Digital Medieval

Abstract

[...]how will the apparent logics of splintering (Graham and Marvin 2001), fragmentation and polarisation sustained by the new bordering logics of what I have termed recently new military urbanism (Graham 2010) be reflected in, and sustained by, the politics, civil societies and landscapes of the world's burgeoning cities? [...]a counter-politics must reject and reverse tendencies toward the ubiquitous bordering of mobility, circulation and social life based on ideas of ubiquitous bordering deployed both within and without the territorial limits of 'homeland' states.

"[We] seem to be reverting to the neo-feudal times [] where the boundaries of civilization, dignity and hope no longer coincide with the boundaries of the nation"

(Hage, 2003: 18)

In 2007 the influential US security analyst, John Robb, published Brave New War, one of myriad popular books about 'security' that have peppered the US bestseller lists since 2001. Robb finished his argument with a scenario depicting his imagination of US urban life in 2016. He predicted that the period until this date was likely to be dominated by a string of major, unpredictable, 9/11-style 'Black Swan' terror attacks in US cities. These would be combined, he predicted, with the regular exploitation of 'cyberterror' techniques by insurgents dotted around the world to bring down large swathes of US energy, communications, transport, finance and health infrastructure. US urban citizens were thus to be regularly plunged into a pre-modern existence of dark disconnection. Combined with a radical shiftaway from the centralised and bureaucratic security structures of national and local states, Robb anticipates such trends ushering in what he calls a "withering of the [national] security apparatus" (Robb 2007: 185). This will be combined, he predicts, with the "development of an entirely new, decentralised security system" (ibid.) involving government, private firms and individuals

According to Robb, such trends mean that "security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for" (ibid.) - rather like US health services, in fact. As nation-state security provision is replaced by uneven, and highly localized security markets organised through booming military corporations, "healthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to hire private military companies [] to protect their homes and establish a protective perimeter around daily life," Robb suggests. "Parallel transportation networks - evolving out of time-share aircraft[] - will cater to this group, leapfrogging its members from one secure, well-appointed lily pad to the next" (ibid.).

Members of the middle classes, imagines Robb, "will follow, taking matters into their own hands by forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security [...] These "armored suburbs" will deploy and maintain back-up generators and communications links; they will be patrolled by civil police auxiliaries that have received corporate training and boast their won state-of-the-art emergency response systems" (ibid.).

And for everyone else? "They will have to make do with the remains of the national system," Robb predicts. "They will gravitate to the cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no refuge" (op cit.: 186)

Like most good pulp-political post-9/11 US non-fiction, Robb weaves a deceptively simple, apocalyptic tale which dramatically exaggerates selected contemporary events. And yet the contemporary evidence suggesting the emergence of internationally organized security assemblages organised to continually (try and) remove those deemed risk-free from those deemed risky - both within and outside the territorial boundaries of nations - does raise major questions about the future political geography of our world. Are the three-dimensional archipelagos of apartheid-style splintering, connection, fortification, and militarisation so palpable in Gaza and the West Bank a kind of grim exemplar of the future? (Gregory 2005). Will the blurring of internal and external archipelagos of exception serve to fatally 'unbundle' the role of nation states as the key economic and fiscal building blocks and 'imagined communities' of global capitalism? Will affluent cities and parts of cities gradually secede and de-link from the residualised territories, and people, surrounding them, generalising the exploitative yet tightly controlled relationship that, say, Singapore has with its surrounding hinterlands in Malaysia and Indonesia? Will transnational structures of policing, surveillance and law enforcement continually strengthen to the extent that they eclipse, or take over, the legacies of national security states? Finally, how will the apparent logics of splintering (Graham and Marvin 2001), fragmentation and polarisation sustained by the new bordering logics of what I have termed recently new military urbanism (Graham 2010) be reflected in, and sustained by, the politics, civil societies and landscapes of the world's burgeoning cities? Wither ideas of national citizenship in such a context?

