Lines of sight: on the visualization of unknown futures

Abstract

This article considers the specific mode of visualization that is at work in contemporary border security practices. Taking inspiration from art historian Jonathan Crary's genealogies of attention, it situates homeland security visuality in a particular economy of attention or attentiveness to the world. How is it that we come to focus on some elements of our way of life, establish them as normal and designate deviations from the norm? How does this algorithmic attentiveness break up the visual field, ‘pixelating’ sensory data so that it can be reintegrated to project a picture of a person? The pre-emptive lines of sight emerging in contemporary security practice become precisely a means of visualizing unknown futures. The article concludes with reflections on the creative artistic forms of attention that flourish even where the lines of sight of the consumer, the citizen, the border guard, the traveller, the migrant appear ever more directed and delimited. It is in these more creative modes of attention that we find one of the most important resources to contemporary political life – the capacity to question the ‘better picture’, to disrupt what we see as ordinary or out of the ordinary and confront the routines of our lives anew.

Keywords:

• borders
• citizenship
• security
• resistance
• technology
• ‘war on terror’

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding of award RES 155 25 0087, ‘Contested Borders: Non-Governmental Public Action and the Technologies of the War on Terror’. Performance artists Rozalinda Borcila and Meghan Trainor have been much valued collaborators and have given generously of their time and images. The article has benefited greatly from the comments of the two anonymous reviewers

Notes

1. In May 2006 the European Court of Justice ruled that the EU–US agreement on the sharing of airline passenger data be annulled (Guild and Brouwer 2006). The Passenger Name Record (PNR) agreement of 2004 required that airlines submit 34 items of data on each passenger (including, for example, credit card details, past travel data and in-flight meal choices, car hire, hotel bookings and other personal information) within 15 minutes of flight departure for the US. The PNR data has become central to pre-emptive border controls, where risk ratings are assigned to individuals in advance of their arrival at a border (Amoore 2006).

2. In a speech to the NATO in 2002, Donald Rumsfeld pondered the importance of taking decisions on the basis of an absence of evidence, of taking into account the ‘unknown unknowns’:

The message is that there are no ‘knowns’. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things we know that we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know […] There is another way to phrase that and that is the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.Hence, the sense that attention is to be paid to that which is not seen, has not been seen, but can nonetheless be ‘projected’.

3. In common with others who have sought to push economy ‘beyond economism’ – that is, beyond the economy as a pre-discursive, pre-political and self-evident material reality – economy is used here to denote a field of intervention and a specific means of rendering political life governable (Miller and Rose 1990, de Goede 2003, 2005). ‘The art of government’, writes Foucault, ‘is essentially concerned with answering the question of how to introduce economy – that is to say, the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family – how to introduce this … into the management of the state’ (1991, p. 92). Foucault finds in economy a continuity of the art of governing the state, such that the ‘very essence of government’ has come to mean ‘the art of exercising power in the form of economy’ (p. 93).

4. Reservations databases Amadeus, Galileo and Sabre, used by the major airlines and hotel and other travel groups, are now the conduit for the routine submission of passenger data to the US authorities before a flight departs for the US.

5. For Jacques Derrida, a decision is not a decision if it simply redeploys calculative practices in order to decide. A decision cannot, in Derrida's reading, be determined by the acquisition of knowledge, for then it is not a decision but ‘simply the application of a body of knowledge of, at the very least, a rule or norm’ (1994, p. 37). An apparent decision taken on the basis of what is ‘seen’ evidentially, via the calculations of experts, or in the screened results of algorithmic visualization, is not a decision at all. ‘The decision, if there is to be one’, writes Derrida, ‘must advance towards a future which is not known, which cannot be anticipated’ (1994, p. 37).

6. As Slavoj Zizek has it: ‘multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a “racism with a distance” – it respects the Other's identity, conceiving of the Other as a self-enclosed “authentic” community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position’ (2006, p. 171). Thus, the decision based on a visualized calculation is precisely a self-referential form of racism, a racism that disavows itself by stripping out its own role in identifying the Other that is threatening and dangerous.