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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The world has entered an unprecedented period of uncertainty and political instability. Faced with the challenge of knowing and acting within such a world, the spread of computers and connectivity, and the arrival of new digital sense-making tools, are widely celebrated as helpful. But is this really the case, or have we lost more than gained in the digital revolution?
In Post-Humanitarianism, renowned scholar of development, security and global governance Mark Duffield offers an alternative interpretation. He contends that connectivity embodies new forms of behavioural incorporation, cognitive subordination and automated management that are themselves inseparable from the emergence of precarity as a global phenomenon. Rather than protect against disasters, we are encouraged to accept them as necessary for strengthening resilience. At a time of permanent emergency, humanitarian disasters function as sites for trialling and anticipating the modes of social automation and remote management necessary to govern the precarity that increasingly embraces us all.
Post-Humanitarianism critically explores how increasing connectivity is inseparable from growing societal polarization, anger and political push-back. It will be essential reading for students of international and social critique, together with anyone concerned about our deepening alienation from the world.
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Seitenzahl: 466
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction: Questioning Connectivity
Circulation and Connectivity
Connectivity and remoteness
Knowledge, data and post-humanitarianism
Boomerang effect
Structure of the Book
Notes
Chapter 2: Against Hierarchy
Spirit of Capitalism
Against hierarchy
Progressive neoliberalism
Death of the social
Mobility v. immobility
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 3: Entropic Barbarism
Precursors of Revolution
The Sovereign Subject
Negative dialectic
Resisting entropy
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 4: Being There
Theoretical Practice
New Anthropology
Fieldwork in Sudan
Dignity of distance
Structural method
Being there
Outcomes
Postscript
Notes
Chapter 5: Fantastic Invasion
Direct Humanitarian Action
New Ontology of Disaster
Empty the camps
The steersman
Theory to Complexity
Environmental exposure
Early warning
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 6: Livelihood Regime
Project Form
Social reproduction
Programming Poverty
Local knowledge
Computer learning
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 7: Instilling Remoteness
Fortified Aid Compound
Reducing circulation
Dangerous world
Securing failure
Personalizing Security
Permanent threat
Internal strength
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 8: Edge of Catastrophe
Global Precarity
Registers of informality
North goes South
Recycling Poverty
Techno-pastoral 1
Notes
Chapter 9: Connecting Precarity
Levelling Downwards
Electronic atmosphere
Expanding the Enclave
Techno-pastoral 2
Notes
Chapter 10: Post-humanitarianism
Remote Sensing
Seeing is believing
Crisis Informatics
Growing impact
Enabling resilience
Homo inscius
Distributed information systems
Decentralizing power
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 11: Living Wild
Humanitarian Design
Cash transfer
Water
Emergency shelter
Energy
Sanitation
Therapeutic foods
Self-help apps
Drone delivery
Individuation
Indignant Objects
Connected logic
User communities
Measuring Success
Ethical irony
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 12: Conclusion: Automating Precarity
Cognitive Turn
Mental precarity
Feedback
Optimizing reproduction
Caretaker Society
Paradox of Connectivity
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
Chapter 1: Introduction: Questioning Connectivity
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Copyright page
Copyright © Mark Duffield 2019
The right of Mark Duffield to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9858-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9859-5 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Duffield, Mark R., author.
Title: Post-humanitarianism : governing precarity in the digital world / Mark Duffield.
Description: Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010023 (print) | LCCN 2018025557 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745698625 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745698588 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745698595 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Humanitarian intervention--Developing countries. | Humanitarianism. | Technology--Social aspects--Developing countries. | Developing countries--Social conditions--21st century. | Developing countries--Economic conditions--21st century.
Classification: LCC JZ6369 (ebook) | LCC JZ6369 .D84 2018 (print) | DDC 341.584091724--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010023
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Dedication
For
Elliott & Rupert
A luta continua
PREFACE
In the summer of 2012, I made a chance discovery, from which this book has grown. An internet search focusing on humanitarian work in Sudan returned some unexpected results. Since 2003, the UN had been working with a number of geospatial research institutes on the feasibility of using high-resolution satellite imagery to help the emergency response in Darfur. Apart from mapping refugee camps, this included remotely finding water sources so that new camps could be located nearby. Particularly striking, however, was the development of algorithms able to estimate the varying size of these settlements almost as they changed, without the need to go there. Moreover, advocacy groups were already using satellite imagery in the usually dangerous work of documenting sites of possible human rights abuse, by identifying things like burnt buildings or disturbed ground safely from the air.
Having visited Sudan many times for work and research purposes, this remote sensing was new to me. For a while, the discovery conveyed an excitement akin to having stumbled into a parallel scientific universe. Reflecting the widespread belief among humanitarian agencies that aid work had become more dangerous, my research at the time focused on the growing retreat of international aid workers into fortified aid compounds and gated-complexes. Given this withdrawal, the significance of remote sensing was immediately apparent – that is, the potential of being able to understand and act from a distance without the need to be entangled on the ground. This ability is the central theme of Post-Humanitarianism: Governing Precarity in the Digital World. It explores a double movement, whereby a loss is also a gain. What is given up is the textured familiarity that disappears with remoteness. What is gained are the new visualization techniques, smart sense-making tools and novel governmental possibilities resulting from the digital recoupment of distance.