It is especially important to consider whether the trends toward ubiquitous digital surveillance, tracking and bordering within and between contemporary cities mean that our planet faces, as Asnezar Alsayyad and Ananya Roy (2006) have argued, a kind of (computerised) 'medieval modernity'. This is helping to produce, they argue, "the emergence of forms of citizenship", which are "fundamentally about protection" and are "located in urban enclaves" (ibid.). These work to challenge the idea of modern citizenship "constituted through a set of abstract individual rights embedded in the concept of the nation-state" (ibid.). Allen Feldman, similarly, wonders if the architectural and spatial production of American identity, which is so often organized now through what he calls "armored sacralized fortresses of secure commodification, be these malls, gated communities, or corporate keeps," now helps to "determine citizenship by whom they [credit] with security passes" (Feldman 2004).

Rather than using the term 'medieval' to mean a simple reversal of Enlightenment notions of progress and a return to societal 'backwardness', as right-wing commentators like John Robb are currently doing (see also: Kobyn 1998), Alsayyad and Roy (2006) suggest something altogether more subtle - and convincing. Within the transnational urban geographies of capitalism, they see the modalities of "modern nationalism, medieval enclaves and imperial brutality" all "co-exist[ing] in non-linear fashion" (17).

Thus, nation states don't simply wither away under some totally 'globalised' future. Rather, the new camp-like enclosures and privatised circulations erupt as archipelagos within, through and between what are conventionally understood as cities and nations (see: Diken and Bagge Laustsen 2005). Such complexes of fractal layering of assemblages, enclaves and passage points, demarcating spaces and zones deemed liberal and requiring policing from those deemed illiberal and requiring militarised force, work to radically "complicates the whole issue of progress and backwardness, the modern and pre-modern" (Alsayyad and Roy 2006: 17) They also force us to be extremely critical of the deployment of extremely common teleologies which signal that the barbarian or Orientalised Other actually inhabits the "savage past" in their urban sites within the present world (ibid.).

Accelerating processes of urban securitisation and fragmentation that existed long before 2001, post-9/11 trends emerge to render the politics of geography and security a fractal layering and superimposition of often contradictory or antagonistic assemblages. Rather than amounting to a shiftfrom a society of discipline based on physical enclosure (Foucault's panoptic society) to one of decentralised surveillance systems (Deleuze's control society), what is emerging is a society organized through assemblages of urban and infrastructural passage-points (for enclaves, infrastructures, events, as well as international bordering systems). Crucially, these assemble both architectures and electronic technologies, working in parallel, and work by trying to stipulate the legitimacy of presence or people or circulations in advance of movement. Crucially, cities, and ideas of citizenship thus become progressively reorganized based on notions of provisional, rather than absolute, mobility, rights and access and pre-emptive notions of suspicion, guilt, riskiness, vulnerability or value.

To back-up their arguments, Alsayyad and Roy deploy a wide range of examples: affluent gated communities, regulated squatter settlements, and a proliferating range of incarceration and torture campcities where "violence is constantly deployed in the name of peace and order" (13). They also mention the insurgent urban governance emerging in places like Hezbollah-controlled towns in Lebanon, Hamascontrolled Gaza, or other "neighbourhood-level Islamic republics being declared by religious fundamentalist groups" (ibid.) To this list we could also add the proliferation of camp-like security architectures which sustain global financial cores, export processing zones, tourist enclaves, offshore finance enclosures, logistics hubs, ports, airport cities, research complexes and 'technopoles' as well as the temporary urban militarisations organized for mega sports events or political summits.1

All their examples, Alsayyad and Roy argue, involve "private systems of governance that operate as medieval fiefdoms, imposing truths and norms that are often contrary to national law" (ibid.) As in medieval times, then, the result seems to be that that the modern city emerges as what Holston and Appadurai (1999) have called "honeycomb of jurisdictions", a "medieval body" of "overlapping, heterogeneous, non-uniform, and increasingly private memberships" (13). Permeating all are mobilizations of the new tracking, targeting and access-control technologies of biometrics and pervasive discourses and tactics of securitization.

Difference and Illusions of Control

"Why has the entire world become a frontier to be simultaneously pushed back, opened up to American colonization, and at the same time sealed off, guarded against foreign incursion?" (Herbst, nd.)

