I V the Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media: Media Arts in the Middle East by Özgün Eylül İşcen Computational

Home , Jonathan Beller

The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media: Media Arts in the Middle East

Özgün Eylül İşcen

Computational Media, Arts and Cultures Duke University

Date:______Approved:

______Mark B. N. Hansen, Advisor

______Mark Olson

______Negar Mottahedeh

______Pedro Lasch

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures in the Graduate School of Duke University

2020

ABSTRACT

The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media: Media Arts in the Middle East

Özgün Eylül İşcen

Computational Media, Arts and Cultures Duke University

Date:______Approved:

______Mark B. N. Hansen, Advisor

______Mark Olson

______Negar Mottahedeh

______Pedro Lasch

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures in the Graduate School of Duke University

2020

Abstract

Today, humans must rely on technical operations that exceed their perceptual threshold and control. The increasingly complex and abstract, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping acts as a model for how we might begin to articulate the relationship between the psychic and social realms, as well as the local and global scales. Jameson’s attentiveness to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations is still helpful for us to map the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers – where its differential impacts are felt and negotiated strongly.

Arabian Gulf, such as Dubai, I look at the war-torn and toxic cities that are spreading in the rest of the region, such as Beirut, due to the violent operations of militarized states as well as the ever-growing economic and ecological deterioration. Hence, these cities constitute two sides of the same coin, bounded by more extensive structures of wealth accumulation and class formation in the region underlying the dominance of the Gulf and

US imperialism. Consequently, we can unpack the spatial-temporal reconfigurations of global capital from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, militarism, logistics, and computation.

Expanding on Jonathan Beller’s idea of computational capital, I argue that computational media are instrumentalized as an imperial apparatus as and within the matrix of racial capitalism. In other words, computational media are operationalized within a capitalist society that preys on the continuous reproduction of imperial divisions, techniques, institutions, and rights while obscuring their historicity. Thus, we need to bring back the historicity of those forms as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present, including from material conditions (labor) to ethico-legal systems (law).

Consequently, Jameson’s cognitive mapping needs to be reconfigured not only due to the shifts in the granularity and scale of capitalist extraction but also due its embeddedness within the histories of modern thought and colonialism.

My aim is to revive the utopian project of envisioning alternatives to capitalism while reformulating the image of historicity and globality today. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms, intervening in the economic, legal, and symbolic systems that animate computational media in the Middle Eastern context, ranging from smart weapons to smart cities. My analyses show that art could allow us some insights about the economic and social structures that govern our immediate and situated experience, whereas media studies could help us to navigate through the convoluted cartographies of computational capital today.

As my project demonstrates, there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space.

Those urban struggles will persist, always exceeding the bounds of our theories. My

project affirms an aesthetic that does not exist yet, not because it is impossible but, rather, it cannot be encapsulated in a formula since it is always already in the process of making on the streets.

Contents

Abstract ...... iv

List of Figures ...... x

Acknowledgements ...... xi

Introduction – The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media ...... 1

Revisiting Jameson’s Cognitive Mapping ...... 13

Cognitive Mapping as Countervisuality ...... 22

Writing About Media Arts in the Middle East ...... 32

Chapter Outline ...... 43

Chapter One – Cognitive Mapping: Historicity and Globality Reconsidered ...... 48

The Jamesonian Dialectical Twist ...... 55

Local Universalities ...... 60

Theoretical Iterations of Cognitive Mapping ...... 63

Cartographies of Capital ...... 65

Extraction in the Expanded Sense ...... 68

Cultural Materialisms ...... 71

The Stack as Multiple Totalities ...... 74

The Interface as Multiple Frontiers ...... 79

Computational Capital ...... 85

Human-Technical Assemblages ...... 92

Political Ontologies ...... 98

Conclusion ...... 105

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Chapter Two – Calculated Mistakes of Neoliberalism: Smart Weapons and Forensic Aesthetics ...... 111

Militarized Drone Strikes ...... 113

Preemptive Logic and Space of Exception ...... 121

Drones as an Apparatus of Racialized State Violence ...... 124

The Imperial Entanglements of Verticality and Visuality ...... 134

Forensic Architecture: Claiming the Right to Look ...... 143

Visualities Countering Militarized States ...... 159

Conclusion ...... 164

Chapter Three – Smart Urbanism and Gulf Futurism(s) ...... 166

The Geopolitics of the Arabian Gulf ...... 167

Post-Oil Spectacles ...... 169

The Gulf’s Smartness Mandate ...... 173

Gulf Futurism(s) ...... 178

Counter-Futurisms Arising from the Middle East ...... 182

The Leaking Subjects ...... 196

Conclusion ...... 199

Chapter Four – Computational Colonialism and the End of the World ...... 201

Decolonizing the Terms of the Anthropocene ...... 203

Past Futures of Oil ...... 207

Material Speculations ...... 210

Condensing Imagination Within Material Reality ...... 226

Conclusion – Rehearsing the Aesthetic That Does Not Exist ...... 232

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Bibliography ...... 236

Web Sources...... 249

Biography ...... 252

List of Figures

Figure 1: Morehshin Allahyari, King Uthal (Material Speculation: ISIS), 3D-printed resin with electronic parts, 2015, courtesy the artist...... 3

Figure 2: The construction site of the Museum of the Future, Dubai, photograph by taken the author on March 20th, 2019...... 5

Figure 3: Forensic Architecture, Drone Strike in Mir Ali, video still, 2013 © Forensic Architecture, 2020 ...... 145

Figure 4: Forensic Architecture, Drone Strike in Miranshah, video still, 2014 © Forensic Architecture, 2020 ...... 149

Figure 5: Forensic Architecture in partnership with Praxis Films, Triple Chaser, synthetic image, 2019 © Forensic Architecture, 2020 ...... 156

Figure 6: Smart Dubai’s official website, screenshot by the author on July 1st, 2020 .... 175

Figure 7: Bassem Saad, Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops), navigable online space screenshot, 2019, courtesy the artist...... 184

Figure 8: Bassem Saad, Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops), navigable online space screenshot, 2019, courtesy the artist...... 186

Figure 9: Bassem Saad, Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops), navigable online space screenshot, 2019, courtesy the artist...... 188

Figure 10: Bassem Saad, Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops), navigable online space screenshot, 2019, courtesy the artist...... 195

Figure 11: Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Huma, video still, 2016, courtesy the artist...... 219

Figure 12: Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Ya’jooj Ma’jooj’, video still, 2017, courtesy the artist...... 222

Acknowledgements

In the interview section of The Undercommons, Stefano Harney describes the possible meanings of studying that could overcome the neoliberal operations of contemporary educational settings. He gathers these varying meanings under the term speculative practice:

A speculative practice is study in movement for me, to walk with others and to talk about ideas, but also what to eat, an old movie, a passing dog, or a new love, is also to speak in the midst of something, to interrupt the other kinds of study that might be going on, or might have just paused, that we pass through, that we may even been invited to join, this study across bodies, across space, across things, this is study as a speculative practice, when the situated practice of a seminar room or squatted space moves out to encounter study in general.1

These lines illustrate my PhD years, as I learned a lot from the people I encountered on the way while travelling across multiple cities at varied stages of my life and study. It is impossible to acknowledge all of them here but I am thankful for all the conversations, walks, laughs, joys, frustrations, confusions, hugs, dances, and cries we shared. All these moments are part of this work in one way or another. The countries in which I relatively spent more time during this period (2014-2020) - Turkey, the United

States, and Lebanon – have gone through the heightened moments of hope, anger, pessimism, and solidarity. All those struggles have not only motivated the current work

1 Stefano Harney, “The General Antagonism: An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Stefano Harney & Fred Moten (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), 118. xi

but also given me the strength to continue it. During the current global pandemic, we need radical crowds and futures more than ever, across the borders.

Friends, fellow graduate student workers, faculty, and staff that I met at Duke have been a large part of my PhD experience. First, I want to express my gratitude to my supervisor Mark Hansen and my committee members Mark Olson, Negar Mottahedeh, and Pedro Lasch. I am happy that I have completed my dissertation with their support and guidance, who knew me since my first day at Duke. They witnessed my journeys across multiple time zones, and always welcomed me when I returned Durham after those travels. They let me think and write beyond the bounds of established disciplines, which strongly shaped me as a media theorist writing about media arts in the Middle East. They encouraged me to recognize and own my arguments, and I am thankful for that.

I am also thankful for the support of graduate students, faculty, and administrative staff at the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, and the Program of

Computational Media, Arts and Cultures. I want to thank our director of graduate studies,

Victoria Szabo and Bill Seaman, respectively, for their generous supports. I also appreciate the administrative support of Megan Whitney, Robin B. Crow, Marion

Monson, Joanne Grosshans, and David Massung. Finally, I thank Elizabeth Grosz,

Fredric Jameson, and Luciana Parisi for the classes and conversations that have shaped the trajectory of my dissertation.

In line with the quote I started with, reading and research groups have been central to my studies and friendships at Duke. I enjoyed being part of the S-1 Speculative

xii

Sensation Lab led by Mark Hansen and Mark Olson, and the Social Practice Lab led by

Pedro Lasch. The Aesthetics and Politics Reading Group with Max Symuleski and

Shannan Lee Hayes, and the Marxist Reading Group taught me that reading groups could act as support systems that we need to survive, personally or intellectually, within the precarious conditions of academia. In this regard, my friends at CMAC, Evan Donahue,

Sinan Göknur, Quran Karriem, Max Symuleski, and Rebecca Uliasz, and fellows at the

Duke Graduate Students Union have affirmed the possibilities of care and support, exceeding the boundaries of academia, especially when the systems, which are supposed to protect us, keep failing us.

I would like to acknowledge the artists and research groups whose artistic endeavors and political commitments made this work possible. I thank all the artists who shared their works and time with me. In particular, thank Morehshin Allahyari and

Bassem Saad, respectively, for sharing their artworks and resources and having fruitful conversations with me throughout my project, and engaging with the earlier versions of my ideas and texts. Both artists put so much research and thought into their artistic practice that I am genuinely happy to learn from and write about their works, which diligently speak to the urgencies of our current times and the possibilities of radical futures. I also appreciate the contribution of the collaborative research group Forensic

Architecture, whose practice has been so influential for the current work. Their practice is exemplary of how artists could contest the calculated mistakes of neoliberalism,

xiii

including the very structures we are necessarily partaking in, thereby underscoring the deepened entanglements of aesthetic and political regimes.

My multi-sited, long-term travels carved the paths of my research. Thanks to the

Julian Price Graduate Fellowship in Humanities and History that I could complete my fieldwork, and thanks to the Evan Frankel Fellowship, I could write up my dissertation. I also want to acknowledge the support of the institutions that were generous enough to share their material resources, Ashkal Alwan (Beirut) and Sharjah Art Foundation

(Sharjah). Finally, I want to acknowledge the contributions of various publishing projects and conferences that provided me opportunities for developing and sharing my work at its various stages.

There are two occasions which contributed to the current work in more concrete ways. First, I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the symposium

Rethinking Affordance, organized by Ashley Scarlett and Martin Zeilinger, that took place at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in June 2018. Ashley and Martin, and the editor-in-chief at Media Theory Journal, Simon Dawes, helped me with the edits of my article, which I later developed into a dissertation chapter. An earlier version of chapter two was first published as “Forensic Aesthetics for Militarized Drone Strikes:

Affordances for Whom, and for What Ends?.” Media Theory [Special Issue: Rethinking

Affordance, Ashley Scarlett and Martin Zeilinger, eds.], Vol 3, No. 1, 2019, 239-268.

ISSN 2557-826X. Open access at: http://mediatheoryjournal.org/

xiv

The second occasion was the research workshop Research Networks organized by

Transmediale and Aarhus University, in cooperation with the Global Emergent Media

Lab in Montréal. Our conversations over emails and workshops led to a group panel at

Transmediale Festival 2020 in Berlin. I thank the organizers, workshop moderators, and fellow participants whose feedback was what I needed most at the moment of finishing up my dissertation. Some sections of my dissertation, fragmentarily distributed across chapters one, three and four, will be published as “Revisiting Cognitive Mapping:

Extractive Capitalism and Media Arts in The Middle East.” In A Peer Reviewed Journal

About Research Networks (APRJA), Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox, eds. Volume

9, Issue 1, Forthcoming 2020. ISSN 2245-7755. Open access at: https://aprja.net/

Finally, I want to thank my families and friends in Istanbul, Durham, Beirut,

Berlin, New York, and Vancouver, who generously inspired and supported my endeavors all along. I thank my Duke crowd, Patricia Bass, Can Evren, Fatma Derya Menteş, Felipe

Alvarez de Toledo, Max Symuleski, and Sinan Oruç, without whom I could not imagine my PhD life. Despite our frequent separations, they always managed to be there where I am at, crises or joys of life. In the end, the biggest thanks go to my family back home, especially my parents, who supported me in every possible way, even when this meant that they needed to be ok with me living abroad too long. I am very much thankful for them, and I can’t wait to move closer to home.

Introduction – The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media

We are all, always, already there.1 You are already in it.2

In late February 2015, a few clips were released on YouTube showing ISIS militants destroying ancient artifacts at the Mosul Museum in Iraq. This was only the most recent incident of destruction done by the jihadist group ISIS (also known as Daesh) across the areas under its control in Iraq and Syria, some of which were well documented and circulated as part of their Hollywood-like propaganda. These videos were followed by the ones of ISIS’ destruction of Palmyra’s Arch, an 1,800-year-old structure, in Syria later that year. These highly publicized videos perpetuated the Western image of ISIS’s concerted attack on civilization and the rising concerns regarding the preservation of the so-called world’s cultural heritage. In the following months, international organizations such as the United Nations, state-sponsored agencies, and private firms initiated varied projects for the reconstruction of those ancient artifacts that were destroyed in the region.

In less than a year, Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph, modeled and printed by 3D technology, was first presented to the public in London. The opening ceremony was declared as a symbol of solidarity with the Syrian people, despite the background of Europe’s troubling

1 McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 15. 2 Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Stefano Harney & Fred Moten (Wivenhow: Minor Compositions, 2013), 17. 1

migration policies and enforcement practices. The monument then traveled around the world from New York to Dubai, except the area where it was originally located.

These techno-capitalist and neocolonial spectacles, however, overshadow the U.S. and other Western colonial powers’ ongoing violence and strategic interests in the region, which led to the formation of ISIS in the first place. Consequently, the political and historical narratives get stuck between simplistic binary readings of political events, dominated by the rhetoric of us versus them, whereas the functioning of global capital relies on more complex structures of capital, power, and violence. In response,

Morehshin Allahyari, born and raised in Iran, and based in the U.S. for a decade now, adopts 3D technology to develop physical tactics for contesting digital colonialism.3

Allahyari defines digital colonialism as “the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations.”4 In Allahyari’s terms, if ISIS claims these objects by destroying them, and techno-capitalists reclaim them by replicating them, she offers a third way, restituting power and ownership of dispossessed communities.5

With the series “Material Speculation: ISIS” (2015-2016), Allahyari reconstructed a dozen of centuries-old original artifacts (statues from the Roman period city of Hatra

3 Morehshin Allahyari. “Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism,” performance lecture, commissioned and co-presented by New Museum affiliate Rhizome, 28 February 2019. https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/morehshin-allahyari-physical-tactics-for-digital-colonialism 4 Morehshin Allahyari, “Digital Colonialism,” 2016-2019. http://www.morehshin.com/digital-colonialism- 2016-2019/ 5 Morehshin Allahyari. “Digital Colonialism, Re-figuring, and Monstrosity,” the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series, the School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, 2 November 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcK9K4Yty74 2

and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh) that were destroyed by ISIS at the Mosul Museum in 2015. For 3D modeling, Allahyari needed still images to reconstruct those artifacts but there were not enough data to start with. These artifacts are already a part of looted archives and obscured histories. So, she needed to design those models from scratch based on the limited, and sometimes inconsistent data that could be gathered regarding the histories and material qualities of these artifacts. To this end, she collaborated with historians, archeologists, and museum staff for extensive research.

Figure 1: Morehshin Allahyari, King Uthal (Material Speculation: ISIS), 3D- printed resin with electronic parts, 2015, courtesy the artist. http://www.morehshin.com/material-speculation-isis/

As depicted in the figure of King Uthal, Allahyari designed replicas as time capsules for the future with a flash drive or a memory card protected inside, which is made visible through the artifact 3D-printed in translucent resin (Figure 1). Those electronic compinents preserve gathered images, maps, and videos about those sites from 3

the time before their destruction. Allahyari released the digital files related to the first of the models, King Uthal, so that others could download and print their versions, which created an archive scattered around the world. Allahyari still seeks an institutional archive for the replicas in the Middle East to support the development of cultural commons based in the region.

In this sense, Allahyari’s use of 3D technology not only repairs the archive but also generates a cognitive mapping that connects the convoluted geographies and systems

(monetary, technological, or symbolic) through which petro-capitalism operates. Thus, she expands from the individual artifact or technology to the broader systems within which they are embedded, thereby re-narrating their historicity as such. Most of the destroyed ancient artifacts in Syria and Iraq were smuggled by ISIS to finance its militant operations via Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel among others, to the Western countries;6 which is to say, those artifacts soon will appear in private collections in the western world.

Moreover, the replica of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph, reconstructed by the

Institute of Digital Archeology (IDA), reveals regional dynamics as well. The project was financed and created by the IDA in partnership with Oxford and Harvard universities and

Dubai Future Foundation.7 The United Arab Emirates’ growing investments in the high-

6 Tom Westcott, Destruction of Theft? Islamic State, Iraqi Antiquities and Organized Crime, March 2020, 30-39. This is a research report prepared by Global Initiative: Against Transnational Organized Crime. https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Destruction-or-theft-Islamic-State-Iraqi-antiquities- and-organized-crime.pdf 7 Visit the project’s website for further information: https://www.dubaifuture.gov.ae/our-initiatives/3d- replica-of-palmyra-arch/

tech industry and logistics are concretized within the body of this foundation. The

Museum of the Future, a leading spectacle of the foundation, has the most technically advanced building in the world. The building is partially 3D printed, while featuring a unique design with Arabic calligraphy on its exterior, and after several delays, the museum is promised to be opened in 2020 (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The construction site of the Museum of the Future, Dubai, photograph taken by the author on March 20th, 2019.

As a promotional video for the museum’s exhibition Climate Change Reimagined

(2017) depicts, the smart future of Dubai as a peaceful and sustainable place with polished images is placed in sharp contrast to the unruly and chaotic scenes that are currently taking place on the streets across the Middle East.8 The visitors start watching

8 The promotional video was produced for the exhibition Climate Change Reimagined (2017) by Tellart, an international design studio, in partnership with the Dubai Future Foundation. The exhibition was opened in Dubai at the annual World Government Summit on February 12, 2017. You can access the video via this link: https://www.tellart.com/projects/museum-of-the-future-climate-change-reimagined/ The described sequence is between 00:43 and 01:19. For further information, see: https://www.museumofthefuture.ae/ 5

on the immersive screen how forests turn into dust, and cities into ruins, depicted by trees and high-rise buildings collapsing on the ground, into particles to disappear by spreading out, accompanied by the darkened visuals and anxiety-provoking sounds of chaos. All this leads up to the scene of rebels and clashes on the streets. After the vividly depicted scenes and soundscapes of chaos, however, there finally arrives an image of a better future with polished images of abundant vegetation, high-tech transportation, and futuristic architecture. The immersive quality of a 360-degree film takes the visitors into the future, dissolving the distinction between two sides of the screen, the moment of now and the one of future.

The visual aesthetic of the video obscures the Arabian Gulf’s reliance on cheap migrant labor and its domination over the rest of the region. Indeed, this contrast manifests the massively polarized accumulation of wealth and class formation in the region, marked by the economic and political domination of the Gulf and U.S. imperialism. Instead of exceptionalizing the Middle East for its autocratic states and so- called never-ending wars, I situate the urban contexts of the region as exemplary of neoliberal globalization. The ongoing investments in petro-politics, militarism, finance, logistics, real estate, and smart futures are taking place all at once in the region. The historical development of the Middle East since the early 20th century has been integral to the constitution of global capitalism (while building upon the colonial periods that involved British, French, Ottoman, and Persian powers) and the particular position of

U.S. imperialism within it. Accordingly, we need to attend to the local and regional

wealth accumulation and class formation, which are themselves situated within a wider space of economic, cultural, and political globalization.9

All of this is to suggest that we can learn something about the spatial-temporal dynamics of global capitalism from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the historically entangled trajectories of oil, finance, militarism, and computation.

