A haptic dream
I am in a room. No... I am in a room, my front room, sitting in
a
chair, my chair. No... Yes, my chair. At my computer, working. I
am
not afraid. They said how real this would feel, that you feel like
yourself, and you do, really... but no... I reach out, pick up my
cup, it has weight, substance, it is hot from the coffee. Its surface
is smooth and hard. I feel it in my hand, no, it's pressing against
my hand. No...
I stand, I mean, I feel I get up. Because I stand, I feel like
I get
up.... Yes... The suit I am wearing, feel I am wearing, pushes in/out
on me. I can feel my back tighten, my feet flex, my forehead crease,
my brain dull behind my eyes... yes...no, I am (am I?) feeling it
tighten around me. It grips me... no... A wave of pressures on me,
inside me. I feel I am being wrapped from the inside, a coil pushing
out. No... no... It's just me. They said it would feel this real,
the
hardness of things, the textures. I am not afraid. I feel my weight
and size shift as I move. Strange sense of being outside myself...
the sense that I am elsewhere, or nowhere. In a room experiencing
all
this, tightly wrapped up. Yes, in a room, my room, wrapped under
my
skin.
My computer blinks and I start. I touch its keys, and they feel
my
fingers and push back on them. I enter a number I have been given,
no... my computer enters the number into my fingers. Suddenly
everything changes. I am back in my room, at the computer, my
computer, at work. Nothing has changed. Yes. I am not afraid. They
said it would feel this real.
"The coils of a serpent are more complex than the burrows
of a
molehill."
Deleuze places this sentence at the very end of "Postscript
on the
Societies of Control" in a section contrasting the socio-technical
"programs" of control and disciplinary societies.[1] He
writes that
we have learned a few things about the telos of the disciplines,
but
much remains to discover about the forces that control societies
make
us serve. What is clear is that a strategic shift in power relations
is underway.
This shift can be framed historically and economically as a problem
of capitalist governance involving the limits of enclosure as a
tool
of capitalist accumulation. Disciplinary institutions, like the
factory or the school, physically enclose diverse populations and
force their unification. The confinement of labor within the factory
and factory-city gave Capital much power over the accumulation
process in the 18th and 19th centuries. It also encountered the
resistance of bodies to concentrated containment and regimentation.
In part, what Foucault calls the modern "crisis of the disciplines"
reflects a move by Capital to modify disciplinary forms of enclosure,
to counter the resistance they provoke and intensify the accumulation
process.
The disciplines reached their height early in the 20th century.
After
WWII, information technologies make it possible to release
populations more into the open. Rather than pack them into closed
spaces, Capital begins a new strategy to disperse them. Network
controls, like remote surveillance and electronic passwords, allow
it
to keep its grip on bodies, in fact, to extend and tighten that
grip.
The new controls promise to counter the resistance of populations
to
confinement by instituting a kind of mobile and free form of
enclosure. The forces of accumulation, exploiting the capacities
of
openness and accessibility in networks, begin to follow you on the
road and, as we have learned in the last few decades, turn "on
the
road" into work, home into work, play into work, the whole
planet
into a flexible, controlled space of work.
It is possible that all this means the end of enclosure as a
capitalist program and the advent of post-disciplinary, even
post-capitalist, society. More likely, as suggested by Deleuze's
analysis, is that rigid mechanisms of enclosure are giving way to
supple ones that have lost none of their power to constrict the
body.
The new mechanisms can position and fix the body independently of
its
location. They expand its territory but more tightly control the
information parameters within which it functions. These controls
range from the mundane (remote electronic surveillance -- are you
where you're supposed to be?) to the extreme (genetic engineering
--
you're always there in advance). These are still forms of enclosure,
but the walls of the factory give way to the permeating "spirit"
of
the corporation, the accumulation of things shifts to the
accumulation of information, and networked bodies replace the spatial
concentration of populations.
One of these supple technologies of enclosure is called haptics,
from
the Greek for the ability to make contact with or to fasten. Unlike
information control that requires a confined population (discipline),
or a dispersed population under passive surveillance (such as CCTV),
haptic technologies respond to the active body and supply it with
tactile feedback. The program of haptics is simple: simulate the
body's feelings of manipulating objects in the real world
(data-gloves that react with vibratory stimuli to users' handling
of
simulated objects are a classic example of a haptic technology).
Haptic control is one of many "coils of a serpent" forming
on the
horizon of control societies, intensive information networked in
ways
to manage and counter the body's most basic capacity to resist,
its
sensitivity to its own power.
Because it is tactile control, haptics reminds us that "coils
of a
serpent" is not a metaphor for Deleuze. Control societies are
not
coils in name only, but literally. They are not analogues, but
isomorphs of each other. They do not resemble each other, nor is
one
a model for the other. They are different concrete assemblages with
different contents, but they are assembled and work in the same
ways,
specifically as tactile controls. Likewise, disciplinary societies
do
not resemble burrows of molehills, they are distinct assemblages
organized by the same abstract machine, one that can be described
as
serial or optical control.
Coils and burrows are apparatuses of capture; in burrows or coils,
either way, you are caught. Burrows, however, are rigid, arborescent
structures, assembled as series of confined spaces or interiors.
