Jeremy Packer

BECOMING BOMBS: MOBILIZING MOBILITY IN THE WAR OF TERROR

The war is on and we are all becoming bombs. Let me repeat. The war is on and whether you like it or not (upon entering the US Homeland), you are becoming a bomb. In the US’s new war of terror a specific formation of the war machine has been turned upon its own citizenry. Citizens and non-citizens alike are now treated as an always present threat. In this sense all are imagined as combatants and all-terrain the site of battle. Mobility, the crossing of terrain, is in differing ways a prime form of weaponry. Contextually, it has become something of a cliché to recognize the increasingly mobile global population. Yet, the explosive possibilities of such mobility and how this alters the relation of governed and governance are something which has yet to receive ample theoretical attention. Gillian Fuller (2003) stresses that ‘We might move more, and through increasingly complex landscapes, but we are also more streamlined and proceduralised in these movements’. When such movement is increasingly processed and treated as if it might be a bomb, mobile subjects are made enemies in terms of the state’s relationship to them. This essay examines previous forms of governing, or proceduralising, mobility and the legitimating logic for doing so, and how these have been radically altered post 9/11 via implementations of Homeland Security. Whether at border crossings, airport terminals, roadside police interrogations, ports, or security checks at government buildings, what is often referred to as ‘freedom of movement’ has become one site where the ‘Homeland’s’ security is seen to be at risk. Points that Fuller notes are thresholds where we are checked. Conceptions of whom has such freedom to cross, how, when, where, and with what velocity, has all changed. As the Department of Homeland Security’s website (dhs.gov 2002) states, ‘The increasing mobility and destructive potential of modern terrorism has required the United States to rethink and rearrange fundamentally its systems for border and transportation security’. Yet, mobility is also imagined as a productive force for ensuring homeland security as a number of programs call upon the auto-mobile citizen

Epistemology Not Ideology OR Why We Need New Germans

This article argues for a shift away from ideology critique as the primary focus of critical communication and media studies. Instead, the author suggests enlisting the work of German Media theorist Friedrich Kittlers Foucault-inspired approach to the epistemological dimensions of media. This focus is relevant to digital media in terms of the selection, storage, and processing of data that are the fundamental concerns of Kittlers media studies. Advertising and drone warfare are used as examples of how this approach differs from ideological critique.

Police Media: The Governance of Territory, Speed, and Communication

The work of the modern police apparatus is highly dependent upon media technologies. This article traces crucial developments in this history, analyzing the central role that media have played in policing practices since the advent of the modern patrol in the late eighteenth century. We trace how the governmentalized police force has used media to govern efficiently what Foucault calls the three great variables: territory, speed, and communication. In conclusion, we consider the possibilities for resistance in a time when digital police media have given rise to alarming strategies for surveilling populations, stifling dissent, and exerting control over public and private space.

Strategies for Materializing Communication

More recently, in their introduction to the edited volume New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost echoed this sentiment, suggesting that the turn to materiality is largely a reaction to the exhaustion of a text-centered, social-constructionist paradigm. In fall 2009, we hosted a symposium at North Carolina State University, the goal of which was to assemble scholars from the fields of communication and cultural studies to engage with what is now being called a materialist turn in social theory. Subsequently, these presentations were compiled into Communication Matters: A Materialist Approach to Media, Mobility, and Networks. In the process of engaging with the scholars who contributed to the symposium and the book, we identified five distinct yet overlapping strategies for thinking about the materiality of communication. While these strategies focus specifically on communication, media, and culture, they are informed by the broader conceptual shift toward materiality occurring in philosophy and social theory.

Screens in the sky: SAGE, surveillance, and the automation of perceptual, mnemonic, and epistemological labor

This essay investigates the centrality of the U.S. Military in the process of automating the labor of surveillance. The creation of Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), an anti-nuclear defense system developed in the 1950s, marked the computerization of the perceptual, mnemonic, and epistemological labor that is necessary for surveillance and is emblematic of screening technologies. The essay situates SAGE in a long history of military surveillance that depended upon media technologies. Building upon the work of Michel Foucault and Freidrich Kittler, it is argued that media are essential for understanding how surveillance is problematized for security.

From Windscreen to Widescreen: Screening Technologies and Mobile Communication

This article suggests that studies of mobile media need to be more attentive to the history of screening technologies. The development of screening technologies is examined by identifying six characteristics—storage and access, interactivity, mobility, control, informationalization, and convergence/translation—through the context of automobility. A brief history of the informationalization of driving, mobile entertainment in the car, and networked automobiles is used to exemplify how screening technologies work. The article concludes by arguing that the development of screening technologies is central to understanding the processes through which conduct is increasingly organized, monitored, and governed. Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publishers online edition of The Communication Review for the following free supplemental resources: Historic illustrations of how media were made mobile.

Homeland Subjectivity: The Algorithmic Identity of Security

War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary.*Michel Foucault, 21 January 1976

The Digital Body: Telegraphy as Discourse Network

This article considers the use of flag telegraphy by the US Signal Corps during the Civil War as it functioned as a proto-technical medium that preceded wire telegraphy as a military communications technology. Not only was flag telegraphy a historical step towards contemporary technical media, it was also an early iteration of the digitization of communication. Our treatment ties together three main theoretical threads as a way of seeing ‘the digital’ in material communication practices: (1) Friedrich Kittler’s concept of technical media as a remediation between the 19th and 20th centuries, (2) Foucault’s docile bodies as means of reproducing culture, and (3) James Carey’s argument that the telegraph reconfigured communication. The Signal Corps is a rich historical moment in terms of media history and history of technology because it illustrates the convergence of historical exigencies at work in the war machine: mobility, secrecy, precision, and speed. Each contributes, we argue, to a digital telos that privileges digital ways of knowing and being.

Hogging the road: Cultural governance and the citizen cyclist

This essay examines how aesthetic, corporate and cultural formations have radically altered. motorcycling and its image over the past two decades as a means to highlight more general changes in cultural politics, citizenship and governing through culture. The essay begins with the Guggenheims The Art of the Motorcycle exhibit, treated. as a means for shaping and governing thought and conduct about and on motorcycles. The essay then addresses numerous articulations between aesthetic criteria and economic practices that have benefited. corporate and professional entities at the expense of long-time motorcyclists. Lastly, the essay formulates genealogical criteria for assessing attempts to represent culture in the hopes of more actively engaging in struggles over not just representation, but the activation of modes of thought, conduct and citizenship.

Taking People Out: Drones, Media/Weapons, and the Coming Humanectomy

The future may or may not bear out my pres ent convictions, but I can not refrain from saying that it is difficult for me to see at pres ent how, with such a princi ple brought to great perfection, as it undoubtedly will be in the course of time, guns can maintain themselves as weapons. We shall be able, by availing ourselves of this advance, to send a projectile at much greater distance, it will not be limited in any way by weight or amount of explosive charge, we shall be able to submerge it at command, to arrest it in its flight, and call it back, and send it out again and explode it at will, and, more than this, it will never make a miss, since all chance in this regard, if hitting the object of attack were at all required, is eliminated. But the chief feature of such a weapon is still to be told; namely, it may be made to respond only to a certain note or tune, it may be endowed with selective power. Directly such an arm is produced, it becomes almost impossible to meet it with a corresponding development. It is this feature, perhaps more than in its power of destruction, that its tendency to arrest the development of arms and to stop warfare will reside.