This discovery sparked a sustained period of enquiry, deepening interest and growing concern around the issue of remoteness and recoupment. There is more to becoming distant in order to get closer, so to speak, than meets the eye. Darfur quickly proved to be a small demonstration of that much wider event known as the computational turn – that is, from the mid-1990s, the rapid spread of computers, mobile devices, software platforms and social media into all aspects of personal, public and international life, without exception. Moreover, as the retreat of aid workers suggests, this veritable electronic globalization gathered momentum at the same time as the world was being seen as more unpredictable and dangerous than before. For most people, the two are unconnected. Indeed, given the often-claimed growth in political complexity and uncertainty, the new sense-making tools appear fortuitous. Sceptical of such coincidences, Post-Humanitarianism is more open to their formative interleaving and interdependence.
The ideas of remoteness and recoupment beg the question of what has been lost, and what exactly has been gained? The computational turn has fundamentally changed our understanding of the world and what it means to be human. Together with a loss of familiarity, a growing reliance on machine-thinking means that reason, human agency and being present in the world no longer occupy the valued place they once did. For much of the twentieth century, human behaviour was measured against the often untrustworthy, but rational, decision-maker Homo economicus. Displacing this once familiar liberal avatar, a new behavioural yardstick has appeared. Compared to the confident Homo economicus, this new figure is unsure of itself. Cognitively challenged by the speed and complexity of contemporary life, it relies more on automatic and unconscious sense-making mechanisms rather than on conscious rational thought. This post-human avatar struggles to take in more than the immediate givens of its environment and accessible networks. The pages of this book are haunted by this overwhelmed, distracted and necessarily ignorant subject that, for want of a better term, is here dubbed Homo inscius. While challenged by a complex and uncertain world, Homo inscius is comfortable with its own inner vulnerabilities and human limitations, and its consequent dependence on the compensatory attentiveness that smart technology affords.
Rather than accept this rather unappealing subject as the guide to our purported post-human future, this book has sought perspective through a return to the materiality of capitalism. As an object of study and critique, capitalism has been long neglected within the academy. The computational turn is an intrinsic part of the transition from the mass production of Fordism to the personal consumption of today’s new economy where Homo inscius is its ideal customer and pampered savant.
When this work began, it was unforeseen that it would demand a reinterpretation of my previous research and experience. After decades in the post-structural wilderness, I was emboldened to return to the structuralism of my Marxist youth. Earlier work on global governance, disasters and security, once felt to be outside and critical of the status quo, now feels inadequate. Not least, the crisis has deepened. With its alienation, patriarchy and racism, the past was never perfect. Since the 1960s, when these oppressions and insults were forcefully identified, a limited institutional progress has been made. The original aim, however, had been to change society radically as a whole for everyone. This revolutionary impulse has stalled and been deflected. Today’s world, moreover, is different. Those areas of educational, economic and political autonomy that once supported independent circulation, allowed resistance and encouraged utopian visions of a better life have narrowed and disappeared.
While contestation and protest continue, much of this energy has been captured and set to work on adapting and deepening the system rather than fundamentally changing it. The problem is that, while reform may have worked in the past, the dots no longer join up. For those vast and ever growing numbers of people obliged to live on the edge of disaster, a future of precarity in an automating and polarizing world is calling. Capitalism, moreover, is being adapted to realize and profit from such a techno-barbaric future. Pitched against this violence-edged intent, however, new and diverse areas of autonomy and forms of recalcitrance are struggling to emerge. In this dangerous interregnum, speculative theory, searching critique and, not least, a solidarity born of political faith in humanity are needed more than ever.
Writing a book is as much a lived relationship as an academic exercise. Acknowledging one’s debts is always incomplete. Over the last few years, they have been many, diverse and sometimes unexpected. In taking stock, a warm thanks to Finn Stepputat and his colleagues at the Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen. In the spring of 2013, I had the pleasure of being a guest professor at DIIS. This provided an opportunity to embark properly on the preparatory work for this book. Many thanks also to Luis Lobo-Guerrero for kindly arranging a similar visit at the end of 2014 to the department of International Relations at the University of Groningen. Over the past few years, I have presented the evolving themes of Post-Humanitarianism in a dozen workshops and conferences in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Lebanon. As such occasions are useful for testing ideas and getting audience feedback, I would like to thank their organizers. In particular, I am grateful to Jolle Demmers in the Centre for Conflict Studies at the University of Utrecht for her interest and support.
At the beginning of 2014, I returned to Sudan to revisit the village where I completed my Ph.D. fieldwork in the mid-1970s. This was invaluable in helping me understand the changing nature of international space. For their advice, help and friendship, I must thank Ahmed Gamal Eldin, Al-Amin Abumanga, George Pagoulatos and Osman el-Kheir, together with Babiker Osman Shanowa, Fiesal Kaghu, Mohammed Osman, Sameer al-Tayeb al-Shami and the rest of my friends in Maiurno. Kind mention must also be made of the many people who have in some way inspired, helped or been tolerant. These include Adbullahi Gallab, Alison Howell, Antonio Donini, Bertrand Taithe, Colleen Bell, Dan Large, David Turton, Diana Felix da Costa, Jan Bachmann, Jonathan Fisher, Judith Squires, Juliano Fiori, Martin Gainsborough, Mathew Bywater, Nada Ghandour-Demiri, Nick Stockton, Norah Nihland, Oliver Richmond, Orit Halpern, Roger Mac Ginty, Sara Pantuliano, Sarah Collinson, Sophia Hoffman, Thea Hilhorst, Tim Edmunds, Tom Scott-Smith and Zoe Marriage. Given my frequent requests for deadline extensions, I am grateful to Louise Knight and Nekane Tanaka Galdos at Polity Press for their patient support. I hope the wait has been worth it.