Given such an argument, it is tempting to adopt an apocalyptic tone. However, such a temptation must be avoided. For it must be remembered that borders and bordering strategies remain inevitably permeable and contradictory. This is especially the case in large cities. Embodying technophiliac dreams of perfect ordering, perfect surveillance, and perfect power, emerging systems of 'digital medieval' enclaves inevitably fail to bring the levels of geographical and social control that drives the fantasies that impute them. Fortressed enclaves are often surrounded, and overwhelmed by, the sheer mass and pulse of urban mixing in large, fast-growing cities. The sheer mass, density and unpredictability of city life often swamps any simple imagination or strategy of boundary enforcement. Moreover, notions of 'security' surrounding the shiftto ubiquitous borders are often tenuous at best, even for those organising or benefiting from the securitisation drive.

Under the attractive technophiliac gloss of the military-security complexes, then, bordering strategies tend to throw enormous resources at technological 'silver bullets'. In practice, these often fail to function, continually break down, do not deliver the anticipated results, and do nothing to address the root causes of feelings of insecurity. Large amounts of messy and expensive work are continually necessary to make ubiquitous bordering even remotely effective; the complex 'assemblages' through which it operates are actually highly precarious. Often, they merely pander to the symptoms, rather than causes, of the spiraling insecurities faced by the world's burgeoning urban poor within societies driven to ever-greater extremes of hyper-inequality by faltering systems of neoliberalisation.

It is crucial to stress, then, that imaginations and fantasies of perfect control and absolute separation between risky and risk-free bodies, places and circulations, of the security 'event' and 'normality', remain as just that: imaginations and fantasies. Like ideas of robotic warfare, such discourses are shot through with technological fetishism and fantasies of omniscience and all-powerful control. Beyond such dreams and fantasies, however, efforts to employ new control technologies inevitably involve a myriad of improvised and messy processes and situated practices. These are strung-out across diverse geographies, necessitating the always-challenging task of (attempted) control-at-a-distance. Even with the rising efforts to integrate groups of previously separate surveillance systems that come with data mining, fusion centres, algorithmic CCTV, biometrics and the like, they do not amount to an all-seeing 'Big Brother' or a single 'global panopticon'. Rather, we are seeing a diverse multitude of 'Little Brothers - an 'omnopticon' encompassing multiple surveillance systems of diverse scope, scale, effectiveness and reach which sometimes interact but very often - despite the hype - do not.

New technosocial borders are also always prone to technological breakdown, ineffectiveness, errors and unintended effects. Paul Edwards (2005) stresses that the experience of military information technology, for example, is often "the world of impossibly irritating, frequently crashing, kluged-together software that nonetheless works pretty well most of the time" (58). Rather than all-seeing omniscience, what goes on within proliferating control rooms is marked by complex practices of improvisation which are extremely fine-grained, contingent and socially very 'messy'. In many cases, these technological dreams simply fail because the technology breaks down or fails to interoperate with a myriad of others or because operators are unable to deal with the complexity of the system. This means that, beyond the fetishistic and technophiliac discourses of perfect control and absolute omniscience, "the geometry of control is never complete" (Shaprio 2005: 29). As Hille Koskela (2003) suggests, it follows that "urban space will always remain less knowable and, thus, less controllable than the restricted panoptic space".

It must also be remembered that all fortressed enclaves are not nearly as splipsistic as they appear. They must be sustained by (often hidden) connections elsewhere; they require multiple mobilities and migrations to allow them to function. "Many [] gated edifices," for example, "depend on small armies of undocumented migrant labor" (Feldman 2004). These linkages, moreober, work to reveal to huge contradictions inherent within securitisation practices. For example, when over-zealous crack-downs on 'illegal migrants' occur, as happened around Long Island's gated communities in 2008, the super-rich residents of such enclaves soon find their houses uncleaned, their parks untended, their children lacking day care and, ironically, their borders unpoliced (see, e.g.: Helmore 2008). Paradoxically, then, the collapse of such services work to reveal how 'illegal immigration' works across complex, transational labour geographies and militarising borders to invisibly sustain economies, cities and social norms. Such migrants live extremely dangerous and perilous lives, however. As "long as they stay behind the scenes, their brawn and skills are highly appreciated" (Decena and Gray 2006). But visibility, especially in suburbs, often sparks controversy, demonisation, violence and removal.

