Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure
Brian Holmes
1: "Great social movements leave the content of their critical politics behind, in the forms of a new
dominion. This was the destiny of the revolt against bureaucratic rationalism in the sixties. The
Situationists, with the practice of the dérive and the program of unitary urbanism, aimed to subvert
the functionalist grids of modernist city planning. They tried to lose themselves in the urban
labyrinth, while calling for the total fusion of artistic and scientific resources in »complete decors«
–»another city for another life«, as the radical architect Constant proclaimed. With the worldwide
implementation of a digital media architecture – and the early signs of a move toward cinematic
buildings – we are now seeing the transformation of the urban framework into total decor (Lev
Manovich: »In the longer term every object may become a screen connected to the Net, with the
whole of built space becoming a set of display surfaces«. What kind of life can be lived in the
media architecture? And how to explain the continuing prestige of Situationist aesthetics, in a
period which has changed so dramatically since the early 1960s?
2: Today, the sensory qualities of the dérive are mimicked by hyperlinked voyages through the
datascapes of the World Wide Web.
3: In this way, the »geograffiti« of GPS waypoint marking seeks to promote a new kind of locational
humanism, tailored to the worldwide wanderer. »Know your place« is the ironic HeadMap motto.
But what would it really take to lose yourself in the abstract spaces of global circulation?
Great social movements leave the content of their critical politics behind, in the forms of a new
dominion. This was the destiny of the revolt against bureaucratic rationalism in the sixties. The
Situationists, with the practice of the dérive and the program of unitary urbanism, aimed to subvert
the functionalist grids of modernist city planning. They tried to lose themselves in the urban
labyrinth, while calling for the total fusion of artistic and scientific resources in »complete decors«
–»another city for another life«, as the radical architect Constant proclaimed. With the worldwide
implementation of a digital media architecture – and the early signs of a move toward cinematic
buildings – we are now seeing the transformation of the urban framework into total decor (Lev
Manovich: »In the longer term every object may become a screen connected to the Net, with the
whole of built space becoming a set of display surfaces«. What kind of life can be lived in the
media architecture? And how to explain the continuing prestige of Situationist aesthetics, in a
period which has changed so dramatically since the early 1960s?
Today, the sensory qualities of the dérive are mimicked by hyperlinked voyages through the
datascapes of the World Wide Web. The decades-old imaginaries of the Silver Surfer still permeate
our computer-assisted fantasies. Within this commercialized flux, the proponents of »locative
media« – like Ben Russel, the developer of headmap.org, or Marc Tuters, of gpster.net – propose
to add a personalized sense of place, a computerized science of global ambiances, using satellite
positioning technology. In this way, the »geograffiti« of GPS waypoint marking seeks to promote a
new kind of locational humanism, tailored to the worldwide wanderer. »Know your place« is the
ironic HeadMap motto. But what would it really take to lose yourself in the abstract spaces of
global circulation?
Not long ago, utopian maps portrayed the Internet as an organic space of interconnected neurons,
like the synapses of a planetary mind. Data- sharing and open-source software production have
effectively pointed a path to a cooperative economy. But a contemporary mapping project like
»Minitasking« depicts the Gnutella network as a seductive arcade, bubbling over with pirated pop
tunes and porno clips. The revolutionary aspirations of the Situationist drift are hard to pinpoint on
the new cartographies.
In the wake of September 11, the Internet's inventors – DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency – conceived a new objective: »Total Information Awareness«, a program to exploit
every possible control function that can be grafted onto the new communications technology.
Here's where the innovation lies: in »Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery«, »Human ID at a
Distance«, »Translingual Information Detection«, etc. Fortunately for American civil liberties,
Congress still had the constitutional power to quash this distorted brainchild of a convicted political
criminal, the retired admiral John Poindexter. But the Pentagon has clearly caught up to the
commercial surveillance packages that took the initiative in the late nineties: workstation monitors,
radio tracking badges, telephone service recording, remote vehicle monitoring (advertising blurb:
»From the privacy of your own computer, you can now watch a vehicle's path LIVE using the new
ProTrak GPS vehicle tracking device«). Military strategist Thomas Barnett has learned the lesson
of the freewheeling 1990s, when individual autonomy developed at the speed of high technology: »In
my mind, we fight fire with fire«, he says. »If we live in a world increasingly populated by Super-
Empowered Individuals, then we field an army of Super- Empowered Individuals.«
In »The Flexible Personality« I tried to show how networked culture emerged as a synthesis of two
contradictory elements: a communicative opportunism, bringing labor and leisure together in a
dream of disalienation that stretches back to the 1960s; and an underlying architecture of
surveillance and control, made possible by the spread of cutting- edge technologies. The
contemporary manager expresses the creativity and liberation of a nomadic lifestyle, while at the
same time controlling flexible work teams for just-in- time production. The Yes Men have made this
figure unforgettable: impersonating the WTO at a textile industry conference in Finland, they
unveiled a tailor-made solution for monitoring a remote labor force, what they called the
Management Leisure Suit. The glittering lycra garment might have recalled what NY Times pundit
Thomas Friedman once called the »golden straitjacket«, forcing national governments into the
adoption of a neoliberal policy mix; but the yard- long, hip-mounted phallus with its inset viewing
screen is just a little too enthusiastic for private-sector discipline! Transmitting pleasurable
sensations when everything is going well on the production floor, it allows the modern manager to
survey distant employees while relaxing on a tropical beach. The conclusion of the whole charade
is that with today's technology, democracy is guaranteed by Darwinian principles: there's no
reason for a reasonable businessman to own a slave in an expensive country like Finland, when
you can have a free employee for much less, in whatever country you chose.