My friends and academic comrades Jens Sorensen and Ray Bush deserve special thanks. It’s always great to meet and talk things through. Many thanks also to Vanessa and Mladan Pupavac for opening my eyes to literary critique and the realities of the migration crisis. Douglas Spencer’s work on neoliberalism and architecture has been inspirational. For the changing regimes of international aid, Susanne Jaspars’ pioneering research has been immensely helpful. In terms of how we understand the world and our place within it, Brad Evans, David Chandler and Julian Reid continue to challenge conventions and set the pace. Not least, I owe Rupert Alcock a huge debt of gratitude for kindly reading the first draft of the book. Besides his own path-breaking work on cognitive politics, his suggestions and impressions have been invaluable. Any mistakes or shortcomings are, of course, my own. I have learnt a lot and thank them all for their conviviality and kind consideration.
Finally, at a more personal level, I’d like to thank Dr Tahir Shah and his wonderful team at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, for their warmth and professional care. I would also like to mention Geoff Whitehouse, George Cree, Chris Lloyd and Graham Ward for their enduring friendship, humour and good company. I am similarly indebted to 1st Sedgley Morris Men for taking me under their wing. My life would be diminished without their camaraderie, mischief and laughter. Last but not least, in what has often felt to be a never-ending task, I have enjoyed the love and support of my family and my wife Jean. This book would otherwise never have been completed.
Mark Duffield
Sedgley
January 2018
Chapter 1INTRODUCTION: QUESTIONING CONNECTIVITY
At the time of writing, there is a consensus among Western security specialists that the world has entered a period of uncertainty and political instability unprecedented in recent times. One such source is the latest Munich Security Report (MSR 2017) provocatively entitled ‘Post-truth, post-West, post-order?’. Intended for policy and security professionals, the Report is a digest of the latest international trends and events. Like a breathless messenger, it describes the different flags and factions of the illiberal barbarians now massing at the gates. In concert with a clutch of new books,1 it depicts a groundswell of populist and fundamentalist movements, laying claim to local or cultural authenticities, which are now challenging and pushing back cosmopolitan values and libertarian identities. Expected since the mid-1990s, it looks as if the ‘coming anarchy’ may now be arriving (Kaplan 1994). There are several factors, however, that give the present a new and distinct feel. Divisions and contradictions are appearing in the West. Random terrorism is becoming routine, while dissatisfaction is growing among those who feel left behind and abandoned. Apart from increasing security measures and orchestrating public displays of resilience, political elites are challenged for real answers. With Syria as a case in point, compared to the 1990s, Western states have also lost their interventionary nerve.
Citizens of democracies believe less and less that their systems are able to deliver positive outcomes for them, and increasingly favour national solutions and closed borders over globalism and openness. Illiberal regimes, on the other hand, seem to be on solid footing and act with assertiveness, while the willingness and ability of Western democracies to shape international affairs and to defend the rules-based liberal order are declining (MSR 2017: 5).
This book is not concerned with questioning whether this picture of international push-back and Western decline is accurate or not. That it exists and has credence is sufficient. Our point of departure is the stark contrast between this imaginary future–present and a different, earlier one – namely, how the international scene looked a mere five or six decades ago. Driven by frequently violent struggles for national liberation, decolonization and the dismantling of imperialism from below were in full swing. With its excess of youthful radicalism, for many commentators the 1960s were a volatile interregnum of emancipatory forces pushing towards world revolution (Mills 1960). Breaking with Victorian Marxism, the rash of anti-colonial struggles ushered in a New Left convinced that the peasantry was now the true heir of this revolution. As the colonial order eroded, continuing privation and exploitation meant that it was the peasantry, unlike most industrial workers, that now had nothing to gain from compromise: ‘In China and Vietnam, in Cuba, Kenya and Algeria, in Brazil’s North-east and in the back-country of Angola, the peasantry has emerged as the decisive force in revolutionary struggles’ (Buchanan 1963: 11).
Contrary to an earlier Eurocentric left orthodoxy, while a radicalized intelligentsia and worker vanguard could prime the revolutionary fuse in the industrial countries, it was an emergent Third World that would now ignite it (Marcuse 1967). Moreover, without the active alignment and international solidarity between these spatially separated forces and struggles, the chance of world revolution would be lost. Whether such views were realistic or delusional should not detract from the fact that they were real enough to mobilize people on an international scale. The contrast between a revolutionary, anti-racist future–present, where the international appeared as a space of political optimism and fraternity, and today’s more pessimistic vista of rupture and political failure is striking.
This book is a preliminary attempt to try to understand this shift and assess what we may have lost and, for good or ill, what we have gained. Methodologically attentive to history, it addresses this question in relation to the changing understanding of the nature of humanitarian disaster. How disasters are understood and communicated shapes the nature of the global North–South interface (Chouliaraki 2013).2 Indeed, one could go further. Since the 1980s, disasters have become a new ontological force. From the crash of asteroids into a primeval Earth, disasters have been given a pivotal role in the evolution of life, in the development of creativity and, not least, as key punctuation marks in the emergence and spread of human society (Homer-Dixon 2007). This catastrophism has accompanied the rise to dominance of an ecology-based resilience thinking, with its signature view that ‘authentic’ life exists in the jouissance that lies on the edge of extinction. Resilience is a measure of the probability of escaping disaster through socializing the smart moves that drive developmental evolution (Holling 1973). Disasters are thus a potent bridging mechanism that connects humanitarian practice with wider ideological and societal change. These changes, moreover, help illuminate the move from optimism to political pessimism. This shift, it will be argued, is integral to the rise of post-humanitarianism.
