topologies. A Möbius strip or a Klein bottle are Euclidean figures, of one and two dimensions respectively. The distinction that is most relevant here is between topological transformation and static geometric figure: between the process of arriving at a form through continuous deformation, and the determinate form arrived at when the process stops. An infinite number of static figures may be extracted from a single topological transformation. The transformation is a kind of superfigure that is defined not by invariant formal properties, but by continuity of transformation. For example, a torus and a coffee-cup belong to the same topological figure because one can be deformed into the other without cutting. Anything left standing when the deformation is stopped at any moment, in its passage through any point in-between, also belongs to their shared figure. The overall topological figure is continuous and multiple. As a transformation, it is defined by vectors rather than coordinate points. A vector is transpositional: a moving-through points. Because of its vectorial nature, the geometry of the topological superfigure cannot be separated from its duration. The figure is what runs-through an infinity of static figures. It is not itself determinate, but determinable. Each static figure stands for its determination, but does not exhaust it. The overall figure exceeds any of its discrete stations, and even all of them taken together as an infinite set. This is because between any two points in Euclidean space, no matter how close, lies another definable point. The transformation joining the points in the same superfigure always falls between Euclidean points. It recedes, continuously, into the between.¹

Important looking event being advertised over at Socializing Finance:

http://socfinance.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/conference-announcement-reembedding-finance/

Just got back from the excellent ATACD Cultures of Change conference in Barcelona.

The conference explored the possibilities opened up by thinking of the social world along topological lines. In that respect, most interesting for me were those approaches that tried to take on the challenge posed to thinking about social (and material) connectedness as posed by mathematical descriptions of multidimensional, recursive, mutually enfolding topological spaces. These approaches sat in contrast to work that focused more on attempting to the connections between entities that are thought of as more or less discrete – descriptions of which were often accounted for by reference to topological networks. This can be somewhat oversimplified – with the help of some of Wikipedia’s finest – as topological space A vs topological space B:

Topological space A         Topological space B

Translating concepts from the natural to the social sciences is, however, a notoriously difficult and potentially problematic task, as – for me – was exemplified in one session, in which a discussion broke out about whether or not thinking topology could serve as a useful metaphor for the analysis of social life. The debate can be very loosely summarised as follows:

The challenge: given that a topological way of thinking about the world rejects seeing entities as standing for other entities, isn’t using topology as a metaphor inherently un-topological?

The defence: while mathematics can afford the luxury of operating in a world of pure concepts, entering the social world requires an entry into the world of the metaphor. This is because language is inherently metaphorical and consequently, so is culture. In that light, while the concept of topology may be useful in shedding a different light on the things we study, it can only do so when used metaphorically.

Perhaps there is a route between these two. For now, I will leave the question open, but if anyone has some thoughts, post away.

In the meantime, you might want to have a look around the topological media lab. This is a project that really does try to take the challenge of topology seriously. It’s chaired by Sha Xin Wei from Concordia University, who I not only saw speak at the conference – but who also led a group of PhD student in an interactive workshop. He was, it has to be said, pretty great. If you prefer the written word, there is also a draft of an article he wrote for the journal Configurations available to download here.

If you have a working knowledge of either Spanish or Catalan, you would do well do check out this Network & Matters blog, which addresses many things relational. My sources tell me that there may be some English posts too in future, so keep an eye…

Opening up another front in the battle to replace bothersome cash with a form of e-money, mobile phone provider O2 (‘powered by Natwest’) has launched a new pre-pay Visa card aimed at teenagers, the Guardian reports.

The card will be available for those aged 13 and over and some safeguards in place around parental control. It’s not possible to borrow on the card, so, in its Q&A for concerned parents, the article instead focuses its worries around the (seedy) world that having a Visa card might open up for an errant teen: ‘So what’s going to stop them buying porn or booze over the net?’ Well, the challenges of explaining to your parents what the crate of alchopops is doing on the doorstep for one. Sexually explicit material? Yes, that is perhaps a concern. But,  as O2 I’m sure know, phones are already being used by young people as a vehicle for this already.

