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Abstract
This article provides a theoretical and empirical contribution to the political history of technology by articulating a new conceptual perspective on the power of technological things and through outlining a history of modern urban technological terror and terrorism. It introduces a user-centered perspective on technological politics in the form of ‘subject histories of technology’ which, contrasting with prevalent ‘object histories of technology’ on technological inventions and innovators, emphasize the self-fashioning power of technological artifacts. Through an overview history of technology of ‘terrormindedness’ covering the three subsequent waves of urban terror arising from aerial bombardment, nuclear weapons and substate terrorism it shows how technologies have been used by individual citizens to cope with the experience of man-made fear and insecurity. In conclusion it argues that the political history of technology should to the focus on community politics and system politics of big institutional technologies add an attention to the personal politics of the emotional and material power of small technical things.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Svante Lindqvist and Justine Cassell for the inspiration, Nina Lerman for the continued conversation and many colleagues for commentaries and collaborations, especially Ingo Danielzik, Bill Durodié, David Edgerton, Jan Garnert, Bernard Geoghegan, Gabrielle Hecht, Rebecca Herzig, Jeff Hughes, Peter Kjærgaard, Susan Lindee, Irene McAra-McWilliam, Dorthe Gert Simonsen, Bruce Seely, Thomas Söderqvist, Mikkel Thorup, John Tresch, Trine Villumsen, Rosalind Williams, Ole Wæver, Waqar Zaidi, and two anonymous referees. An early version of this article was presented at SHOT’s 2007 anniversary NSF workshop in Washington, DC.
Notes
1. Henningsen, ‘Ekspeditionen til København,’ 10. All translations from the Danish by the author.
2. Dictionary.com, ‘Terror’; Harrison and Austin, Some Tuscan Cities, 116; Yardley, Backing into the Limelight, 156.
3. Henningsen, ‘Ekspeditionen til København,’ 325.
4. Seerup, ‘Napoleonskrigenes største amfibiske operation,’ 118; Henningsen, København 1807, 10; Rasmussen, ‘Epilog,’ 258–61; Krogaard, ‘Bomberegnens følger,’ 209, 232; Seerup, ‘Æreløst som togtet til København,’ 67.
5. Seerup, ‘Æreløst som togtet,’ 67.
6. Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 133–4.
7. An interesting discussion of the Japanese kamikaze heritage of the ‘human cruise missiles’ used on 11 September 2001 is Croitoru, Der Märtyrer als Waffe.
8. Narasimha, Rockets in Mysore and Britain, 2. Before Copenhagen the new rocket had been deployed in a battle at Boulogne, but Copenhagen was its first use against civilians. The line in the US national anthem was ‘And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air.’ It is not known to this author of the effects of the rockets on the civilian population of Washington.
9. Although not singularly embracing it, this study is aware of Joan Scott’s imperative of historizing ‘experience’ and to which it contributes through providing evidence of subjects’ experiential expressions of subject-positions regarding fearfullness, fearlessness, and doubt when facing man-made threats as well as those not seeing any threats to fear, see Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience.’ For a pertinent critique of Scott’s view of experience, see Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies.
10. Thirteen firemen died in the bombardment, see Hassø, Københavns Brandvæsens historie, 253.
11. Wiene, ‘Et ædelt og tappert folk,’ 238, 247.
12. Quote from the newspaper Adresseavisen, in Hassø, Københavns Brandvæsens historie, 248; cf. Wiene, ‘Et ædelt og tappert folk,’ 242.
13. Wiene, ‘Et ædelt og tappert folk,’ 243.
14. Ibid., 242.
15. Ibid., 243.
16. I read the seminal articles by Langdon Winner on the politics of artifacts and Bryan Pfaffenberger on technological dramas as examples of system politics and community politics respectively, see Winner, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’; Pfaffenberger, ‘Technological Dramas.’ For an example of a recent article by Winner on the system politics of terrorism, see Winner, ‘Trust and Terror.’
