<nettime> mobility and its armaments

["Jordan Crandall" <crandall@blast.org>]

Fitness in Wartime:
Americans on the Move

Jordan Crandall


Not so very long ago, in America, we were in danger of becoming embalmed by
the image.  The specter of the "couch potato," propped up in front of the
television set, haunted what seemed to be an increasingly sedentary culture.
Fused with the image in a kind of mind-meld, the body became a fulfillment
vehicle for the desire-creating machine that is television.  But it very
often just became fat.  In the early days of cyberspace, this figure morphed
into a "meatself" parked at the computer monitor -- a viewer who, released
from the restraints of the body, frolicked gleefully in the matrix.  In both
cases, we had a nearly inert lump of flesh whose only life signs were tiny
eye and finger flickers.  With television, the body was immobilized; with
early cyberspace, there was the premonition of its abandonment -- in a
"lifestyled" culture increasingly at odds with the reality of its flesh.  We
wondered:  what would become of the body rendered obsolete in the
playgrounds of virtuality?

Those days, for better or worse, were soon over.  The rallying cry became:
Time to get in shape!  Wrested from the chair and launched into circulation
within new mobile communications landscapes, we were to get our asses in
gear, outfitted with arrays of portable devices.  Mobile phones that were
Web-enabled.  Palm PCs outfitted with modems.  Wearable GPS systems.
Internet-enhanced eyegoggles.  Smart shoes.  Personal satellites.  Implants.


It made one long for the days when one could just sit there.


Once upon a time in America there was an immobilized viewer, a fixed screen,
and a stream of visuals that seemed to course in between, pulling the
arrested viewer along a landscape that increasingly seemed as "travel."  We
went "to" the image -- or rather traveled through it, to its offerings,
whether by Web or television or by the Fulfillment Vehicle of the
automobile.  Lodged within a shelter outfitted with ports, we were held in
thrall by the screen yet mobilized in terms of the places that could be
accessed through its confines.  Through the image, the shelter was secured
yet made portable.  We carried it with us as a shield.  It protected us from
the elements and from danger, while with the remote control or the mouse we
fired bullets at the screen in order to defend that for which it stood.  Our
house stands for something.  We stood for something.  Through this tapping
of the finger and the mini-projectiles it launched, friend/enemy divisions
coalesced, helping to determine the contours of shelter and self.  Fueled by
the disaster imaginary -- Hollywood, videogames, CNN -- combat dynamics were
filtered through an easy logistics of Choice.  To select a channel and to
meld with the image flow was to create a "for" and an "against" -- a feeling
that "I" stood here against "them" -- and a means of eliminating that which
did not fit within the barricades of the here-and-now.  "We will have none
of that in this house," one's parents would say, banishing opposition to the
exterior.  The automobile extended the im/mobile home:  we steered through
the image, cushioned occupants soothed within the travel-flow.  The car
allowed a shiny projectile to be launched across the commons, its immobile
occupant sealed inside, as it raced en route toward the fulfillment of its
duty:  to gather resources from afar in order to fortify the
home-in-mobility.


The home-shield and the transmission/transport-weapon.  Both corporealizing,
in whatever degree of inertia.  The finger-taps on the remote control, the
hands on the wheel, or the hand turning off of the cathode ray tube as the
light fades and the womb of the shelter cradles its occupant in a soothing
net of safety.




To Hunt, and to be Not Harmed


The vision of legions of Web-enabled citizens on the move in the name of
commerce has morphed into that of a populace armed with communications
appliances, taking to the streets with a warrior spirit, bunkering down in
the name of protectionisms, or engaging in some combination of both.  (We
carry our shields with us.)  We are assured of our right to hunt -- to
shop -- and to be protected from danger, in a world that seems increasingly
fraught with peril.  Under the possibility of danger -- danger defined in
terms of corporeality as well as transmissions assault -- a hybrid body is
generated to require new fortifications.  The logic of protection
intertwines with that of enhancement:  to improve is to make safer; to bring
the body up to par is to make it adequate to meet new production demands as
well as to make it adequate to meet new threats.  Inefficiency, the
contouring agent of business, combines with danger, the contouring agent of
militarization -- though the distinctions erode as they outsource together.
What does it mean to be a "fit" individual?  What does it mean to be "safe"?
What does its "outside" tell us?


Justified in the name of convenience and defense, we are promised a vast
extension of the net, where appliances of all kinds are tied into one
another and where new kinds of observing networks extend a deceptively
soothing gaze of protection.  It is an infrastructure where every
movement -- not only just mouse-clicks but street-level activity -- is
trackable and potentially contoured through the advent of location-based
services and new ideologies of preventivity.  Through net-enabled devices,
GPS-systems, and monitoring networks connected to shared databases, we are
able to be locked onto for the purpose of targeting information, creating a
desire, steering us in a specific direction, finding us should Help be
necessary, or containing us if we are suspected of a crime.  Combined with
the increasing precision of surveillance technology, the rise of proactive
policing, the lowering of governmental restraints, and the increasing
acquiescence of a public that has been numbed to the threats this might
impose, we face a situation where the body has not been immobilized by the
image, or caused to abandon itself in the face of the image, but is in very
many real senses replaced by it.  In turn, the image is replaced by
something else.  The mobile user is imaged, transformed into a calculus of
patterns, habits, opinions, and functions by an observing system that
~compels~ movement -- a movement very often called forth and enacted by
those whom it hails.


Frozen in an image, or replaced by one.  Detective strategies are always met
with new means of deception.  New agencies are spawned.  The seemingly
immobilized body at the television or monitor was the site of the production
of new mobilities:  a stepping stone toward the fracturing of mobility,
toward the splintering of corporeality into layers of embodiment, and toward
the multidimensional layering of the immediate.  Forms and motions follow
one another in an elaborate dance:  bodily orientations and behaviors change
in relationship to communications devices, as they revolve about the body
and are intertwined with specific concepts of what it means to move and to
move well.  What it means to move efficiently, what it means to move safely.
Different kinds of movements, technological interventions, combat
conventions, and bodily faculties help to continually shape and constitute
one another, interlacing a "here" and a "there," resolving disparity by
warping distance and space.  And further: helping to determine and "us" and
a "them," filtering into the very basis of the political.


Relays between movement and technologies of registration loop through a
newly figurable viewer.  Foes are produced; a shelter coalesces; and a
subject appears.  Install a projectile and a shield, and one can always
count on a body to appear in the circuit.  The projectile maps its vectors
of movement and desire; the shield its bodily and subjective contours.


Exit couchpotato and screen, meatself and monitor, at home and clicking away
upon command.  We no longer have subjects and objects that sit; we have
relays or clusters through which forms and movements coalesce.  We have
body/machine/movement clusters, into which a fitting (weapon-gadget) is
introduced, and which is enmeshed in an incorporative/integrative dynamic:
its visual faculty extended through the network, its rhythms intertwined
within the demands and enhancements offered by communications and battle
machines, its body lodged within a protective encasing or squeezed within an
invasive projectile.


In this space of mobility, mutations are left in the aftermath, like a whisk
of air from a passing car that coalesces in a form.




The New Inertia


Fellow Americans:  think about these things the next time you feel the
pressure to move.  Defend your right to sit still!  There are too many
people moving around already.  With all this mobility, no one is going to be
home any more.


And remember that it is war out there.  Right in the palm of your hand.

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