Thus, I acknowledge how the regional context itself is being reshaped as part of making of the global. To this end, I am mainly expanding on Adam Hanieh’s materialist reading of the Gulf and the Middle East, who argues that:

This is not only a matter of adding yet another case study to our understanding of global processes; it is about seeing the global in and through in relation to the Gulf, viewing the whole as more than just an aggregate sum of supposedly lesser or greater parts. By better understanding the relation between the global and the Gulf – including, more centrally, what this means for the Gulf’s wider regional neighborhood – we reveal something qualitatively new about the whole itself.10

Indeed, the imperious rise of Gulf monarchies has been closely tied to the rise of the United States as the major global power in the aftermath of World War II due to its role in the oil-centered economy, financialization, and global supply chain. According to

Hanieh, the formation of the Gulf Cooperation of Council (GCC) in 1981 manifested these imperial entanglements. The six monarchies (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi

9 Adam Hanieh. Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 6. 10 Ibid., 5. 7

Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) have become hubs from which US-led wars and interventions in the region are coordinated in return for military and political protection.11

In this sense, the Middle Eastern context underscores how the process of financialization has built upon the violent operations of capital, overwhelmingly mediated by computational media today, ranging from militarized drone strikes to smart cities. For instance, the UAE expands its logistics space as a commercial, military, and humanitarian nexus.12 Besides its long-standing ties with the US military, “the growth of the UAE logistics space increasingly underpins the expansion of the country’s regional footprint,” especially accelerated in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings.13 With the emergence of new centers of global accumulation in countries such as China, the UAE

(and other Gulf states) have sought to position themselves within a fast-changing international order.

Consequently, I situate the Middle East as a fruitful setting for examining the extractive operations of global capital that are produced and maintained by computational media. Given the fuller integration of extraction, logistics, and finance, capitalism expands its frontiers by means of computational systems. To this end, I counterbalance the high-tech and architectural spectacles of Dubai with the war-torn and toxic cities, such as Beirut, that are spreading in the rest of the region due to the violent operations of militarized states as well as the ever-growing economic and ecological deterioration.

11 Ibid., 23. 12 Rafeef Ziadah, “Circulating Power: Humanitarian Logistics, Militarism, and the United Arab Emirates.” Antipode, Vol 51 (5), 2019, 1684-1702. 13 Ibid., 1691. 8

Hence, these cities constitute two sides of the same coin, bounded by more extensive structures of capital and power. When the people in Beirut protested the banking or kafala system, they do not only target their own governments but also the wider class hierarchies in the region, traversing the Global South/North divide.

I propose that Fredric Jameson’s concept of “geopolitical aesthetic” and the accompanying counter-visual method of cognitive mapping are helpful for addressing these conflicting tendencies, as they are concretized in cultural forms, whether architectural or artistic.14 Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping” refers to an aesthetic that enables individuals and collectivities to render their positions in a capitalist world- system and its historicity intelligible.15 In Jameson’s framework, the term is closely tied to the historical condition of late capitalism “in which the truth of our social life as a whole – in György Lukács’ terms, as a totality – is increasingly irreconcilable with the possibilities of aesthetic expression or articulation available to us.”16 Jameson combines

Kevin Lynch’s empirical problems of city space with Louis Althusser’s Lacanian redefinition of ideology as “‘the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’”.17 Thus, cognitive mapping acts as a model for how we might begin to articulate the relationship between material and abstract terms,

14 Fredric Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 15 Fredric Jameson. “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–60. 16 Fredric Jameson, “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film,” in Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 54. 17 Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping.” 353. See also: Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 50-51. Here, Jameson cites: Louis Althusser, "Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy. Monthly Review Press, 1972. 9

and the local and global scales of capitalist operations, and consequently, as a metaphor for a transnational class consciousness.18

This dialectical move, unifying and differentiating at once, is crucial for my project of situating the Middle East within the imperial operations of global capital, thereby overcoming its peripherical reading. My primary argument is that computational media are instrumentalized as an imperial apparatus as and within the matrix of racial capitalism. I identify computational media as imperial apparatus because its operationalization relies on the reproductions of imperial divisions, techniques, institutions, and rights. As a result, computational media are not racist per se but operationalized as such within a capitalist society that preys on the continuous reproduction of difference while obscuring its historicity. In response, we need to trace the historicity of those cultural forms as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present, including from material conditions (labor) to ethico-legal systems (law).

Expanding on Jonathan Beller’s notion of computational capital, my project highlights the historically entangled trajectories of capital and computation. With this term, Beller claims that computation has been here before computers themselves, which only intensified the granularity and scale of colonialization with the development of algorithms as extracting, abstracting, and predicting machines. The colonial and neoliberal underpinnings of computational media heighten the necessity of attending to seemingly distant events and sites, which are tied together within the functioning of

18 Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (London: Zero Books, 2015). 10

global capital. In response, we need to delve into the geopolitical implementations of these media formations, which are inseparable from both political economy and the ongoing expansion of coloniality.19 According to Beller, “we must do more than focus on technics; we must attend to the surround,” that have instrumentalized today’s machines within the matrix of capitalist logic.20 Only then we could map out both the contemporary frontiers of extraction and their roots in settler colonialism as well as their extensions into contemporary petro-capitalism.21

Inspired by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s emphasis on the material specificity of capitalist operations, I interpret “the surround” as the sites of extraction – where “capital hits the ground.”22 Their idea of extraction in the expanded sense connects the abstract processes of datafication and financialization to the material conditions of extraction of natural resources, land, labor, and human sociality. As capitalist operations enter into complex relations with different forms of life and matter, they also accumulate a multiplicity of frictions and conflicts inherent to the very operations of capital. This inherently relational nature of capital demonstrates how it relies on resources and relations that it cannot produce, which involve the social hierarchies predicated on race and gender among others, too.

19 Jonathan Beller. The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 9. 20 Ibid., 3. 21 Heather Davis & Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” International Journal of Critical Geographies, 2016, 761-780. 22 Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). 11

The histories of settler colonialism, slavery, global commodification, industrialization, financialization, and militarism underscore the historical entanglements of the extractive mechanisms of capital and computation, which merge in Beller’s concept of computational capital. I occasionally use this term to emphasize this historical background. Likewise, I prefer to use the term ‘computational media,’ rather than digital and networked media, or information and communication technologies. This preference highlights the historicity of those media formations as a set of techniques and logics, rooted in the Cold War period, which brings closer the histories of the Middle East and

US imperialism.

The historicity of computational media, however, does not represent the foreclosure of its emancipatory possibility but highlights the fact that it should not be taken for granted. There is a long journey ahead of us, through which we need to aesthetically and politically “rehearse” in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s terms23 to overcome imperial thinking that underlies the operative integration of infrastructures, techniques, institutions, and knowledge systems under the capitalist logic. This is also why writing about artworks has been central to my project. In response to the ever-expanding scales and complexities of computation, artists could attend to the material conditions and performative implementations of computational aesthetics, reworking the bounds of the psychic and the social, as well as the local and the global.

23 Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), 347. 12

Consequently, Jameson’s cognitive mapping needs to be reconfigured not only due to the shifts in the scale of capitalist extraction but also due to the embeddedness of computational media within the histories of modern thought and colonialism. I aim to revive the Jamesonian utopian project of envisioning alternatives to capitalism while reformulating the image of historicity and globality with which cognitive mapping is ultimately concerned. The urban struggles taking place in the Middle East, but also around the world, prove the relevance of Jameson’s cognitive mapping as a practice of

“countervisuality” in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms. Thus, cognitive mapping necessarily involves reworking the imperial modes of visuality, knowledge systems, and institutional structures that are always already integral to the capitalist logic but not reducible to it.

These sites are where capital hits the ground and countervisuality flourishes all at once.

Revisiting Jameson’s Cognitive Mapping

According to Jameson, each epoch develops cultural forms that allow it, however partially, to represent its world, which are dialectically linked to the modes of production of their times. Jameson’s notion of “geopolitical aesthetic” refers to this spatial analysis of culture and thus underscores how each capitalist mode of production operates along with a distinct temporal logic and spatial sensibility that organize our perceptual apparatus. Thus, a cultural form (literary, artistic, or architectural) could become a means through which the individual expresses varied effects and contradictions of late capitalism, whether consciously or unconsciously. This is where Jameson’s geopolitical aesthetic intersects with the countervisual method of cognitive mapping that seeks to map the social totality within which the individual is embedded. 13

Revisiting Jameson’s renowned term cognitive mapping allows us to complicate our taken for granted conceptions of politics within contemporary media theory, addressing today’s increasingly complex and automated media systems. The arguments regarding the capitalization of the general intellect (which also involves our capacity to imagine alternatives for capitalism) usually end up claiming that our thoughts, affects, desires, and futures are already captured by capital via the means of computational and financial systems. I agree that we have every right to be pessimistic in today’s control societies. In this sense, whatever I propose here does not comes from a naïve enthusiasm.

Nonetheless, I want to develop a media theory that is fair to the undercommons in the terms of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, who “refuse to ask for recognition and instead want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places we know lie beyond its walls.”24 I seek a media theory that acknowledges and learns from the ongoing urban struggles, from those who do not have a privilege to stop believing in the future, and even becoming generative in the condition of decay of which we are all unevenly a part. In the face of state-sanctioned violence, financial crisis, and ecological/urban collapse, we more than ever need radical crowds, across the borders, who are aspiring to be there for and with others that are also targeted by imperial violence, in Azoulay’s terms.25

24 Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), 6. 25 Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, 32. 14

Within the scope of my project, I work through the dialectical twists that

Jameson’s cognitive mapping offers, while reformulating it in terms of what historicity and globality entail today. The field of media studies is a fruitful setting to undertake this task in its complexity. On the one hand, some scholars rework the digital aesthetic of cognitive mapping as a form of mediation, such as Alexander Galloway’s interpretation of the interface as an effect, or Benjamin Bratton’s figuring of the Stack as multiple totalities. On the other end, there are scholars such as Wendy Chun and Hito Steyerl, who argue that Jameson’s cognitive mapping has lost its radicality, as it is colonized by the global network itself. For instance, data mining, filter bubbles, and predictive systems, which replace causation with correlation, disintegrate our relationship to the real.

Still, we can reaffirm Jameson’s cognitive mapping at the very moment that it seems no longer pertinent or viable. For Jameson, it is not despite but because of their subsumption by the logic of market that cultural forms become a frontline of our struggles, which do not only contest the extensive structures of capital and power but also express “the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it rather ought to be lived.”26

Drawing upon Mezzadra and Neilson’s emphasis on the politics of operations, I situate Jameson’s dialectical model of cognitive mapping beyond deterministic and totalizing models of representation since it indicates the individual’s active negotiation of

26 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” in Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 34. 15

urban space, varying along the axes of class, race, and gender, among others.27 Mezzadra and Neilson encourage us to reflect on the differential impacts of capitalist operations within particular sites without undermining the universalizing, abstracting terms of global capital. Indeed, Jameson himself highlights that cognitive mapping “addresses individual experience rather than something that conceptualizes the real in a more abstract way.”28

Ultimately, Jameson formulates cognitive mapping as an aesthetic problem rather than a prescriptive proposal since he sets the problem as the one of representation, underlining the inexhaustible gap between the structure of social life as a whole and its expressions. Jameson affirms the possibility of art that does not exist while asking “what kind of an operation this will be, to produce the concept of something we cannot imagine.”29 Thus, it is an ongoing inquiry, almost a pedagogical one, which I locate closer to Azoulay’s method of rehearsal for reworking the spatial and temporal logics underlying the imperial structures, operations, and relations of capital.

Consequently, the functioning of computational capital through the reproduction of imperial divisions, practices, rights, and institutions necessitates the reformulation of the aesthetic affiliated with cognitive mapping. Feminist and postcolonial thinkers criticize Jameson’s framing of the capitalist world order as a totality for failing to adequately address its differential impacts, which prey on the forms of inequality that exceeds the bounds of market relations or class politics. I suggest, however, that these

27 Toscano & Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 15. 28 Jameson, Cognitive Mapping, 358. 29 Ibid., 347. 16

critiques underestimate Jameson’s emphasis on the situatedness; which is to say, the positionality of the subject in relation to capital.

While engaging with multiple feminist and postcolonial canons, Mezzadra and

Neilson indicate the possibility of observing systemic qualities across varied operations of capital without attributing to them a priori coherence.30 Feminist and queer thought, as well as postcolonial and critical race studies, demonstrate how the laws of capital are

“tendential,” as opposed to totalizing, constantly producing and reworking the hierarchies predicated on race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and geopolitics.31 This becomes even more significant today, as the intersecting trajectories of logistics and finance expand frontiers of valorization through the intensified networks and techniques of extraction.32

Thus, Mezzadra and Neilson among other scholars, turn to Karl Marx’s identification of capital as a “social relation” rather than a thing, thereby highlighting how its operations are inseparable from the relations of social difference.

Nonetheless, this idea of positionality needs be to be complicated further given the imperial roots of capitalism. It is crucial to understand race and gender as productive and destructive in their own rights rather than a secondary division that qualifies class struggle.33 Building upon Cedric Robinson’s racial capitalism thesis, Mezzadra and

Neilson argue that the cultural soil of Western civilization was already infused with racialism (categorizing difference as racial) which gave form to the future development

30 Mezzadra & Neilson, The Politics of Operations, 33. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 4. 33 Ibid., 188. 17

of capitalism as an imperial and colonial enterprise (involving invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchization).34 Discussing about the debt/penal state that

U.S. has become, Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva argue that:

What we suggest is missing … is the consideration of how these “new territories” of consumption and investment have been mapped onto previous racial and colonial (imperial) discourses and practices. If we go back to C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, to name only three classic anticolonial, racial, and global interrogations of historical materialism, we are reminded of how historical materialism alone cannot account for the ways in which capitalism has lived off—always backed by the colonial and national state’s means of death—of colonial/racial expropriation…As Manu Goswami writes in her critique of both historical materialism and the “excision” of “socioeconomic coordinates from colonialism” in postmodern theory, we must look at the “tangled causal relationships” of the lived experiences of the colonial space and the “expansive logic of capital.”35

With his renowned concept of “coloniality of power,” Anibal Quijano underlines the role of coloniality within the constitution of global capitalism as a Euro-centered endeavor, and thus, situates race as a mental category of conquest-driven colonial/modern world power.36 Along with my emphasis on the productive role of imperial thinking within the matrix of computational capital, Quijano’s work demonstrates how coloniality cannot be reduced to direct violence, like in the case of military interventions, but needs to encompass the domains of production, everyday life, and social existence all together.

34 Ibid., 41. 35 Paula Chakravartty, Paula & Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism,” American Quarterly, 64, no. 3, 2012: 367. 36 Anibal Quijano “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” International Sociology, Vol 15 (2), 2000, 215-232. 18

In the realm of computational media, for instance, some scholars unpack the coloniality of data. According to Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, contemporary “data relations” present a new form of colonialism that combines “the predatory extractive practice of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing.”37 Building upon Quijano’s idea of “epistemological decolonization,” they argue:

The goal is not to abandon rationality or even the claim to “some universality.” What must be abandoned is the claim to absolute universality that Quijano sees as characteristic of European modernity, and which we find reproduced in data colonialism, and its logics of universal data extraction and management of human beings through data.38

This expansive capitalization of life forms requires the expansion of our scope of analysis by integrating the cases of datafication of and in the Souths. For instance,

Stefania Milan and Emiliano Trere call for a “de-Westernization of critical data studies,” to counterbalance the main-stream theories’ failure of recognizing alternative ways of relating to the world through information. According to Monika Halkort, we need to complicate the mostly unspoken universality built in the idea of data colonialism as a planetary social order by attending to locally and historically situated analysis of information.39 To this end, Halkort encourages us to critically examine the role of datafication in materializing objects, environments, and bodies “into historically situated

37 Nick Couldry, & Ulises A. Mejias, “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject,” Television & New Media, 20 (4), 2019, 337. 38 Ibid., 346. 39 Halkort, Monika. “Decolonizing Data Relations: On the Moral Economy of Data Sharing in Palestinian Refugee Camps,” Canadian Journal of Communication, 44, 2019, 317-329. 19

measure-value relations that both enable and constrain possibilities for existence within the registers of market and state.”40 For example, her analysis of the flows of information in the contexts of the Palestinian refugee camps, and the irregular migration in the

Mediterranean Sea, grasps the complexity of data relations on the ground due to the shifting registers of rationalities, regimes of aesthetics, and asymmetries of power.

Interestingly, Jameson’s focus on aesthetic experience in terms of spatial- temporal sensibilities and cultural forms offers a middle ground between micro- and macro-levels of analyses. Concomitantly, Jameson’s dialectical view traversing local and global scales embraces capital’s complex relationship to its multiple outsides at its frontiers, where it hits the ground (including its process of materializing and sustaining social difference). Indeed, Jameson’s conception of culture as a historical form, with his commitment to historicizing the present, could offer a dialectical model for us to denaturalize imperial knowing embedded within both capitalist operations and media systems today.

In National Allegory: Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational

Capitalism, Jameson once again raises the problem of cognitive mapping posed in and from the ‘West’ as the imperialist center.41 For Jameson, the Third World literary works operate as national allegories from the standpoint of the First-Worldist, who is precisely unable to imagine the Other outside the unsatisfactory categories of (culturally) inferior

40 Ibid., 321. 41 Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,’’ Social Text 15, 1986, 65–88. 20

or derivative. According to Jameson, the First World culture is marked by forgetting the depredations of not only the past but also the present of the continuing violence upon which the current order rests, as well as the globally dispersed actuality of inequality.42

Thus, it is crucial to examine how material differences, caused by colonial practices and their neoliberal expansions that constitute the regions differently but always already interdependent and uneven, are expressed in cultural forms.

In the realm of computational media, as Beller argues, the violent operations of computational capital cannot be separated from the fact that “Westernized” consciousness is already presupposed within the colonizing abstractions of mediation. Therefore,

… machines, abstract, concrete, cybernetic, with roots in the plantation, the factory, the colony, the patriarchal household, the university and the jail, reproduce and exacerbate inequality, oftentimes under the guise of a value-neutrality that tends to render their exploitative operations unconscious even if many of the resultant effects do not remain in the unthought, or the unfelt.43

Similar to Jameson’s interpretive reading of literary works for excavating the political unconscious reflecting of the socio-economic conditions of their times, Beller approaches computational media as a symptom of contemporary capitalist societies. It is on account of this ‘already integral’ status of imperial logic that I identify computational media as an imperial apparatus. In the face of computational media’s erasure of the immediate history of its emergence as such, Jameson’s mode of interpretation could help us to reveal what it obscures while functioning.

42 Neil Lazarus, “Fredric Jameson on ‘Third-World Litrature’: a defense,” in The Political Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 108. 43 Ibid., 4. 21

Cognitive Mapping as Countervisuality

The extension of multinational capitalism created a gap between a lived experience and the socio-economic structures that govern that experience.44 Such spatial disjunction leads to an inability to grasp the social totality as a whole. According to

Nicholas Mirzoeff, however, this condition is closely tied to the historically situated invisibility of the colonized, which has been carried over the realm of aesthetic as well.45

Mirzoeff defines visuality as a set of discursive practices for classifying, segregating, and aestheticizing used to represent the world in a way that legitimizes the authority of established power.46

For example, Azoulay’s idea of the political ontology of medium, demonstrates how the form, usage, and technical development (of photography) goes along with a mutually imbricated trajectory of imperial practices. Interestingly, Azoulay situates the origin of photography not in the moment of its invention in the 19th century, but its formation as a technique of extraction and erasure in the 15th-century body politic, having started with the destruction and exploitation of the New World.47 The imperial divisions and rights are materialized in institutions, captured by key political terms, and embedded within practices that reproduce the continuing violence of the forced dissociation between people and objects. Similarly, Mirzoeff highlights how non-

44 Jameson, Postmodernism. Following the global-world system model proposed by the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, Jameson draws upon a three-stage designation: market economy, monopoly capitalism (imperialism), and late capitalism (postmodern). 45 Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 46 Ibid., 4. 47 Azoulay, Potential History:Unlearning Imperialism. 22

European setting became a space in which there was “nothing to see,” not only through the invisibility or dehumanization of the colonized, but also through the idea of man’s superiority, promoted by the ideals of the conquest of nature (Immanuel Kant) and the sovereign (Thomas Hobbes).48

Inspired by Azoulay, Beller traces back the current extractive operations of digital media within the development of colonial logic and the accompanying visuality preceding the actual invention of the computer.49 According to Beller, today’s machine- based codifications and abstractions, far from being value-neutral emergences in some degree-zero history of technology, are rather racial, sex-gender, and national formations of violence.50 As Beller highlights, this very violence is directly inscribed into machine architectures, and thus, computing machines are not necessarily racist but racialized as modes of abstraction; which is to say, as a form of mediation.