Foucault has shown us how, in disciplinary societies, you move from
one interior to the next, from home, to school, to work, back
home.[2] These interiors are constructed as closed "optical"
spaces
and their occupants placed under passive observation. Each interior
partitions space and orders time according to its own method --
the
factory, the household, the classroom -- but you always move
sequentially between them.
Serpents' coils, on the other hand, are meshes rather than series.[3]
A more flexible form of enclosure than burrows, they adjust to the
body as it moves and wherever it moves. Serpent's coils are networks
of modulating pressures. They contract and release in waves,
substituting for control of the body's optical environment the
regulation of its tactile milieu. Because they enclose the body
at
its surface, effectively reducing the interior to the body itself,
coils form a kind of mobile confinement. Surrounding you as you
go
out the door and into the open, they go where you go, or stay where
you stay. With coils, control is more intensive, enclosure more
supple, and confinement to fixed interiors redundant.
Control societies, Deleuze writes, are organized by codes. Codes
are
flexible systems of capture in ways that fixed enclosures are not.
They can be quickly and easily reconfigured to regulate access to
networks. He uses Guattari's example of a passcode that allows you
into certain areas of a city at given times of day, but can just
as
easily be changed to lock you out. Embedded today in technologies
like barcoded ID cards, and tomorrow in your genetically modified
cells, codes eventually aim to control capitalist accumulation at
the
haptic or tactile level.
In a sense, we could assert that this is still discipline, updated
to
new conditions of accumulation. In fact, control societies simulate
disciplinary societies -- they have all their "feel" without
their
walls. Not just discipline by means of optical control, but by direct
adjustments of the sensitivity of the body, its capacities to affect
and be affected. It is hard to imagine control societies without
the
extensive preparations made for them by disciplinary societies.
But,
as Deleuze says, the coils of a serpent are more complex than
burrows, and if we have learned something of the complexity of the
disciplines, we are still struggling to understand and resist
societies of control.
Everything touches everything.-- Jorge Luis Borges
Reach out and touch someone.-- Old AT&T advertising
slogan
If the body's optical space was a target of disciplinary
societies[4], haptic control is about its tactile space. Unlike
vision, which is concentrated in the head, tactility is distributed
throughout the body (including the eyes), in sheets of varying
intensities. It is not one of the five senses (touch), but a capacity
of all of them, a quality of openness or sensitivity. Tactility
involves not only so-called extero-perception (perception directed
outward to the external environment), but also proprioception, the
body's internal sense of itself and its required efforts to move
or
resist movement.[5] It belongs to the body's complex web of nerves
and muscles and joints. Like Taussig said of the nervous system,
tactility is that "which passes through us and makes us what
we
are."[6] It is, quite literally, an affect that opens or closes
us to
becoming.
Haptic technologies are not new -- body armor and clothing control
the tactile space between the body and its environment. Today, like
everything else, these controls are being informated. In network
society, Borges's haptic world in which "everything touches
everything" becomes an engineering project to produce digital
environments that have exactly the "right feel" and can
command the
body directly. McLuhan noted years ago that information media are
tactile systems.[7] They demand not just the eyes and ears of the
viewer, but the intensive involvement of the whole body. The medium
is not just the message but the massage, a technology of the
flesh.[8] Reach out and squeeze someone.
The common view of haptic control is that it simulates the sense
of
touch, but the larger goal is to create "immersive" environments
that
synthesize visual, auditory, and olfactory messages with tactile
or
vibratory information, to create so-called "multi-media"
interfaces
that produce "complete" sensory experiences. The simulation
of touch
is simply one step in a project governed by an integrative model
of
sensitivity rather than a traditional, oppositional model of the
senses. In the haptic model, the eye may have tactile as well as
optical functions, as a surface of pressure or heat, for instance.
It
is very difficult, some say impossible, to construct complete and
convincing tactile interfaces -- virtual reality systems simulate
visual or sound information passably well, but the problems of
engineering virtual objects to feel real are of another order of
magnitude altogether. Object-images on computer screens can look
real, but their texture and weight are hard to capture with existing
technology. Incomparably more difficult is reproducing a complete
haptic space, which includes the felt movements over time of a
subject in relation to his or her manipulation of virtual objects.
Research, however, is moving in this direction.
Putting the difficulty in terms of the distinction between passive
and active touch, inventor Kenneth Salisbury observes:
Unlike our other sensory modalities, haptics relies on action
to
stimulate perception... to sense the shape of a cup we do not
take a simple tactile snapshot and go away and think about what
we felt. Rather, we grasp and manipulate the object, running our
fingers across its shape and surfaces in order to build a mental
image of a cup.[9]
To get a convincing sense of touch in a virtual world through
a
haptic interface, the manipulation of the object must occur over
time, in a synthetic world still with spatial and sensory continuity,
so that tactile memory flows over time to build up a complex dynamic
haptic image of the object under examination. To accomplish this,
the
haptic is collocated in virtual space with the visual, auditory,
olfactory, etc., so that interactions confirm each other for the
user
and produce a realistic, embodied experience.[10]
Current haptic interfaces generate vibratory and force feedback
to
the user, and convey sense information about objects and their
surfaces in virtual space. They must be designed to react to users'
actions that are themselves prompted by haptic cues in the user's
virtual environment, in order to reproduce, for instance, the feeling
of grasping and working with real objects. In a word, they are
feedback systems -- users react to tactilely induced sensations
with
further manipulations of virtual objects, in a continuous, controlled
loop. A research paper on cognitive computing notes:
These sensations can be programmed to communicate information
about the occurrence of certain events. Such systems are known
as haptic cueing systems. Haptic cueing is analogous to the
audio-visual messaging system used in conventional graphical
user interfaces where the user's attention is diverted to a
certain event or region of the display through audio-visual
cues. It presents a simple yet effective messaging approach.