What happens when the freedmen revolt? Today all eyes are on the soldier. Thomas Barnett has
drawn up a new world map for the Pentagon: it divides the »functioning core« of globalization,
»thick with network connectivity,« from the »non-integrating gap« of the equatorial regions,
»plagued by politically repressive regimes«. The gap is where the majority of American military
interventions have taken place since the end of the Cold War. It's also where a great deal of the
world's oil reserves are located. And it's mainly inhabited by indigenous peoples (in Latin America)
or by Muslims (in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Indonesia). Barnett's solution:
»Shrink the gap«. Integrate those people, by force if necessary.
Jordan Crandall seems to grapple with this question of integration in one of his installations, »Heat
Seeking«. The piece is full of menacing violence; but one scene shows a passive, unconscious
woman being fed, apparently under the influence of a radio transmission. This disturbing image
gets under the skin of the new media architecture, exploring its relations to psychic intimacy. What
kind of subjectivity emerges from exposure to the contemporary networks?
I think we should conceive the worldwide communications technologies as Imperial infrastructure.
These are systems with strictly military origins, but which have been rapidly liberalized, so that
broad sectors of civil society are integrated into the basic architecture. Everything depends on the
liberalization. The strong argument of Empire was to show that democratic legitimacy is necessary
for the spread of a reticular governance, whose inseparably military and economic power cannot
simply be equated with its point of origin in the United States. Imperial dimension is gained when
infrastructures become accessible to a new category of world citizens. The effect of legitimacy
goes along with integration to the »thick connectivity« of which Barnett speaks.
What happens, for example, when a private individual buys a GPS device, made by any of dozens
of manufacturers? You're connecting to the results of a rocket-launch campaign which has put a
constellation of 24 satellites into orbit, at least four of which are constantly in your line-of-sight,
broadcasting the radio signals that will allow your device to calculate its position. The satellites
themselves are fine- tuned by US Air Force monitor stations installed on islands across the earth,
on either side of the equator. Since Clinton lifted the encryption of GPS signals in the year 2000,
the infrastructure has functioned as a global public service: its extraordinary precision (down to the
centimeter with various correction systems) is now open to any user, except in those cases where
unencrypted access is selectively denied (as in Iraq during the last war). With fixed data from the
World Geodetic System – a planetary mapping program initiated by the US Department of Defense
in 1984 – you can locate your own nomadic trajectory on a three-dimensional Cartesian grid,
anytime and anywhere on Earth (Defense department dogma: »Modern maps, navigation systems
and geodetic applications require a single accessible, global, 3- dimensional reference frame. It is
important for global operations and interoperability that DoD systems implement and operate as
much as possible on WGS 84«).
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this satellite infrastructure is that in order for one's location
to be pinpointed, the clock in each personal receiver has to be exactly synchronized with the
atomic clocks in orbit. So you have an integration to Imperial time. The computer-coded radio
waves interpellate you in the sense of Althusser, they hail you with an electromagnetic »hey you!«
When you use the locating device you respond to the call: you are interpellated into Imperial
ideology. The message is that integration equals security, as exemplified in the advertising for the
Digital Angel, a personal locative device pitched to medical surveillance and senior care. It's a
logical development for anyone who takes seriously the concept of the »surgical strike«: give
yourself over to the care of the machines, target yourself for safety.
In light of all this, one can wonder about the limits of the concept of conversion, developed
extensively by Marko Peljhan in quite brilliant projects for the civilian reappropriation of military
technology. Can we still make any distinction between a planetary civil society articulated by
global infrastructure, and the military perspective that Crandall calls »armed vision«? The urgency
is social subversion, psychic deconditioning, an aesthetics of dissident experience. Most of the
alternative projects or artworks using the GPS system are premised on the idea that it permits an
inscription of the individual, a geodetic tracery of individual difference. The most beautiful example
to date is Esther Polak's »RealTime« project, where GPS-equipped pedestrians gradually sketch
out the city plan of Amsterdam, as a record of their everyday itineraries. But the work is a fragile
gesture, fraught with ambiguity: the individual's wavering life-line appears at once as testimony of
human singularity in time, and proof of infallible performance by the satellite mapping system.
All too often in contemporary society, aesthetics is politics as decor. Which is why the
Situationists themselves soon abandoned Constant's elaborate representations of unitary
urbanism. »Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence«, wrote Althusser. It's what makes you walk the line, to use his image. Has the ideology
of our time not become an erratic, wavering pattern of crisscrossing footsteps, traced in secure
metric points on an abstract field? The aesthetic form of the dérive is everywhere. But so is the
hyper- rationalist grid of Imperial infrastructure. And the questions of social subversion and psychic
deconditioning are wide open, unanswered, seemingly lost to our minds, in an era when civil
society has been integrated to the military architecture of digital media.