In line with Beller’s position, Azoulay argues that the institutions that make up our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. In Ferreira da Silva’s terms, the analytics of raciality is rooted within contemporary ethico-juridical systems and scientific tools as well as the accompanying regimes of truth and visuality.51 Similar to da Silva’s global idea of race, Azoulay also emphasizes the productive nature of imperial rights, which not

48 Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Public Culture 26:2, 2014, 218. 49 Beller, The Message is Murder. 50 Ibid. 51 Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 23

only have produced racial difference but also have set the ground for the formation of

Western history and subject. In their universal declaration (e.g. human rights), there is erasure and extraction of those who are made noncitizens or flawed citizens in Azoulay’s terms (racialized others, women, or refugees), those on which the violence of imperial rights is enacted on and naturalized. Drawing upon this position, I seek to reframe political consciousness based on the fact the imperial logic is always already integral to one’s so-called positionality in relation to capital.

It is on account of this already integral status of imperial logic that I identify computational media as an imperial apparatus, which enacts the matrix of valuation, to use Beller’s term, by tracking and weighting factors of whiteness, masculinity, citizenship, and geopolitics. Countervisual practices can be understood as responses to this operation insofar as they intervene directly in the economic, legal, media, and symbolic systems that animate computational media within the Middle Eastern context, ranging from smart bombs to smart cities. The crucial point Mirzoeff makes is that countervisuality is never merely about seeing but claiming the right to look.52 The opposite of the “right to look,” in return, is not censorship, but visuality. Thus, visuality is a technique for the reproduction of the imaginaries (and thus, not restricted to the bounds of the visual) with which the state-capital nexus maintains and justifies itself. Drawing upon the Derridean registers, Mirzoeff tackles the expression of the self-authorizing

52 Mirzoff, Countervisuality, 2. 24

tendencies of hegemonic authority, and consequently, the violent transformation of our relationship to history as well as reality:

Visuality is an old word for an old project. It is not a trendy theory-word meaning the totality of all visual images and devices, but it is in fact an early nineteenth-century term, meaning the visualization of history. This practice must be imaginary, rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images, and ideas. This ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the ‘normal’ or every day because it is always already contested. The autonomy claimed by the right to look is thus opposed by the authority of visuality. But the right to look came first, and we should not forget it.53

In this regard, computational media are foremost an imperial apparatus that reproduces the imperial regimes of visuality in the expanded sense. Like the Jamesonian dialectical twist, however, Azoulay’s emphasis on the historicity of the medium affirms its dynamic nature rather than foreclosing its potentiality for a political will and agenda other than its programmed nature. In other words, the apparatus cannot be reduced to the logic (whether colonial, national, or commercial) that has dominated its operationalization as such. Thus, Azoulay offers a heuristic vocabulary to articulate a civil imagination as transcending “the individual mind,” by being constituted between individuals and shared by all.54 For instance, photography has enabled not only an imperial regime of visuality but also a political space for encounter and visibility, as people take, look at, and distribute photographs and reimagine their everyday life through these practices.

53 Ibid., 2. 54 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 5. 25

In Mirzoeff’s terms, the right to look claims autonomy, not in the form of individualism or voyeurism, but as a claim to political subjectivity and collectivity. As

Derrida captures through his conceptualization of the “invention of other,” a recognition of the other is required to have a position from which to claim a right and to determine what is right.55 While writing on contemporary necro-political regimes, Achille Mbembe refers to Frantz Fanon’s gesture of care as a practice of “re-symbolization” that carves the possibility of reciprocity and mutuality, thereby rectifying the asymmetries of power.56

Similarly, Azoulay is interested in the question of how a medium could accumulate civil skills, referring to the acknowledgment of obligations to struggle with/for others who are governed along with us, and to kinds of belonging that is not exclusive to the members of a particular group.

In this regard, my dissertation examines countervisual practices intervening in the economic, legal, and symbolic systems that animate computational media in the Middle

Eastern context, along with the continuum from smart weapons to smart cities. For example, the multidisciplinary and collaborative research group Forensic Architecture’s investigations of covert drone strikes contest the politics of visuality and erasure through which militarized states attempt to legitimize drone warfare.57 In return, they raise a civil imagination in Azoulay’s terms by providing their analyses to varied groups who seek

55 Mirzoeff, Countervisuality, 1. 56 Achille Mbembe, “Introduction: The Ordeal of the World,” in Necro-Politics. trans. Steven Corcoran. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 5. 57 See Chapter Two, and visit Forensic Architecture’s website for further information: https://forensic- architecture.org/investigation/the-drone-strikes-platform

accountability for drone strikes and who are involved in pursuing legal processes against states partaking in drone warfare.

Moreover, Forensic Architecture’s investigations not only render the sites of covert militarized drone operations visible but also map the historical entanglements of visuality, surveillance, and violence that are integral to neoliberal governance as an imperialist global network. For instance, they repurpose computationally-informed technologies for connecting singular events to larger patterns of contemporary (urban) warfare. On the one hand, I acknowledge the limits of their practice in terms of functioning within the bounds of contemporary imperial structures (such as international courts or art biennials). On the other hand, I argue that their investigations are direct interventions into the operationalization of drone technology as imperial apparatus, through which this very violence is enacted and legitimized.

In this regard, it is useful to situate Forensic Architecture’s practice in comparison to other examples of so-called drone art. The film industry has already naturalized the violence of drone technology by absorbing it into its mainstream aesthetics. In contrast, I draw upon Jennifer Rhee’s definition of drone art, referring to “works of art and literature that explicitly respond to drone warfare.”58 Even though most of these artworks are interested in bringing closer the violence enacted on lands and people far away, those gestures are not enough to dismantle the dominance of imperial logic because they are still reproducing the very same division of us versus them, or here and there.

58 Jennifer Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 136. 27

Similarly, Rhee criticizes some of these art works for their reliance on an identificatory relationship, which “both equates the human with the Western Subject and obscures the colonial continuum by constructing racial state violence as exceptional, rather than normalized and constitutive of the West itself.”59 According to Fred Moten, the coalition only could emerge out of one’s recognition that the existing social order harms all of us rather than helping others out of sympathy, even though its harms are unevenly distributed and experienced.60 As McKenzie Wark writes about global media events back in the mid-1990s (e.g. CNN’s live coverage of the First Gulf War), “there is no safe haven from which to observe, unaffected” since “we are all, always, implicated within it.”61

For instance, Jasbir Puar demonstrates how disability politics becomes a register of biopolitical formations of populations under neoliberalism which demands bodily capacity while promoting debility (e.g. the right to maim).62 According to Puar, “the production of the world’s disability mostly happens through colonial violence, developmentalism, war, occupation, and the disparity of resources”; which is to say, through “U.S. settler colonialism and imperial occupations.”63 As a consequence, Puar embraces the concept of debility, which overcomes the reduction of disability to an identity, and attunes to the massification of debility across the structures of working,

59 Ibid. 137. 60 Fred Moten, “The General Antagonism: An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis,” The Undercommons, 140. 61 Wark, Virtual Geography, 15. 62 Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University, 2017), xviii. 63 Ibid., xix. 28

living, and schooling along with the control mechanisms of neoliberal state (including from police to health care).64

As a concrete example, Puar mainly traces the resonances between the social mobilizations for Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine, while simultaneously reaching out to the ongoing struggles for socialized health care, or indigenous rights to land in the

United States. Thus, Puar’s framework locates the Middle Eastern context within the global politics as well as the particular role of US imperialism within it, shaping its domestic and international agenda at once. According to Puar:

Rather than an exception, writes Michael Hardt, “we can see Palestine and the struggles of Palestinians as exemplary—a lesson and inspiration for those fighting back around the world.” Connecting Palestine to struggles elsewhere, Hardt argues that four rubrics of enclosure link different geopolitical sites: indebtedness, mediatization, securitization, and representation. This brief schema is perhaps one entrée into conceptualizations that neither exceptionalize Palestine nor minimize the role of the Israeli occupation in legitimating geopolitical technologies of securitization and sovereignty around the globe.65

As Angela Davis highlights, the international solidarity between Black Lives

Matter and Palestinian activists is not merely an abstract political gesture, since both groups struggle against similar technologies and tactics of militarized violence in everyday life.6667 Indeed, the works of urban scholars, such as Saskia Sassen, demonstrate

64 Ibid., xvii. 65 Puar, The Right to Maim, 153. Here, Puar cites: Hardt, Michael. Preface to “Palestine: Cartography of an Occupation,” in Creative Time Reports, September 16, 2013. Accessed November 6, 2016. http://creativetimereports.org/2013/09/16/palestine-mtl-cartography-occupation/ 66 Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 67 There is a growing reaction against the militarization of police departments in the United States, including their ties with the Israeli Defense Forces. In April 2018, the coalition of community organizations in Durham, NC (where Duke University is based) forced the city council to ban training and exchanges 29

how the city becomes a technology of war itself while the pursuit of national security exacerbates urban insecurity.68 Since the wake of the Global War on Terror, whereby the

U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq became an urban war theater, cities have become the frontlines of militarized conflicts. Consequently, civilian casualties are neither error nor exceptions but integral to military asymmetries, or what Chakravartty and Ferreira da

Silva call “calculated mistakes” of neoliberalism. In this sense, Sassen’s work highlights how the neoliberal state is inherently a militarized one. Likewise, Brian Massumi demonstrates how power has become environmental as it thrives in crisis, threat, and fear-provoking milieus, which collapses the continuum across the civilian and the military.69 Most of the time, this brutal exercise of power is cloaked in humanitarian, democratic, and life preservationist terms,70 as well as ecologies of computational systems themselves.

The gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience has grown with the development of algorithms as extracting, abstracting, and predicting machines, colonizing human body and mind. In this regard, I insist on revisiting Jameson’s cognitive mapping because it attunes to the possibility of cultural expressions that could

between Durham’s police department and the Israeli military. In May 2020, protests against police brutality swept across the United States, following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In response to the ongoing racialized state violence and injustice, millions of people went on the streets to demand justice and defunding police forces in the US. As of June 20, the ongoing country-wide protests also continue to echo around the world. 68 Saskia Sassen, “When the City Itself Becomes a Technology of War,” Theory, Culture, and Society, 27 (6), 2010, 33-50. 69 Massumi, Brian, Ontopower: Wars, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 70 Puar, The Right to Maim, xxi. 30

connect our individual experiences to the broader historical and geopolitical context, starting with the urban scale as a site of negotiation. This is why my project is an aesthetic and political at once, and always already globally situated.

According to Hito Steyerl, the task of cognitive mapping is no longer viable since the paranoia of the Cold War era is replaced by the apophenia of correlation-based pattern recognition systems today.71 Alternatively, I would call it as an opportunity for unpacking the historicity of not only computational systems but imperial visuality pioneering it. Steyerl’s focus on the politics of networks is parallel to my efforts of reformulating the historicity of networked subject, as well as the mediality of material processes underlying it, including from infrastructure to labor.72 Similar to Jameson’s framing of cognitive mapping as an incomplete struggle, both Steyerl and Chun offer an analysis of a present condition while assessing the possible sites of intervention. Indeed,

Chun’s idea of queering homophily,73 against the homogenizing operations of algorithmic assemblages, could speak to my reframing of cognitive mapping in terms of

Azoulay’s idea of unlearning imperialism.

Hence, we need to extend the scope of analysis and intervention toward the systems within which computational media are instrumentalized as such. This is why I

71 Hito Steyerl, "A Sea of Data: Pattern Recognition and Corporate Animism," in Pattern Discrimination, by Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Florian Cramer, and Hito Steyerl. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 3. 72 See the Research Center for Proxy Politics for further resources: http://rcpp.lensbased.net/ Also see: Hito Steyerl, “Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise,” e-flux Journal, no. 60, 2014. https://www.e- flux.com/journal/60/61045/proxy-politics-signal-and-noise/ 73 Wendy Chun, “Queering Homophily,” in Pattern Discrimination, by Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Florian Cramer, and Hito Steyerl. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 59- 98. 31

revisit Jameson’s cognitive mapping in a dialogue with Mezzadra and Neilson’s emphasis on the politics and material specificity of capitalist operations. At the edges of the interface, or the frictions inherent to the capitalist operations, there arise the possibilities of contestation. However, we need to trace resonances across the recent social movements along with messy practices rather than cleanly defined theories.74 In other words, those struggles will persist, not reducible to our theories – where artistic practice could situate itself in the middle, bridging the realms of action and theory as well as the scales of local and global. The apparatus is social as much as it is technical and political, which indicates its dialectical nature, and thus, incompleteness. As Jameson reminds us, a cultural form could express the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel how it ought to be lived.

Writing About Media Arts in the Middle East

Within the scope of my project, I identify the Middle Eastern context as constitutive and reflective of the extractive mechanisms of computational capital, and thus, as a site to develop media theory, rather than a mere adaptation of it. Writing in the mid-90s, Wark mobilized Paul Virilio’s idea of vector for addressing global media events, such as the CNN’s coverage of the First Gulf War, which constituted a virtual geography. The model of vector traces any trajectory along which bodies and information

74 Mirzoeff, Visualizing the Anthropocene. 32

could pass and links various points (geographical, material, or symbolic systems), thereby providing a historical grasp of the technical.75

For instance, Wark claims that his book was not about the Gulf War but about

“[t]he evolution of the vector field which made the Gulf War, and the critical response to it, possible.”76 In other words, the Gulf War was an event that happened in a network of global vectors, necessarily implicating the globality of such events, and our own participation as objects or subjects of such technologically mediated relations. According to Tarek El-Ariss, “[w]hen we begin to consider the digital as a condition, or as a landscape, that enables certain connections and intersections, then the engagement with specific examples from the Arab World or elsewhere informs our understanding of digital practices and phenomena in a transnational context.”77

This position recalls what Reza Negarestani calls “hidden writing” in

Cyclonopedia, which refers to the reading of stories through their plot holes.78 The process of reading the Middle Eastern events in a connection to the World (the visible or base plot) requires a reinvention of this main plot to host, transport, or nurture other plots.

Negarestani reformulates a geopolitical aesthetic in Jameson’s terms, bridging the local and the global scales, that is customized for the Middle East.79 Within this framework,

75 Wark, Virtual Geography. 76 Ibid., 14. 77 Tarek El-Ariss, Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 12. 78 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia (Melbourne: Re.press, 2008), 60. 79 Benjamin Bratton. “Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia,” in Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium. Ed. Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro & Eugene Thacker (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2012), 45- 58. 33

the Middle East is not a distant geography of wars, but it is a setting for hidden writing of the world politics, hosting ungrounding plots. These theoretical and artistic interventions do not fetishize the histories of the Middle East but shift the registers of analysis, the perspective through which the current socio-political events are narrated.

Accordingly, my thesis identifies the Middle Eastern context as a fruitful setting for examining contemporary frontiers of capitalism that have instrumentalized computational media as an imperial apparatus. To this end, I look at media artists who use their artistic practice to situate the Middle East in wider flows of capital, technology, and culture. Those flows have been intensified but also obscured by computational media that go from infrahuman levels of code to high-definition spectacles of war. Aesthetics is tied to the history of military technologies, the rhetoric of crisis, and the political economy of the region. Therefore, it is necessary to trace connections between aesthetics, violence, and capital that have material consequences, channel power, and shape political subjectivities. Consequently, a wide range of artists, activists, and scholars situate computational media within a larger sphere of geopolitical, economic, and social conflicts that have consumed the region for decades.

Before moving further, I would like to acknowledge the strengths and limitations of using the term “Middle East”. The constitution of the Middle East as a specific geopolitical entity is embedded within the cultural imaginaries of colonial rule and imperialist agenda, especially marked by the dominance of U.S. imperialism. As Edward

Said demonstrates in his critique, the Orientalist tendencies, whether explicit or implicit, keep reproducing the essentialization as well as marginalization of the Non-Western as

the Other.80 In return, my research attempts to expose the historicity of such cultural formations, and thus, it is perplexing that I use the term myself. Still, my preference for the term derives from my attentiveness to its functional role within the material history of the region that led to the given geopolitical context. As a media theorist, I aim at providing a sufficient historical context based on my case studies in each chapter rather than claiming an over-arching theme of the Middle East.

My focus on the material history of the region helped me to narrate the given context as constitutive of global capitalism. To this end, I focus on urban settings, ranging from urban warfare to smart urbanism, all of which manifest the broader context of neoliberal governance. Indeed, the Middle East cannot be thought in isolation from the other regional contexts, which it is economically and culturally tied to, such as North

Africa and South Asia, as well as from the U.S. and other Western colonial powers’ violent acts and strategic interests in the region. The entangled trajectories of oil, finance, and militarism in the wake of neoliberal globalization since the 1970s have evolved into an information regime of necropolitics, intensifying with the U.S. led global counterinsurgency, along with the expanding Israeli occupation of Palestine, which has become a testing ground for varied militarized technologies and tactics for urban control.81

80 Edward W. Said. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 81 See Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Global Counterinsurgency and the Crisis of Visuality.” The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, by Nicholas Mirzoeff. Duke University Press, 2011, 277-310. See also Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Verso, 2007. 35

For instance, predictive algorithms that are mobilized for the U.S. led Global War on Terror (e.g. targeted assassinations via drone strikes) prey on similar technical and ideological infrastructures that animate the U.S.’ domestic war on drugs (e.g. predictive policing) and on poverty (e.g. credit score). Through this spatial-discursive continuity, counterinsurgency has become a new frontier for accumulation by dispossession in David

Harvey’s terms (occupation, debt).82 Indeed, Jennifer Rhee draws a connection between overseas drone strikes and the histories and present realities of racialized state-sanctioned violence within the U.S., thereby highlighting the continued influence of colonialism across nation-states.83 All these instances, including drones’ casualties in the U.S.’ declared and undeclared war zones, or the so-called misconducts of police and creditors, which disproportionately target people of color, illustrate the logic of neoliberalism to profit from “calculated mistakes” in Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva’s terms.84 They are neither exceptions nor errors, but they are operational to the functioning of global capitalism as well as the accompanying racializing/racialized practices and techniques.

The recent histories of the Middle East have been strongly shaped by the U.S. imperialist agenda, starting with the Cold War Period, and intensifying after 9/11, which was followed by the U.S.-led Global War on Terror. According to Jackie Wang, the U.S. is a global power that increasingly produces the conditions for its instability and then burdens the most vulnerable populations with risk and cost of its vulnerability, within,

82 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 83 Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary, 148. 84 Chakravartty & Ferreira da Silva, Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt. 36

outside, and at its borders.85 When the state’s pivotal role in securing the maintenance of neoliberal institutions and policies is considered, we can situate these instances as distinct but related forms of state-sanctioned violence at home and abroad.

The outcome of neoliberal policies has not been only privatization and austerity, but also predatory governance, marked by the state of exception as a generalized social condition. According to Wang, this parasitic form of governance underscores the gradual transformation of the welfare state (as the provider of services) into the debt and penal state, the provider of “security” in the face of dysfunctional aspects of neoliberalism.86

This is what Harvey calls new imperialism by the means of “accumulation by dispossession”,87 as well as the inclusion of the excluded, that occurs when poor black

Americans in the U.S. take mortgage loans, or when the postcolonial nations take aid from the IMF and the World Bank. More strikingly, these new territories and architectures of neoliberalism act on earlier forms of racial and colonial subjugation, embedded within the U.S. histories of war, occupation, settlement, and slavery.88

Given the centrality of the same technologies to the ongoing military conflicts and urban developments in the Middle East, Miriyam Aouragh and Paula Chakravartty encourage us to pay attention to the Western colonial powers’ legacy of occupation, ongoing violence, and strategic interests in the region.89 As they argue, the dominant

85 Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 86 Ibid., 99. 87 Harvey, The New Imperialism. 88 Chakravartty & Ferreira da Silva, Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt. 89 Miriyam Aouragh & Paula Chakravartty. "Infrastructures of Empire: Towards a Critical Geopolitics of Media and Information Studies," Media, Culture & Society 38, no. 4, 2016, 559. 37

historical narrative of computation has mostly left out the material history of the post-

World War II period as it played out across the Third World, especially by overlooking the violence of the Cold War origins of cybernetics and global class formations. Their analysis underlines the necessity of examining the geopolitical context within which computational media operate as imperial infrastructures.