.... Results [of experiments with haptic devices] have shown
that tactile cueing based systems for conveying spatial features
are an effective tool in communicating spatial information to
individuals who are blind.[11]
Haptic interfaces simulate the feel of objects, their texture,
surface resistance, bulk, edges and gaps. Current applications
include locomotion devices for navigating virtual worlds (updated
treadmills), orthopedic equipment, touch-screen technologies,
tele-operators (remotely controlled robots), diagnostic tools for
measuring or producing pressure and resistance, density, heat, and
other intensive parameters, and, of course, computer games that
provide gamers with various kinds of vibrational or positional
feedback.[12] Some of the first modern haptic technologies were
developed in avionics to simulate the vibrations on aircraft wings,
conveyed as information to the pilot's hand on the joystick. These
early tools were in many ways the precursors of modern telesurgical
instruments, which assist remote doctors to feel, as well as see
and
hear, the images of distant bodies.[13] Today there are uses of
haptics for sex, which would augment visual and aural with tactile
forms of erotic stimulation. Pornography, not surprisingly, is a
force of innovation in haptic control. If the use of cyber-gloves
to
simulate the feel of objects in virtual space offers us a glimpse
of
the future of tactile control, the vibrator does the same in the
electronic evolution of sex toys, where convincing tactility is
the
Holy Grail. There is even an old research and marketing designation
for this branch of haptics -- teledildonics.[14]
There is a complex relation between haptic control and what Deleuze
calls "dividuation," the logic of control societies.[15]
Individuation, the logic of disciplinary societies, is external
division of a mass into distinct, numbered (or signed) entities.
Dividuation, on the other hand, is the internal division of entities
into measurable and adjustable parameters, in the way, for instance,
a digital sound sample is divided into separate parameters of tone,
pitch, or velocity.[16] For audio engineers, these parameters, or
"modules," can be independently adjusted (some fixed while
others are
varied) and modified in real time to flow within certain limits
(e.g., if the velocity setting is too high or low, the sound breaks
up or becomes inaudible, etc.). Each sound, in turn, can be divided
into smaller samples that are also subject to parametric control,
and
so on. Think of your body composed of samples of vibrational
information like these sounds, whose parameters can be measured
and
used to generate tactile feedback (e.g., the pressure you exert
in
grasping a virtual object fed back to you as the felt hardness of
the
object). Haptic controls adjust this information to vary within
pre-set thresholds.
Deleuze writes that dividuals in control societies are not shaped
by
molds, which produce distinct individuals, but consist of modulations
of coded information. That is, dividuation involves something like
a
"moving form" of coding (continuous decoding and recoding).
A mold,
Deleuze writes, is a distinct casting, whereas a modulation is like
a
"self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one
moment to
the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point
to
point."[17] If individuation produces units that have a distinct
casting, dividuation produces the flexible modules of control (the
parameters) through which they pass. As an economic process,
dividuation serves the demands of postmodern global Capital for
flexible modes of production and consumption [18]. When Amazon.com
recommends books for customers to buy based on information stored
in
its database, or when global corporations abandon Taylorist forms
of
control based on the individuation of confined bodies in favor of
outsourcing and informated production strategies, they use the tools
of dividuation, i.e., parametric controls, internal adjustments
of
sampled information, continuous modulation.
Capital is a decoding machine.[19] A code is simply the form of
repetition of some process (e.g., the translation of words in a
language, the conversion of money into goods, the sorting of statuses
into ranks, bodies into categories, etc.). Decoding unlocks the
economic value of repetitive processes, and it is the basis of
capitalist control of accumulation. Baudrillard writes, for example,
how the code of fashion in capitalist societies is simply the
repetition of the newest model.[20] As soon as one model emerges
on
the market, it is decoded and replaced by a newer one. Foucault
describes prisons as assemblages that decode delinquency, and
biopower as a system that decodes life.[21] We are all familiar
today
with genetic science as a decoding machine linked to global
capitalism that promises to accomplish for the body what advertising
does for fashion. Here we have one of the best examples of the
abandonment of strategies of individuation in favor of continuous
modulation. Having broken the molecular code of human individuation,
genetic science proceeds to experiment on its parameters. Dividuals
are like the newest fashions, the "latest" individuals,
recycled
hybrid forms with recombinable parts, easily reconfigured, hot items
today, obsolete tomorrow.
The program of dividuation is flexibility. Dividuals are not the
products of fixed training in closed environments, but artifacts
of
data mining searches and computer profiles. They are the continuously
morphing targets of advertising schemes, insurance scams, and opinion
polls. A dividual is a data double passed through a moving screen,
stripped down to whatever modular information is required for a
particular intervention, task or transaction. Increasingly,
postmodern subjectivity is defined by interaction with information
meshes and the modular dividuals they produce. When you use an ATM
machine, you are interacting with your dividuated self, or when
you
access your work environment via your home computer. Likewise, when
a
database is mined for information on your buying habits, leisure
habits, reading habits, communication habits, etc., you are
transformed into a dividual.
