Digital Medieval

Abstract

Newcastle University “[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”[1] In 2007 the influential US security analyst, John Robb, published Brave New War, one of the myriad of popular books about ‘security’ that have peppered the US best seller 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 shift away 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.”[2] This will be combined, he predicts, with the “development of an entirely new, decentralised security system”[3] 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”[4] – 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 fro this group, leapfrogging its members from one secure, well-appointed lily pad to the next.” [5] 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.”[6] 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.”[7] Like most good pulp-political post-9/11 non fiction in the US, 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?[8] 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? How will the apparent logics of splintering,[9] fragmentation and polarisation sustained by the new bordering logics of the new military urbanism 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 have argued, a kind of (computerised) ‘medieval modernity.’[10] This is helping to produce, they argue, “the emergence of forms of citizenship”, which are “fundamentally about protection” and are “located in urban enclaves.”[11] 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.”[12] 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.”[13] 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 saying,[14] Alsayyad and Roy 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.” [15] Thus, nation states don’t simply whither away under some totally globalised future. Rather, the new camp-like enclosures and privatised circulations erupt within, through and between what are conventionally understood as cities and nations. [16] Such complexes of fractal layering of assemlabges, enclaves and passage points works to radically “complicates the whole issue of progress and backwardness, the modern and pre-modern”[17]. It also forces us to be careful of deploying usual teleologies which signal that the barbarian or Orientalised Other actually inhabits the “savage past” in their urban sites within the present world.[18] 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 shift from a society of discipline based on 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. Crucially, these assemble both architectures and electronic technologies, working in parallel, and work by trying to stipulate the legitimacy of presence or circulation in advance or movement. Thus, cities, and ideas of citizenship, become progressively reorganized based on notions of provisional, rather than absolute, mobility, rights and access. 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 camp-cities where “violence is constantly deployed in the name of peace and order”[19] They also mention the insurgent urban governance emerging in places like Hezbollah-controlled towns in Lebanon, Hamas-controlled Gaza, or other “neighbourhood-level Islamic republics being declared by religious fundamentalist groups.”[20] 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.[21] 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.”[22] As in medieval times, then, the result seems to be that that the modern city emerges as what Holston and Appadurai have called “honeycomb of jurisdictions”, a “medieval body” of “overlapping, heterogeneous, non-uniform, and increasingly private memberships”.[23] Permeating all are mobilizations of the new tracking, targeting and access-control technologies of biometrics. 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?”[24] Given such a conclusion, it is tempting to finish in an apocalyptic tone. Such a temptation must be avoided, however. For it must be remembered that borders and bordering strategies remain inevitably permeable and contradictory. This is especially the case in large cities. As technophiliac dreams of perfect ordering and perfect power, they will 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’ surrou

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