Today, postcolonial infrastructures have metamorphosed for the benefit of new regional alliances. Information and communication networks have become the lifeline of neoliberal globalization enforced by multilateral governance regimes, multinational corporations as well as local ruling elites:

Therefore, in contrast to previous studies of ‘media imperialism’, which are remembered primarily for an emphasis on the unequal flows of culture from the First World to the Third World, here we are collapsing the distinction and drawing on a definition of infrastructure as ‘… a totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate ….’ This unique dual approach shows, how through a maze of wires and obtrusive policies, media and information infrastructures are therefore, indeed, both central as digital nodes for financial transaction and trade, and key in squeezing down dissent or co-opting social movements.90

According to Walter Armbrust, a technologically determinist understanding of media dominates the field of media studies in the Middle East, which focuses mostly on the presumed social effects of technology rather than the history of technology itself.91

Consequently, Armbrust proposes that we need to historically and contextually unpack

90 Ibid., 564. Here, the authors refer to Bruce Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 91 Walter Armbrust, "A History of New Media in the Arab Middle East," Journal for Cultural Research, 16, no. 2-3, 2012, 155-174. 38

the observed social outcomes to build up a social history of any given medium. On the other hand, geopolitical perspectives complicate the culturally essentialist readings of the postcolonial nations, and even the critiques of cultural imperialism (which carries the assumption of one-way of influence from the West to the postcolonial world). For instance, India is the world’s largest importer of arms in close cooperation with Israel’s cyber/warfare technologies. In this regard, Aouragh and Chakravartty argue that there are more similarities than differences between large and small imperial powers. Thus, the task should be unmasking the obscured structures and operations of dominance in their spatial-temporal specificity as well as their embeddedness within a global context.

As Aouragh argues in a separate text, a method of de-fetishization could be adopted for a materialist analysis of digital media in the Middle East and beyond, by emphasizing the historicity of infrastructures and ideologies that constitute both the material conditions and social imaginaries in/of the region.92 According to Aurough,

Marxist theories of literature and aesthetics provide useful vantage points for a materialist approach to the question of media and political change.93 In the Marxist tradition, the concept of base (political-economy) is easily confused to mean essence, whereas the superstructure (ideology/media) is just an derivation thereof. Expectedly, the Marxist concept of mediation, referring to a reconciliation of material and cultural realms (via media), comes forth. For example, Aouragh highlights the dual role of networked media

92 Miriyam Aouragh, “Social Media, Mediation, and the Arab Revolutions,” tripleC: Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 10 (2), 2012, 524. 93 Ibid., 519. Aouragh mainly draws upon Terry Eagleton’s body of works, especially his 1976 book Marxism and Literary Criticism. 39

as a powerful sector for economy as well as an emancipatory tool for resistance. In this sense, producers of culture, in whatever form or expression, are relatively free, yet shaped by that material reality.94

Writing about computational media in the context of the Middle East encourages a comparative approach to deal with contemporary mediascapes across national and disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, according to Anthony Downey, writing about digital media and artistic practices spanning across North Africa and the Middle East (MENA) could overturn the dominant tendencies of prescribing the region to a set of problems that revolve around either extremist ideologies or revolts against the oppressive regimes.95

This twist is not only a matter of denaturalizing the colonial gaze, but also about locating contemporary media events within a broader entanglement of political economy and cultural production.

My overall methodology relies on media theory-driven research that engages with media arts affiliated with the Middle Eastern context. Writing about artworks has been integral to my thinking. In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway talks about how building up ideas takes place within a collaborative process of story-telling, especially in its speculative modem, whether aesthetically or politically (e.g. Morehshin Allahyari’s concept of “re-figuring”).96 In this sense, the artists that I write about already assume

94 Ibid., 534. 95 Anthony Downey, “Introduction,” in Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East ed. Anthony Downey (New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 13-29. 96 Donna Haraway, “Playing String Figures with Companion Species,” in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, 9-29. 40

multiple roles (writers, activists, scholars, and educators) and do the work of theory through their creative and critical engagement with computational aesthetics. It has been a process of theorizing along with or through their artistic practice rather than me imposing some theoretical frameworks upon their works. Consequently, my dissertation does not offer a survey of contemporary artists who work with or reflect on computational media. Instead, I write about only a very few artistic practices that open up and deepen my media historical and theoretical trajectory in the particularity of each case study. In the further steps of this project, other examples could be added, especially given the extensive body of work on the convoluted histories of war technology, oil/desert imaginaries, and counter-futurisms arising from the region.

Due to the protracted violence and displacement in the Middle East, artists and cultural/archival institutions are dispersed over multiple countries. My research required long-term and multi-faceted fieldwork to have enough time and depth to engage with my research materials, whether in the form of artistic or scholarly projects. I visited a wide variety of cultural institutions and exhibitions, and I met artists specializing in diverse mediums and living in multiple cities, including Istanbul, Beirut, Dubai/Sharjah, Paris,

London, New York, and Berlin. In the end, I come up with three case studies that constitute my middle chapters in the current work.

My primary concern has been exploring contemporary artistic and cultural production that could help me to reflect on computational media in line with the urgencies of the region, independent of whether production takes place in an algorithmic mode or not. Additionally, it is crucial to clarify that the scope of my project, building

upon Jameson’s dialectical model of economic and cultural production, diverges from the cultural industry-based critiques of art worlds or media industries. Nonetheless, all these artworks respond to the same inquiry of revisiting cognitive mapping as a countervisual practice in their distinct ways, and this sometimes involves mapping neoliberal operations of art settings itself (e.g. Forensic Architecture’s intervention at the Whitney Biennial).

To this end, I write about artists who repurpose computational media (e.g. imaging technologies) to invert the dominant registers of visuality, through which the state-capital nexus attempts to legitimize the imperial logic and violence it preys on.

Some works operate within the realm of truth-telling, such as Forensic Architecture.

Some partake in a more speculative mode, such as Morehshin Allahyari. Both styles speak to the varied registers of Jameson’s aesthetic endeavor, ranging from a detective figure of the modern novel to the utopic worlds of techno-capitalism.

In response to the ever-expanding scales of computation, artists could attend to its material operations and their performative implementations, reworking the inexhaustible gap between materiality and thought. With his idea of discorrelated images, Shane

Denson highlights how our sensory ratios (in Marshall McLuhan’s terms) and perceptual faculties are transformed with the new speeds and scales of imaging processes which are increasingly characterized by human-technical systems in Katherine Hayles’ terms.97

Here, we do not only mark the nonhuman ontology of contemporary images but also their environmental, or what Denson calls “metabolic,” operations.98 Thus, contemporary

97 Shane Denson. Discorrelated Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 1; 136. (forthcoming). 98 Ibid., 33-34. 42

discorrelated images, or architectural-image complexes in Eyal Weizman’s terms, recall

Mark Hansen’s definition of the medium as “environment for life,” foregrounding the infrastructural role of media concerning the material powers of perception, action, and thought.99 Since computational images have become a process itself, which is no longer restricted to the level of surface appearance, we need to attend to “the entire process by which information is made perceivable.”100 Consequently, media ecological approaches could demonstrate the significance of artistic insight and practice amid increasingly abstract and automated media systems.

Chapter Outline

In the field of media and cultural studies in the Middle East, I observe three streams of scholarly work on the role of computational media in the recent socio-political transformations taking place in the region: The first stream of research focuses on the emergent networked-publics, which critically assess the role of social media platforms in the rise and fall of the recent social upheavals, especially in the aftermath of Arab uprisings of late 2010. The second stream addresses the ongoing violence enacted by foreign and local governments partaking in the development and use of militarized technologies in the region, especially in the case of militarized drone strikes. The third stream shifts the attention toward the growing investments in smart infrastructures in the

Arabian Gulf amid the shifting registers of the world order.

99 Mark B. N. Hansen, “Media Theory,” Theory, Culture and Society, 23.2-3, 2006, 299-300. 100 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 10. See also W.J.T. Mitchell, “Image,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen. (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2010), 35-48. 43

As demonstrated above, my project aims at addressing all these incidents in their totality, which manifests a broader process of economic, political, and cultural globalization. In their particularity, each chapter offers a case study, an aesthetic rehearsal, that contributes to my reformulation of cognitive mapping as a countervisual practice. Since Jameson leaves it as an incomplete aesthetic inquiry, these three cases offer different possibilities for it. I do not argue that one is better or worse in terms of accomplishing the task of cognitive mapping. Instead, I outline them as an opportunity for us to discuss their strengths and limits along with the trajectory of unlearning imperialism in Azoulay’s terms.

In the first chapter, I will offer an expanded theoretical framework for my project.

First, I lay out Jameson’s initial work on cognitive mapping, including the context in which he developed the term in the late 1980s, along with a few political theoretical works that engage with it over time. Within the field of media studies, my overview of relevant iterations covers Christian Fuchs’ cultural materialism, Benjamin Bratton’s

“Stack,” Alexander Galloway’s “Interface Effect,” Jonathan Beller’s “Computational

Capital,” and Katherine Hayles’ “Human-Technical Assemblages” among several others.

This overview also introduces a set of key terms that help me to reconfigure Jameson’s cognitive mapping as countervisuality and computational media as an imperial apparatus: affordance, assemblage, operation, verticality, and visuality.

Drawing upon the critical scholarship on drone warfare, the second chapter offers a historical overview of the cultural imaginaries and biopolitical formations that reconfigure drone technology as an imperial apparatus. Forensic Architecture’s

investigations of covert militarized drone strikes address the material, media, and legal systems through which these strikes operate, and tackle the entangled politics of verticality and visuality. To this end, they invert the forensic gaze through an architectural mode of analysis and political commitment to the right to look in Mirzoeff’s terms. Contesting the ideals of omniscience that dominate today’s information societies,

Forensic Architecture’s research shows how data relations reproduce the regime of visuality that obscures the continuing imperial violence of militarized states. Ultimately, their investigations are direct interventions into the operationalization of contemporary militarized technology as a technical, discursive, and political apparatus, and thus exemplifies my reframing of cognitive mapping as a countervisual practice.

The third chapter takes Gulf Futurism as a case study, which has emerged in the context of socio-technological imaginaries of petro-capitalism and geopolitical shifts since the 1970s. I mainly draw upon the critique of smart city as a form of cybernetic urbanism that imposes its own spatial-temporal logic aligned with the one of capital (e.g.

Orit Halpern). Expanding on my framing of cognitive mapping as countervisuality, I discuss Bassem Saad's online, interactive, game-like setting based on a 3D model of a near-future fiction set in Beirut. Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops) (2019) unpacks the unevenly distributed and racialized patterns of labor, care, waste, and toxicity, passing through Beirut. In contrast to the post-oil futures of the Arabian Gulf,

Saad’s counter-futuristic narrative enacts cognitive mapping, offering a link between cellular and transnational scales, thereby speaking to the broader context of urban politics across the Global North/South divide.

The fourth chapter tackles the dialectical conditions of the Anthropocene and computational colonialism within the context of the Middle East. Thinking about the future of Earth and computational media is inherently tied to the act of historicizing this relationship and resituating the material reality and social totality it is part of in the present. The systems produced and maintained by computational media, ranging from military to financial systems, are integral to the petro-politics taking place in the Middle

East. In this regard, Morehshin Allahyari’s artistic experimentation with 3D technology digs into the under- or misrepresented histories of the Middle East as hidden writing in

Reza Negarestani’s terms for shifting the registers through which the current socio- political events are narrated and possible futures envisioned. Allahyari’s work not only repairs the archive but also generates a cognitive mapping that lays out the convoluted geographies and systems underlying the contemporary forms of imperialism.

Unlearning imperialism in Azoulay’s terms, is a long journey, which requires rehearsals that start with denaturalizing imperial divisions and rights that seem so intrinsic to our capitalist world today. Each case study could be one instant of those rehearsals, reflecting our ongoing struggle. According to Azoulay, unlearning with companions from different places and times is important because the milestones of contemporary neoliberalism or financial capitalism (debt, dispossession) were already

“deployed against people whose lives were ruined while the fiction of Western progress, resting on the erasure of their histories, was established.”101 Imagining alternative future

101 Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, 38. 46

requires bringing back the historicity of those forms as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present. It is simultaneously archaic and futuristic, provoking the possibilities of not only deconstruction but also regeneration.

Chapter One – Cognitive Mapping: Historicity and Globality Reconsidered

… it is because culture has become material that we are now in a position to understand that it always was material, or materialistic, in its structures and functions. We postcontemporary people have a word for that discovery -- a word that has tended to displace the older language of genres and forms -- and this is, of course, the word medium, and in particular its plural, media, a word which now conjoins three relatively distinct signals: that of an artistic mode or specific form of aesthetic production, that of a specific technology, generally organized around a central apparatus or machine; and that, finally, of a social institution. These three areas of meaning do not define a medium, or the media, but designate the distinct dimensions that must be addressed in order for such a definition to be completed or constructed.1

The ever-growing economic and ecological crisis in the contemporary world manifests the dominance of technical rationality, characterized by planetary scale, increasingly complex, abstract, and automated media systems. Data collection and statistical analysis identify patterns between persons, places, and events, by flattening the subject into a simulated model, or a functional category. The politics of difference, affect, and the struggle over the future, once pursued as sites of liberation, are subsumed today by global networks of capital and computation. Consequently, humans must rely on technical operations that exceed their perceptual threshold and control.

Hence, we seek conceptual and practical approaches that allow us some capacity to grasp these scales and tempos. This capacity is ultimately tied to the question of mediation that attends to the relationship between material and abstract processes, and

1 Jameson, Postmodernism, 55. 48

local and global scales through which global capital operates. Scholars including from

Brian Massumi to Benjamin Bratton appropriate Michel Foucault to demonstrate that computational systems animate neoliberal governance as an effect, meaning that its mechanics are not only representative but also actively part of governance. In other words, we can situate the instantiations of the capitalist logic (imperial, preemptive) within the architectures of machine itself. This is why it is ultimately an aesthetic operation that is not restricted to the surface or interface. Instead, computational aesthetics traverse a multitude of systems, ranging from geopolitical implementations to affective registers, through which computational media are instrumentalized as an imperial apparatus. There arises a further question of how to grasp the multiscalar nature of computational capital in Jonathan Beller’s terms, highlighting the historical, and currently escalated entanglements of capital and computation.

In response, we need to delve into the realm of computational aesthetics that exceeds the technics of the interface as well as the obvious, direct operations of capital accumulation. To this end, Fredric Jameson’s dynamic model of the relationship between economic and cultural categories, as well as local and global scales allows us to grasp the dialectical nature of computational capital, relying on recourses and relations that are external to itself. These multiple outsides, however, cannot be reduced to physical territories since they also involve social hierarchies predicated on race, gender, and geopolitics. This is why, according to Mezzadra and Neilson, we need to attend to the continuities and ruptures that characterize the relations between literal extraction and extraction in the expanded sense, especially when capital accumulates on human sociality

as well as difference.2 On the one hand, capital is characterized by totalizing tendencies by its reorganization of the whole social fabric according to the logic and imperative of its valorization. On the other hand, as they refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s “axiomatic of capital,” which raises the necessity of attending to the different sites and milieus in which capitalist operations unfold.3

This is the gap, a level of mediation, with which Jameson’s cognitive mapping is ultimately concerned. Jameson’s notion of the geopolitical aesthetic precisely addresses this very gap that is inherent to global capital, whose unitary matrix could only be heterogeneously implemented at its expanding frontiers. In return, Jameson offers a spatial analysis of culture, which underscores how each capitalist mode of production operates along with a distinct temporal logic and spatial sensibility that organize our perceptual apparatus. This is how he unpacks not only the multi-scalar nature of capital but also its conflicting tendencies, as we encounter them in cultural forms.

My analysis of contemporary forms and relations underlying extractive operations of capital circles back to the question of what organizes the conditions of how they unfold, as well as how they appear. Mezzadra and Neilson’s emphasis on the scenes and sites of capital hitting the ground could help us to reflect on this dialectical condition of mediation. In Jameson’s terms, this could be only framed as an inexhaustible gap, or the incommensurable totality that affirms the dialectical nature of capital itself. Hence, the aesthetic dimension of my project frames the concept of mediation as a link between

2 Mezzadra & Neilson, The Politics of Operations, 39. 3 Ibid., 36. 50

psychic and social realms, material and abstract processes, and local and global scales through which computational capital operates.

For instance, in the third chapter, I discuss Bassem Saad’s work Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops) (2019), which sheds light upon the racialized patterns of labor, care, and waste that are materialized within a city space. He expands from his immediate experience of the protracted waste crisis in Lebanon to the entangled relationship between environmental degradation and computational media, thereby offering a link between cellular and transnational scales. Indeed, the aesthetic condition of slow violence in Rob Nixon’s terms corresponds to a representational problem of

“how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects and invisible harms.”4 In this regard, Jameson's dialectical twist engages with cultural production as an expression of these expanding scales and conflicting tendencies of capital. This is important to show how aesthetics and politics are inherently entangled within capitalist operations, whose historicity reveals the fact that they are neither given nor inevitable.

With these entanglements in mind, I investigate how to enable transnational encounters, overcoming the binary models of differentiation (e.g. the Global

North/South), by mapping both continuities and ruptures across and within the regions to contest the ongoing violence of global capitalism. Since imperial thinking is integral to the operations of computational capital, Jameson’s cognitive mapping needs to be

4 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 3. 51

reconfigured not only due to the shifts in the granularity and scale of capitalist extraction but also due to the embeddedness of computational media within the histories of modern thought and colonialism. My aim is to revive the Jamesonian utopian project of envisioning alternatives to capitalism and building collective consciousness while reformulating the image of historicity and globality. In other words, cognitive mapping necessarily involves reworking the imperial modes of visuality, knowledge systems, and institutional structures that are always already integral to capitalist logic but not reducible to it. In the end, the dialectical view of computational capital shows how it cannot exhaust human sociality and labor that it is ultimately dependent on.

Thus, it is important for me to reconfigure Jameson’s cognitive mapping in the terms of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s countervisuality, contesting the already integral status of imperial logic that computational capital preys on. Following upon Beller’s argument that the world-media system is built on and out of the material and epistemological forms of racial capitalism, I highlight that imperial violence is enacted within a matrix of valuation that tracks and weights factors of whiteness, masculinity, citizenship, and geopolitics. We need to aesthetically and politically “rehearse” in Azoulay’s terms to overcome imperial thinking that is integral to the functional integration of infrastructures, techniques, and institutions under the capitalist logic. In the end, countervisuality provokes not only an alternative way of seeing or looking at images but also a set of practices and imaginaries to dismantle spatial-temporal registers of the hegemonic system.

This is also why writing about artworks has been central to my project. In response to the ever-expanding scales of computation, artists could attend to its material

operations and their performative implementations, reworking the inexhaustible gap between materiality and thought. The subject of cognitive mapping is not a stable one, traversing local universalities due to the frictions of and resistances to unifying tendencies of global capital. This is also partly because cognitive mapping is ultimately an active negotiation of an urban site, an arena of rehearsal, where capital hits the ground.

In order to reframe political consciousness based on the fact the imperial logic is always already integral to one’s positionality to capital, I find it useful to think together

Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “global idea of race” and Azoulay’s conceptualization of

"political ontology." Similar to da Silva’s global idea of race, Azoulay also emphasizes the productive nature of imperial rights, not only producing racial difference but also setting the ground for white supremacy. In their universal declaration, there is erasure and extraction of those who are made noncitizens or flawed citizens in Azoulay’s terms (the racialized other, women, or refugees), which the violence of imperial divisions is enacted on.