This brings us back to haptics. Imagine an ATM machine whose
interface is not just textual or visual, but simulates the feel
of a
real transaction with a real bank teller. Or the haptic workplace
at
home, a haptic road trip, a haptic surgical procedure performed
by a
haptic doctor. In these examples, the body is connected to data
that
feeds back feelings, emotions and capacities for judgment to it
as so
many parametric modulations. Such a body would have as many modular
forms as networks to which it potentially can be connected -- simply
decode the interface, reconfigure its parameters and save to the
file
dubbed "New You."
Nomad Art
Typically, Deleuze and Guattari do not focus on haptics from the
viewpoint of control, but as a capacity to resist control. They
describe haptics as a kind of "nomad art."[22] They define
nomad art,
first, in terms of "close range" vision, as distinguished
from
long-range or "distance" vision; and second, as tactile,
or haptic
space, as distinguished from optical space. "Haptic,"
they write, is
a better word than "tactile" since it does not suggest
an opposition
between vision and touch, but rather invites the assumption that
the
eye itself may fulfill this non-optical function.
For Deleuze and Guattari, haptic space is smooth space, i.e.,
it is
fluid and intensive. Smooth space is deterritorialized and must
be
navigated by constant reference to the immediate concrete
environment, not to abstractions like maps or compasses, but by
perception that attends to the particularities of the materials
that
must be traversed, as when a person walks through sand or snow
(Deleuze and Guattari use examples of nomadic peoples, Bedouins
or
Inuit, to illustrate this).
Optical space, in contrast, is striated space, extensive, fixed
and
territorialized. Optical visuality sees objects as distinct, at
a
distance, identifiable, and existing in three-dimensional space.
It
maintains a clear and precise relationship between figure and ground.
Laura Marks writes:
Optical visuality is necessary for distance perception: for
surveying a landscape, for making fine distinctions between
things at a distance. That's how the object of vision is
constituted in optical visuality. The subject of vision -- the
beholder -- is also conceived as discrete, as having solid
borders that demarcate the beholder from the thing beheld. So
you can see why optical visuality is needed, for example, for
firing a missile. It conceives of the other, the object of
vision, as distant and unconnected to the subject of vision.
Optical visuality is necessary. But it's only half of
vision.[23]
In the other half, haptic visuality, the subject is not detached
from
the object and sees the world as if it were touching it: close,
intensive, on the surface of the body. Deleuze and Guattari cite
Alois Riegl (along with Wilhelm Worringer and Henri Maldiney) as
the
artists who gave fundamental aesthetic status to the relation between
close range vision and haptic spaces.[24] Reigl, a historian of
textiles who studied the complex visual textures of Persian rugs,
borrowed the term from psychology, haptein, signifying a kind of
vision that "grabs" the thing it looks at.[25] Drawing
examples from
Imperial Egyptian art, Riegl defined haptic space as the "presence
of
a horizon-background" in which space is reduced to a plane,
from
which an optical space was later differentiated in Greek and Roman
art. The latter space formalized the relation of objects to their
background, organized perspective and represented volumes.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the space of nomad art is flat and
immanent. There is no transcendent operator, and the experience
of
space is intimate and immersive. "Cezanne," they write,
"spoke of the
need to no longer see the wheat field, but to be too close to it,
to
lose oneself without landmarks in smooth space."[26] The same
can be
said of a musical improviser who loses herself in the sound of her
and others' playing. Any artist who becomes immersed in her work
is a
nomad. In the notion of "too" close, Cezanne captures
the submersion
of the artist in the particularity of her materials. It has nothing
to do with vision or hearing or touch in their isolated, separated
forms, but with enveloping sheets of intensity and perception as
affect, not merely affection.[27]
Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between smooth and striated
is an
ethico-aesthetic distinction between two ways of occupying space.
Smooth space is lived in immediately, there is no subject-object
separation, and the body is not conceived as a physical property
so
much as a provisional assemblage of connections between flows of
affects and ideas. To inhabit striated space, on the other hand,
is
to be caught up in hierarchical forms of observation and control.
It
is to travel on pre-set paths to predetermined destinations, laid
out
according to fixed maps that distance the traveler from the milieu
in
which he moves.
In their corporate and state configurations, electronic networks
are
striated systems. Baudrillard sees in McLuhan's insight about the
tactility of the media a formula for society where "contacts"
have
replaced the sensuousness of touch, and testing becomes a continuous
"palpitation."