However, in making a link from disasters to these broader questions, two additional and accompanying registers or sets of differences are important. Over the period in question, there has been a spatial shift from ‘circulation’ to ‘connectivity’, together with an interrelated ontological, epistemological and methodological transition from deductive ‘knowledge’, framed by history and causation, to an increasing reliance on inductive mathematical ‘data’ and machine-thinking for sense-making. The way we know the world and understand what it means to be human has fundamentally changed (Chandler 2018). Rather than seeing the emergence of a new post-human essence, this book grounds these shifts and registers in the changing nature of capitalism. While corporations, governments and the academy celebrate the age of connectivity, and regard the sort of international foreboding described in the Munich Security Report as a separate issue, we are more open to the possibility of their causal correlation. This Introduction unpacks these registers and gives the reader an indication of the structure of the book.
Circulation and Connectivity
Between the 1960s and the present, the nature and organization of international space have changed. Of primary importance has been the relative shift from ‘circulation’ to ‘connectivity’ (Reid 2009). As a factor of spatial organization, circulation involves the physical movement or flow of people and things within, across or around terrestrial milieus and topographies. Discussed more fully in chapter 5, Foucault has argued, that the principle of circulation was central to a liberal conception of security arising from the discovery of the early modern town in terms of its spatial and logistical dynamics. The problem of the town ‘was essentially and fundamentally a problem of circulation’ (Foucault 2007: 13). During the nineteenth century, improving the circulation of people, goods, sewage, light and air, together with managing the movement of disease, crime and political unrest, would become a key feature of modernist planning and urban design (Rabinow 1995). From the perspective of modern urban planning, the city was an infrastructure designed to maximize the circulatory potential of autonomous people and things, while controlling the bad and inimical. Through the opening-up achieved by roads, canals, sewers and railways, for example, people and things were enabled to move, change place and transact. While not without risks, and thus needing administrative, health and police oversight, the aim was to maximize circulation along such fixed conduits.
Connectivity is similar but fundamentally different. Google’s notion of a data-based urbanism, for example, sees cities as key sites for the conversion of data extracted from the electronic interactions of individuals into continually adapting forms of artificial urban intelligence. A 12-acre site in Toronto’s waterfront area is currently being developed as a testbed. It envisions: ‘Modular buildings assembled quickly; sensors monitoring air quality; traffic lights prioritising pedestrians and cyclists; parking systems directing cars to available slots; delivery robots; advanced energy grids; automated waste sorting and self-driving cars’ (Morozov 2017).
Here the city appears as a closed interactive milieu involving the continuous recording and exchange of information between people, things and computer interfaces in motion. Connectivity draws together different domains such as consumer needs, waste disposal, transport, parking and delivery requirements into an integrated real-time information network. While people and things still move, change place and transact, it is no longer autonomous circulation in the modernist sense. Without triggering a series of alerts, a person could not, for example, arrive unexpectedly at a railway station, and buy a ticket for destination A but leave instead at station B. Within the smart city, movement and behaviour are constantly recorded, algorithmically analysed, optimized and directed (Halpern 2014b). Unlike the spontaneous circulation allowed by the modern city, movement within the smart city is essentially robotic.
As a science of information, cybernetics requires the recording and storing of data on all past interactions as a precondition for predicting future behaviour and signalling the presence of anomalies (Wiener 1954). Unlike free circulation, which always involves a potential threat to security (Foucault 2007: 19), connectivity uses the command and control functions made possible by data informatics to avoid surprise. To put this another way, while circulation is necessary it is also open to accidents, dangers and unforeseen consequences. Air travel, for example, can be a vector in the spread of disease. As a way of controlling the necessary risks of circulation, security has evolved as an expanding and invasive technology of connectivity (see chapter 5).
There is another aspect of connectivity, however, that is also important for this book, and which further distinguishes it from the territorially grounded nature of circulation. Imagine a dozen computers scattered around the globe, networked together via a central hub and each machine being able to transmit and exchange data with the others instantaneously. Rather than having to flow through or circulate within frictive topographies, connectivity has the power to leap directly across them, bypassing terrestrial insecurity while rendering distance insignificant. Finance capital, for example, is not like physical money. The latter constantly circulates between pockets, cash registers and banks until it is worn out. As an example of connectivity, finance is capital encoded as data that travels at the speed of light between the vast territorially dispersed network of computers that constitute the global banking system (Lewis 2014): ‘[Connectivity] de-spatializes the real globe, replacing the curved earth with an almost extensionless point, or a network of intersection points and lines that amount to nothing other than connections between two computers any given distance apart’ (Sloterdijk 2013 [2005]: 13).
Although different, circulation and connectivity are not mutually exclusive. They exist together, shape each other and, over time, exist in varying combinations. For this book, the relative shift from circulation to connectivity is implicated in the displacement of revolutionary optimism by political pessimism. In the 1960s, at the height of international expectation, the ability for people, their histories, experience and politics, to circulate internationally was greater than it is today. For a while, the circulation and flow of political praxis was possible as never before. During the period of decolonization, Western European countries were moved to accept permanent immigrants from their colonies and former colonies, together with allowing refugee settlement and recruiting significant numbers of migrant workers. Aspirational white settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada also temporally lifted the ‘colour line’ that had earlier applied, especially toward Asian labour migrants (Meyers 2002). For Herbert Marcuse, as for other radicals exiled at some point in their lives, the ability for political praxis to circulate was taken for granted. At a time when journalists were not embedded (Page 1989), this ability was an essential condition of the international solidarity necessary for world revolution. By the mid-1970s, however, the near-universal curtailment of immigration was already underway.