17. Pinch and Bijker, ‘The Social Construction’; Cowan, ‘The Consumption Junction.’
18. Domanska, ‘The Material Presence of the Past.’ Within STS this is primarily represented through work on material agency within actor network theory (ANT), for a prominent example see Latour, Pandora’s Hope. For the influence of ANT’s discussion of material agency within these new materiality studies see, for example, Bill Brown, Things; Dant, Materiality and Society; Miller, Materiality; Knappett and Malafouris, Material Agency.
19. For a critique of the prevalent emphasis on linguistic discourse within materiality studies, see Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity.’
20. This could probably be read as another example of the dichotomy between agency-filled micro-histories vs. deterministic macro-stories discussed in Misa, ‘Retrieving Sociotechnical Change.’
21. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey; Schivelbusch, ‘Railroad Space and Railroad Time.’ This interpretation of Schivelbusch’s work follows Alan Trachtenberg who in his foreword to the English translation of Schivelbusch’s Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise (1977) describes him as ‘wishing to recover the subjective experience’ that the railway made possible and showing the construction of ‘the industrial subject,’ see Trachtenberg, ‘Foreword,’ xiv–xv.
22. Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population; Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self.’ Technologies of power are also called ‘technologies of domination’ and Foucault describes governmentality as the ‘contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self,’ see Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self,’ 19. For a review of Foucault and technological artifacts and in particular his influence on studies of ICTs and surveillance technology, see Willcocks, ‘Michel Foucault in the Social Study.’
23. Some notable work inspired by Schivelbusch and Foucault are Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Crary, Suspensions of Perception; Seiler, ‘Statist Means to Individualist Ends’; Seiler, Republic of Drivers; Otter, The Victorian Eye; Barak, ‘Scraping the Surface’; Cohen, Technology and the Early Modern Self; Adey, Aerial Life.
24. For a benevolent critique of Otter’s work as elitist cultural history, see Hård, ‘The Victorian Eye and Its Blind Spot.’
25. Nye, Electrifying America; Garnert, Anden i lampan; Fischer, America Calling; Nye, American Technological Sublime; Herzig, ‘Removing Roots’; Nye, Technology Matters.
26. See, for example, Gomart and Hennion, ‘A Sociology of Attachment’; Thompson, Making Parents; Turkle, The Second Self; Edwards, The Closed World; Turkle, Life on the Screen. Also of relevance is some of Turkle’s work outside ICT, see especially, Turkle, The Inner History of Devices.
27. Miller, ‘Materiality: An Introduction,’ 38.
28. Banerjee and Miller, The Sari, ii, 4. See also Miller, The Comfort of Things; Miller, Stuff.
29. The concept of ‘terrormindedness’ carries a lot of unintended affinities with Cindy Katz’s ‘banal terrorism’ as the ‘everyday, routinized, barely noticed reminders of terror or the threat of an always already presence of terrorism in our midst’ and which ‘is sutured to – and secured in – the performance of security in the everyday environment,’ see Katz, ‘Banal Terrorism,’ 350–1. This use of habitus follows Bourdieu’s formulation of the concept and the role the materialities of the Kabyle house played in aiding subject-making by inculcating dominant cultural norms and values, see Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 87–95; Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 9–10, 271–83, 316–17. On the influence of Bourdieu on the new material culture studies as seen through Daniel Miller’s work: Miller, Material Culture, 102–8; 147–57; Miller, ‘Why Some Things Matter,’ 3–5, 10; Miller, ‘Materiality,’ 6–8, 38.
30. For examples that to some degree engage with the role of technology and materiality in the history of urban terrorism, see Ashworth, War and the City; Coaffee, Terrorism, Risk and the City; Graham, Cities, War, and Terrorism; Davis, Buda’s Wagon; Savitch, Cities in a Time of Terror; Coaffee, Wood, and Rogers, Everyday Resilience of the City; Coaffee, Terrorism, Risk and the Global City. David Nye has previously discussed the same examples of urban terror technologies against civilians in relation to security and protection but with different aims and conclusions, see Nye, Technology Matters, 161–84, 221.