And you understand why McLuhan saw in the era of the great
electronic media an era of tactile communication. We are closer
here in effect to the tactile than to the visual universe, where
the distancing is greater and reflection is always possible. At
the same time as touch loses its sensorial, sensual value for us
("touching is an interaction of the senses rather than a simple
contact of an object with the skin"), it is possible that it
returns as the strategy of a universe of communication - but as
the field of tactile and tactical simulation, where the message
becomes "massage," tentacular solicitation, test. Everywhere
you're tested, palpated, the method is "tactical," the
sphere of
communication is "tactile." Without even speaking of the
ideology of "contact," that is being pushed in all its
forms as
a substitute for social rapport, there is an entire social
configuration that orbits around the test (the question/answer
cell) as around the commandments of the molecular code.[28]
Tactile media, of course, do open new possibilities for expression,
performance, and so on:
The haptic device allows the artist to have a direct contact
with a virtual instrument, which is able to produce real-time
sound or images. We can quote the physical modeling synthesis,
which is an efficient modeling theory to implement cross-play
interaction between sound, image and physical objects. For
instance, the simulation of a violin string produces real-time
vibrations of this string under the pressure and expressivity of
the bow (haptic device) held by the artist.[29]
Can technical control also be nomad art, haptic and smooth? Can
the
feel of playing a virtual violin be the same as playing a violin?
Can
haptic space be informated? The technical control of tactility does
produce affections (see note 27). The virtual violin has a different
expressiveness than a real one, and produces new sensations in
playing and performance. But though tactile control is affective,
it
is not an affect itself. McLuhan's "tactility" of the
media refers to
its capacity to affect us, to stimulate our nervous system, but
the
media itself is not an affect, has no independent power to exist
or
act. Haptic space is resistant to haptic control by the media, to
measurement, to modulation, ultimately to informationalization.
Capital's efforts to dominate haptic space, however, are real. To
find its most affective forms, we only have to look to the
technologies of cloning, haptic control on our immediate horizon.
What is a clone if not an effort to simulate haptic space, a figure
of the complete parametric control of affect in the name of
accumulation? But is a clone a nomad artist? I don't think so.
Men fear most what they cannot see.-- Raz, in ~Batman Begins~
Raz's formula is not quite right. According to Elias Canetti,
men
fear most the touch of what they cannot see. He opens _Crowds and
Power_ with these words: "There is nothing that man fears more
than
the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards
him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it."[30]
Presumably, if man could see what touches him, it would ease his
fear
of it. Canetti, like Foucault, sees visibility, optical space, as
a
trap; what is observed can be known and thus controlled. But he
notes
another way that man loses his fear of being touched, and that is
simply through being touched itself. Canetti goes on to say that
men
lose their fear of being touched in crowds. The fear of being touched
is what distances human beings from each other and keeps them
isolated individuals. In a crowd that presses in on itself and
becomes denser, however, physical contact among individuals is
unavoidable and produces the opposite of fear, a feeling of power
or
even daring. Crowds are compressed populations that are dangerous
in
different ways than bodies. They do not always respond to the
disciplinary forces that keep bodies docile and in line. In crowds,
it is not simply a question of seeing the unknown, but often of
rushing headlong into it. The body becomes capable of what the crowd
is capable, for better or worse. It is incorporated tactilely, by
physical proximity and by being carried on the crowd's undulations
and vibrations.
Canetti has a better sense than Raz of the real machines at work
here. They are not just vision-machines, but desiring machines in
the
most basic sense, as waves of affect that course through
multiplicities.[31] This is haptic space, where everything is "too
close." In a compressed population, which paradoxically discipline
creates, tactile connections replace visual ones, and immersion
suppresses differences. One way to view haptic space is as the
suppression of a code, the code that organizes optical space, which
disciplinary society and capitalist accumulation used to such great
advantage. There is an evolution of complexity of social control
here. Man needs to see the unknown, and so he keeps watch over it,
places everything under surveillance. But beyond simply watching
the
unknown, the real problem is grasping it, fastening to it, walking
through it, running with it. This is not a problem of surveillance,
but of immersion. We said earlier that haptic control is a problem
of
controlling released populations. Now we can be more specific. It
is
a problem of crowd control, i.e., control of turbulent
multiplicities.[32] It is not exercised on individuals from a
distance, nor does it operate internally to individuals (in the
sense
that individuals internalize norms of behavior). Rather, it is
designed to be a reflexive and self-organizing property of the crowd
itself, as the transmission of a multiplicity of contacts is
articulated in waves that intensify and diminish like waves of the
ocean. Or in collective vibrations that respond to the force of
strange attractors.
Generally, the problem for the police is how to exercise control
over
crowds, over dense and moving populations, how to confine them or
otherwise keep them orderly.[33] Foucault, of course, famously writes
about the roles of hierarchical observation and examination in this
process. But control within the crowd, as a function of its own
self-organization, is of another nature altogether. The affects
that
govern the internal organizations of crowds are haptic, tactile
and
immersive. Police technologies for controlling crowd affects are
evolving in network societies. No longer content with passive
surveillance (cameras, listening devices), the new technologies
seek
to control crowd affect directly, by informating tactile qualities
of
crowds -- texture, concentration, pressure, attraction and repulsion
-- generating those qualities through technical means.
Tactile networks are the technical horizon of crowd control. This
I
take to be the whole logic of haptics understood as an information
control technology and means of capitalist accumulation. The dream
of
police technologies is to harness the tactility of crowds and place
it at the disposal of the new information economy. This demands
not
just control of visible space, but parametric control using tactile
feedback.
