1st Final Essay: Choreography of Identitarian Control

CHOREOGRAPHY OF IDENTITARIAN CONTROL

The architecture of our public space is telling us lots of stories about the politics of our identities. The regulations and laws of our technological system of control are written in our public bodies. The motion of our steps into the topological spaces of the city, the street, the airports, or the flow of our gestures, behaviors and reactions are embodied relationships with the politics of social fields. There is nothing that is not political. Even the weight of a step can tell important informations about society. The mechanic of the “society of control” is the mechanic of our subjective and quantifiable movements. The self is now a “quantifiable”-self: the accessibility to the code depict the position of our identity and the way we move around the “identitarian” technologies of control.

Is the automatic language of our bio-technologies able to connect with our cognitive capacities?

Is really necessary to form a connection and assimilation with these structures of power and quantifiability?

What happens when we resist against the connection with the automaton?

Starting with the analysis by Foucault of the “disciplinary society” as an organization of vast spaces of enclosure, and going through the concept of “society of control” of Deleuze that replaces the foucaultian model with a system of perpetual numeric identification, networking and finding footing among identities, in order to designate a meaning to the act of moving though our spaces. In the society of control the identity exist in parallel to a code that gives to the body an opportunity to access informations and mobility. Individuals have become data, masses, samples, banks. The numeric monetarian system has pervaded the social life of individuals. Money is a “self-referential sign” that can mobilize and control our social tissue of relationships and production. The aleatory global economy is indeed based on finance: an abstract game of speculation, as described by F.Berardi in his essay “Is there life beyond money?”. Money, or the code, is the key of access to any kind of experience. The immateriality of money and finance and their diffusion into every aspect of individual’s life produces a “capital relation” , a creation of value from the embracement with the social aspects of our lives. The financial capitalism is working in capturing energies and resources and transforming them into monetary value. Money itself act like a language: as a metaphor, a bridge, a tool to persuade and mobilize. The technologies of control and surveillance are consequences of the operations of the market. Market uses them to control unlimitedly the network of the social instances. The consequences of this “informational capitalism” are social exclusion, disconnected population groups and ghettoization of the “offline” populations. The more mobile we become, the more our behaviors acts in “capsule” . Capsularization, as De Cauter describes in his book “The Capsular Civilization”, is the act of extending the body as artificial environment. An organicism of the inorganic. A capsulae is a device that creates an artificial and enclosed environment. Within these spaces we form new patterns of habits. Consuming, producing and controlling are all forms of capsular habits. Our territories are in parallel consequences of the capsulae existence: decentralized logics of production, communication and mobility are characteristic of our spaces and paradigm of the way we move through them.

In my essay I want to analyze the space of the airport as a metaphor of the “capsular mobility”. New liminal spaces are regulating the intersectional movement in borders spaces in order to control and limit people’s and things movements. Lots of surveillance and disciplinary technologies are imposed in border-spaces like the airports. In these kind of spaces our movements are being watched, checked, classified, quantified and in certain condition arrested, blocked and immobilized. Despite of the global capability of our financial system, the mobility of our public bodies is still enforced by technological devices that limit, control and gives a number to our identity.

In a world where national boundaries are collapsing in the name of a transnational circulation of ideas, languages and popular culture where lies the meaning of being public? Does a public and free zone exists in the global village? Which are the contradictions within the concept of globality regarding our necessity of moving freely in (public) space?

I would like to answer to these research questions with a performative act within the space of the airport of Schiphol, Amsterdam. (It is not by chance that Schiphol is one of the first airports that uses bio-metrics technologies of surveillance) The performance consist in a choreography of movements that traverses the architecture of the airport while revealing the devices of surveillance and quantifiability. A sort of choreography of illegal movements that analyze and reflects upon the system of quantifiability of people’s intents. The choreography will be published on a little instruction book of movements that could be distributed to the passengers at the entrance of an airport. The publication should be accompanied by a physical performance within the space of the airport. Playing and imitating the regulations of the airport without getting into real troubles. At the moment I’m studying all the different surveillance dispositive that are usually present in airports, and from this analysis I want to define a sort of itinerary that emphasize and go through all the different technologies used in airport to limit our movements.

The choreography will be a sort of game to “watch the watchers” - “surveil the surveillance”.

Conclusion:

This action will be my personal answer to the question: “ can we connect with the automaton?” The answer is neither yes and no. We can try to connect only with simplifying and watching its structures. Only with a conscious stance and clarity we can try to translate into human language the codes of the machines. The functionally complexity of our technologies needs to cease to be invisible and incomprehensible.

Bibliography:

Berardi F. "Is There Life Beyond Money?", Money Lab Reader, An Intervention in Digital Economy", Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2015;

"Malinche and the end of the world", The Internet Doesn't exist, Sternberg Press, 2015;

Castells M. "The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I", Wiley-Blackwell, 2 edition (August 17, 2009);

De Cauter L. "The Capsular Civilization, On the City in the Age of Fear", NAi Uitgevers, 2004;

Deleuze G., "Postscript on the Societies of Control", October, vol.59 , pp. 3-7, MIT Press, 1992;

Lazzarato M. " Immaterial Labor", Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Paolo Vimo and Michael Hardy;