Radars and fences, satellites and walls, networks and bunkers. Two
different sets of technologies confront us: the former are transparent,
discreet, mobile, and selective; the latter are opaque, conspicuous,
immobile, and non-discriminating. The former epitomize the modulating
and flexible character of what Gilles Deleuze termed the “societies of
control” while the latter embody the “old” disciplinary paradigm based
on separation, physical mass containment, and restriction of the freedom
of movement. Most of the times control and discipline coexist and
reinforce each other; sometimes they seem to collide. This is due to a
variety of far-reaching factors and transformations occurred in the
productive sphere over the last three decades.
If the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of ICT seemed to
foretell, if only for a while, the decline of disciplinary apparatuses,
the new millennium presents us with an extremely functional “return” of
dividing and enclosing technologies – from the U.S.-Mexico fence and
Israel-Palestine wall to the steady growth of the U.S. prison-industrial
system. In other words, besides that such a "return" may be in fact a
process of constant strengthening, the Foucaultian disciplinary paradigm
and the Deleuzian control societies are coming to form a mesh, where
individualized immaterial control and physical mass containment of the
workforce seem perfectly integrated and complementary.
However, if in authoritarian states such as China and Iran such
integration of discipline and control needs little justification in
ideological terms (at least on the inside), in the West such a
co-existence is not frictionless. During the Cold War, the emerging
rhetoric of transparency and accountability associated with control
societies had primarily a propagandistic function against the opacity
and closeness of real socialism. But with the rise of the network
society, transparency has increasingly become a necessary and material
component of open workflows, management methods, and governance. At the
same time though, an excess of openness puts at risk industrial secrets,
military R&D, intellectual property assets, state secrets, and political
careers.
To be sure, in the control societies access to information is restricted
and modulated by codes and passwords. However, a number of notable
examples – from the Abu Ghraib scandal to the leaking of the Windows
source code, from the unveiling of the NSA eavesdropping program to the
CIA extraordinary renditions – show how hard it is for governments and
corporations to obfuscate and seclude information from public scrutiny.
And yet, there are areas of public life that formidably resist the
rhetoric of transparency: around the 10 per cent of the DoD budget is
allocated to the so-called “black programs,” top-secret military
programs whose very existence and name is unacknowledged by the
government; immigrants’ detention facilities are situated in the
remotest regions; and biotech research is highly protected in spite of
its far-reaching consequences on the ecosystem and human life.
On the other hand, it is the very structure of the network society, with its
decentralization of tasks and constant multiplication of electronic eyes
that threatens the opacity of physical and immaterial bunkers. By
looking at the grey areas where control and discipline, transparency and
secrecy, democracy and the state of exception overlap and collide,
Radars and Fences provide a cross-disciplinary and experimental platform
whereby researchers, artists, journalists, and activists can negotiate
new and critical positions.
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