31. Vanderbilt, Survival City, 54; Edmonds, ‘How Australians,’ 183–206. The uses and meanings of airmindedness have had positive as well as negative political and cultural resonances in Europe and America, see Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane; Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers; Corn, The Winged Gospel; Wohl, A Passion for Wings. I am grateful to David Mindell who in the early 1990s pointed me to Fritzsche’s continually inspiring and intriguing book.
32. Smith, Urban Disorder; Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power; MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy.
33. As far as I can determine the two leading journals in the history of technology Technology and Culture (T&C) and History and Technology have only published two substantial empirical articles dealing with non-state terrorism: Walker, ‘Regulating against Nuclear Terrorism, Lavenir, ‘Bombs, Printers, and Pistols.’ For other articles in these journals tangentially dealing with the history of technology of terrorism, see the special post-9/11 issue on terrorism and technology of History and Technology 19 (2003), no. 1, as well as the following articles in T&C: Williams, ‘Technological World We Can Live In’; Wosk, ‘Photographing Desolation’; Mukerji, ‘Intelligent Uses of Engineering.’
34. For two examples discussing such perspective, see Herman and O’Sullivan, The ‘Terrorism’ Industry; Jones and Smith, ‘We’re All Terrorists Now.’
35. Vanderbilt, Survival City, 54.
36. Diary entry by Virginia Woolf from 1 February 1915, quoted in Saint-Amour, ‘Air War Prophecy,’ 140.
37. Ibid., 132; Van Riper, Imagining Flight, 64.
38. Van Riper, Imagining Flight, 65; Saint-Amour, ‘Air War Prophecy,’ 132–3; Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers, 206.
39. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, v, 272–3, 275.
40. Ibid., 275.
41. Ibid., 275.
42. Paul Saint-Amour has described Mumford as seeing this as how a contemporary political crisis ‘has become ritualized, quotidian, a general rather than an exceptional case’ and how the ‘real war and the rehearsal for war become psychologically indistinct,’ see Saint-Amour, ‘Air War Prophecy,’ 130–1.
43. Fritzsche, ‘Machine Dreams,’ 689, 694, 697, 699–703, 705, 709; Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers, 209–11.
44. Fritzsche, ‘Machine Dreams,’ 697–8; Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers, 195, 211, 214–15. The Volksgasmaske was a sibling of the Nazi’s other community shaping consumer technologies like the Volkswagen car, Volksempfänger radio, Volkskühlschrank refrigerator and the contemplated but never realized Volksflugzeug airplane.
45. Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers, 214. For similar thoughts along British interwar architects, see McGrath, Twentieth Century Houses, 211.
46. Fritzsche, ‘Machine Dreams,’ 705.
47. Meisel, ‘Air Raid Shelter Policy,’ 300; Lee, ‘“I See Dead People,”’ 257.
48. Spiers, ‘Gas Disarmament in the 1920s,’ 297; Ewen, ‘Preparing the British Fire Service,’ 224, 213; Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, 12, 109; Werskey, The Visible College, 226.
49. O’Brien, Civil Defence, 70.
50. Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, 11, 50–2; Patterson, Guernica and Total War, 106–7; Jones, British Civilians in the Front Line, 57. Volunteer American airmen under French command bombed the city of Chechaouen in Spanish Morocco in 1925.
51. Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, 127.
52. Lee, ‘“I See Dead People,”’ 264.
53. Woman quoted in Madge and Harrisson, Britain by Mass-Observation, 243.
54. For examples of how children appropriated gas-masks in un-anticipated ways, see Moshenska, ‘Gas Masks.’
55. Joan Hurford-Veazey, Love and War: An Autobiographical study of the years 1939-1945: Covering the Second Great War, 15 September 1938, PP/MCR/199, Imperial War Museum London Archive (IWMLA).
56. Vera W. Reid, Cameos of 1939–40 Diary, p. 27, microfilm PP/MCR/88, IWMLA.
57. Mass observation diarist DR2450 in reply to question 4 in directives ‘September 1940 – gas masks (1–221),’ Mass Observation Archives, University of Sussex Library.