Driven by a mix of racial, social and security fears, the relative post-World War II openness to migration has narrowed and closed under successive waves of immigration controls, nationality laws and refugee restrictions (Hammerstad 2014). Since the end of the Cold War, as a visible register of this institutional move to closure and return, the number of physical border fences, demarcation walls or separation zones to contain the risk of autonomous movement has exploded globally (Brown 2010). Of course, the barriers and restrictions that now striate the globe have not prevented the urge to move. Indeed, as the upward track of numbers suggests (UNHCR 2017a), the pressure to escape poverty, disaster and war, even at the risk of an arduous and perilous passage, is as strong as ever. With millions in the queue, it shows few signs of abating. While offering no viable solution, the interdiction and return measures used to insulate the West have done little more than criminalize autonomous human circulation.
Connectivity and remoteness
As the legal circulation of migrants, refugees and other sans-papiers has narrowed and closed, in terms of the data being stored and exchanged between machines and screen interfaces, connectivity has expanded exponentially (Cortada 2012). At the same time, computational technologies including remote satellite sensing, computer modelling and Big Data informatics have come to shape a dominant, if particular, understanding of the world, how it works and the status of the humans that inhabit it (Halpern 2014a; Chandler 2018). Climate change, for example, was a key discovery of predictive computer modelling (Edwards 2010). The juxtaposition between the international closure to the circulation of political praxis and the expansion of data connectivity and its new remote sense-making tools is a formative tension that runs throughout this book. To put this another way, since the 1990s there has been an associated growth in physical and existential ‘remoteness’ from the world that is being compensated by the digital recoupment of distance. Remoteness, however, is ambiguous. It is negative, as in a loss of familiarity, while also being a positive condition – that is, as a challenge for technoscience to overcome.
A negative remoteness is not only reflected in the erection of physical and technological barriers to stop the circulation of political praxis; it can be seen at many levels, including the fragmentation of nations. With examples spanning the globe, over the last three or four decades many erstwhile multicultural or mixed societies have been wrenched apart, fragmenting and polarizing along inimical ethnic, cultural and religious lines (Gregory 2008; Sorensen 2014; Mishra 2017a). Mid-level technological societies have been reduced to – or, should we say, ‘revealed’ as – a chimera of competing tribal amalgams (Usborne 2004). As if designed for it, the trend towards individuation, separation and polarization has taken to social media with alacrity (McBain 2014; O’Callaghan et al. 2014; Cadwalladr 2017). As discussed in chapter 7, through a combination of risk aversion and political push-back, a loss of familiarity can also be seen in the increasing absence of grounded international aid workers, journalists and academics within ‘challenging environments’ (Healy & Tiller 2014). President Trump’s travel ban on selected Muslim countries, and the current uncertainty over the future of EU nationals in Brexit Britain, are symptoms of this pervasive, and often violent and discriminatory, tendency towards distancing and a loss of familiarity.
Remoteness, however, also has a positive dynamic that springs from the ability of connectivity to leap across, sidestep or pass beneath the ground friction3 of a dangerous world productively, while simultaneously creating new ways of knowing and appropriating that world. First identified over fifty years ago, the inverse relationship that technoscience establishes between familiarity and distance is what Hannah Arendt called ‘world alienation’ (Arendt 1998 [1958]: 48–254). The paradox of exploration is that, while its aim was to widen horizons, the maps and charts of the early modern age ‘anticipated the technical inventions through which all earthly space has become small and close at hand’ (1998 [1958]: 251). This shrinking of the globe has continued through the surveying capacity of the human mind, ‘whose uses of numbers, symbols, and models condense and scale earthly physical distance down to the size of the human body’s natural sense and understanding’ (1998 [1958]: 251). The shrinkage of the Earth, however, has been compensated for by the objectivity that distance gives. Objectivity necessitates a disentanglement ‘from all involvement in and concern with the close at hand’ (1998 [1958]: 251). For Arendt in the 1950s, the decisive technology of shrinkage was the aeroplane. The advent of satellites, geospatial technology and interactive broadband, however, redoubles her point. The ability to leave the Earth, either physically or as an Internaut,4 ‘is like a symbol for the general phenomenon that any decrease of terrestrial distance can be won only at the price of putting a decisive distance between man and earth, of alienating man from his immediate earthly surroundings’ (1998 [1958]: 251).
World alienation is the hallmark of the modern age and is ‘inherent in the discovery and taking possession of the earth’ (1998 [1958]: 254). As the political history of maps suggests (Wood 2010), remoteness and distance call forth new sense-making tools which furnish new ways to strategize and project power – and, thus, to appropriate and reappropriate the Earth.
Knowledge, data and post-humanitarianism
As a function of the reappropriation of the modernist legacy currently under way by the agents of the new economy (Boutang 2011 [2008]; Srnicek 2016), the recoupment of distance through digital connectivity has its own history of abstraction and violence.5 The textured histories, motivations and justifications of distant or now-hard-to-reach people, once familiar through face-to-face exchange or the ethnographic encounter (see chapter 4), have been transformed for the convenience of mathematics into electronic data. To make behavioural patterns amenable to visual representation, knowledge has been reworked into digital signals and alerts able to be recorded and algorithmically analysed by machines (see chapter 5). As a tool for knowing and appropriating the world afresh, the supplanting of the grounded ontologies of circulation/knowledge with those of connectivity/data has not been frictionless or straightforward (Amoore 2011). Moreover, it has been far from natural, or a simple matter of technological change.
As world history suggests, knowledge can be put to many uses, including vile, repressive and genocidal ones. However, while murderous dictators may wish otherwise, knowledge is never closed to itself. Knowledge affords its own critique. Even the slaves of San Domingo could dream of freedom through the Enlightenment texts that their masters betrayed (James 2001 [1938]). Data is different from – even antagonistic to – knowledge (Galloway 2013; Chandler 2015). Knowledge is open to intentions, justifications and causes. It emerges from empirical experimentation, ethnographic encounters and deductive causal reasoning. By comparison data focuses on the potentialities of individuals as derived from the inductive statistical analysis of their past behaviour.