Looking at computational media within the context of the Middle East gathers all these parts that are necessary for a fuller analysis of computational capital today. In return, this dialectical move is crucial for situating the Middle East within the imperial operations of global capital and thus, overcomes its peripherical reading. Ultimately, I argue that computational media are instrumentalized as an imperial apparatus as and within the matrix of global capital. As a result, computational media are not racist per se but operationalized as such within a capitalist society that preys on imperial reproduction of difference while obscuring its historicity. In the face of computational media’s erasure

of the immediate (colonial) history of its emergence as such, Jameson’s mode of interpretation could help us to reveal what it obscures while functioning. We need to bring back the historicity of those operations as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present, including from material conditions (labor) to ethico-legal systems (law).

This is where my emphasis on praxis comes forth, along with the ongoing urban struggles that opens up spaces in which countervisuality flourishes.

In the following part of the chapter, I outline varied theoretical iterations of

Jameson’s cognitive mapping to concretize the potentials and limits of the task of cognitive mapping, whether theoretical or practical. Cognitive mapping has been a significant part of Jameson’s entire critical endeavor since the late 1980s, coupled with his other renowned concepts such as political unconscious and utopia, and taken on different guises over the years. Jameson treats cognitive mapping, which was never meant to be a prescriptive proposal, as an aesthetic problem mainly of the imperialist core due to its distance from the sites of extraction (the colonies). This idealization of the subaltern, however, could be misleading since the disjunction between lived experiences and abstractions of capitalism manifests the geographically differentiated and partial resolutions of its limits.

When seen from the point of view of feminist and postcolonial critiques of the self-contained, rational subject of modernity, the method of cognitive mapping is often critiqued as a mental process, failing to adequately engage with other forms of political affects and desires. I acknowledge the limits of the term in terms of addressing the forms of inequality and oppression that cannot be merely explained by market economy, or

class politics. Nonetheless, Jameson’s dialectical twists complicate these reductive readings of the term. Instead, cognitive mapping could help us to rethink those realms without essentializing it as an ultimate aesthetic or political end or a single model that fits all situations. As I will show in this chapter, political and media theoretical endeavors necessarily merge on the way to reimagine historicity and globality today.

The Jamesonian Dialectical Twist

Within the dominant Marxist tradition, the forms of economic activity (the base) is given primacy over the cultural forms (the superstructure), including from law to architecture. This view, however, cannot fully address the complexity of the ways in which the economic organization of the society shapes the realms of thought and action.

Moreover, the economic base cannot be identified without having recourse to the categories which are themselves superstructural.5 According to Mezzadra and Neilson, capital always relies on resources and relations that cannot be reduced to its logic, referring to its multiple outsides.6

Producers of culture, in whatever form or expression, are relatively free, yet influenced by that material reality, and how this relationship of interdependence refers back to the mediation itself. For instance, Aouragh underscores how the Internet is both a product of capitalist logic and simultaneously is used to resist its violent acts, which gives mass culture its utopian potential:

5 Colin MacCabe, “Preface” in Fredric Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), ix-xvi. 6 Mezzadra, & Neilson, The Politics of Operations. 55

… a conceptual understanding of internet activism that integrates imperialism and political-economy with the possible value and contribution of internet to grass-roots social capital. Social media cannot be reduced to capital ideology but have a rather particular relationship to it, revealing to us the limits of that ideology too.7

This is where, Fredric Jameson’s dialectical twist plays a crucial role, which offers a dialectical account of economic and cultural categories while acknowledging the structural role of capital:

… he [Jameson] makes the radical theoretical move of assuming that the relation to the economic is a fundamental element within the cultural object to be analyzed – not in terms of economic processes within which the cultural object takes form but in the psychic processes which engage in its production and reception.8

As Jameson points out, each epoch develops cultural forms that allow it, however partially, to represent its world, which are dialectically linked to the modes of production of their times. For instance, Jameson writes about shopping malls and hotels rising up in the late capitalist cities, as exemplary of “postmodern hyperspace” that transcends “the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively map its position in a mappable external world.”9

Indeed, the expanding frontiers of multinational capitalism created a gap between a lived experience and economic and social structures that govern that experience. Such

7 Aouragh, Social Media, Mediation, and the Arab Revolutions, 534. 8 MacCabe, Preface, x. 9 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (New York: Verso, 1998), 16. 56

spatial disjunction leads to an inability to grasp the system as a whole, which, for

Jameson, constitutes the political economy of imperialism:

The truth of daily experience of London lies, rather in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound with the whole colonial system of British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people.10

Jameson’s notion of the “geopolitical aesthetic,” underlining the hierarchically reconfigured imperial space, builds on a spatial analysis of culture, which underscores how each capitalist mode of production operates along with a distinct temporal logic and spatial sensibility that organize our perceptual apparatus. Unlike the Frankfurt School’s pessimism regarding the culture industry (e.g. Adorno and Horkheimer), a cultural form

(literary, artistic, or architectural) could become a means of expression through which the individual articulates the effects of late capitalism, whether consciously or unconsciously.

In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, for example, Jameson envisions cinema as a (film) space, through which they can grasp the social totality within which their lives and the film itself are placed.11 Jameson’s geopolitical aesthetic not only offers a spatially sensitive framework for film/cultural studies, but also provide general accounts of the scales and contradictions of globalization, and becomes relevant to the disciplines beyond humanities (e.g. geography).12

10 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 410-411. 11 Fredric Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic. 12 Deborah Dixon & Leo Zonn, “Confronting the Geopolitical Aesthetic: Fredric Jameson, The Perfumed Nightmare and the Perilous Place of Third Cinema,” Geopolitics, 10, 2005, 290-315. The authors argue that Jameson’s geopolitical aesthetic underestimates how economic categories are articulated within particular contexts by thriving on identity makers such as gender. Thus, instead of merely engaging gendered characters, we need to attend to how the economic category is imbricated within the terms and acts of what 57

This is the framework in which I expand on Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping,” referring to an aesthetic that enables individuals and collectivities to render their places in a capitalist world-system and its historicity intelligible. It is closely tied to the historical condition of late capitalism “in which the truth of our social life as a whole

– in György Lukács’ terms, as a totality – is increasingly irreconcilable with the possibilities of aesthetic expression or articulation available to us.”13 Jameson combines

Kevin Lynch’s14 empirical problems of city space with Louis Althusser’s Lacanian redefinition of ideology as “’the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’”.15 In other words, cognitive mapping refers to this capacity for “a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.”16 As Mezzzadra and Neilson put, “drawing upon Sartre’s concept of totalization, Jameson repudiated a ‘bird eye view of the whole’ and affirms a project that

‘takes as its premise the impossibility for biological or individual human subject to conceive’ of such a position, let alone to adapt or achieve it’.”17

it is to be feminine or masculine. Nonetheless, I argue that Jameson’s dialectical model of geopolitical aesthetic highlights this mutually imbricated histories of economic and cultural spheres, as well as local and global articulations of capital. 13 Jameson, Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture, 54. 14 Here, Jameson’s main inspiration is Kevin Lynch’s well-known book “The Image of the City” (1960) that derived from his MIT-based research on “the Perceptual Form of the City,” in collaboration with Gyorgy Kepes. Interestingly, Kevin Lynch’s work is still one of the predominant references in the field of cybernetic urbanism, whether historically interpreted as a basis of such cybernetic experimentations or reinterpreted as a critique by the approaches that argue for a more grounded and contextualized analysis of datafication (prioritizing human experience). 15 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 50-51. Here, Jameson cites: Louis Althusser, "Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy. Monthly Review Press, 1972. 16 Ibid., 51. 17 Mezzadra and Neilson, The Politics of Operation, 32. Here, they cite Jameson, Postmodernism, 332. 58

In this regard, Jameson’s conception of cognitive mapping is usually criticized for failing to adequately acknowledge the bodily, lived experience, as it is merely understood as a detached, mental process. On the contrary, Jameson’s understanding of the individual’s representation of their social reality goes beyond the traditional critique of representation because the act of mapping is intimately tied to practice, the individual’s active negotiation of urban space. His descriptions of postmodern hyperspaces (e.g. the

Bonaventure Hotel, Walmart) build upon the disorienting, alienated experiences of the people who try to navigate these spaces. Additionally, a subtler influence of Henri

Lefebvre’s idea of “production of space,” comes forth, which underlines how space is socially produced within the dialectics of praxis and representation.18

According to Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Jameson transcoded the political and epistemological problem of class consciousness of Georg Lukacs from 1920s to an urban, postmodern U.S. context. The Althusserian emphasis allows Jameson to extend geopolitical issues into local, national, or transnational class realities. In the end, Jameson does not try to systemize the unsystemizable, but poses it as a problem, which is at once economic, aesthetic, and political.19 The aesthetic problem of being unable to conceive one’s spatial and historical situation within the global capitalist system signals a political problem. Thus, for Jameson, cognitive mapping speaks to the urgent need of mapping

“the great global, multinational and de-centered communicational network in which we

18 Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1998). See also Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden: Blackwell, [1974] 1991). 19 Toscano & Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 12. 59

find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”20 Cognitive mapping, ultimately, seeks a transnational class consciousness.

Local Universalities

According to Imre Szeman,21 Jameson’s idea of cognitive mapping needs to be accompanied with his other writings, especially his writing on National Allegory: Third-

World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism22, where he, once again, raises the problem of cognitive mapping posed in and from the ‘West’ as the imperialist center.

For Jameson, the Third World literary works operate as national allegories from the standpoint of the First-Worldist, who is precisely unable to imagine the Other outside the unsatisfactory categories of (culturally) inferior or derivative. Here, Jameson underscores the political unconscious of the First Worldist in their reading of non-Western cultures, rather than essentializing them himself. In this sense, the First World culture is marked by forgetting the depredations of not only the past but also the present of the continuing violence upon which the current order rests, as well as the globally dispersed actuality of inequality.23 Ultimately, Jameson attends to the differentiation across cultures/regions through their positionality of where they stand in relation to Capital (in terms of both material conditions but also class consciousness).

Even though Jameson’s nostalgia for the Third World was well-situated within

20 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, 16. 21 Imre Szeman, "Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization." South Atlantic Quarterly, 100, no. 3, 2001, 803-27. 22 Jameson, Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism. 23 Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 108. 60

the atmosphere of the 1980s, it still needs to be updated along with the trajectories that neoliberal and computational systems have taken up until today. First, the subject of cognitive mapping is not a stable one. For instance, Roberto Schwartz warns against the temptation to treat cognitive mapping as a problem of the so-called core due to being more advanced in terms of capitalist development, and thus more prone to the disjunction between personal and political realms.24 The disjunction between experience and abstraction is a more complicated problem that cannot be simply resolved by being exposed to the supposedly more direct experience at the periphery. According to Neil

Smith, this very problem is inflected by the unevenness of capitalism and its geographically differentiated partial resolutions of inherent crises of capitalism.25 The problem of abstraction and differentiation, foundational to the operations of capital, generates different appearances of and relations within the same system and renders cognitive mapping a difficult task in any given setting.

According to Manu Goswami, who mainly draws upon Henri Lefebvre, the ongoing creation of unevenness (economic, cultural, spatial and temporal) is the internal supplement of the universalizing orientation of capital.26 The colonies were increasingly conceived not as extraterritorial zones for trade and raw materials, rather as substantively and functionally internal supplements of a globe spanning, which constitutes the

24 Roberto Schwarz, “A Brazilian Breakthrough,” New Left Review 36, 2005, 92. 25 Neil Smith. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 206. 26 Goswami, Producing India. See also Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden: Blackwell, [1974] 1991). 61

hierarchically reconfigured imperial space. Therefore, she highlights the dialectical relationship between the homogenizing orientation of capital and its uneven historical and geographical actualizations. According to Lefebvre, global space produces rather than subsumes, generates rather than negates the local, regional and national.27 As a result, heterogeneous social and cultural forms emerge, whose internal dynamics are framed by but not reducible to a unifying logic of capital. In this sense, those histories that seem to be operating outside the logic of capitalism do not constitute an absolute outside but an internal dimension, one that interrupts the supposedly homogeneous, linear progression of capitalism. In return, Jameson’s model allows us to attune to these conflicting tendencies and expansive scales/realms of capitalist operations, as they shape the organization of a given space or a cultural form.

Moreover, a spatial analysis becomes complicated due to the contradictions of the

First World itself. In his response to Jameson’s National Allegory in the 1980s, Aijaz

Ahmad emphasizes that there are social classes in the First World, who experience such mandatory materialism quite as immediately as residents in the colonized formations.28

According to Ahmad, if we replace the idea of nation with larger, less restricting idea of collectivity, it becomes possible to see that this disjunction is by no means specific to the so-called First-World.29 In Antonio Gramsci’s terms, it is the subaltern classes that are excluded from a society’s established institutions and thus denied the means by which

27 Goswami, Producing India, 35. 28 Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’,” Social Text, no.17, 1987, 3- 25. 29 Ibid., 15. 62

people economically, politically, and socially participate into their society.

Therefore, my focus on the Middle East renders this naïve idealization of the subaltern as not yet blinded by capitalism, which is apparent not only in Jameson’s work but also among various postcolonial critiques, problematic. Instead, we need to claim a transnational perspective based on the fact that we are all situated within the operations of global capitalism and its underlying ethico-juridical assemblages, however unequal it would be. To this end, it is crucial to examine how material differences, caused by colonial practices and their neoliberal expansions that constitute the communities and regions differently but always already interdependent and uneven, are expressed in cultural forms.

Theoretical Iterations of Cognitive Mapping

Cognitive mapping lies at the heart of Jameson’s entire critical endeavor, as it is coupled with his other concepts such as political unconscious and utopia. It still retains its urgency and relevance in any contemporary criticism that aims at grasping the entangled relationship between aesthetics and politics in late capitalist societies. The gap between structure and lived experience is only deepened by increasingly complex operations of computational capital today. In return, cognitive mapping acts as a model for how we might begin to articulate the relationship between the psychic and social realms, and the local and global scales, and consequently, as a metaphor for transnational consciousness.

For addressing the possibility of countervisual practices flourishing at the expanding frontiers of capital, media theory has a lot to offer. Mezzadra and Neilson’s emphasis on material specificity has resonance across the fields of infrastructure studies, 63

processual media theory, and media ecologies among others. For instance, Ned Rossiter’s work30 on logistical media theory comes the closest among those possible expansions, which locates the operations of media within the frictions and ruins of capitalist operations (labor, waste). Ultimately, I draw upon Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s “political ontology” of the (photographic) medium while expanding Jonathan Beller’s notion of

“surround” over not only the sites where capital hits the ground but also the ethico-legal assemblages that have instrumentalized computation as an apparatus of imperiality.

Therefore, cognitive mapping requires bringing back the historicity of those forms as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present. Indeed, Jameson frames cognitive mapping as an aesthetic problem rather than a prescriptive proposal.31 Art could allow some insights about “the true economic and social form that govern” our immediate and limited experience, while media studies could expand on it with its expertise in navigating through the increasingly complex and abstract operations of computational capital today. This chapter tackles the role of aesthetics in my project, and primarily in Jameson’s framework, but does not talk about artworks per se. Here, I lay out the theoretical ground for delving later into more detailed analyses of artistic practices that rehearse cognitive mapping in the face of ever-growing economic and ecological crises.

30 Ned Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares (New York: Routledge, 2016). 31 Jameson, Cognitive Mapping. 64

Cartographies of Capital

In Cartographies of the Absolute, Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle tackle the crisis of representation associated with the global network of capital, power, and information and thus, seek the possibility of narrativizing and visualizing contemporary capitalism. Today, visual representations of any given system are extensively shaped by technologies of cartography, including satellite images, drones, digital maps, big data, etc. The problem, however, is not so much to gather the enormous amount of data but to penetrate into the nexus that regulates their complex relations. Indeed, we need to understand the compositions and hierarchies underlying these relations beyond their immediate manifestations. To this end, they look at aesthetic objects, including models, photographs, films, and novels that “depict and present a visual and narrative proposition about the social forces that shape their present.”32

Toscano and Kinkle’s focus on cartography negotiates the deterministic tone of

“the Absolute” by bringing it back to its vertical and horizontal mediations. Following upon the Jamesonian twist, Toscano and Kinkle’s dialectic writing balances off the dominant idea of a detached view – the view from above –, which is usually associated with the vertical domination of military force as well as the omniscient gaze of Modern

Man. Rather, they critically unpack the vertical and horizontal dynamics of capital accumulation and class formation in a given setting, its constituent devices, as well as attendant gaps and dislocations.

32 Toscano & Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 21. 65

For instance, Toscano and Kinkle write about HBO series The Wire, where vertical and horizontal relations that constitute Baltimore as the dark corner of the

American experiment come to the surface.33 The series addresses the socio-economic implications of deindustrialization, deunionization, and mass incarceration across various settings, including city hall, school, police departments, and families, as well as various scales spanning from the drug trade in local neighborhoods to international human trafficking at the port. All these systems, or “worlds” are entangled vertically (the internal hierarchies within groups) and horizontally (the entanglements with other ‘worlds’ spreading throughout the city and beyond). Ultimately, Baltimore, as a city, becomes the critical prism through which to examine neoliberal U.S. capitalism and its urban instantiations; which is to say, capital hitting the ground.

Even though the scope of their analysis is mostly limited to the U.S. context, it still offers an opportunity for me to track the traces of the U.S. imperialism simultaneously within and beyond its territory. For instance, they discuss Trevor Paglen’s work as a practice of cognitive mapping that follows the thread of black, out-of-sight sites of the U.S. state conducts and capital at large:

His exploration of this world and its accompanying juridical vacuum doesn’t just lead Paglen to remote desert locations in which the national security state has hived itself off from the everyday lives of most citizens and denizens. These are of course included, but beyond the sweltering expanses of the Nevada desert and the carceral dungeons on the outskirts of Kabul, Paglen’s investigation takes him to sites like the geography department at the University of California, Berkeley (where he carried out his own doctoral research), corporate parks in northern Virginia and hotel conferences rooms in New Mexico. What transpires from this inter-linked

33 Ibid., 89. 66

series of inquiries, is the war on terror’s ‘relational geography’ – geography that permits us to pose questions such as: ‘How do facts on the ground in Afghanistan sculpt the future of the United States?’34

Paglen’s works enact a practice of cognitive mapping not only by uncovering the hidden sites but following the threads of these sites as a whole. As Paglen puts it, “the black world is much more than an archipelago of secret bases. It is a secret basis underlying much of the American economy”.35 In other words, the dark geography of the repressive apparatus largely overlaps with the dark geography of global capital itself. In a reference to Marx, Toscano and Kinkle’s attunes to “not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced;” “the secret of profit making.”36 In this sense, Paglen’s works not only reveal the hidden sites of U.S. secret conducts but also identify those sites where the extractive operations of capital take place – in both literal sense of occupying indigenous lands and in its extended sense of building the military-industry complex.

In my project, however, I diverge from their focus that is mostly restricted to the scope of the Western and U.S. context. On the one hand, there has been a great effort to overcome the concept of center; for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt focus on the processes of deterritorialization (and reterritorialization) of capital across the peripheries.37 As a result, the new geographies of capital, as well as the idea of masses as the multitude (coming together through their differences rather than commonalities) come

34 Ibid., 62. Also see: Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Dutton, 2009), 246. 35 Ibid., 64. Also see: Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map, 277. 36 Ibid., 47. 37 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri. Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

forth. On the other hand, there is a growing interest in critical practices that draw upon the needs and desires of marginalized groups to subvert the established modes of spatial and temporal organization of the given urban setting.

Even though I acknowledge (and will occasionally come back to) the legacy of these varied political agendas, Jameson’s cognitive mapping is ultimately about a class consciousness that is globally situated. Therefore, Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping should not be framed as a mere issue of visibility or spatial mapping. The Jamesonian dialectical model of the relationship between global and local scales, as well as economic and cultural categories provides a space for reflecting on the differentiating impacts of capitalist operations. Ultimately, it is a matter of how one maps the relationship of capital to its multiple outsides, ranging from new territories to the social categories of race and gender.