58. Jones, British Civilians in the Front Line, 9.
59. O’Brien, Civil Defence, 508.
60. Rose, One Nation Underground, 5; Vanderbilt, Survival City, 74.
61. Quoted in Rose, One Nation Underground, 23.
62. Tone, Age of Anxiety, 94.
63. Rose, One Nation Underground, 132. This skepticism could also be found among children on the other side of the iron curtain.
64. Vanderbilt, Survival City, 180.
65. Ziliak, ‘Nuclear Reaction’; Butigan, Pilgrimage through a Burning World, 35–6.
66. Speech by John F. Kennedy, quoted in Rose, One Nation Underground, 2.
67. Ibid., 37, 4; Vanderbilt, Survival City, 141.
68. Rose, One Nation Underground, 191.
69. Ibid., 125; Bergqvist, ‘En lägenhet med plats för 76 personer,’ 7–8.
70. Quoted in Vanderbilt, Survival City, 130.
71. Ibid., 130; Rose, One Nation Underground, 125.
72. Terrorism as an modern political tactic is generally traced back to the state terror of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror while modern substate terrorism is considered to emerge in 1870s Russia. The definition of terrorism used here is the so called ‘new consensus definition,’ i.e. that terrorism is ‘a politically motivated tactic involving the threat or use of force or violence in which the pursuit of publicity plays a significant role.’ See Weinberg, Pedahzur, and Hirsch-Hoefler, ‘The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism.’
73. Coaffee, ‘Fortification, Fragmentation,’ 117; Coaffee, ‘Rings of Steel.’
74. Vale, ‘Securing Public Space,’ 40; Hoffman and Chalk, Security in the Nation’s Capital, 12, 27; Wekerle and Jackson, ‘Urbanizing the Security Agenda,’ 37; Davis, ‘The Flames of New York,’ 45; Vanderbilt, Survival City, 199. See also Winner, ‘Trust and Terror.’
75. Davis, ‘The Flames of New York,’ 45.
76. Brown, ‘Designs for a Land’; Ouroussoff, ‘Medieval Modern.’ Those advocating airport screening technology as the best candidate for the iconic materiality of terrorismmindedness neglects the facts that these things are mainly the concerns of the affluent minority of frequent fliers rather than the majority of ordinary citizens, as well as these technologies are so far primarily being confined to airports and not affecting the everyday terrorismmindedness of cities which is the focus of this study.
77. Davis, Buda’s Wagon, 7; Coaffee, Terrorism, Risk and the City, 73; Ouroussoff, ‘Medieval Modern’; Coaffee, ‘Fortification, Fragmentation,’ 115.
78. Vale, ‘Securing Public Space,’ 42.
79. Jay Rivera quoted in Barry Shifrin, ‘Tomb raters! Commuters think those bollards are for the birds, too,’ The Brooklyn Paper, 6 January 2010, http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/33/2/33_02_bs_lirr_vox_pop.html; Signature FSRG quoted at Gersh Kuntzman, ‘New LIRR terminal is a monument to fear and paranoia,’ The Brooklyn Paper, 6 January 2010, available at http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/33/2/33_02_gk_lirr_angle.html; rhywun quoted at Benjamin Kabak, When a security bollard goes too far,’ Second Ave. Sagas, 21 January 2010, http://secondavenuesagas.com/2010/01/21/when-a-security-bollard-goes-too-far/; Signatures Michael and Jaimie quoted at Stephen Brown, ‘Int’l terror expert speaks: LIRR bollards are “overkill” and “ugly,”’ The Brooklyn Paper, 22 March 2010, http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/33/13/33_13_sb_bollards_expert_main.html.
80. Kabak, ‘When a security bollard,’ 21 January 2010 (see note 79).
81. Noah Pfefferblit, quoted in Manjoo, ‘Cityscape of Fear’; Buckley and Baker, ‘Security Barriers Born of 9/11.’
82. Ouroussoff, ‘Medieval Modern.’
83. For a prominent advocate of such a perspective, see Edgerton, The Shock of the Old.
84. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 3.
85. See for example, Furedi, Politics of Fear; Altheide, Terrorism and the Politics of Fear; Hughes, War on Terror, Inc.