Knowledge admits to a distinction between the ‘reality’ of lived experience and an existing and structurally defined ‘world’ inhabited by actual, present and sentient subjects. The space, or commons, between reality and the world allows room for different truths, competing theory and critique (Rouvroy 2012). Knowledge is inseparable from the contested political commons producing it. Data allows no such distinction or space. Reality and the world are indistinct, and existence is a condition of the pure, unmediated factuality of virtual and probabilistic subjects. Whereas knowledge allows for consciousness, reflexivity and theorizing, data is more concerned with signals, alerts and reflexes, and the unconscious or unreasoned dimensions of human behaviour (World Bank 2015). As such, the very possibility of theory and reasoned critique is questioned (Anderson 2007).
Despite knowledge and data being antagonistic regarding how we understand the world and what it means to be human, the current hegemony of what Antoinette Rouvroy (2012) has called ‘data behaviourism’ in explaining social and environmental phenomena has largely escaped critical concern. If anything, its rise has been welcomed and seen as fortuitous given the ‘complexity’ of the problems we face. As discussed in chapter 4, this is partly explained by the dominance within the academy of empirical and behavioural modes of understanding and methodology. Included here are the various strands of work often drawn together as post-humanism (Braidotti 2013). For example, the new empiricism, speculative realism and actor network theories that variously draw on process-oriented behavioural ontologies of becoming, in which materially embedded individuals are held to exist in an unmediated empirical relationship within their enfolding environments (see Galloway 2013; Chandler 2015). Like data behaviourism, the pure factuality of a post-human existence also casts doubt on the distinction that knowledge produces between reality and the world. Without this distinction, the world becomes smaller than the sum of its parts (Latour et al. 2012). An individual’s mental horizon reduces to the immediate who, where and when of their changing network connections and disconnections.
Post-humanitarianism goes beyond the smart forms of humanitarian intervention and design that have emerged from the rubble of 1990s liberal interventionism following the West’s foreign policy disasters in the Middle East. This book does not add to the growing pile of optimistic declarations of a fresh humanitarian start based on these technologies (Meier 2015). Post-humanitarianism is the international face of post-humanism. It gives Arendt’s notion of world alienation through growing technoscientific remoteness a new dimension and meaning. At a time of deepening polarization, fragmentation and anger, the post-humanitarian turn to narrow empiricism, unmediated experience and data behaviourism as the international optic of choice is short-sighted, to say the least. Allowing no distinction between reality and the world, and asserting the design principle over any need for radical change, post-humanitarianism lacks any political, historical or moral perspective save that of its own importance. Yet it is also a positive and active force. Post-humanitarianism is central to capitalism’s moving beyond the enclave or special economic zone to incorporate the vast informal economies of the global South – a move discussed in chapter 9. It is a key departure in fashioning the disaggregated biopolitical technologies necessary to support the social reproduction of an expanding global precariat in a post-social world (see chapters 11 and 12).
Boomerang effect
The emergence of post-humanitarianism is intimately bound up with the computational turn – that is, the steady penetration, since the 1980s, of computers, the internet, mobile telephony, interactive broadband, software platforms, social media and automating apps into all aspects of personal, social, national and international life tout court. Given the antagonistic relationship between the knowledge/circulation and data/connectivity registers, what is remarkable about the computational turn is its seamless, unremarkable and almost natural arrival. To paraphrase John Robert Seeley’s reflection on the British Empire, we seem to have readily transferred to machines the ability to think on our behalf, in a fit of absent-mindedness. Yet, this naturalness is illusionary.
The arrival of the computational turn was preceded by a wide range of contributory and anticipatory developments. Before the commercial arrival of computers, the transformation of textured knowledge into mathematical data was already under way. These anticipatory developments prepared the ground, as it were, for the seamless datafication of society. As argued in this book, a strategic site for the transformation of knowledge into data, and the current refinement of the smart technologies that have emerged, is the global North–South interface. Moreover, since the 1980s, the changing understanding of what constitutes a humanitarian disaster has been instrumental (see chapter 5). The anticipatory and developmental role of disaster is a contemporary example of what Hannah Arendt called the ‘boomerang effect’ (Arendt 1994: 155; also Foucault 2003: 103).
For Arendt, the moral licence and lack of restraint that characterized nineteenth-century imperialism served as a trial run for the European totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Throughout the colonial period, the colonies functioned as general laboratories, testbeds or sites of anticipation for emerging capitalist relations and new modes of governance that would materialize in Europe. These ranged from prison reform through public health to centralized policing and modernist urban planning (Rose 2000: 107, n25; Rabinow 1995).6 While the boomerang effect has a history, it also operates in the present. Relatively deregulated and with weak data protection laws, the global South continues to be a testbed for new technologies (Jacobsen 2015). The boomerang effect is a disruptive concept. It unsettles modernist ideas of developmental and temporal sequencing by according the global South an experimental or forward-looking role; the South is where our post-humanitarian future lies.
Structure of the Book
In seeking to understand the shift from optimism to political pessimism, this book examines how the reason and human agency associated with the former have been seamlessly transferred to the automatic devices and smart technologies that underpin the post-humanist turn. In analysing the arrival of the computational turn, seeing its roots in the positive or creative urge driving contemporary capitalism has been central. Chapter 2 addresses this issue through the idea of a new spirit of capitalism. Ironically, this spirit drew much of its energy from the international revolutionary and countercultural upsurge that peaked during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and which is here called the May ’68 critique. Recouped as a progressive neoliberalism, the resulting problematization of the alienation, hierarchy and patriarchy of welfare-Fordism played a formative role in the transition to a personalized, computer-based new economy. In the process, the new spirit has been willing to exchange the security of welfare-Fordism for the freedom of the market in a post-social world – that is, a world where social protection and state provision are attenuated or no longer exist. The idea of the post-social, its anticipation in the global South, and the social automation necessary to make it a reality, are essential constituents of post-humanitarianism.