Often, it must also be stressed, the deployment of borders and new security technology is a symbolic process at odds with the radical openness of places to connections elsewhere. Proceseses which render spaces 'secure' are always laden with theatre, symbolism and performace. These mix the symbolism of reassurance with the seeding of anxiety. Jon Coaffee and David Murakami Wood (2006) stress that some practices of temporary securitisation - around major summits of sporting events, for example - are also, in a sense, theaterical in that their purpose is to stage performances of highly visible military and security power, as much as to prevent protest, terrorism or unrest. Anthropologist Cindy Katz (2007) also emphasises the banal symbolism of camouflaged soldiers lingering, bored, on the streets of New York after 2001. "That, of course, is their point," she writes. "Banal terrorism is sutured to-and secured in - the performace of security in the everyday environment."

Nor are such performanes of security merely about the policing of purported risks. Francisco Klauser (2007) points out, for example, that the massive systems of temporary fortification that surround events like the Olympics or World Cup are as much efforts to construct new, highly salable exemplars of the latest high-tech 'security solutions', as well as the obsessive imposition of particular brand cultures for global media exposure within 'clean' cities, as they are the actual policing of risk.

Finally, all borders and borderings are always in tension with everyday attempts at transgression and resistance. The order and experience of a particular city is "determined, at least partially, by the unintended, and cumulative, consequence of all border controls" (Franze 2001). As Minority Report, the influential movie depicting a dystopian future dominated by pre-emptive surveillance demonstrates, there are always complex "tension[s] between the machines of capture and the micro-politics of escape" (Shapiro 2005). Indeed, "curiously," as John Kaliski (1994) writes, "many of the social transactions that are shaping the tenor of culture occur in the very places most subject to the scan of globalism. Shopping mall culture, gated enclaves (whether suburbs or rock houses), omnipresent recording, and surveillance of every aspect of daily life do not seem to limit ever new and evolving cultural expressions and mutations born of unexpected gatherings".

Consequences

Such important caveats do not offer an excuse for complacency, however. Rather, they make the costs, impacts and politics of ubiquitous bordering easier to disentangle. A panoply of further questions emerges here. For example, as Adrian Parr (2006) asks, "At what point does an urban environment stop working as one?" (99). Do ubiquitous borders threaten to render what Parr calls the "cacophony of civic life" - with all its political and cultural potential - a mere memory? Will the allure of security technologies and camplike architectures work to create "islands of order" amidst an urban 'sea' of violence, desperation and horror? (ibid.)

Are cities, then, in the process of being reconstructed as little more than a series of interconnected 'camps' organised through militarized and surveilled passage-points and where all presences, and circulations, are pre-screened and pre-approved by continuous electronic calculation? What becomes of the 'right to the city' and the politics of urban citizenship in a world of ubiquitous borderings which work to render urban life increasingly passive, consumerised, surveilled, and algorithmically marshalled? Will these trends fatally undermine the roles of cities as the main centres of political, cultural, social and even economic innovation? Does the pervasive security surge work, as Parr claims, to 'infantilize' the social body of the city by imposing an intervening, paternalistic-authoritarian power which proclaims "the privileged status of being the only one who can and knows how to say 'no' to terrorism" (ibid.). Beyond all this, does a shiftto ubiquitous borders amount, as Naomi Wolf (2007) has argued, to a serious move in some inexcorable emergence of a generally Fascist transnational polity?

How are geographies of democratic dissent being affected by the general 'chilling' of the political culture, and the assertion of executive power over democratic scrutiny (see: Sarikakis 2007) that are so closely associated with the trends outlined in the above discussion? (Mitchell and Mitchell Staeheli 2005). How are different traditions of urban political culture, and diverse traditions of military and police power, refracting and shaping specific trajectories within the broader trends towards (attempted) ubiquitous bordering? Finally, are processes of ubiquitous bordering as much the result of industrial policy as a response to real threats? In other words, are they driven by states and supranational blocks - as with the EU example discussed above - launching their own securitisation drives as stepping stones to allow their own corporate players to compete effectively within booming global security markets?

