Zones of Entrapment and Impunity: On the Constitution of Vague and Strange Regimes of Power (original) (raw)

The Surveillance, the Control and Invisible Violence

The encrypted signals, the artificial intelligence, all gadgets and electronic mechanisms, in some way, put humanity in its dependence. Insofar as that, the advances converge to a utopia not performed in its fullness, the man heading towards his disappearance as a leading man and the individual lends his physical body and, in exchange, increasingly wraps the meandering of technological paraphernalia. The present paper has as objective, build a thought about the individualization and invisible violence in the context of surveillance and control, taking the body as its largest distinctive sign. The latent visibility into our society literally sees in the speed of gadgets your biggest indicator, the social draining and made the territorial extensions were abolished and with a push of a button, the communication is performed. The local site is completely protected. The surveillance is controlled by cameras in the distance. The death of the body is declared, as far as it virtualizes. The world around does not exist but there is no physical interaction. Natural elements are no longer available, and everything is measured by the interrelation of virtual bidders. The immateriality becomes spectrum and in this relationship it is more important that the contact in itself. What may have happened to the physical contact? Lost in time or shrunk by electronic devices that run on marketing, there are virtually no more. The bodies do not interact and superficiality takes account of family and business meetings. The meetings are lost to the distancing; the "des-Virtual meetings" are more "alive". It is the life, which takes away the technological few and offers opportunities, which supposedly we believe to be important. In this condition, humanity walks for its retrenchment and oblivionism that, before was only remote, appears with force and puts us in a condition never before imagined with the loss of the senses. Create devices to provide security for persons with lightning speed, as if this condition would be able to control and maintain the social order, which has been imposed upon us a subtle and poetic by sweetie advertisements, but fierce, is betting as being the redemption and the solution to all the problems and the evils of humanity. Connect and be connected without interruption, represents security up to where the limit allowed. The existing violence and foggy, confronted with the social dislocation that cannot be measured as behavior assigned to a society. This bond conditions, is in anyway, always raised discussions as being curtailed and deprivation. However, when it becomes a common and asks that we be free through the surveillance cameras, chip cards and mobile phones, shows in fact that we are trapped and most of the times we accept this condition. Who make a profit? People, businesses of technologies that develop gadgets, promising results with its discarded products and outdated? To feed this technological race, people prepares all day a way to sell more things that each time we need less. Is this the key to discontent and sense of freedom that both seek since ancient times? To be free, we must deprive of choice or at least be tied to anchors who owns the capital. The central proposal is, understand how the body fits in this context, in which the power exerts safety function, in that war daily by a piece of people that are sold, as by-products, to which the companies of consumption may in some way to offer the most diverse products. The pocket or the body is who pays the price of the technology to the extent that the invisible violence is bypassed or arbitrarily presented as trivial. In this panorama, not distinguished accuser and accused, and we can only redeem what remains of the crumbs scattered. Big Dates, museums, image files and of monitoring data to preserve a society that prefers to archive to live. What is the participation of this body, in a society that walks, to the disappearance, toward the virtual in its fullness? In this sense, thinking body, is thinking sensorial dimensions and in virtual the sensorium is unsettled by complete and cadenced according to who has the absolute power. The downtime and the sedation behind of bunkers residential brings the denial of the body as productive agent. The inertia of the will pulse is stagnation of life and social agent, insofar as the disappearance of the body is inevitable. In a world plagued by speculations about surveillance, power and control, this research is based on authors who recommend reading and more in-depth reflections about this proposed theme. Some of the authors who contribute more directly and significantly to this thesis are Virilio (1998), Bauman (2001), Rüdiger (2002), Lyon (1994) and Trivinho (2007), who sought to study the impact of digital technologies on social life. On the other hand, Castells (1999), Bourdieu (1999) and Foucault (1979) analyze the condition of surveillance and control, ranging from the social to the technological domain. Wiener (1978) analyzed the developments in society marked by cybernetics. As early as the 1970s, other and equally important authors, such as Toynbee (1971), identified the technological power wielded by companies. In more recent times, authors such as Postman (1993) and Julian Assange (2012) – the latter is one of the most emblematic examples – stated that the technological condition is favorable to the one who wields power, since the rules are not egalitarian. Nevertheless, although ordinary users demand privacy, governments and corporations violate this condition in order to exercise strict control over them. In fact, for the microsphere of power, information must be crystal clear to enable the maintenance of surveillance of people.