During the 1960s, however, these outcomes were still uncertain. The postmodern age has been shaped by a questioning of the sovereignty of the subject from many competing viewpoints. Chapter 3 looks at the contrasting positions of New Left Marxism and cybernetics on this issue. The former, through the negative dialectic, saw the possibility of capitalism’s decent into a techno-barbarism unless prevented by revolution. For cybernetics, the problem was one of avoiding entropy by using the command and control functions made possible by a science of information able to govern human–machine interaction. In the transition to post-Fordism, it was cybernetics that triumphed. As chapter 4 argues, the May ’68 movement was the last time an autonomous intelligentsia was able to make a stand against the rising tide of empiricism and behaviourism within the academy. To provide a comparison with the isolating risk aversion of the present, the chapter concludes with a review of the structural method and immersive anthropological fieldwork that were still possible in the mid-1970s.
As examples of the boomerang effect, chapters 5 and 6 present non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the changing nature of international aid during the 1980s as a preparatory stage for the computational turn and appearance of post-humanitarianism. In relation to the present, it was a phase of both anticipation and rupture. A new ontology of disaster emerged. Rather than a modernist separation from society, disaster became a defining characteristic of society and its inner vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The earlier social and political views of famine gave way to complexity thinking and indeterminacy. Experimentation with early warning transformed famines into the signals and alerts thrown off by behavioural change. Rather than theory, the new emphasis was operationality. These developments exemplified the coming of age of an essentially cybernetic understanding of liberal security. In anticipating the post-social, the fantastic NGO invasion also piloted the projectized forms of livelihood support and community development. While anticipatory, however, the project form, together with the direct humanitarian action of the period, were still vested in the primacy of human agency and grounded engagement.
With liberal interventionism now buried in the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, chapter 7 examines the West’s growing inhibition and retreat from the world through the culture and architecture of the fortified aid compound. Field-security training is used as an example of how the shift from circulation to connectivity is not natural, as it were, but must be taught. Training instils remoteness and how to view the world in post-human terms. Rather than a product of history and causation, the outside is now an unmediated flux of green, amber and red behavioural cues and environmental alerts. Resilience training reinforces a refocusing on the inner-self. The fortified aid compound functions as a therapeutic structure offering refuge and mental respite from an uncertain world that is no longer fully understood. While a cultural dead-end, the fortified aid compound provides a counterpoint to the liberating leap that has been made into the electronic atmosphere – the last global strategic plane where one-sided economic, political and cultural action is still possible.
The creation of a global precariat has been the single most significant achievement of capitalism’s new economy. Precarity is also the governmental object of post-humanitarianism. Chapter 8 examines the blurring of economy and disaster that brought the precariat into being. Made possible by the spread of mobile connectivity throughout the global South, new ways of valorizing the social reproduction of the precariat have emerged. As argued in chapter 9, smart technology folds downwards into the inequalities and mobility differences encountered. It has enabled capitalism to move beyond the confines of the special economic zone to enrol the precariat within the circuits of the global economy.
The remaining chapters focus on the new distance-recouping and sense-making tools that have emerged as part of the computational turn and form the technological basis of post-humanitarianism. Chapter 10 examines remote satellite sensing and how refugees are now understood ecologically – that is, as part of the environments in which they are embedded. Crisis informatics has rediscovered disaster events as distributed information systems, and enabled, among other things, the appearance of a new generation of hyper-bunkered post-humanitarians. Chapter 11 takes this analysis further by focusing on the disaggregated biopolitics of the biohuman as reflected in the notion of humanitarian innovation. This includes the emergence of a suite of attentive self-acting objects and smart technologies that have now absorbed the individual and collective human agency associated with earlier direct humanitarian action. These technologies are celebrated as enabling the precariat to survive in a post-social world, a key feature of which is the absence of a fixed infrastructural grid.
In drawing the book to a close, the Conclusion discusses the post-humanitarian attempts at streamlining and automating social reproduction among the precariat through cognitive science. Such developments dovetail with the long postmodern trope of a caretaker society – that is, having solved all important social and political problems, all that is now needed is piecemeal technological change. Such elite complacency, however, sits awkwardly with the paradox of connectivity – that is, the more connectivity, the greater the ground friction and political anger generated.
Notes
1
For a critical review, see Mishra (2017a).
2
The terms ‘global North’ and ‘global South’ are used here figuratively. Loosely associated with earlier modernist distinctions between developed and underdeveloped countries, they no longer imply any fixed geographical or social homogeneity. Their use, however, serves to retain the sense of a historic political and economic division that continues to produce global power and distribute life-chances unequally.
3
‘Ground friction’ is a generic term for anything that acts to slow the ease or speed of terrestrial movement and circulation. This can range from bureaucratic hurdles, insurance requirements and restrictive regulations through to political resistance, insecurity and weak public institutions.
4
This is a notion borrowed from Paul Virilio.
5
I am not seeking to detract from modernism’s colonial violence and periods of murderous excess. The focus here is that reappropriation of the modernist legacy that, itself, has produced new forms of control and domination.
6
Stephen Graham has also used the notion of the boomerang effect in relation to the development and perfection of Western security techniques in the global South (Graham 2013).