This second range of questions raise concerns about the relationships between the rush towards ubiquitous bordering, constructions of difference, and processes of Othering. Here we confront the argument that constructions of zoning and borders represented sovereign attempts to create illusions of difference rather than responses to difference and its putative risks. Importantly, Seri Guillermina (2003) argues that the "the concrete features of what is captured under the protection of sovereign power and what is excluded matter little. What is crucial is that the distinction is made".

Ubiquitous borderings, Guillermina argues, "are about creating the illusion of differences, although in actuality there may be none". She suggests that such 'virtual' productions of difference and antagonistic conflict are now "crucial to the definition of safe and lawless zones" within the emerging geographical archipeligos of enclaves. Thus, practices of ubiquitous bordering tend to be self-fulfilling. Constructing zones of security and insecurity - and of liberal and illiberal rule - organised within and through ubiquitous borders, thus actually involves "the critical task of recreating dangers and threats". To Guillermina, this allows the channeling of "peoples' and investors' moves in a world scenario in which state territories increasingly resemble its own borders, the social landscape of borders re-emerges in metropolitan inner cities, and the exception stains irregularly but progressively the world map". Securocratic war thus provides the tools for producing social and geographic differences that provide the very "tools of sovereign power".

Cosmopolitan Security?

A final, crucial question emerges here. Above all these concerns, caveats, and crises we must consider how a successful counter-politics of security might be mobilized, which resists and recasts the violent shifttowards a biopolitics of preemption, exception and managing the consequences of extreme polarization. Such a counterpolitics must seek to challenge not only the mythologies sustaining ubiquitous bordering. It must also confront the transnational complexes that feed offthe way the extending and all-pervasive mantra of militarized 'security' now works to permeate every crevice of everyday urban life (Parr 2006).

In the current context it is profoundly subversive to ask the simple question: What might a politics of security be that actually addresses the real risks and threats that humankind faces in a rapidly urbanizing world prone to resource exhaustion, spiraling food, energy and water insecurity, biodiversity collapse, hyper-automobilisation, financial crises, and global warming and does this from a cosmopolitan rather than xenophobic and militaristic starting point? Or where it is the human, urban or ecological aspects of security that are foregrounded, rather than tawdry machinations and imagineering which surrounds constellations of states and transnational corporations, integrated through the dubious and corrupt relationships with burgeoning security-industrial-military complexes?

Such a process must clearly begin by contesting the increasingly widespread mobilisation of 'hard' - i.e. profitable - borders and security strategies to question whether these actually do anything but exacerbate vicious circles of fear and isolation, and quests for the holy grail of certainty, through technological omniscience combined with architectures of withdrawal for the wealthy, mobile, or powerful. "The growth of enclave societies," Bryan Turner (2007) writes, "makes the search for cosmopolitan values and institutions a pressing need, but the current trend towards the erection of walls against the dispossessed and the underclass appears to be inexorable" (301).

Such cosmopolitan notions of urban, human and ecological security must be open to - indeed forged through - difference. They must work against the habitual translation of difference into objectification, Otherness and violence. They must assert the reinstatement of rights within states of reception as means to overcome the murderous sovereignties which surround the states of exception which increasingly characterize neoliberal capitalism. Finally, such a counter-politics must reject and reverse tendencies toward the ubiquitous bordering of mobility, circulation and social life based on ideas of ubiquitous bordering deployed both within and without the territorial limits of 'homeland' states.

A useful starting point here is provided by the work of philosopher, Adrian Parr. He urges that a viable counter politics to the ubiquitous border must start by opening up the "parameters of this debate in a way that no longer understands the outside as terrifying and a source of contamination, against which the inside defensively freezes itself in an effort to contain and ward-offencroachment" (2006: 106).

Acknowledgement

This piece is an updated version of an extract from Graham 2010: 142-152.

Footnote

1 For a brilliant analysis of the architectures of such camps see Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence, Cambridge: MA, MIT Press. 2006.

References

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