Extraction in the Expanded Sense

Today, as the fields of extraction, logistics, and finance collide, digital networks become the apparatus through which capitalism touches upon its frontiers. According to

Juan Pablo Melo, this is where Mezzadra and Neilson’s procedural and non-economistic approach to Marxist theory could eventually link up with procedurally oriented media theories:

Although not specified in the text, what The Politics of Operations gestures to is the need to produce a Marxist media theory, a materialist media theory that approaches capitalism as a network of media- technological and operational chains inscribed in infrastructures, institutions, technologies, ideologies, and even personality structures – but

a Marxist media theory that retains a space and perspective for a normatively oriented and framed ideology critique.38

As a result, we need to address “how media-technological networks and lifeworlds are mutually and materially constituted, how persons capable of action emerge at their interstices, and how abstraction is a matter of levels of mediation and operational reifications.”39 Thus, Mezzadra and Neilson’s idea of extraction in the expanded sense attunes capital’s relationship to its multiple outsides, including the absorption of human cognitive and affective capacities by computational systems.40 As capitalist operations enter into complex relations with different forms of life and matter, they take heterogeneous forms and produce differential relations at their frontiers.

Moreover, Mezzadra and Neilson’s emphasis on the nexus of capital and difference is useful for rethinking the controversial concept of totality. Even though

Jameson offers a more complex, dialectical view of totality, the conflict of unifying and differentiating tendencies of capitalist operations puts the notion of totality itself into a question. As Mezzadra and Neilson bring up, “the question remains open as to whether such totality provides a background against which visions and experiences of difference can thrive or whether it is asserted in the face of a proliferation of differences that threatens to tear it apart.”41 In response, Mezzadra and Neilson indicates the possibility of

38 Juan Pablo Melo, “Book Review: The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson,” triple C, 17 (2), 2019, 245. 39 Ibid., 246. 40 Mezzadra and Neilson, The Politics of Operation. See also Mezzadra, Sandro & Brett Neilson, “On the Multiple Frontiers of Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism,” Cultural Studies, 2017, pp. 185- 204. 41 Ibid., 39. 69

observing systematic qualities across varied operations of capital without necessarily attributing to them a priori coherence. For them, capital cannot be a self-sufficient totality since its operations are predicated on a set of conditions that it cannot produce, including from labor to sociality. In their attempt to address the politics of difference within the bounds of the critique of capitalism, they refer back to Marx, who saw capital as a social relation rather than a thing or substance. This is why capital’s operations are inseparable from the relations of social difference, constantly producing and reworking social hierarchies that it preys on.

The concept of multiple outsides highlights how capital relies upon and benefits from material conditions and social relations that are external to itself; which is to say, that it cannot produce as well as that is not reducible to its logic. In this regard, as

Mezzadra and Neilson emphasize, it is crucial to understand race and gender as productive and destructive in their own rights rather than a secondary division that qualifies class struggle. The authors refer to, for example, Cedric Robinson’s (2000) racial capitalism thesis, highlighting the racial character of capitalism. The cultural soil of

Western civilization was already infused with racialism which gave form to the future development of capitalism as an imperial and colonial enterprise (involving invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchy).

Thereby, the concept of operation refers not only to the functioning of capital, but also to capital’s engagements with different kinds of social, legal, and political structures as well as natural environments – which recalls Jason W. Moore’s notion of “web of

life,” identifying capitalist system as a way of organizing life.”42 Hence, Mezzadra and

Neilson encourage us to attend to the operative integration of infrastructures, techniques, institutions, media and knowledge systems under the capitalist logic. Only then, we could think capitalism in its political and material specificity, when its imbrication with computational media simultaneously complexifies and obscures its material effects on territories and subjects.

Cultural Materialisms

Within the Marxist critique of computational media, the changing forms of labor, fixed capital, value formation, and accumulation strategies are among the main venues of attention. Political and media theorists, including from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt to Jonathan Beller and Matteo Pasquinelli, underscore the new forms of expropriation of the commons (e.g. the general intellect) by the rise of finance capitalism, cognitive labor, and AI systems. These inquiries are usually situated within class politics, seeking alternative ways of building political commons and consciousness. The common idea apparent in most of these endeavors is that information (e.g. programmability) does not simply express the hegemony of the abstract over the social, as in the case of capitalist operation itself.

Similarly, Christian Fuchs claims that the main issue circles back to Marx’s definition of commodity fetishism; “the form of appearance, in which “the definite social

42 Moore, Jason W. Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015). 71

relation between men themselves” is presented as “a relation between things.”43 Thus, the commodity appears as natural, unsocial, and out of history, and ultimately, makes it difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalism. Beyond the realm of economy, political and ideological forms of fetishism are also integral part of the capitalist societies, in which specific institutions or ideas (nation, racism, war) are promoted as natural properties of society, despite being embedded within particular power relations and strategic interests. In this way, Fuchs formulates a media theoretical question of what role information and telecommunication technologies could play in demystifying as well as transforming the social relations of production.

Parallel to my project’s appropriation of Jameson’s dialectical twist, Fuchs approaches the role of technology in a capitalist society as a dialectical matter, linking structuralist and agency/praxis-based approaches while maintaining his emphasis on class politics. With his appropriation of Henri Lefebvre’s production of space, Fuchs extends the scope of the social to encompass social space; a by-product of humans’ social reproduction, and thus integral but not reducible to the relations of production. In this way, Fuchs situates the forms of signification as the product of the human-material-social processes. On a similar path, Fuchs mobilizes Raymond Williams’ materialist communication theory, or what Fuchs calls communicative materialism, to highlight that

“’the analysis of all forms of signification […] within the actual means and conditions of

43 Christian Fuchs, “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space and the Critical Theory of Communication” Communication Theory, 29, 2019, 138. Fuchs cites: Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1. (London, England: Penguin, 1867). 72

their production.’”44 Indeed, Jameson himself extends Williams’ cultural materialism

(e.g. “structures of feeling”) to characterize postmodern cultural production as new forms of social and mental habits.45 Given the intensified capitalization of cognitive-linguistic function and sensuous activity, Fuchs attempts to set a ground for a dialectical view of the relationship between commodification and communication that does not exhaust human sociality all together.

Similarly, Tiziana Terranova has been at the frontline of emphasizing the materiality of information systems as a way of situating them as infrastructures of not only capitalist capture but also autonomization (along with the Marxist autonomist tradition). Since her earlier work on the networked culture, Terranova has framed media as a multiplicity of concepts, techniques, and milieus, thereby grasping the complexity of materialities that are linked by the so-called immaterial processes of information.46

Terranova’s ongoing focus on the conflicting tendencies of the architectures of networked media speaks back to Mezzadra and Neilson’s emphasis on the politics of capitalist operations. At these liminal sites, information spills over its narrow channel and opens up to a larger milieu, amplifying or inhibiting the emergence of commonalties as well as antagonisms.

44 Christian Fuchs. “Raymond Williams’ Communicative Materialism.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 26 (6), 2017, 748. Here, Fuchs cites: Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 45 Maria Elisa Cevasco, “The Political Unconscious of Globalization: Notes from the Periphery,” in Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader, ed. D. Kellner & S. Homer (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 103. 46 Tiziana Terranova, Networked Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004). 73

The Stack as Multiple Totalities

Is Benjamin Bratton’s Stack47 the new totality interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales? Bratton coins term the “Stack,” to refer to an accidental megastructure that mediates the realms of hard- and software at the limits of chemical, material, technological, economic, sociological, and geopolitical systems. Instead of seeing these scales as a hodgepodge of different species of computing, for Bratton, we can conceive them as forming a modular, interdependent whole. In other words, all these different systems are part of a greater machine, which could offer “the diagrammatic image of a totality”48. The Stack as totality is a vast and incomplete, pervasive, but irregular, not only technical but also a geopolitical system.

According to Bratton, we are witnessing the emergence of a new nomos of the earth, where older geopolitical divisions tied to territorial sovereign powers are facing the new forms of sovereignty extending across planetary computational systems, what he calls “platform sovereignty”49. In other words, the Stack underlines the contradictory tendencies of sovereignty, traversing national governments, transnational bodies, and corporations:

Planetary-scale computation both distorts and reforms modern jurisdiction and political geography and produces new forms of these in its own image. It perforates and transcends some borders while introducing and re- thickening others at new scales and in greater quantity. While this inaugurates new design problems, it does not represent the introduction of design into political geography as such: design is always already there. The frame of the nation-state as the core jurisdiction is a design —

47 Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, (Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2016) 48 Ibid., 5. 49 Ibid., 22. 74

deliberate and otherwise — of a geopolitical architecture derived from the partitioning of planar geography, separating and containing sovereign domains as discrete, adjacent units among a linear and horizontal surface.50

Hence, the horizontal mapping of global space can’t account for all the overlapping layers that create a thickened jurisdictional complexity through which we design and govern our worlds today. I argue that Bratton reworks Jameson’s spatial, horizontal mapping along with the axis of verticality. Thus, vertical mediation, as an axis of domination and abstraction, necessarily becomes part of our efforts for cognitive mapping today. There is an ever-growing interest in verticality (from the revitalization of

Paul Virilio to the rise of infrastructure studies) due the planetary-scale operations of computational capital. In this sense, Bratton’s emphasis on verticality underlines its colonial histories and current crises of domination.

On the one hand, there is the colonial legacy and modern history of the jurisdictional organization of a given space and population. On the other hand, the modern understanding of human and nation-state as a coherent whole is threatened by the operation of planetary computation. As a result, we witness the intensifying efforts of national sovereignty and global capital to maintain itself and legitimize its violent acts.

This constant negotiation is also the reason why the state of exception has become the norm as a form of governance, which is to say, operational to the functioning of the Stack at large.

50 Ibid., 5. 75

Through its expansive verticality – gathering, supporting, and superimposing multiple totalities (states, networks, economies, cities, political theologies) –, the Stack reflects the totality that emerges accidentally. Based on his framing of it as an accidental megastructure, Bratton argues that the Stack cannot be reduced to a (secondary) technological manifestation of an existing economic order. Instead, he reconfigures neoliberalism as interlocking political-economic conditions within the encompassing armature of planetary computation. To this end, Bratton refers to Jameson’s dialectical understanding of the base-superstructure relationship himself, which “treats these arrangements as active temporal operations rather than fixed architectures.”51

Moreover, Bratton makes a further twist by situating the political within the machine rather than the machine representing it. Appropriating Michel Foucault’s idea of governmentality, Bratton highlights that governance is an effect as much as it is a cause, which is to say, its mechanics are not representative of governance, but they are part of governance itself.52 Bratton’s critique situates aesthetics not restricted to the surface level but within the underlying operations, thereby acknowledging the very role of aesthetic in their production as such. Those layers traverse the multitude of systems, including

“interfaces, protocols, visuable data, strategic renderings of geography, time, landscapes, and object fields”53 as well as interoperable layers, such as the machine-to-machine communication. Thus, Bratton attends to the levels of mediation that entail both

51 Ibid., 56-57. 52 Ibid., 7-8. 53 Ibid., 46. 76

prosthetic and non-prosthetic elements, speaking to a larger tradition of materialist, processual media theory.

This is where, for Bratton, design practices come forth, not only for contesting the existing structures but also imagining and acting alternative ones. Amid the legitimate anxieties around planetary computation (e.g. automation, surveillance), Bratton emphasizes the accidental nature of this megastructure. For him, the Stack does not represent a different order, but shows that this order is not given in advance: “We need to design what that order is and will be.”54 This tendency is taken up by Terranova in more radical terms with the notion of Red Stack, highlighting a more concrete, organized political implications of networked space.55 For Terranova, planetary computational systems could be mobilized for developing new imaginaries and values that surplus the exchange value (social, aesthetic, ethical, etc.,), thereby opening up new avenues of social cooperation that cannot be contained by the bounds of nation-state, corporate governance, and social media platforms, such as open source software movements, or new monetization systems (e.g. cryptocurrency). In a way, Bratton’s emphasis on design practice expands the scope of Jameson’s emphasis on praxis in his conception of cognitive mapping, which can never be reduced to a merely mental process, or a fixed position. Instead, Jameson’s dialectical model underscores the dynamic relationship between structure and agency while attuning to its shifting spatial-temporal registers.

54 Ibid., 39. 55 Tiziana Terranova, “Red Stack Attack!” in #Accelerate# Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin MacKay and Armen Avanessian (New York: Urbanomic, 2014), 379-400. 77

For instance, what Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler accomplish with the

“anatomical map of human labor, data, and planetary resources” in their analysis of the

Amazon Echo device could be exemplary of what the horizontal and vertical axes of cognitive mapping entail today.56 When one interacts with Amazon’s Echo device, this interaction invokes interlaced chains of resource extraction, human labor, and algorithmic processing across the vast networks of mining, logistics, distribution, prediction, and optimization. As Crawford and Joler highlight, the scale of the system is almost beyond human imagining, and thus they ask: “How can we begin to see it, to grasp its immensity and complexity as a connected form?

Crawford and Joler’s multi-scalar analysis demonstrates, however, that a mapping of contemporary operations is not enough in itself (even if it is possible somehow). We need to delve into the historicity of these systems along with vertical (of extraction and domination) and horizontal (of territoriality and logistics) axes. In this way, we could acknowledge the long histories and contemporary patterns of labor, spanning from

European imperialism’s use of slave labor to today’s indigenous communities that are dispossessed by and forced to work for the mining industry. Their mapping underscores the fact that thinking about extraction requires thinking about labor, resources, and data all at once:

[t]his presents a challenge to critical and popular understandings of artificial intelligence: it is hard to ‘see’ any of these processes individually, let alone collectively. Hence the need for a visualization that

56 Kate Crawford, Kate & Vladan Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an Anatomical Map of Human Labor, Data, and Planetary Resources,” 2018, https://anatomyof.ai/ 78

can bring these connected, but globally dispersed processes into a single map.57

Once again, we are back to the problem of representation; a return to the interface layer since this is where “remaking of the world through instrumentalized images of totality” takes place, in Bratton’s terms.58 Eventually, Bratton comes up with varied regimes that organize the interfacial layer’s linking form and historicity, ranging from the visual organization of the global supply chain to the user’s body. Ultimately, Bratton acknowledges the interface’s expansive and generative quality, by pointing out how interfacial regimes do not only transmit but also produce information, thereby traversing the process of both production and ideation.

The Interface as Multiple Frontiers

The significance of the interface layer is also apparent in Alexander Galloway’s project of updating Jameson’s cognitive mapping as an allegory for contemporary control societies.59 For Galloway, the problem of representation is no longer organized around the indexical relationship (e.g. what it represents) but what it does to and in the world.

The interface takes our execution of the world as the condition of its expression and thus, the computer does not represent but remediates the very condition of being itself.60

Similarly to Bratton, Galloway argues that power does not reside in the image but rather

57 Ibid. 58 Bratton, The Stack, 229. 59 Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Pluto Press, 2012). 60 In the chapter “The Computer as a Mode of Mediation,” Galloway provides a necessary overview of the media-centric approaches to culture, especially by drawing upon the notion of techne, ranging from Martin Heidegger to Friedrich Kittler. 79

in architectures of interface, dispersed across networks, computers, algorithms, information, and data.61 The interface is, therefore, not so much a thing but an effect.

Rethinking Chun’s idea of software as ideology with Jameson’s dialectical model of allegory, Galloway argues that software corresponds to an allegory of the social, as it exacerbates or ridicules the tension within itself (between narrative and machinic layers):

“It is a relationship of figuration in which the complexities and contradictions of ideology, which itself contains both utopian and repressive instincts, are modeled and simulated out of the formal structures of the software itself.”62 Due to the increased incompatibility between the truth of social life as a whole and its expressions, Galloway demonstrates that ideology is no longer a one-way street, but always negotiated at the sites of cultural production and consumption. Thus, Galloway draws upon a more dynamic operations of ideology, spanning from Antonio Gramsci’s conception of hegemony to Stuart Hall’s notion of encoding/decoding.

Galloway is committed to the task of updating Jameson’s cognitive mapping by giving a dialectical model of the interface as an effect, which continuously produces its status as social. Galloway expands the edges of the interface, which refers back to the aesthetics of the medium itself; which is to say, its historicity. Instead of looking at the surface level of the interface as an aesthetic object, Galloway situates it across the visible and invisible layers of its production as such. With the term “intraface,” Galloway indicates the implicit presence of the outside within the inside, where the outside refers to

61 Ibid., 92. 62 Ibid., 75. 80

the social and history: “there will be an intraface within the object between the aesthetic form of the piece and the larger historical material context in which it is situated.”63

Thus, Galloway underscores how the interface acts as frontiers through capital touches upon multiple outsides (e.g. racialized labor).64 As Mezzadra and Neilson emphasize, we need to attend to new fronts of extraction other than literal forms of extraction prevalent in mining and agribusiness but in activities such as data mining.65

For instance, computational capital makes life itself the site of valorization by turning seemingly social behavior (playing games) into monetizable labor. In the case of

“Chinese gold farmer,” as Galloway elaborates, it is not the gold that is farmed but the

Chinese, whose body is captured and massified by the monetized system.66 In this very sense, the specter of the Chinese gold farmer” becomes an allegorical portrait of “not so much of the Orientalized other, but of ourselves.”67 Thus, Mezzadra and Neilson’s idea of extraction in the expanded sense attunes to the multiple outsides of capital, including the

63 Ibid., 53. 64 My emphasis on Galloway’s understanding of interface as multiple frontiers developed over the conversations I had with the participants of the Research Networks workshop, led by Christian Ulrik Anderson and Geoff Cox at Transmediale Festival 2020. In particular, Sudipto Basu’s analysis of the ends of the network as frontiers of extraction helped me to deepen my argumentation here. See our workshop catalog for Transmediale, 2020: Research Networks A Peer-Reviewed Newspaper, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020: https://transmediale.de/content/research-networks-1 See also: Sudipto Basu, “On the Ends of the Network as a Zone of Friction (and Extraction),” A Peer Reviewed Journal About Research Networks (APRJA), Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox, eds. Volume 9, Issue 1, Forthcoming 2020. ISSN 2245- 7755. Will be available at: https://aprja.net/ 65 Mezzadra and Neilson, The Politics of Operation. See also Mezzadra, Sandro & Brett Neilson, “On the Multiple Frontiers of Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism,” Cultural Studies, 2017, pp. 185- 204. 66 Galloway, The Interface Effect, 136. Chinese gold farmer refers to a gamer who plays all day long to gain virtual gold and sell it for real money. 67 Ibid., 121. 81

absorption of human cognitive and affective capacities as well as sociality by computational systems.

The politics of difference, affect, and the future, once defended as sites of liberation, are fully subsumed by the global networks of capital and computational media today. In return, Galloway argues that the problem is no longer that bodies cannot speak, but that bodies always need to speak as:

If Spivak’s ‘can the subaltern speak?’ is emblematic of the 1980s and 1990s period of cultural politics, today the very terms of the question have changed dramatically. The question today is not so much can the subaltern speak, for the new global networks of technicity have solved this problem with ruthless precision, but where and how the subaltern speaks, or indeed, is forced to speak. It is not so much a question of can but does, not so much a politics of exclusion as a politics of subsumption.68

According to Galloway, the body has no choice but to speak – “the subaltern speaks, and somewhere algorithms listen.”69 The threat of invisibility has expanded to the extent that everyone is desperate to make words and images that could testify to their existence in an ever-encompassing informatic regime. Indeed, the colonies are the first content providers, such as the Syrian refugees struggling for survival who are

“overdetermined if not almost fully absorbed in the ambient semiosis that is part of the precarity of informatic financialization (…) along the lines of hierarchy of historically negotiated codes and codifications.”70

68 Ibid., 128. 69 Ibid., 137. 70 Beller, The Message is Murder, 166. 82

As Beller refers to Guy Debord, all that once was lived has become mere representation in the spectacle now.71 Programmed and weaponized apparatuses deconstruct and transform fixed identities into dividualized nodes in Gilles Deleuze’s terms. According to Beller, everyone, even white man, becomes a mirage, a placeholder, a function, and “strictly speaking no longer exists.”72 Consequently, for Beller, white man, as a “digitized neo-liberal” and “fascist-populist subject,” cannot embrace the dissolution of his white privilege brought by the very systems (and varied forms of contestations) and thus, instantiates new targets.73 Technologies like drones, are there to sustain this asymmetry of power while rendering profiting from the war-machine that drone has become. In Galloway’s terms, “with the media of simulation we have entered the phase of purely idealized racial coding, no longer merely the dirty racism of actual struggle.” 74

Despite his valid but over-the-top critique of identity politics (as if there weren’t other forms of racial politics), Galloway demonstrates how the discourses of liberation and inclusion become operational to the mechanisms through which capital extracts and accumulates on cultural difference. For Galloway, the virtual, or the new is no longer the site of emancipation but the primary mechanism of oppression. By drawing upon “the whatever” politics, mostly developed by Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, Galloway seeks a political agenda of “universality without collectivity” that does not presuppose

71 Ibid., 156. See also Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12. 72 Ibid., 157. 73 Ibid., 145. 74 Ibid., 142. 83

commonality or identity as a condition of belonging: “The whatever is an attempt to work through this dilemma, not by eliminating universality, but by showing how collectivity is the natural outcome of the generic, how the common is only achieved by those who have nothing in common.”75

In this regard, I share Galloway’s motivation for shifting the paradigm for envisioning the relationship between the universal and the particular without falling into the traps of either end. For instance, Galloway also mobilizes Susan Buck Morss’ reworking Hegel in the context of the Haitian Revolution for reframing the idea of universality by asking the question of “[c]an we rest satisfied with the call for acknowledging “multiple modernities,” with a politics of “diversality,” or

“multiversality,” when in fact the inhumanities of these multiplicities are often strikingly the same?”76 Similarly, my project acknowledges a similar sense of belonging that transcends identarian politics across national borders and exclusive categories of citizenship, thereby rethinking globality and history along with the axis of unlearning imperialism. Nonetheless, I diverge from Galloway’s emphasis on “the whatever” politics, which he could have concretized further with specific examples or strategies. In the end, I am interested in reworking Jameson’s framework, which still grasps the situatedness of one’s position to capital, in line with contemporary urban struggles and

75 Ibid., 142. 76 Ibid., 127. Galloway cites: Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 138. 84

countervisual practices rising against the violent operations and dissociative logics of racial capitalism.