Chapter 2AGAINST HIERARCHY
By the mid-1990s, the claim that we now live in a network society – indeed, in an information-centric network world – was already widely accepted (Castells 1996). A key economic change supporting the network metaphor was the reorganization of the Fordist company into a global brand. It should be emphasized that these changes would have been difficult without the extraordinary diffusion and global embedding of digital technologies. From the mid-1970s, with their decreasing size and expense, computers spread from large companies to embed in the national economic auditing systems of the global North. During the 1990s, via PCs, the internet and, eventually, smart portable devices, computers moved from the business sector and government departments into the homes and hands of Northern consumers. For the digital historian James Cortada, the end of the 1990s marks the completion of the first stage of computer diffusion (Cortada 2012). By this time, capitalism’s new post-Fordist economy can be seen as having been reconstituted as a globally distributed information system. This aspect of second-wave globalization,1 called ‘deindustrialization’ at the time, saw large-scale factory closures and redundancy in the industrial heartlands of Europe and the USA as manufacturing functions typically moved to the expanding low-wage enclaves of East Asia (Amsden 1990). Headquarter companies in the global North retained core activities, usually involving logistics, finance and design skills, while subcontracting or franchising manufacturing or service functions to a network of overseas ancillary companies and sites.
Given this pattern of global restructuring, this book uses the descriptive term ‘network capitalism’ interchangeably with ‘new economy’.2 The term ‘network capitalism’ is useful because it makes a structural and spatial link with connectivity at the same time as anticipating the increasing datafication of capitalism’s global logistical network. According to Cortada (2012), the second and present stage of digital embedding began towards the end of the 1990s before accelerating from the mid-2000s. It is based on interactive broadband and the rapid expansion of geolocational mobile telephony as the commercial interface of choice. The main feature of this second stage has been the rapid leapfrogging of broadband and mobile telephony into the extensive informal milieus of the global South. The implications of this are discussed in chapter 9. Together with the financialization and liquefaction of capital, this embedding and digitalization has been a necessary condition for the global expansion of the complex business logistics that underpin network capitalism’s dispersed just-in-time manufacturing, assembly and delivery systems (Cowen 2014). Lying at the heart of network capitalism, a multilevelled web of financial circuits and global supply chains interconnects Europe and the USA with East Asia and the global South. Reliant on the power of connectivity to leap across the intervening barriers, inequalities and expropriations – indeed, to occlude such violence and ground friction – this vast network of global logistical systems has enabled the replacement of an earlier culture of mass consumption in the global North by post-Fordist patterns of personalized pampering.
This chapter continues to introduce concepts and ideas that are important for this book. Its main purpose, however, is to outline some of the cultural and political forces involved in the transition from Fordism to network capitalism. In particular, those forces driving the boomerang effect, or feedback loop, connecting the global North and South during this transitional period. Originating in the May ’68 anti-capitalist critique, a new cosmopolitan spirit of capitalism emerged. For authenticity and creativity, while against hierarchy and patriarchy, this spirit shaped the emergence of the new economy. A key feature of the time was the exchange of the normative and social insurance-based security of welfare-Fordism for the individual freedom of the market. A need for new forms of individuated post-social career and work structures consequently emerged – that is, livelihood systems adapted to the absence of public support and corporate responsibility. Such forces animated the anticipatory 1980s NGO invasion of the global South, which is returned to in subsequent chapters.
Spirit of Capitalism
For some years, it’s been unusual to talk about capitalism. Following the high point of anti-capitalist critique at the end of the 1960s, the serious study of capitalism within the academy had ground to a halt by the end of the 1970s (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005: xxxv; Stiegler 2014 [2006]: 11). Through the combined efforts of politicians and academics of all persuasions – from left to right, behaviourists to poststructuralists – the economy became unfashionable. Capitalism disappeared into the environment, becoming an anthropocentric force of nature and as natural as geological change. The timing of this loss of interest was unfortunate as it coincided with a period of rapid and momentous transformation. Capitalism slipped from view during the 1980s and 1990s, just as those far-reaching processes called globalization, deregulation and privatization were fashioning the networked, computer-based and personalized new economy that we now enjoy. This decline in academic interest at such a critical time, to the benefit of nothing except capitalism itself, has made the need to re-engage all the more urgent.
Our view of the new economy has been inspired by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s important sociological work The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005). As the title suggests, they use Max Weber as a point of departure. Most people have to work, whether they want to or not. Because of the burdens and irrationality of this life-long compulsion, capitalism has historically required a set of moral and ethical motivations, beyond money or naked force that justify working. There has been a need, as it were, for a spirit of capitalism (Weber 2005 [1930]). For Weber, during capitalism’s prehistory, this spirit was originally supplied by post-Reformation Calvinism. Pursuing a secular vocation became a religious duty, and success in the pious creation of worldly wealth was a measure of heavenly predestination. The spirit of capitalism has typically been conceived as an exchange whereby workers, figuratively at least, gave up their freedom for the real or imagined security of work. Struggles over the terms of this exchange were instrumental in shaping labour history. As we shall see, the historic singularity of the new economy is that it reverses this longstanding equation. Workers – or, to be more accurate, agents, operatives, partners and franchisers – are now expected to give up the security that capitalism once provided for the purported freedom of the market.
Writing at the end of the 1990s, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) identify two modern iterations of the spirit of capitalism and begin to outline the spirit of the new economy then taking shape. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the spirit had coalesced around the heroic patriarchal figure of the bourgeois factory-owning entrepreneur.3 Another spirit of capitalism precipitated in the mid twentieth century. This focused on the large industrial company at the centre of the Fordist revolution in standardized mass production and the growth of consumer society. The hero of welfare-Fordism was now the corporate manager, a key figure in the development of standardized mass consumption.4