In the 1973 sci-fi story "Flash Crowd," Larry Niven
envisages a
society that has invented teleportation. An argument in a mall
covered by a TV crew becomes the impetus for an instantaneous riot,
as people from everywhere teleport to the scene. The modern
incarnation of this is the "flash mob." Flash mobs are
populations
that suddenly assemble in a public place, do something interesting,
then disperse. They are mostly self-organizing, taking advantage
of
the potentials in digital networks and instant messaging, and are
often unpredictable and disruptive. We can imagine contemporary
social control as a problem in the anticipation and policing of
flash
mobs. This is what occupies the authorities today. (In Niven's story,
a policeman dryly says of flash crowds, "we watch for them").[34]
Imagine a society where instead of teleporting to an event, you
are
plugged into an interface that is a node in a highly policed haptic
network. In such a society, the police (or authorities of other
kinds) are able to control the generation of flash crowds, mobilize
them in advance and assemble them at the necessary times and places,
in ways that invest the full tactile participation of their members.
This is the logic of televised "pay-per-view" events,
where the goal
is to provide paying customers with realistic spectacles of remote
happenings (e.g., sporting and entertainment events, political and
educational events, sex and violence). Or Capital's dream of an
automated and mobile labor force, capable of being outsourced over
computer networks to wherever it needs. The remote workplace is
already a reality for many "affective" laborers in the
professional
administrative and service sectors of the economy. The once enclosed
site of the industrial workplace is becoming a relic of the past
as
the corporate tactile model spreads through information networks
across the planet. The new networked worker, as Hardt and Negri
observe, is already the common figure of the postmodern economy.[35]
Finally, it is the dream of completely liquid consumption, the
instantaneous mobilization of crowds of dividualized consumers
online, buying everything in site, flash crowd shopping. Artificially
induced tactility.
Virilio writes that crowd control is a problem in controlling
speed,
an issue of channeling and otherwise regulating "traffic."[36]
Information providers describe this in terms of bandwidth. But speed
in turn is a function of the variable thickness of flows, that is,
their texture. Control of crowd speeds is the effort to control
crowd
textures, pressures, densities, vibrational intensities. This, not
simply bandwidth, is the control horizon of the electronic media
--
information textures stored in interconnected mega-capacity
databases. The new haptic controls will transform our relation to
remote crowds from spectator to programmed participant. Haptic
interfaces, networks generally, are our contemporary forms of
teleportation. Perhaps in the future these interfaces will be
implanted directly into our brains to generate the body's sense
of
presence in a population of other bodies similarly connected --
shopping, working, gaming, traveling, learning, fighting, fucking,
each body a dividualized member of an informated crowd (the
database). It doesn't matter that futuristic teleport stations like
the ones imagined by Niven or in Doctor Who may never exist. This
does not negate the interest of Capital and its police forces in
haptic technologies to generate crowds.
Haptic control increasingly organizes labor (also a kind of crowd)
as
an "affective" entity. Hardt and Negri note the new forms
of labor
concerned with generating mood, feeling, and so on. Deleuze talks
about students who seek the "motivation" to work. The
new controls
are tactile and require only connection to a network. If you have
the
right code you can join whatever crowd you must, become affected
the
way it is. Beyond the coercive power of visual surveillance, what
distinguishes network control is ability to convert the human subject
into a mobile node in a population of mobile nodes that can be sorted
and compressed together instantaneously. To this end, the
monadological designation once given to the visual space of control
can be applied to the person wherever he or she goes. The visually
tracked body is now its own network node, thoroughly
deterritorialized -- it becomes a mobile attachment to a database,
an
informated crowd, a networked population. Each population is run
through a unique set of parameters -- your banking crowd (accessed
with this password, with its own programmed affections), your
shopping crowd, your work crowd, your pleasure crowd (the online
chatroom). Each crowd is a monad, but not like a space in a burrow.
Here you are out in the open and the crowd is dispersed. Its members
are a roaming population controlled by a variable yet common set
of
parameters.
Against standard critiques of postmodern culture as a "culture
of
fear" (fear of being watched, fear of terrorism, of losing
one's
identity, control of one's body, whatever), haptic control raises
another possibility, viz., the disappearance of fear (and perhaps
caution) surrounding the body and identity in postmodern society.
Every machinic assemblage produces a subject alongside it that
parallels it and provides it with a target -- the assembly line
produces the industrial laborer, the prison creates the modern
delinquent. What subjects do haptic assemblages produce? What these
systems may produce are fearless subjects. In the 1980's, a number
of
writers on the "cyborgization" of the postmodern soldier
described
not only the use of surveillance technology to monitor military
forces in the field, but also the development of integrated
information control systems that would operate directly on the
proprioceptive side of battle -- combat simulators, panic-suppressing
and nausea-controlling drugs, symbiotic body-weapon interfaces,
digitalized performance enhancement systems of all kinds. Generally,
even in a culture such as the U.S., obsessed with terrorist threats,
bird flu, or aging and dying, it is not the affect of fear but
fearlessness that predominates today, the same fearlessness that
enables video gamers to die in combat or crash cars off cliffs or
into walls without any hesitation. This is not a kind of fatalism,
but more a manipulation of feeling supported by media's incredible
force of distraction.[36] Multi-player online video gaming is only
a
simulation of crowd experience. Life and death intensities are not
at
stake here. Bodies are only attached to dividuals, and contact is
pseudo-tactile. Whatever the game provides in tactile realism, what
matters more are the distractive and euphoric qualities the game
produces. Flash wars, flash competitions, flash sacrifices, all
attempts to capture and enclose crowd experience. When police forces
and military entities are the players, online war is the most
dangerous game of all, threatening to break out anywhere, conducted
in a complete and utter state of distraction. Can we view online
shopping in the same way, as the incarnation of the fearless,
distracted consumer, or online sex as the creation of the fearless,
distracted pleasure seeker? The bodies are dispersed, but they
reassemble in an artificial haptic space, in dense, textured crowds
of information.