Computational Capital

According to Beller, today’s machine-based codifications and abstractions, far from being value-neutral emergences in some degree-zero history of technology, are rather racialized, sex-gendered, and national formations of violence.77 Beller situates this very violence as directly inscribed into machine architectures. Here, it is crucial to highlight the historicity of racialized operations of computation; meaning that they are historically produced as a racialized mode of mediation. For Beller, race, gender, and media are co-constituted in the sense of being co-emergent historical formations. To this end, Beller makes a distinction between two streams of digital culture: Settler colonialism, plantation slavery, global commodification, and industrial capitalism instantiated the first order of digital culture (DC 1) with universalizing aspirations of the globally expansive assignation of quantity to qualities from the early modern period forward.78 The second order of digital culture (DC 2) marks a shift in the granularity and scale of colonialization with intensive development of algorithms as extracting and abstracting machines.

Building upon some tangential inquiries, Matteo Pasquinelli’s “algorithmic governance” and Bratton’s “platform sovereignty,” Beller coins the term computational

77 Beller, The Message is Murder. 78Ibid., 5-6. 85

colonialism for identifying the informatic organization of life for profitable value extraction along the vectors of social difference. For Beller, what is called “convergence” refers to a total informatic convergence in which financial, biometric, and computational operations are increasingly unified”79. The entangled relationship between finance and security systems operate through “the discursive, informatic, and screen-mediated production of social difference.” Hence, Beller argues that the contemporary world-media system is built on and out of the material and epistemological forms of racial capitalism.

Beller’s notion of computational colonialism renders the historical formation of information as violent as the history of capital itself because their histories overlap. As

Beller demonstrates, information is a historical achievement of capital, a higher-order

(real) abstraction. As Beller draws upon Simone Browne’s Dark Matters:

…the technologies of racialization and enslavement were at once horrific technologies of capitalist production, bent as they were on the violent conversion of people into objectified beings and processes, and also the precursors to current technologies. The histories and practices of racial violence are embedded within technologies of, for example, shipping and branding, and they are perpetuated by their contemporary development into logistics of surveillance and transmission.80

Besides pointing out how coloniality is embedded within the architectures of computational media, it is important to unpack how race acts as technology in contemporary societies. In her infamous essay “Race as Technology,” Wendy Chun highlights the historical role of race as a tool of social subjugation, thereby grasping race

79 Ibid., 20. 80 Ibid., 164-165. Here, Beller cites Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 86

not in terms of what it is but through what it does.81 Her conception of race as techne (in

Heidegger’s terms) help us to understand how race is employed to establish hierarchical differences between people, and thus, to render some populations into mere objects to be exploited, enslaved, measured, demeaned, and sometimes destroyed:

Race in these circumstances was wielded and is still wielded as an invaluable mapping tool, a means by which origins and boundaries are simultaneously traced and constructed, and through which the visible traces of the body are tied to allegedly innate invisible characteristics.82

By tracing the roots of race as technology back in the eras of Exploration (the 15-

16th century) and Enlightenment (the 18th century), along with the Scientific Revolution,

Chun highlights how the process of “seeing of” internal differences had made accidental characteristics appear essential, “prescriptors rather than descriptors.”83 Consequently, race has become a heuristic tool to reveal and make sense of the world around us. As this violence is literally inscribed in machine architectures and the bodies of all who are marginalized, it is absorbed by the normal functioning of informatic machines under the protocols of computational capital today, in Beller’s terms. In this sense, according to

Beller, this violence is organized and enforced in a matrix of valuation that tracks and weights factors of whiteness, masculinity, citizenship, and geopolitics: “Suffering

(suffering of others) can never fully be separated from the fact of ‘Westernized’ consciousness and thus logically capitalizing mediation.”84

81 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Race and/as Technology, or How to Do Thing with Race.” in Race after the Internet, ed. Lisa Makamura and Peter A. Chow-White. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 38-60. 82 Ibid., 40. 83 Ibid., 41. 84 Beller, The Message is Murder, 4. 87

Similar to Chun, Beller demonstrates how modern computation is situated not only in a continuum with the history of capitalism but also with the unconscious of modern thought due to the embeddedness of instrumental rationality within computational architectures. The inequalities endemic to modern thought and capitalism are operationally absorbed into our machines today. Similar to Jameson’s interpretive reading of literary works for excavating the political unconscious reflecting of their times, Beller approaches computational media as a surface to encounter the contradictions and limits of the capitalist logic.

Concomitantly, Beller brings up Walter Benjamin’s idea of “unconscious optics,” referring to the spatialization of the unconscious, which I situate closer to Jameson’s geopolitical aesthetic as a matrix of unconscious forces acting on the subject (within a film space).85 Thus, according to Beller, these spatial dynamics become part of the dialectical “semiosis of the optical field,” thereby acting as “the legible text of the unconscious and means by which to program the unconscious.”86 Consequently, the already integral status of imperial thinking within computational systems speaks to the larger historical context of what Benjamin identify as the aestheticization of politics,

“processing of data in a fascist sense.”87 In return, Benjamin makes his renowned call for the politicization of art, which is just another way of expressing the stakes of countervisual practices today. Indeed, Benjamin’s work on the dialectical relationship of

85 Ibid., 124. 86 Ibid., 125. 87 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 218, as cited in Beller, The Message is Murder, 125. 88

technology, vision, and time encourages us to grasp revolutionary potentials of computational systems as the contemporary medium of perception.88 The decay, or disintegration of aura in Benjamin’s terms, accelerated with coded, fragmented, and viral nature of networked media, could also become a moment of dismantling the value systems global capital keeps thriving on.

Upon this detour through Benjamin, I continue with Matteo Pasquinelli’s conception of artificial intelligent (AI) systems as simultaneously technical and social constructs.89 Thus, the logical and political fallacies of statistic models lie at the intersection of technical and social limits, which never can be divorced from one another.

AI systems, ultimately, refer to a statistical measure (rather than a machine intelligence per se) of a correlation between data points via the means of approximation and optimization techniques. In other words, a statistical correlation between two elements is used to explain the logical causation, whereas correlation does not imply causation. So, when a predictive system fails, this is not a technical but a political fallacy, as in the case of predictive policing. The underlying reason comes from the "calculated mistake" (in

Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva’s terms) of accepting statistical correlation as causation among real entities in the world. This is why Hito Steyerl argues that the cold war era conspiracy theories in Jameson’s terms are replaced by contemporary apophenia,

88 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968). 89 Matteo Pasquinelli, “How Machine Learns and Fails – A Grammar of Error for Artificial Intelligence” Spheres, #5 Specters of AI, November 2019, 3. 89

which disrupts the connection between one’s experience and the social reality they are part of.90

This is exactly where we could push it further to expose the limits of instrumental rationality, more specifically, its historicity – especially when the recurring economic and ecological crises do the same. Indeed, AI systems manifest the computational unconscious in Beller’s terms as we trace the operation of reification, underlying its constitution as an imperial apparatus. In Lefebvre’s terms, however, there emerges a social space that cannot be reduced to the relations of production, or the instrumental logic itself. In their distinct ways, this is where a wide range of theorists argue that computational media could express the limits of our capitalist society at large, by producing more than what it is instrumentalized for – beyond the instrumentalization of the life-world. For instance, Tiziana Terranova tackles the productive side-effects of automation of jobs and skills for reclaiming the commons91, or Luciana Parisi emphasizes the performative aesthetic of computation that cannot be contained by its design.92

This is a good place to refer back to the pioneering work of Donna Haraway, which provides us the figure of the cyborg93, as well as the vision of making new kin94, to

90 Steyerl, A Sea of Data: Pattern Recognition and Corporate Animism, 3-13. 91 Terranova, Red Stack. 92 Luciana Parisi. “Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Capitalism, and the Incomputable,” in Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas, ed. Matteo Pasquinelli (Lüneburg: meson press, 2016), 125-138. 93 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Simians, Cyborgs and Natures: The Re-Invention of Nature. (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), 149-183. 94 See also Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 90

transform the exceptionalism of human thinking stemming from colonial and patriarchal epistemologies, underlying our computational systems today. According to Jason Moore, it is precisely the capacity to objectify, measure and quantify life on earth enabled by the human/nature binary that has formed the foundation for the Western, modern subject who only sees the world relative to themselves and others as extensions of their will, to reduce racialized other, women, workers as well as the Earth itself to the level of objects valued for their exploitability.95

Consequently, decolonizing, or queering the instrumental reason has become an important method of possible intervention into imperial logic and operations of computational systems, which could never exhaust the social relations within which they are embedded. For instance, Chun asks: “Can we critically assume the role of abject in order to call into question the larger system of representation and its closure?”96

Provocatively, we could ask whether if we have all become the abject, since we can never be reduced to the normative formations that govern computational systems.

Nonetheless, it is not enough, and sometimes dangerous, to make oneself incalculable or uncountable (as in the case of refugees disappearing/dying amid the Mediterranean Sea without any government taking responsibility for it). So, invisibility is not necessarily a viable strategy. Instead, we could extend our scope of analysis and intervention by problematizing the usual modes of visualization and making possible other modes of agency and causality. In other words, we need to look at how the material, technical, and

95 Moore, Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. 96 Chun, Race and/as Technology, 51-52. 91

social limits of computational systems, very similar to capitalist operations, are legitimized and naturalized but also could be contested and transformed by the systems integral but external to their logic. The apparatus is ultimately a social relation, whose meaning is never complete. My reframing of Jameson’s cognitive mapping as countervisuality aims at coming to terms with the dialectical nature of computational capital.

Human-Technical Assemblages

As previously laid out, my project is interested in reconfiguring Jameson’s cognitive mapping due to the shifts in the granularity and scale of capitalist extraction that is increasingly materialized by human-technical assemblages. This is why I find it necessary to overview the strengths and limits of the existing literature on today’s complex and automated systems that transform our understanding of what human cognition and subjectivity entail. In return, Jameson’s emphasis on historicity allows us to historically situate the evolving forms and relations of power within the matrix of global capital and its imperial logic.

For instance, in Unthought, Katherine Hayles identifies human-technical assemblages, cutting across biological and technical cognizers, which situates information within the contexts through which its meaning comes forth. Thus, she attends to the contingent and performative nature of networked and automated systems, which

“create dynamic systems flexible enough to change their configurations continuously and stable enough to function within the complex architectures of human-technical

interactions.”97 With her idea of “planetary cognitive ecology,” Hayles infuses these cognitive assemblages with socio-technical-cultural-economic practices that instantiate and negotiate between different kinds of powers and modes of cognition.

Hayles is cautious, however, about putting too much emphasis on the agency of technical or material forces, celebrated by some scholarly endeavors such as new materialism. Even though those theoretical canons help us to acknowledge the importance of non-human cognizers, we should not flatten their distinction and underestimate the responsibilities of humans and the socio-economic systems in which they live. Moreover, Hayles incorporates affects and nonconscious processes into the registers of cognition, without establishing them as the ultimate end for politics or the optimum site of liberation itself. Then, the question has become how power is exercised, transformed, and distributed, especially when human cognition is largely interpenetrated by the technical one. Like Bratton, Hayles underlines the inherently political nature of cognitive assemblages and tackles the question of how human-technical systems could be extended to include not only technical devices but also involve overly political concerns such as violence and injustice.

Nonetheless, Hayles’ analysis falls short in terms of my project’s focus on the historicity of extractive operations of capital that fundamentally constitute the politics of these human-technical systems. Therefore, in the following parts of this section, I will delve into some other theoretical endeavors, which still adopt the model of assemblage

97 Katherine Hayles. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Non-Conscious (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), 197. 93

but with a more concrete emphasis on their racialized patterns within the matrix of computational colonialism. My reformulation of Jameson’s cognitive mapping as a countervisual practice in Mirzoeff’s terms underscores the relevance of intervening in a set of systems, or so-called assemblages, which organize our relationship to reality and history, and thus, ultimately, shape our political subjectivity.

In a similar way to Hayles’ reworking of Karen Barad’s quantum physics-inspired new materialism, Eric Snodgrass expands on the entanglements of physical and cultural formations. Snodgrass, however, diverges from Hayles’ appropriation with his shift toward the macro scale of historical dynamics. To this end, Snodgrass brings Barad’s

“material-discursive” approach, which underlines the mutually constituted and contingent formation of “matter and meaning,” in a dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s idea of orientations as a dynamic interpretation of historical carryovers. Ahmed speaks of how “[w]hat passes through history is not only the work done by generations but the ‘sedimentation’ of that work as the condition of arrival for future generations:”98

The terms orientations and sedimentation in Ahmed’s reading are meant to point beyond an object’s surface effects and any kind of ideal sense of givenness attributed to an object, and indicate instead towards a historical and materialist sensitivity that traces the condition of such “arrivals” of “what appears” in the object or process in question.99

98 Eric Snodgrass, Executions: Power and Expression in Networked and Computational Media, [Dissertation Series: New Media, Public Spheres and Forms of Expression] Malmö: Malmö University Press, 2017, 30. Here, Snodgrass cites: Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 41. 99 Ibid., 30. 94

Thus, Snodgrass emphasizes the historicity of the executable and coins the term

“compositional affordances.”100 Inspired by Matthew Fuller’s work on media as ecology

(constituted by the mutual intermeshing of a variety of forces), Snodgrass identifies compositional affordances as forces that directly inform the process and practice of making any given computational media executable. Thus, affordances could involve those of skin, silicon, the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as issues such as discursive norms within areas such as computer science, economics, and politics, all of which can potentially participate in informing, to various degrees, the question of what is executable in any particular instance and how an executable process might specifically be composed.101 More importantly, similar to Hayles’ emphasis, Snodgrass brings the question of power into the picture by asking how particular affordances lead to certain enactments of power. This is ultimately a matter of asking for whom such computationally-afforded practices work, and which bodies, relations, and forms of expression they include or exclude.

On a similar path, drawing upon both Karen Barad’s more-than-human theory of the performative102 and Luciana Parisi’s emphasis on the generative quality of algorithmic reasoning103, Ezekiel Dixon-Román coins the term algo-ritmo to identify

100 Ibid., 13. 101 Ibid., 13-14. 102 See: Karen Barad. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 103 See: Parisi, Luciana. Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013). 95

more-than-human performative acts of algorithmic architectures.104 For Dixon-Román, algorithms are sociotechnical-ontologies that are always in the process of becoming embedded within sociopolitical systems, legal practices, statistical models, and data sets.

Nonetheless, Dixon-Román mobilizes this systems-thinking for demonstrating how algorithms become “racializing assemblages” that differentiate and hierarchize lives.105

Here, Dixon-Román incorporates Alexander Weheliye’s theory of racializing assemblages to conceptualize “the racialized, classed, gendered, queered, and disabled shaping and forming of bodies within algorithmic architectures,” thereby locating the process of racialization not only within racist practices but also within the very process of differentiation and hierarchization of bodies as such.106

As Cathy O’Neil highlights with the term “weapons of math destruction,” the biases of predictive algorithms derive from the systems they are instrumentalized within, as they are applied to the governance of society and labor via statistical models.107 For instance, predictive policing relies on flawed statistics and models that reflect the inherent bias of not only data sets, but also the racialized criminal justice system.108 By turning race into a flattened category of input, decision makers do not only predict future behaviors of individuals (in which the risk score becomes a constructed attribute of the

104 Ezekiel Dixon-Román, "Algo-ritmo: More-than-Human Performative Acts and the Racializing Assemblages of Algorithmic Architectures,” Cultural Studies ↔Critical Methodologies, 16, no. 6, 2016, 482-490. 105 Dixon-Román, Algo-ritmo, 483. 106 Ibid., 487. Here, Dixon-Román cites: Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and Black feminist theories of the human. (Durham, Duke University Press, 2014). 107 Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction, (New York, Broadway Books, 2016). 108 Dixon-Román, Algo-ritmo, 15. 96

individual) but also speak with authority for claiming to the truth, while repressing the dynamics of history and error through which algorithms operate. In this regard, as I will discuss in the third chapter, militarized drone strikes are operationalized as racializing assemblages, too.

As Louise Amoore argues, it is difficult to develop a critical response to predictive algorithms; for instance, pointing to its errors and contingencies, because it is precisely through these variations that algorithms get trained, and learn what to do.109 If error is functional to machine learning, how can we account for errors that are productively reabsorbed into the model? Thus, as Parisi puts it, the truth model of machine learning algorithms cannot be based on their opposition to error or falsity.110 As they fabricate rather than discover facts, we need to call into question the very mode of truth-telling and decision-making that predictive algorithms offer. As Amoore highlights, predictive algorithms hold out the promise of securing against all possible futures with the collection and analysis of data, but doubt becomes the very terrain of algorithmic calculation since algorithms allow the indeterminacies of data to become a means of learning and making decisions.111

So, the problem is not so much that predictive algorithms are blackboxed, but rather a clear-sighted, transparent account would seem impossible. As Amoore explains,

109 Louise Amoore, “Doubt and the Algorithm: On the Partial Accounts of Machine Learning.” Theory, Culture & Society, 2019: 2-3. 110 Parisi, “Contagious Architecture”. Also see: Luciana Parisi, “Reprogramming Decisionism.” e-flux Journal, no. 85, 2017. 111 Amoore, Doubt and the Algorithm, 3. 97

however, doubt becomes transformed into a malleable arrangement of weighted probabilities, which contains a multiplicity of doubts in the model, later condensed into a single output with a numeric value between 0 and 1 (e.g. risk score). Consequently, algorithms pertain to the “ground truth,” a human-labeled set of training data from which the algorithms generate its model of the world. In other words, algorithms generate the parameters against which uncertainty will be adjudicated, such as targets of interest, weightings, and thresholds. The ultimate point of decision is rendered by a composite of algorithm designers, officers, the experimental models of the mathematical and physical sciences, a training dataset, and the generative capacities of machine-learning classifiers working on entities and events.

As a result, the parties involved in the decision-making process need to decide which type of error is ‘costlier’ and build their preference into the model. This point brings us back to the question of “what risk and costs, and for whom? (e.g. what is the optimal threshold of false positives to false negatives?). Thus, predictive algorithms, as racialized socio-technical assemblages, operate as an imperial apparatus. They do not cut through uncertainties or partial knowing but are instead enabled through them. Paired alongside the elasticity of definitional terms and modern fantasies of omniscience, algorithms generate a form of intangibility through which they function as an imperial apparatus.

Political Ontologies

Katherine Hayles’ model of human-technical assemblages introduces the conflicting tendencies of structure and agency, as well as stability and divergence along 98

with the question of how power is exercised, distributed, and negotiated. Nonetheless,

Hayles’ model falls short on the critique of systemically racialized operations of global capitalism and the constitutive role of computational media within it. Hayles’ emphasis on the nonconscious could be useful for balancing consciousness-focused analyses, but we still need to locate computational media within the long histories of modern thought and colonialism, like how Beller encourages us to attend to the unconscious of computational systems as a way of tackling those convoluted histories.

