User:Cristinac/SomeResearch

SECRECY, AUTHORSHIP AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCIENTISTS - Hugh Gusterson

...refused science’s cult of individual fame by publishing, starting in 1934, under the collective nom de plume Nicolas Bourbaki.

... The Livermore Laboratory, America’s second weapons laboratory, was founded in 1952 in order to intensify work on the atomic and hydrogen bombs as the cold war escalated. Most parts of the laboratory are off-limits to the public, and access to spaces and to information for its 8,000 employees (almost 3,000 of them scientists and engineers with Ph.D.s) is regulated by an elaborate system of rules and taboos.

... A few areas on the perimeter of the laboratory are “white areas” accessible to the public. (These areas include two cafeterias, the Public Affairs office, the Visitors’ Center, etc.)

...Large parts of the laboratory are “red areas” that are off-limits to the public, although only open research is done there.

...“green areas,” constituting roughly half of the laboratory in the 1980s, where secret research is done.

...Within the green areas, there are also special exclusion areas, set apart by barbed wire fences and guard booths, accessible only to a few. The plutonium facility, for example, is in an exclusion area, as is the facility where intelligence reports are handled.

...In the localized face-to-face community of weapons designers, this credit would be established and circulated as much by word of mouth—in gossip and in formal presentations—as through the written documentation of individual contributions and achievements.

...In some ways the national security state has created a national intellectual economy analogous to the traditional unmonetarized African economies described by Paul Bohannon in which there were separate spheres of exchange that could not be integrated so that, for example, the beads of one family could be exchanged for the cloth but not the food of another family, since beads and food, circulating in different spheres, were untradeable and non-convertible.

...At the other extreme are scientists the very titles of whose publications are secret, so that their resumés are, to the outside world, surrealistically blank after years of labor.

...one scientist told me that one of his colleagues won the prestigious Lawrence Award for his work, but he was never able to find out what his colleague had done

...There was a mill for publishing the results of test shots, the latest methods for calculating opacities and so on. But there was no serious library for these reports in the early days. The reports would get thrown in a room, then someone would take one and hold on to it and that article would now be officially “misplaced.” (That’s why the GAO found that 10,000 secret documents were missing at Livermore. They’re not exactly lost. They’re not floating around outside the lab. They’re in people’s offices somewhere.) Old-timers would have safes full of documents inherited from someone else who retired ten years earlier. So, when they retired, you’d get those documents transferred to you, and that was a sort of library. In other words, even within the laboratory, knowledge could be stored and exchanged in highly localized ways.

...In these large hierarchical science institutions intellectual value, or capital, tends to behave in the same way as material value in large capitalist institutions: it is extracted from those on the bottom, who create it through labor, accruing as wealth to those on the top. Thus in the large science laboratories the labor of a Seth Neddermeyer is transmuted into the reputation of a Robert Oppenheimer.

...Michel Foucault (1977, 147) has observed that the modern individualist idea of the author has a “classificatory function,” since the author’s “name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them with others.”

...As Martha Woodmansee (1994a) argues, while copying and embellishing the work of others used to be seen as a form of authorship in its own right in mediaeval Europe, in the context of contemporary copyright law and current ideologies of authorial individualism, copying is now seen as a highly degraded form of creativity.

...And, far from circulating freely, the written knowledge produced within the laboratory often cannot leave the laboratory (unless it is going to Los Alamos) and, even within the laboratory, may lie dormant in safes or travel eccentric routes of exchange marked by chains of friendship rather than being universally available.

...The knowledge they have produced largely circulates outside the commodified sphere of exchange regulated and constrained by copyright laws and the academic promotions treadmill. And many Livermore scientists, in a critique of academic culture that is increasingly resonant for this author, criticize the cult of individual assessment in the university and the emphasis in academia on stockpiling refereed articles as commodities, even if hardly anyone reads many of them.

LIQUID SURVEILLANCE: The Contribution of Zygmunt Bauman to Surveillance Studies - David Lyon

...‘‘Whether in their consciousness or their subconscious, men and women of our times are haunted by the spectre of exclusion’’ (2004a:47) This relates to the sea change that has occurred between the ‘‘social state and the security state’’ in which ‘‘state provisions gradually turned from token’s of citizen’s rights into tools of social exclusion and symptoms… of social stigma’’

...Those thereby excluded are the ‘‘weeds in the consumerist garden, people short of cash, credit cards and⁄ or shopping enthusiasm and otherwise immune to the blandishments of marketing’’

...Power, Bauman asserts, is evaporating from the nation state into (using Manuel Castells’ expression) the electronically facilitated ‘‘space of flows’’ (Bauman in Davis and Tester 2010:204).

...Here, the sense of flow becomes palpable as personal information moves constantly from the individual to the database and back again, via experiences of access and denial, inclusion and exclusion, privileges, rewards and benefits or lack thereof.