Networks of resistance?
Power, Foucault says, is resistance. There are counter-forces
emerging to tactile enclosures just as there were, and are, to the
optical enclosures invented by disciplinary societies. Some of these
we are familiar with. Hacking, cracking, reverse coding and
engineering, viruses, spam, tools for resisting network domination.
Cyber-body art. Flash happenings. Populations resist controlled
distribution, whether it is dispersed on the net or behind closed
walls. Haptic networks are a means of control, and control can only
be an affection, not an affect; a tactile s(t)imulation, a modulation
of tactility, but not tactility itself for which there are no
modules, no parameters. If there is a political message in the image
of the coils of a serpent, it is to resist modulation, at least
in
its electronic, parametric form. There are no controlled "parameters"
of affect, no digitalized thresholds of tactility. Of course, this
does not stop Capital's effort to control tactility by analyzing
it
into bits of information and feeding that back as electronic impulses
into our nerves and muscles, or by modulating the affects of
populations, by maneuvering bodies within a net of tactile portals
all interconnected with each other. For all these efforts, however,
Capital does not control haptic space or tactility, because control,
in a word, is not an affect.
Despite the hype about openness and flat communications, digital
networks are mainly hierarchical spaces. Some nodes, called hubs,
dominate connections and block access to information with passwords.
Other connections are broken or decrypted. Networks do have a kind
of
paradoxical opennness -- they can temporarily block their own
controls -- passwords are broken with the same tools used to create
them, closed connections get re-routed or filled in, hubs collapse
with tiny changes in their code, viruses. In these sudden,
self-induced collapses of hierarchical networks, haptic space reopens
to reclaim too-closeness and tactility for itself.
Resistance to haptic control is not about retaking control of
haptic
space, which would only be another strategy of enclosure and mirror
Capital's strategy to release the energy of haptic space and put
it
to work. Resistance means pushing tactility beyond its parameters,
reclaiming too-closeness and immersion and fearlessness, and most
of
all, feelings of power, the body's sensitivity to itself and its
capacities to affect and to be affected (the capacities haptic
control destroys). For populations it means resistance to dispersal
over networks and rediscovery of the political efficacy of
concentration and crowding. These projects are not pure, as flash
crowds demonstrate, and present their own problems. Immersion and
closeness in crowds can be suffocating. Fearlessness in crowds also
makes them close in on the body, which in turn can offer little
resistance to the crowd's line of flight. There is always the danger
that resistance to haptic control will end up enclosing the body
even
tighter, and even reinstating older modes of confinement (discipline,
Deleuze writes, may stage a comeback).
We end with Deleuze's concept of dividuation and its relation
to
haptic space. Dividuation is tied to control and parametric
modulation. It is the logic of capitalist accumulation that breaks
down life into measures of information, and populations into
databases. We distinguish dividuation from internal differenciation,
which, according to Deleuze, is not a process of modulation but
a
becoming different. We should understand information networks and
haptic controls as dividuating technologies that block the number
of
connections a body can make and decrease its capacity to be affected.
The new flexible forms of labor and consumption demanded by global
Capital are ample evidence that dividuation serves to further
artificialize life and impoverish the social connections that matter
to us. Haptic space, on the other hand, is internal becoming. Each
move through haptic space is a change of nature, not a controlled
modulation. Reach out and touch someone in control societies is
an
imperative to connect, an order to accumulate information, to
multi-task, to stay accessible and in the grip of a haptic control.
In haptic space, however, it is an invitation for intimacy and the
exhilaration of becoming too close.
Acknowledgments: I
would like to thank the anonymous _CTheory_ reviewer and the editors
of _CTheory_ for the helpful comments and suggestions they provided.
Notes:
[1] Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the societies
of control," _October_59 (Winter), 1992, p. 7.
[2] Michel Foucault, _Discipline and Punish: the
Birth of the Prison_, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977, pp. 141-177.
[3] On the concept of a meshwork and its relation
to digital control, see Manuel De Landa,_ Real Virtuality: Meshworks
and Hierarchies in the Digital Domain_, Netherlands Architecture
Institute, 2006.
[4] Foucault, 1977, pp. 200ff.
[5] S. Gallagher, "Bodily self-awareness and
object perception," _Theoria et Historia Scientiarum: International
Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies_ 7, 2003; J.J. Gibson, _The
Ecological Approach to Visual Perception_, London: Houghton Mifflin,
1979; Mark
Paterson, _The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies_,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
[6] Michael Taussig, _The Nervous System_, New
York: Routledge, 1992, p. 10.
[7] Marshall McLuhan, _Understanding Media; the
Extensions of Man_, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
[8] Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, _The Medium
is the Massage_, New York: Random House, 1967.
[9] K. Salisbury, "Haptics: The Technology
of Touch," ~HPCwire Special~, Nov. 10, 1995.