More interesting to me is the footnote to the story is the parallel launch of the very similar ‘Cash Manager’ card for adults, making it the first mass-market, fee free, pre-pay Visa card. As the article highlights, this means that ‘Britain’s unbanked – especially recent immigrants, but all those refused banking facilities – can obtain a Visa card for free’ (you do also have to have an O2 phone).

It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on both takeup and the precise ways in which these two cards actually come to be used, as they are integrated into people’s everyday lives.

Have just come across these irresistable 19th century reflections on the over confidence in reality that accompanies some altered states of mind. By pragmatist philosopher William James, in his essay ‘The Perception of Reality‘:

One of the charms of drunkenness unquestionably lies in the deepening of the sense of reality and truth which is gained therein. In whatever light things may then appear to us, they seem more utterly what they are, more ‘utterly utter’ than when we are sober. This goes to a fully unutterable extreme in the nitrous oxide intoxication, in which a man’s very soul will sweat with conviction, and he be all the while unable to tell what he is convinced of at all.

Putting the simple pleasure of coming across this in what you expect to be a perhaps dry essay on perception and reality, William James’ essay is fascinating. (I must admit to only just finding out about James’ extensive personal experimentation with nitrous oxide).

The problem with trying to get to the bottom of ‘what it is’ to believe in reality, as far as James sees it, is that - as in the case of the overconfident drunk - belief on its own does not go very far to telling you about how real something is or isn’t. In fact a state of total skepticism as to the reality of the world (for James, not a hypothetical state - giving as an example those afflicted with what he refers to as ‘questioning mania’) is not a radically different state of mind, but, to put it simply, just the flip side of the same coin.

For James, you won’t really get very far in just trying to get to the bottom of a particular belief, in its own terms. The more interesting question is ‘Under what circumstances do we think things real?’ (his italics).

It’s an essay that also seems to have fascinated Erving Goffman. He quotes the same central question at the beginning of his sociological classic, Frame Analysis, commenting that

[t]he important thing about reality, [James] implied, is our sense of its realness in contrast to our feeling that some things lack this quality. One can then ask under what conditions such a feeling is generated, and this question speaks to a small, manageable problem having to do with the camera and not what it is the camera takes pictures of. ¹

What Goffman admired about James was his attention to the organisation of experience, not its its inner nature. Or, to continue his metaphor, an attention to the camera, its history, how it came to be facing a particular slice of the world in a particular way, held by a particular person, with a particular set of photographic skills.

But what Goffman perhaps misses is perhaps an attention to the transformative capacities of camera itself. This attention has been provided in sociological thinking by the loose collection of work that goes under the rubric of Actor Network Theory (a quite horrible term), which make central to their work an examination of the transformative role played by a full range of material entities (including, but certainly not limited to cameras) which continually, and in a quite practical sense, ‘make’ the world. These writers are happy to give agency not only to people, but to a huge range of things non-human.

That also perhaps makes them closer, here, to James than Goffman. After all, James is, in both his writing, and his personal experimentation, making explicit the transformative power of particular combinations of (non human) chemicals on the (human) body. Which in turn reminds me of a classic early Actor Network Theory paper by Gomart and Hennion, in their study of drug users and music lovers. Like James, they are interested in the ways a particular world is composed, rather than hunting for its inner cores. Or, as they put it, an attention to the ways that ‘the subject can emerge as she actively submits herself to a collection of constraints’ (whether by taking a drug, or entering a musical reverie).² The question is not, therefore, whether or not it’s ‘the drink talking’, but the ways in which ‘utter reality’ of drunkenness emerge.

In our everyday journeys through public space, I was reminded recently that, when it comes to walking, it’s not simply where that matters, but how. The ‘how’, I will return to – the ‘where’ in this instance was the gleaming air conditioned interior of the new Heathrow Terminal 5.