...The old, solid institutions of marketing or crime control have become fluid and rapidly adaptive in a world of softwares and networks. The old enclosures, like the panopticon, in which surveillance disciplines were instilled, are gone, and in their place only something resembling Gilles Deleuze’s audio-visual protocols check and trace us in a mobile world. Or rather, they are now supplemented—not supplanted—by the controls that admit or deny access, indicate eligibility or exclusion.

...Following an insight of Ernst Gellner, Bauman contrasts the premodern as ‘‘wild culture’’ that needs no conscious care to reproduce, with the modern ‘‘garden’’ culture that requires constant tending and where supervision is needed to rid the place of weeds. So ‘‘gardeners’’ take over from ‘‘gamekeepers,’’ David Lyon 327 believing themselves to be responsible for the cultivation and welfare of all. Surveillance and education accompany the destruction of popular culture and the tending of compliant plants. ‘‘Civilizing’’ appeared to be curiously close in practical meaning to ‘‘policing’’ and ‘‘culture’’ could in some respects be ‘‘legislated.’’ In this world, Max Weber’s myth of the ascendant Puritan made much sense. Or rather, as Bauman suggests, the myth started to make sense just as the figure of the Puritan began decisively to disappear.

...The theme of panoptic dismantling and replacement by self-surveillance and monitoring reappears in a number of Bauman’s works (e.g., 1998a, 2001a,b, 2002), and it is worthwhile to examine the elaboration of this idea. In Globalization, for example, he notes Mark Poster’s (1996 and reprinted elsewhere) Foucaldian comments on the ‘‘superpanopticon’’ but insists that the similarities are super- ficial. The database, after all, determines who should be included for full access to consumer privilege. It is not intended to prevent escape. For Bauman, it is a ‘‘vehicle of mobility, not the fetters keeping people in place.’’ This is spelled out more clearly in the description of the database as an ‘‘instrument of selection, separation and exclusion. It keeps the globals in the sieve and washes out the locals’’ (1998a:51). The former are made to feel at home wherever they go; the latter are deprived of passports and transit visas. While the ‘‘superpanopticon’’ may not be the best name for it, that database is still an instrument of surveillance, sorting, in this case, the varieties of mobility.

LIQUID MODERNITY - Zygmunt Bauman

...“access to the means of transportation and the resulting freedom of movement,” is the foundation of power; conversely, the inmates immobilization also aids in defining persuasions of power (Bauman, 10:2000).

BANOPTICON (from Wikipedia)

...The Banopticon (sometimes written as Ban-opticon) is a term coined by Paris School academic Didier Bigo used within an International Political Sociology approach to security studies to describe a situation where profiling technologies are used to determine who to place under surveillance.[1] The term takes it name from Michel Foucault's notion ofpanopticon used in Discipline and Punish to describe a situation where observation is used as a disciplinary tool. According to Bigo the banopticon is said to have contributed towards the securitization of migration in Europe.

Islands of Exception: Forbidden Spaces and the (Geo)Politics of Extraterritoriality - Rogan Collins

..."There is no world, there are only islands." Jacques Derrida

...Forbidden spaces are the barren dystopias of modern civilisation, the wastelands and borderscapes of our society. They are certainly places of danger, yet they are also fascinating, because they call into question the line between the real and the imagined, between the permitted and the forbidden, and between the spatial dichotomy of what lies ‘inside’ and what is excluded as ‘outside.’

... as David Howarth has argued: ‘...social space is not a subset of physical space, but exactly the reverse: Physical space is a subset of any order that yields a structural regularity between objects.’

...Extraterritorial practices include phenomenon such as embassies, military maneuvers, or diplomatic immunity. Extraterritoriality is therefore seen to be rooted in the concept of sovereignty, although usually as a violation of the sovereignty of another state. However, and more importantly for this paper, extraterritoriality can also apply to when a state fails to maintain, or heightens, control over all or parts of its own territory, creating legal loopholes into ‘...quasi-utopian spaces to the extent that, in their internal logic, they attempt to create a radically new social order.’ Extraterritorial sites are therefore exceptional spaces where different rules apply and different formations of political and social expression become actualised.

...forbidden spaces such as the CEZ and Area 51 bring into question the typical understanding of inside/outside because they act as challengeable indeterminate sites at the limit of a political horizon that becomes replicated elsewhere throughout global geopolitics. In order to engage in this challenging, the paper puts forward the concept of the ‘Heterotopic-Island-of-Exception'

... the land can subsequently become a sacrifice zone for our other social spaces of existence;31 an ‘outside’ space that must be colonised so as to feed the ‘inside.’

...The principle of state sovereignty tries to fix a clear spatial demarcation between life ‘inside’ and life ‘outside’ a centered political community.42 This promotes an understanding of spatiality that must have an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside,’ even if at Area 51 it is the ‘inside’ that is forbidden and dangerous, rather than the ‘outside.’ Therefore, if sovereignty is a practice rather than an essence of states,43 then sovereignty is very much practiced at ‘Area 51,’ and the borders that demarcate the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’ shore up a particular political understanding of space - an understanding that quite literally draws lines in the desert sand.