[10] M. Hodges, "It Just Feels Right,"
_Computer Graphics World 21_,
1998.
[11] K. Kahol and S. Panchanathan, "Haptic
Cueing," Center for
Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing, 2006. Available online at:
http://cubic.asu.edu/research/haptic_interfaces/tactile_cueing.html.
[12] Lake Porter and Jutta Treviranus, "Haptic
Applications to
Virtual Worlds," University of Toronto Adaptive Technology
Resource
Centre, 2006. Available online at:
http://www.utoronto.ca/atrc/rd/vrml/haptics.html.
[13] Griffin Weber, "Using Tactile Images
to Differentiate Breast
Tissue Types," 2006. Available online at:
http://www.griffinweber.com/thesis/.
[14] A great term from the 1980's referring to
the integration of
telepresence and remote sex.
[15] Deleuze, 1992, p. 5.
[16] Individuation and dividuation are not opposed
operations. Both
are control mechanisms, the first producing unified entities, the
second modular, or internally divided, units. When societies move
from disciplinary to control societies, they adopt a new model and
practice of division.
[17] Deleuze, 1992, p. 4.
[18] Cf. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, _Multitude:
War and
Democracy in the Age of Empire_, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.
[19] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, _Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and
Schizophrenia_, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983,
pp.
139ff.
[20] Jean Baudrillard, _The System of Objects_,
London and New York:
Verso, 1996, pp. 164ff.
[21] Michel Foucault, _The History of Sexuality_,
New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978.
[22] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, _A Thousand
Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia_, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987, pp. 492-9.
[23] Laura U. Marks, "Haptic Visuality: Touching
with the Eyes," in
_Frameworks_ 2:1, 2004. Available online at:
http://www.framework.fi/2_2004/visitor/artikkelit/marks.html.
[24] Deleuze and Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_,
p. 493.
[25] Marks, 2004.
[26] Deleuze and Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_,
p. 493.
[27] The distinction between affect and affection
is complex, but
important in this context. Control, for Deleuze, can only be an
affection. An affect is the variation of the power of existing and
acting. Affection is the state of a body as subject to another body.
It is the "modified" or affected body, as opposed to the
active body.
The feelings produced by haptic technologies are not affects, but
affections. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, _Spinoza: Practical Philosophy_,
San
Francisco: City Light Books, 1988; also Gilles Deleuze, "Course
on
Spinoza," 1978. Available online at:
http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html.
[28] Jean Baudrillard, _Simulations_, New York:
Semiotext(e) Inc.,
1983.
[29] With regard to sound, the physical modeling
synthesis comprises
a set of equations and algorithms to simulate a physical source
of
sound. "Sound is then generated using parameters that describe
the
physical materials used in the instrument and the user's interaction
with it, for example, by plucking a string, or covering tone holes,
and so on. For example, to model the sound of a drum, there would
be
a formula for how striking the drumhead injects energy into a two
dimensional membrane. Thereafter the properties of the membrane
(mass
density, stiffness, etc.), its coupling with the resonance of the
cylindrical body of the drum, and the conditions at its boundaries
(a
rigid termination to the drum's body) would describe its movement
over time and thus its generation of sound. Similar stages to be
modeled can be found in instruments such as a violin mentioned
above..." Wikipedia, "Haptic Technologies," 2007.
Available online
at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic#Haptic_technology.
[30] Elias Canetti, _Crowds and Power_, New York:
Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1984, p.1.
[31] Deleuze and Guattari view the crowd as a molar
formation and
prefer to focus on the "pack" as a molecular formation
closer to the
problem of desire. Still, Canetti's work on crowds is exceptionally
important for its examples of haptic phenomena and their relation
to
feelings of power, immersion, and tactility. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari
1983, 1987.
[32] See DeLanda's explanation of turbulence, which
extends ideas of
Deleuze and Guattari, as a way of understanding control in
self-organizing dynamic systems. Manuel De Landa, _Intensive Science
and Virtual Philosophy_, London; New York: Continuum, 2002.
[33] This includes all kinds of crowds, including
clusters of
objects, signs, and of course human beings. Cf. Paul Virilio, _Pure
War_, New York: Semiotext(e), 1997.
[34] Another interesting example is the "TARDIS,"
"a fictional
time-space machine in the television show Doctor Who. A TARDIS is
capable of transporting its occupants to any point in space and
time.
Its interior exists in multidimensional space, making it
significantly larger on the inside than it appears from outside.
Externally, the TARDIS resembles the shape of a 1950s British police
box. The show has become so much a part of British popular culture
that the shape of the police box is now more immediately associated
with the TARDIS than its original real-world function. The word
has
also entered popular usage and is used to describe anything that
seems bigger on the inside than on the outside." Larry Niven,
"Flash
Crowd," in _The Flight of the Horse_, 1973, pp. 99-164. Cf.
also
Wikipedia, "Haptic Technologies," 2007. Available online
at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic#Haptic_technology.
[35] Hardt and Negri, 2004.
[36] Virilio, 1997.
[37] William Bogard. "Distraction and Digital
Culture," in _Life in
the Wires: The CTheory Reader_, Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker,
eds. Victoria: CTheory Books, 2005, pp. 443-460.
--------------------