Exploring the Banality of Bureaucracy in Carceral States

Piercing the Shroud: Destabilizations of "Evil", 2019

Bureaucracy, the governing legacy of the expanse of European colonialism, has come to be the dominating means by which states relate to their citizens; but also through which they relate to other states. Analysing geographies of evil from within a post-colonial world system perspective, it becomes possible to see the creation of carceral geographies – literal prison states – created to control and manage populations inconvenient to or unwanted by the state. Deemed always already criminal, the unwanted are submitted to the technologies of control that have come to be associated most closely with the prison-with checkpoints, with constant suspicion that they are planning some malevolent behaviour, forbidden from entering certain areas of the state, forced to prove their own innocence in the face of presumed guilt, and often literally caged in by geographies designed to recreate the architecture of the prison. I contend that such systems are capable of being upheld through the banality of bureaucracy. The purpose of this piece is to first attempt a deconstruction of the notion of a banal bureaucracy and its role in the creation and maintenance of carceral geographies, and second to add to the growing literature on anthropology of the state through incorporated comparisons between individual carceral circumstances and a wider capitalist pattern of power.

“The Physiognomy of Dispersed Power”

Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol.16 (4–5). 2009

The web of post-modern power appears nomadic, elusive and always elsewhere. Like our online presences, it has no obvious boundaries and appears as spirit-like, a magic life haunting the net and the world. Government becomes liminal: 'Liminal identities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom and ceremonial' to quote Victor Turner. This liminality has changed the balance of power between the corporate and non-corporate sectors, however this does not mean that power is straightforward. When everything is interlinked through information technology then exercises of power may even increase confusion and undermine the bases or legitimacy of that power. Modes of ordering can produce perceived disorder. Knowledge of the system becomes divination and trapped in magic. It is suggested that an awareness of this, and focusing on contradiction, or oscillation is more useful than focusing on simplicity.

Dense Struggle: On Ghosts, Law, and the Global Order

A. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed), Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory (2018)

Today’s global order is characterised by a constellation of ever more closely-imbricated relationships among different laws, levels of government, managerial techniques, economic, political and social forces and deeply-engrained antagonisms. This chapter tries to rethink this – our – global order as a site of ‘dense struggle’, using a body of visual and ethnographic material gathered over a period of six months in 2009, when I accompanied a group of Internal Displaced People (IDPs) protesting in the city of Bogotá, Colombia. During this period, this group engaged in a long and unsuccessful protest for the recognition of their rights as IDPs against the local administration of Bogotá, the national government and various international institutions. In following their protest, their agonies, and a ghost that appeared in the middle of all of this, it is possible to appreciate some of the products of today’s global order, and in particular what this order produces on its margins: home to the popular, the (supposedly) anti-modern, the otherworldly. Three suggestions emerge from this exercise. First, that in paying attention to the products of today’s global order it becomes possible to question anew what law does and how it is experienced in our global times. Second, this exercise helps us to recalibrate what our response should be once we remember that our assumedly uniform late-modern, globalised, capitalist and disenchanted present is healthily plagued by frictions and clashes – clashes through which other worlds speak. Finally, this exercise invites us to consider the value of approaching law ethnographically in these dense times.

The Perpetual Challenge and Power's Secret Violence

2007

The cat's cradle of relations between violence, power and secrecy, and how law refuses to acknowledge their activity, is examined here through readings of three novels, Bram Stoker's 'The Lady Of The Shroud', John Buchan's 'John Macnab,' and Andrew Greig's 'The Return Of John MacNab'. Like scissors/paper/stone, violence, power and secrecy combine and recombine to generate different outcomes.

Power, Secrecy, Paranoia: Technologies of Governance and the Structure of Rule

Cultural Politics vol. 6, no. 3, 2010

This essay concerns paranoia's apocalyptic implications when harnessed by the state. It argues that current characterizations of paranoia as either resistance to globalization or a lay critique of Enlightenment ideals do not obviate paranoia's destructive dynamics in the service of state power. Paranoia remains a political phenomenon that calls for analysis at the level of the structure of rule. The essay explores one approach to paranoia as a political category through an ideal-typical model drawn from Elias Canetti's classic 1960 text Crowds and Power. It concludes with a discussion on how technology mediates between power and secrecy, forming a key nexus in the exploration of politics and paranoia.