Dave Young - Thesis

In this chapter, I will provide a historical context for my argument through the analysis of past examples of intitutionalised distributed control systems. By this, I mean a system within a traditional societal institution (i.e. the church, the state, the military, the factory) in which there is a tactical delegation of power and accountability between multiple individuals in order to encourage complicity. I would like to examine the firing squad and the assembly-line as being prime examples of such systems in the military and industrial institutions. The former is a military disciplinary ritual whose actions and codes are deliberately designed to protect the identity of the squad member who fired the lethal shot, meaning that the soldiers' complicity in the act is easier to control. In the latter example, the assembly-line is a visible distribution of control over a process. In the manufacturing of unethical and problematic products, a single assembly-line worker will only have a fractional experience of its production, thus making it easier to participate as a labourer. In relation to this topic, I will discuss Harun Farocki's work The Inextinguishable Fire, which deals with the division of labour in Dow Chemical Corporation's production of napalm during the Vietnam war in the 1960s.

History, as Karl Marx tells us, can be described as being a succession of struggles between classes vying for greater control. These hierarchical oscillations have led to the creation of innumerable experimental utopias (nowhere-places) with the vast majority of documented examples being primarily concerned with the distribution of power between the subjects of the social system. The distribution of power could be designed in order to facilitate the development of an egalitarian state, as in class Greek democracy, or it could be designed to pass the control to a single person backed by an army, as in a military dictatorship. Thus, to design a utopia is to immediately design a system engaged with the management of a social hierarchy, whether it is desired to be flat or pyramidal. While there are many organisations and communities of people all over the world campaigning for egalitarianism under the guise of a variety of political systems, non-hierarchical social systems have historically proven to be problematic – utopian (ideal) places that degenerate into a dystopia through the erosion of the barriers that distribute power equally. A non-hierarchical system can be usefully exploited as a means of disguising power, rather than just sharing it.

The dominant institutions that historically formulated a society – the church, the state, industry – have all appropriated this exploitation in order to abstract their position 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.