Paul N. Edwards: Open source destruction, weak discipline, war infrastructures
The end of the Cold War was also the end of grand systems theories (cybernetics, systems analysis, operations research, and their children), and the closed world discourse they inspired. In their place have arisen network discourses -- very many of them, proliferating at an astonishing rate along with their technical substrates, which include not only the Internet but corporate supply chain management, military "netwar" doctrines and tools, social software, six degrees of separation, and thousands of other formulas and formulations of the node-link architecture of the post-Cold War, post-post-modern world. This ultracomplex, infinite and indefinite architecture could be the framework of Alain Joxe's structured chaos and the enabling technology of Saskia Sassen's embedded bordering.Network discourses move us from hierarchy to intricate mesh, from topography to topology, from closed to fractally open, from determinism to chaos and complexity, from control to monitoring and statistical analysis. Within them, traditional notions of power as domination from above become much harder to sustain. What, then, has power become in the world-network -- or much more accurately, the world as exponential internetwork, a network of networks of networks without end?
The automatic response of those who came of age in the Cold War is to see networks as systems in disguise, the creations of shadowy sovereigns -- capital, multinational corporations, the CIA, Osama bin Laden -- who work the strings from invisible positions behind the scenes. Even the most profound of the 1970s theorists of capillary power -- Foucault, Lukes, Giddens, Bourdieu -- could not free themselves from Ur-images of closed systems, of hierarchical control, of institutions as locales, where all-seeing sovereigns lay hidden, shadowed, but still ultimately governing even if indirectly through the astonishing techniques of discipline and surveillance. There is still truth in this view; networks have not, of course, replaced systems. The institutions of Foucault's carceral society - schools, clinics, hospitals, prisons, armies - remain potent and central. But sociotechnical networks increasingly penetrate, overlie, and fracture the borders of closed disciplinary institutions. Through them knowledge leaks out and with it, power. The decline of the closed disciplinary institution, and its replacement by distributed organizations, open source production, and other network forms of sociotechnical structure, reflects a modality of power I want to call weak discipline.
The strong discipline of carceral institutions relies on regular exercise of intensive, direct encounters between authorities and individual subjects (the confessional, the examination, boot camp, courts martial, etc.). Traditional military forces work in this way. And this is exactly why they are failing, everywhere and increasingly, in struggles against low-tech, networked enemies: Al Quaeda, the janjaweed militias, Iraqi insurgents, Hezbollah. The traditional militaries know this, of course, though their numbwitted political masters (Rice, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) remain trapped in the carceral closed world of the Cold War mindset.
Weak discipline describes a condition in which the balance between the two moments of disciplinary power is shifted. Moments of direct authority/subject encounter are reduced in number and/or intensity. Yet the productive power of subjects is, if anything, increased -- in large part through what I increasingly want to call an infrastructuration effect. Contemporary networked infrastructures shift part (not all) of the production of conformity, habit, and even personal identity from human authorities to the behaviors, mental and physical, required to operate and navigate their technical strata. Even surveillance may no longer be so central as it seemed to Foucault. Some degree of discipline (in the ordinary sense) is always required to produce new power/knowledge. But given that disciplinary techniques are productive not only for institutions, but also for disciplined individuals, there is more than one way to achieve it and to gain its benefits. The redundant resources of vast networks can replace some of what disciplinary institutions once required individuals to internalize.
What am I talking about? The theme of this week's Under Fire is "War Infrastructures." I am saying that although "infrastructure" originally referred to major military assets such as airbases, that way of understanding the category is no longer adequate. War infrastructures now properly include not only the massive, expensive, high-tech, high-prestige, high-fetish assets of the rich (and still ultrapowerful) traditional militaries, but also those of the poor, cheap, low-tech, low-prestige, high-charisma, high-fetish networks of ideologically and religiously motivated terrorists, not all of whom are Islamic. (Here in the US of A, we have our own home-grown evangelical Christian abortion-clinic bombers and abortion doctor murderers, our Timothy McVeighs, our End Times religionists and white supremacists.) Networks give them power, weak discipline unites them without carcerality, they are on the ascendant. >From their bedrooms in Leeds, their student apartments in Hamburg, their mobile phones and their Internet cafes, in their spare time, between the lines, in the interstices, they can act with a coordinated and compelling power unknown to any previous generation, even against the world's most powerful army. It's open source destruction.
> Paul N. Edwards