It came in the shape of an encounter, a negotiation, between me and Imran. Between me, a bored civilian, waiting to pick up his girlfriend, and him, a bored representative of the state. Imran (a pseudonym) was a police community support officer (PCSO), a few hours into his shift, who stopped me for questioning. It was an exchange that left me somewhat bemused, holding a Metropolitan Police 5090 form (a sample of which have been uploaded onto Flickr here), whose ballpoint inscriptions acted as evidence that our conversation had been circumscribed by certain norms of officialdom. The form (an identical carbon copy was whisking its way to what I imagine to be the nebulous caverns of a Metropolitan Police records department) recorded, as might be expected, my personal details, and that our negotiations had satisfied Imran that a more invasive form of interaction, a search, wasn’t necessary.

Let me be clear. I wasn’ particularly shocked. Or outraged. Or distressed. Partly, I am sure, this is because I was, without too much critical thought on my part, adding my contribution to the largely passive acceptance on the part of many global city dwellers of what seem to be the norm of increasingly intrusive urban policing. But partly it was because the episode had been so very congenial (I do, of course recognise, that this is not always the case – in particular, I can’t help but wonder what the atmosphere would have been had my ethnicity and appearance more closely approached a terrorist stereotype). In fact, once Imran had left, my realisation that it had taken up a whole 15 minutes of my time meant that it was, on one level at least, far more successful, and cheap, than the coffee and muffin which I had just finished nursing, aimed at achieving the same result.

My bemusement emerged more from the reasons given for me being – literally – stopped. When Imran halted me, passing a peculiarly alien-shaped Krispy Kreme stand, he told me he had noticed me ‘wandering around’. Well, of course, he was right. I had. More precisely, I had been engaged in a kind of shuffling, meandering, time wasting gait, taking in the full scope of the arrivals hall, and lacking any clearly defined destination. It was the kind of ambling that, I now fully realise, can attract attention, if performed in the wrong places. I actually suspect, however, that it was not just this that attracted Imran’s gaze, but the combination of this haphazard stroll with another suspicious tendency: a lazy wandering eye, as I sought to take in the vaulting interior of the latest addition to London’s global transportation infrastructure. I can only presume that, for Imran, this behaviour sat in visible contrast to the more directed activity of others in the terminal.

It would be easy to be reactionary about this. But perhaps, in this case, a little too easy. The result might be to obscure the specifically mundane character of our encounter. As Imran told me, he been engaged in a wandering activity of his own before noticing me, up and down the length of the terminal concourse, in the hope of spotting someone, anyone, that he felt he could, with at least some justification, stop. This would enable him, he implied, to feel like he was doing his job. Because Imran was bored and, it seemed, demoralised. The problem was, he said, that his transfer to Terminal 5 had meant that his days had slowed to an ambling pace. Having previously worked in the older, more ramshackle and chaotic Heathrow terminals, with the hustle and bustle excitement of too many people crammed into spaces too small, Terminal 5 with its open, empty spaces (a feature central to the recent ‘Terminal 5 is working’ campaign) was plain and simply dull. ‘What I really want to do’ (I paraphrase), ‘is bag thefts. Here, there’s not enough people around. Who would try to steal a bag here?’. No bag thefts meant no chases, not much excitement, and hence, a life of slow, gallery-paced walking. Imran had, therefore, requested a transfer back to Terminal 4, to where his daily life could accelerate to a pace he preferred and where he could feel like (to echo The Wire), ‘real police’.

There is, however, an absent third figure in this encounter, invisible to Imran, to whom I am tempted to attribute at least some causal responsibility. Immediately prior to my stroll, while finishing off my coffee, I had been reading Michelle Murphy’s excellent book, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty.¹ It provides a sophisticated historical analysis of the interplay between the fabric of, in particular, office buildings and the people that work and move through them, focusing, as the title suggests, on the emergence of the, prior to the 1980s, non existent sick building syndrome. The specifics of the analysis are compelling, but it was the more general attention to the innards of modern buildings that got me thinking then, while passing time in Terminal 5. It was the book that prompted me to look up, to see if I could see the air ducts, the cables, to think about the work that had gone into making Terminal 5 itself work. And, after looking up, it was the book that prompted me to begin to wander, to begin to try and understand how the building was moving people around, keeping them settled, funnelling them in and out, directing their attention, keeping them cool. This was then, a very direct example (even if perhaps not quite what Murphy has in mind), of the way in which, as she put it in a paper presented yesterday at the Oxford University Scalography workshop, ‘one’s own analysis re-narrates or disrupts the terrain of matters’.²