...The Heterotopic-Islandof-Exception (HIE). In a Deleuzian fashion, the HIE is a ‘mobile concept’ in which its terms of reference are always ‘on the move’, just like the reference points themselves.78 The concept is designed to allow for motion in the signifiers in the same way that the positions of the signified are themselves always in a state of transition.

...CEZ and Area 51 can function as both utopic and dystopic from different perspectives. They are unstable places that are interpreted, practiced and performed in certain ways rather than having fixed meaning. They therefore bring into question the very categories of utopia/dystopia in a way that is interesting for thinking about the conditions of possibility for both terms.

...The ‘state of exception,’ on his reading, has come to represent the limit, blurry and undefined, of a juridical order that determines when law is applied or when it is suspended. In this sense, the exception relies on being defined as the ‘outside’ that defines the ‘inside,’ yet actually belongs originally to the ‘inside.’ The state of exception is actually relational to the ‘inside,’ via what Agamben terms an ‘inclusive exclusion’: a logical relationship that inherently transforms our notion of the borders between inside and outside the rule of law.

...This relation between exception and norm is therefore really a relation of ‘ban,’ not exception, because to ‘ban’ is to similarly be abandoned yet remain on a threshold where law and life, inside and outside, becomes indistinguishable.

...we are faced by the camp when we inhabit any structure that ‘…delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign.’

...Forbidden and extraterritorial spaces are therefore places where sovereignty is shored up and performed, where the states ability to decide on the-exception-that-has-now-become-the-rule is practiced. In other words, their articulation as meaningful places relies on a distinction between the ‘inside’ of those spaces and an ‘outside’ of those places: ‘...because the creation of any social space involves the creation of such a boundary...the existence of an exteriority is partly constitutive of the inside.’

‘...political surface has now splintered into discontinuous territorial fragments set apart and fortified by makeshift barriers, temporary boundaries, or invisible security apparatuses. Instead of its edges clearly demarcated by continuous lines, political space has now grown to resemble a territorial patchwork of introvert enclaves located side by side, each within the other, simultaneously and in unprecedented proximities...These shreds are Islands- externally alienated and internally homogenized extraterritorial enclaves - spaces of political void or strategic implants - laying outside the jurisdiction that physically surrounds them. Islands are the territorialized nodes of a de-territorialized power - one distributed through military, political or financial networks.’

...Islands can then form Archipelagos of exception - a spatial expression of spaces of emergency that are positioned outside the sovereignty and jurisdiction that surrounds them.

...As Foucault mentions at the end of his lecture, the boat is the heterotopia par excelence, a floating piece of space that at any one time can have fixed coordinates but that is given over to the infinity of the sea, paradoxically a ‘...place without a place.’

The Rise Of the Network Society - Manuel Castells

...‘There is indeed a common cultural code in the diverse workings of the network enterprise. It is made of many cultures, many values, many projects, that cross through the minds and inform the strategies of the various participants in the networks, changing at the same pace as the network’s members, and following the organisational and cultural transformation of the units of the network. It is a culture, indeed, but a culture of the ephemeral, a culture of each strategic decision, a patchwork of experiences and interests rather than a charter of rights and obligations. It is a multifaceted, virtual culture, as in the visual experiences created by cyberspace by rearranging reality. It is not a fantasy. It is a material force because it informs, and enforces, powerful economic decisions at every moment in the life of the network. But it does not stay long: it goes into the computer’s memory as raw material of past successes and failures. ...any attempt at crystallising the position in the network as a cultural code in a particular time and space sentences the network to obsolescence, since it becomes too rigid for the variable geometry required by informationalism. The “spirit of informationalism” is the culture of ‘creative destruction’ accelerated to the speed of the optoelectronic circuits that process its signals.’

Walled Garden

A closed platform, walled garden or closed ecosystem is a software system where the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applications or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, where consumers have unrestricted access to applications, content, and much more.

The parasite - Michel Serres

...The parasite adopts a functional role; the host survives the parasite’s abuses of him – he even survives in the literal sense of the word; his life finds a reinforced equilibrium, like a sur-equilibrium. A kind of reversibility is seen on the ground of irreversibility. Use succeeds abuse, and exchange follows use. A contract can be imagined (SERRES, 1982a, p. 168).

...The relation upsets equilibrium, making it deviate. If some equilibrium exists or ever existed somewhere, somehow, the introduction of the parasite in the system immediately provokes a difference, a disequilibrium. Immediately, the system changes; time has begun (SERRES, 1982a, p. 182).

Globalized (in)Security: the Field and the Ban-opticon - Didier Bigo

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Metalogue 5: Why do things have outlines? - Gregory Bateson

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