Dave Young - Thesis

The first chapter of the thesis will provide an historical context for my argument through the analysis of past examples of institutionalised distributed control systems. By this I mean a system within an institution (the church, the state, the military, industry) in which there is a tactical distribution of power and accountability over a given process in order to encourage complicity. I would like to examine the firing squad as a prime example of a such a system, it being a ritual with processes specifically designed to share the power (and thus disguise the identity of the executioner) among a squad of soldiers. In addition to this, I would like to discuss the use of such systems within industry, with particular reference to the assembly line as a system of distributed control. I would like to finish the chapter by summarising that these systems are designed to abstract the distribution of power in order to permit the participants to engage with a process they might otherwise find objectionable.

Throughout history, there are innumerable examples of social systems based around a strategic distribution of power and control. The equal sharing of power among a civil populace is generally considered a utopian ideal: a truly egalitarian society is a fair society, goes the common argument. This ideal has produced some of the dominant paradigms of political thought – from classic Greek democracy to Marxism. History has thought us otherwise, of course. In fact, there are many examples where the concepts of social egalitarianism is exploited, in order to be used as a strategic disguise for an uneven distribution of institutional power. The dominant institutions that formulate a society – the church, the state, industry – have all appropriated this exploitation throughout history in order to exert an abstraction of control over an assembly of people – such as a congregation, a population, or a labour force. An abstraction of power and control is useful, I will argue, as it helps to facilitate complicity in a process that requires the participation of a disciplined assembly . Depending on the institutional context, this process can take the form of the manufacturing of a mass-produced product with the use of an assembly line, or the ritual of the military firing squad as a traditional method of execution, for example. In this chapter, I would like to analyse some of these examples, discussing how power/control was distributed among the members of the assembly, and what this allowed the institutional governors of the assembly to produce.

"I am an engineer and I work for an electrical corporation. The workers think we produce vacuum cleaners. The students think we make machine guns. This vacuum cleaner can be a valuable weapon. This machine gun can be a useful household appliance. What we produce is the product of the workers, students, and engineers." Inextinguishable Fire (1969)

Harun Farocki, a prolific video artist working from the mid 1960s to the present, hardly shied away from difficult subjects. Farocki's vision in The Inextinguishable Fire was to comment not only on the questionable ethics of the Vietnam war, but to make a more general statement about how a greater division of labour facilitates complicity in the production of unethical commodities – for example, napalm. The Dow Chemical Corporation, manufacturers of napalm, employed a collection of researchers, engineers, and scientists to assist with the design and production process. In doing so, no one person offered a truly individual contribution to the development of the highly controversial weapon. Instead, it was approached like a puzzle: “yes, it is a fire that is inextinguishable – but you can also make it stick to skin?” And so, the task was distributed among the teams of researchers, scientists, and engineers.

Farocki plays with film as a recombinant media form, drawing you into an unexpected conclusion about factory labour and complicity. He repeats a scene where an assembly-line worker is describing what he produces in the factory assembly line, recombining the product he believes he is producing with the product the factory actually produces. By dividing the work along an assembly line of workers, Farocki suggests, the relationship between the individual workers and the product becomes abstracted to the point where the workers have only an objective relationship with the product they are creating. Farocki exposes this conceptual disconnection between production and function in the minds of the labourers as a devastating prospect. If both control and accountability are abstracted by way of distribution among a large body of workers, are we really much more willing to engage in a production process in conflict with what we deem to be ethical?

For me, The Inextinguishable Fire only gains more relevance in the post-industrial information age. If the assembly line abstracts the dynamics of control and accountability through distribution among numerous human labourers, then the introduction of the computer into the production process only further complicates our conceptual understanding of responsibility. My current work is dealing with this precise topic, with respect to post World War II technologies of war – one example being the current emphasis on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV, or drone) being an example of an abstracted division of labour between both an assembly network of humans and machines. Do the increased levels of automation in modern warfare somehow oil the frictions of ethics? The Inextinguishable Fire seems to suggest it does.