This re-narration continued for me once Imran had left. As I began to process what had just occurred, Murphy’s theoretical analysis of the relationship between buildings and people came into focus. She considers some of the results of considering buildings as ‘assemblages’, existing in a dynamic relationship with the bodies that inhabit them; of tracing their ‘mutual presupposition’, their transformative ‘mutual capture’ (12). In particular, she traces the ongoing coming into being ‘regimes of perception’ in which these assemblages are implicated. These regimes, she writes, ‘establish what phenomena become perceptible, and thus what phenomena come into being for us, giving objects boundaries and imbuing them with qualities’ (24).

The assemblage of Terminal 5 consisted, on that day, of not only me, Imran, thousands of other visitors, and the full range of material devices to transport us there and feed, heat, and entertain us. For also incorporated in amongst the assemblage was the necessary legal architecture that provided Imran with the power to stop me in the first place. As a Community Support officer, his power to stop and search is limited to specifically designated areas, as laid out the Terrorism Act 2000; Heathrow airport, I have to presume, is such a place. It was this that made me perceptible to Imran, as much as the fact that my trajectory through the terminal’s interior and my wayward gaze didn’t quite match up to that expected of its visitors.

Terminal 5 Flickr fragments

Richard Rogers’ building, whose initial design was first put out for planning approval in 1994 (the process lasted until 1999), has been hailed by some as a ‘cathedral to flight’. The analogy only goes so far, however. A cathedral invites contemplation, both of its interior detail and exterior grandeur. However, Terminal 5 – along with other new airport buildings I suspect – practically forbids both. The difficulties for the public in seeing the building as a whole can be evidenced by a quick search on Flickr.³ The results (a sample of which are above) are a myriad collection of fragments – some external, but most internal – comprising the largely empty open spaces that Imran found so frustrating, as well as supporting beams, courtyards, fountains, announcement boards, train terminals, shopping zones and, of course, the panes of the glass cladding which cover much of the building. Only a tiny minority capture the building as a whole (most are tiny, from plane windows). But the kind of contemplation of internal detail that these photos allow online, are, as I discovered, similarly difficult to achieve in situ (I wonder if some of the Flickr photographers, presuming they lacked permission, like me, also ended up clutching a 5090 form). Given the sensitivities around the security of airport spaces, the ‘regime of perception’ at work in the Terminal 5 assemblage does not, somewhat ironically, permit a gaze too focused on its much vaunted splendour. It is a building that is not only designed to be passed through without noticing, but is also policed as such. In such a situation, aimless ambling coupled with a deliberate attempt to notice, poses an unlikely, if mundane, challenge. Not that Imran minded; I got that distinct impression as he walked away to continue his far longer daily wander, that my minor inadvertant challenge, and our subsequent conversation, had ever so slightly improved his morning.

Was today struck by the parallel’s between Latour’s and Sloterdijk’s attention to ‘what it means to inhabit a place‘ and Vonnegut’s to what it means to de-inhabit one, with the aid of too well designed ‘artificial weather’. Writing in Slaughterhouse-Five:

The colonel asked old Derby how he had been captured, and Derby told a tale of being in a clump of trees with about a hundred other frightened soldiers. The battle had been going on for five days. The hundred had been driven into the trees by tanks.

Derby described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more. Shells were burting into treetops with terrific bangs, he said, showering down knives and needles and razorblades. Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sounds.

A lot of people were being wounded or killed. So it goes.

Then the shelling stopped, and a hidden German with a loudspeaker told the Americans to put their weapons down and come out of the woods with their hands on the top of their heads, or the shelling would start again. It wouldn’t stop until everyone in there was dead.

So the Americans put their weapons down, and they came out of the woods with their hands on top of their heads, because they wanted to go on living if they possibly could.