For instance, Orit Halpern, writing about Harun Farocki’s work on the use of immersive technologies in the treatment of war traumas demonstrates how the conditioning of reflexes by computational media transforms the nature of trauma itself:

“trauma here is not created from a world external to the system, but actually generated, preemptively, from within the channel between the screens and the nervous system.”112

Moreover, Halpern traces the historical roots of machinic vision in the Architecture

Machine Group at MIT in the 1970s, which reveals how race and gender play a critical part in conditioning these systems of spectatorship. In this sense, Hayles’ model is strong in terms of addressing the ever-widening collapse of cognition and computation and its socio-political implications. Nonetheless, we need to unpack the historicity of the forms and modes through which this collapse is mobilized within imperialist operations of global capital.

112 Orit Halpern, “The Trauma Machine: Demos, Immersive Technologies, and the Politics of Simulation.” In Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas, ed. Matteo Pasquinelli (Lüneburg: meson press, 2015), 54. Here, Halpern writes about Harun Farocki’s video installation Serious Games (2011). 99

To this end, I turn to Azoulay’s idea of the political ontology of the medium, which demonstrates how the form, usage, and technical development (of photography) goes along with a mutually imbricated trajectory of imperial practices. Interestingly,

Azoulay situates the origin of photography not in the moment of its invention in the 19th century, but its formation as a technique of extraction and erasure in the 15th-century body politic, having started with the destruction and exploitation of the New World.

Likewise, Mirzoeff highlights how the non-European became a space in which there was

“nothing to see,” not only through the invisibility or dehumanization of the colonized but also through the idea of man’s superiority, promoted by the ideal of the conquest of nature and the sovereign.113 As inspired by Azoulay, Beller traces the roots of the current extractive operations of digital media within the development of colonial rationality and the accompanying regime of visuality preceding the actual invention of the computer.

In this regard, Ferreira Da Silva exposes how colonial violence remains active in the global present, not only because of its ongoing instrumentalization by computational capital but also the underlying ethico-legal systems that are still intact today; for instance, the ideals of human rights and humanitarianism that shape the contemporary politics of migration and law enforcement. Her work demonstrates how the productive weapons of reason, the tools of science and history, constitute both man and his others as global- historical beings. In other words, she offers an account of racial subjection that cannot be distinguished from a global one. As she explicitly puts it, her critical move is not about

113 Mirzoeff, Visualizing the Anthropocene, 218. 100

ideologically unveiling how European Man “overrepresents” the human while disavowing all other modes of being human. Instead, she digs into the pioneers of modern thought, such as Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, who put forth the strategies of the will to truth:

... determinacy as deployed in Kant’s knowledge (scientific) program remains the core of modern thought: it is presupposed in accounts of the juridical and ethical field of statements (such as the human-rights framework) which (a) presume a universal that operates as an a priori (formal) determining force (effectivity), and which (b) produce objects for which “Truth” refers to how they relate to something else—relationships mediated by abstract determinants (laws and rules) that can only be captured by the rational things’ (including the human mind/soul) “principles of disposition.”114

Consequently, both scientific and ethical figuring of determinacy entered into

19th-century scientific accounts of human differences. The notions of rational and cultural difference are manufactured in knowledge procedures that reproduce physical and social configurations as effects and causes of (explanations for) mental (moral and intellectual) differences. Within the Kantian framework, humanity is the guiding ethical entity, possessing intrinsic value because humanity has the highest capacity for determining powers of universal reason, such as a free will. In his revision of the Kantian program, Hegel transforms World History into a scene of development – the self- actualization of universal reason. Thus, raciality as the onto-epistemological toolbox has transformed the spatial “others of Europe” into historical “others of whiteness.” “Man”

114 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value,” e-flux, #79, 201: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter- beyond-the-equation-of-value/ 101

has become the measure of all things, the subjective presentation of the universal value- form of capital.

Thus, according to Ferreira da Silva, raciality is a productive force within the working of global capitalism today. The production of cultural difference been always integral to capital in all the shapes it has taken.115 In this sense, it is not enough to map out how capital accumulates on cultural difference, but how racial violence is met with indifference, as it is morally, ethically or legally justified, like the calculated mistakes of neoliberalism. Indeed, Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. This imperial citizenship dooms different people who share a world to not coincide in it ontologically or politically. In da Silva’s terms, “the racial combines with other social categories (gender, class, sexuality, culture, etc.) to produce modern subjects who can be excluded from (juridical) universality without unleashing an ethical crisis”.116

Hence, I theoretically bring together Ferreira da Silva’s “global idea of race” and

Azoulay’s “political ontology” to reframe political consciousness based on the fact the imperial logic is always already integral to the so-called one’s positionality to capital.

Similar to da Silva’s global idea of race, Azoulay also emphasizes the productive nature of imperial rights, not only producing racial difference but also as foundational to

Western history and the subject. In their universal declaration, there is an erasure and

115 Chakravartty, Paula & Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt.” 116 Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, xxx. 102

extraction of those who are made noncitizens or flawed citizens in Azoulay’s terms (the racialized other, women, or refugees), which the violence of imperial rights is enacted on and naturalized by. According to Achille Mbembe, “owing to the “war on terror” and in line with aerial bombardments, extrajudicial executions (preferably with the help of drones), massacres, attacks, and other forms of carnage that set the overall tone, the idea according to which the West as the only province of the world able to understand and institute the universal is reemerging”.117

Therefore, it is not enough to trace the imperial violence in the violent acts of the state-capital nexus. We need to attend to its normative formations, such as the notion of citizenship itself. According to Azoulay, a differential system of citizenship discriminates against certain sectors of the governed population on the basis of differences of religion, gender, race, class, ethnicity, or language.118 Such a system constitutes certain groups of citizens as “flawed citizens” or noncitizens are. Consequently, both flawed citizens and noncitizens more exposed than “proper” citizens to hazards and risks, and their vulnerability is systematic, and thus normalized.119

In this regard, computational media, like photography, are foremost an imperial apparatus that reproduce the imperial divisions and rights and constituted them as given, in Azoulay’s terms.120 Like the Jamesonian dialectical view of the relationship between structure and agency, however, Azoulay’s emphasis on the historicity of the medium

117 Mbembe, Necro-Politics, 64. 118 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. 119 Ibid., 30. 120 Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. 103

affirms its dynamic nature rather than foreclosing its potentiality for a political will other than its programmed nature. In other words, the apparatus cannot be reduced to the logic

(whether colonial, national, or economic) that has dominated its operationalization as such. Thus, Azoulay offers a heuristic vocabulary to articulate a civil imagination as transcending “the individual mind,” by being constituted between individuals and shared by all.121

Ultimately, Azoulay is interested in the question of how photography accumulates civil skills, referring to an obligation to struggle against injuries inflicted on those others, citizens and noncitizens alike. As Wark writes about the First Gulf War as a network of global vectors, “to see it was to be implicated in it.”122 Similarly, Azoulay’s model of civil, political space is created by these vectors that rely on and produce new forms of encounter and visibility that transform how people, engaging with media (taking or looking at a photograph), imagine everyday life. The efforts to develop a political consciousness across the Global North/South divide do not build on an identification with the suffering of others but rather a realization that we are interdependent and responsible for one another as we are all governed by global capitalism and its accompanying regimes of visuality, even though unevenly. In a close resonance with Antonio Negri and

Michael Hardt’s idea of the commons, Azoulay come up with “worldly rights,”123 and

“worldly sovereignty.”124

121 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 5. 122 Wark, The Virtual Geography, 15. 123 Azoulay, Potential History, 139. 124 Ibid., 344. 104

As a result, there is no privileged subject, site, or method of cognitive mapping.

Nonetheless, there are some communities which have developed muscles for facing, contesting, and navigating the differential effects of global capitalism. We need to trace resonances across the recent social movements along with messy practices rather than cleanly defined theories.125 In other words, those struggles will persist, and in ways that are not reducible to our theories – where artistic practice could situate itself in the middle.

Rather than claiming one’s voice or identity, which still prey on the cultural difference, we could aim at “unlearning” imperial thinking and, thus, producing locally produced universalities that could collectively response to the ongoing urban struggles (as I unpack further with my case studies in the following chapters). This agenda brings the idea of cognitive mapping back to the realm of praxis.

Conclusion

After engaging with a wide range of theoretical iterations and relevant concepts that help me to revisit Jameson’s cognitive mapping, I would like to summarize my main points once again. I would like to emphasize the theoretical and political implications of the Jamesonian dialectical twist for both acknowledging the real subsumption of the social by computational capital and identifying the possible sites of contestation at the same time. To this end, I draw upon Mezzadra and Neilson’s understanding of extraction in the expanded sense, which underlines the conflicting, dialectical tendencies of capital itself, unifying and differentiating at once. Moreover, their emphasis on the inherently

125 Mirzoeff, Visualizing the Anthropocene. 105

relational nature of capital demonstrates how it relies on resources and relations that it cannot produce and how its multiple outsides include the social hierarchies predicated on race and gender among others. This dialectical move is crucial for my project, which situates the Middle East within the imperial operations of global capital.

Without undermining the historical contributions and present capacities of varied aesthetic engagements with computational media, I would like to identify the possible sites and forms of intervention within the scope of my project. My primary argument is that computational media are instrumentalized as an imperial apparatus within the matrix of racial capitalism today. In response, we need to bring back the historicity of those operations as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present, including from material conditions to ethico-legal systems. Following upon Beller, I extend my focus from technics to the surrounds of computational capital, including the racialized and gendered patterns of dispossession, labor, waste, and care.

Moreover, Ferreira da Silva’s emphasis on the analytics of raciality demonstrates that we should address how capitalist operations are not only racialized but also legitimized or justified as such. We need to intervene in the systems, which are constitutive of but external to capitalist operations. When the same logic is applied to computational media, it exposes the need to shift our focus toward the broader systems that operationalize computational media as an imperial apparatus. As various theorists put forth, despite its programmed nature, a technical apparatus is, ultimately, a social relation, producing sociality that cannot be reduced to its logic.

106

My focus on the inexhaustible sociality of capital refers back to the question of what kind of political encounters computational media could enable or inhibit. In my response, I expand my focus from the level of interface by mapping the resonances across social groups or movements that are not necessarily mediated by the interface directly, but by the flows and systems through which capital as well as media operate. For instance, when we analyze smart, sustainable urban technologies in Dubai, we need to examine the entangled relationship between the racialized patterns of devalued labor and the unevenly distributed impacts of environmental degradation in the Middle East. Or another example would be the disuse of media that preys on the same politics of invisibility. As Blake Atwood points out, the most vulnerable populations of Beirut reside alongside the city’s dumpsites, who are already marginalized within Lebanon’s sectarian structures of social and spatial organization. Consequently, Atwood raises the question of what happens to these neighborhoods when they become “the dumping ground for tons of trash, including waste from the very media devices that promise to challenge sectarian politics.”126 Thereupon, as Atwood puts forward, if we want to tell a story of media use in urban struggles, these populations are also part of the story we tell since media are material as much as our conditions are (65).

Yet, this condition creates, for Nixon, a representational problem as it raises the question of “how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the

126 Blake Atwood, “A City by the Sea: Uncovering Beirut’s Media Waste,” Communication Culture & Critique, no. 12: 2019, 60. 107

pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects and invisible harms.”127 Consequently,

Nixon connects the aesthetic problem of slow violence to the environmentalism that often only the poor, the most vulnerable can see. This is why I insist on revisiting Jameson’s cognitive mapping, which does not only provide a dialectical twist but also identifies a political problem in aesthetic terms and vice versa – and this is why I write about aesthetic practices in the rest of my dissertation as examples of unlearning imperial logic.

According to Jameson, cognitive mapping is not a prescriptive proposal, which invites praxis, or, I would add, rehearsal of unlearning imperialism in Azoulay’s terms.

However, it cannot be reduced to a mapping of various sites or events but claiming the right to look, as Mirzoeff puts it, which is never merely about seeing but making claim to a political collectivity. For instance, as Toscano and Kinkle observe, Trevor Paglen’s work becomes an act of cognitive mapping not when he uncovers the hidden sites of US military per se but when his project reveals the broader geographies and intervenes into the regimes of visuality corresponding to the U.S. military-industry complex.

Likewise, accumulating errors and breakdowns might fall short for the task of reformulating what the image of history and globality entail today. Indeed, the strategy of becoming incalculable, or uncountable, sometimes ends up hurting the most vulnerable, like the thousands of refugees disappearing in the Mediterranean Sea without any liability. Here, I do not mean to evaluate better or worse examples of cognitive mapping, which stands against the open-ended nature of the term itself. Nor do I want to

127 Nixon, Slow Violence, 3. 108

essentialize the task of cognitive mapping as an ultimate aesthetic or political end.

Instead, I try to concretize the potentials and limits of cognitive mapping, which I devote my whole project to navigating through.

Nonetheless, as Mirzoeff puts forth with his term counter-visuality, where capital hits the ground could become a setting in which counter-visual practices flourish, especially in the Global South and its equivalents in Western metropoles. According to

Mezzadra and Neilson, these are the sites where capital face conflicts, frictions, and resistances, as the material conditions and the abstract logic of capital clash. In the wake of planetary computational systems as well as ecological crises (and in the face of an ongoing global pandemic), we need to rethink globality, rather than dismissing it altogether.

In the following case studies, I occasionally address the question of how a computational aesthetic could help us to reconceptualize the medium of thought and produce locally established universalities. This is part of a long journey of unlearning imperialism that contest the aesthetic regime through which the neoliberal state-capital nexus attempts to legitimize the imperial logic and violence it preys on. In Azoulay’s terms, we need to aim for “cocitizenship,”128 building a set of practices shared by different social groups, who oppose racial capitalism, and its institution of citizenship as a set of rights against and the expense of others. In other words, those struggles will persist but not reducible to our theories. In the end, my project characterizes an aesthetic

128 Azoulay, Potential History, 72. 109

that does not exist, not because it is not possible yet, but rather, it cannot be encapsulated within a formula since it is always already in the process of making on the streets.

110

Chapter Two – Calculated Mistakes of Neoliberalism: Smart Weapons and Forensic Aesthetics

Militarized drone strikes are based on predictive algorithms that are not unlike those used in the technical analysis of the financial stock market or environmental degradation, all of which interpret and display future outcomes by analyzing past patterns. In contrast, Forensic Architecture simultaneously investigates the incidents of militarized drone strikes, environmental crimes, migration politics, and the cuts on public housing and services (e.g. the Grenfell Tower fire in London). All these incidents are not the same; however, when mapped together they reveal the material-discursive networks through which the state-capital nexus maintains and justifies itself in the face of its recurring crises. In other words, these incidents in their totality reflect the calculated mistakes of contemporary neoliberalism.

Forensic Architecture’s investigations enact a cognitive mapping that necessarily reworks the imperial ethico-legal systems that are historically entangled with the constellations of vertical and visual field. Our analysis of the frontiers of computational capital requires our attention directed to the materializing relations between objects, designs, environments, and bodies that enacts the matrix of valuation by tracking and weighting factors of whiteness, masculinity, citizenship, and geopolitics. Countervisual practices can be understood as responses to this operation insofar as they unpack and contest the economic, legal, media, and symbolic systems that animate computational media in the Middle Eastern context.

111

Drawing upon the critical scholarship on drone warfare, this chapter1 argues that drones’ mistargeting of civilians is neither exception nor error but is instead intrinsic to the rationale behind militarized drone strikes. A historical overview of the cultural imaginaries and biopolitical formations corresponding to drone warfare reconfigures drone technology as an apparatus of racialized state violence. Therefore, an analysis of their affordances cannot be thought in isolation from the historicity of the material and discursive systems that underlie those strikes. Towards the end of the chapter, I will also briefly discuss the recent project by Forensic Architecture, Triple Chaser, which tracks the hazardous use of tear gas by police and army forces against civilians around the world

(including the US/Mexico border, Gaza, and Istanbul among many other cities). This project underscores the importance of mapping out contemporary forms of imperial structures within which our use and analysis of computational media are placed. Like in the case of militarized drone operations, the violence against people and surroundings is redoubled by the violence against the evidence. Contesting the ideals of omniscience that dominates today’s information societies, Forensic Architecture’s research shows how data relations reproduce the regime of visuality that obscures the continuing imperial violence. As a result, they invert the forensic gaze through an architectural mode of analysis and political commitment to “the right to look” in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms.

1 Earlier version of this chapter was published as: Iscen, Ozgun Eylul. “Forensic Aesthetics for Militarized Drone Strikes: Affordances for Whom, and for What Ends?.” Media Theory, [Special Issue: Rethinking Affordance], Vol 3, No. 1, 2019, 239-268. ISSN 2557-826X. Available open access at: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/86 112

Ultimately, their investigations are direct interventions into the operationalization of contemporary militarized technology as a technical, discursive, and political apparatus.

Militarized Drone Strikes

Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have become fetishized technical objects. They are popularly known for their technological acuity, despite the fact that they regularly fail.2 Weaponized drones in particular regularly crash or hit civilian non-combatants34. Drones’ aerial perspective and seeming removal of human pilots from active conflict zones speak seductively to Modern fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence.56 In actuality, drone technology is far from mastery, as it is contingent upon an expansive assemblage of bodies, machines, algorithms, and signals as well as noise, ambiguity, and delay. Militarized drone strikes operate through the further triangulation of: the visualization methods of drone surveillance; the procedures of target- construction (which rely on both human and artificial intelligence); and the materials (e.g. the air that signals go through) and bodies (e.g. human laborers) involved in strike events.

2 Chandler, Katherine, “Drone Errans,” talk, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, 12 June 2018, Berlin, Germany. Uploaded on September 10, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Cxnh9ZI7E&list=UUYQNklqDl5CjL314I-PxI3Q&index=25 3 There is a huge disparity in civilian death tolls between the U.S. official reports and other resources, which is largely caused by the U.S. method of counting who is an enemy combatant. For further information: NYU and Stanford Law Clinics. Living under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan, September 2012: https://law.stanford.edu/wp- content/uploads/sites/default/files/publication/313671/doc/slspublic/Stanford_NYU_LIVING_UNDER_D RONES.pdf 4 See the online site of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war 5 Caren Kaplan, “Mobility and War: The Cosmic View of US ‘Air Power,” Environment and Planning A, 38(2), 2006, 401. 6 Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary, 141. 113

A variety of juridical arrangements, cultural imaginaries, and biopolitical formations also accompany the operationalization of militarized drone strikes.78

Individuals are produced as threats, and thus as legitimate targets, while the spaces where this form of state-sanctioned violence occurs are rendered unruly, and therefore threatening.9 And yet, drone surveillance does not lead to greater precision, but rather to a prevalent misapprehension of both the technology’s limits and the civilian casualties, whose actions and social customs are misread as a terrorist activity.10 Drones do not help to cut through the fog of war and the uncertainties that accompany war practices, but are instead enabled through them. The oversight and secrecy of these operations, paired alongside the elasticity of definitional terms, generate a form of intangibility through which militarized states mobilize rationalization for drone violence.

Militarized drone operations enact a form of necropolitical violence that produces regions and populations where death is deemed acceptable. This is enabled through the articulation of racialized distinctions, drawn between populations deemed worthy of life and populations whose very livelihood is framed as a threat to the essential health and

7 Lisa Parks & Caren Kaplan, C. ed. Life the Age of Drone Warfare (Durham: Duke University Press 2017), 18. 8 Along with the fact that it is hard to find or confirm reliable sources for detailed information on drone warfare, here is a report prepared by a US-based public policy-focused think tank, New America, that came up with some data analysis and visualization. Their analyses demonstrate which/how countries have developed, acquired, and used armed drones over time. According to the report, the United States, Israel, and China are the biggest producers and sellers of drones. The acquirement and use of armed drones are rapidly increasing worldwide: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/world- drones/introduction-how-we-became-a-world-of-drones 9 Oliver Kearns, “Secrecy and Absence in the Residue of Covert Drone Strike,” Political Geography 57, 2017, 15. 10 Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary, 142. 114

safety of the former.11 Working within this context, drone operators do not only misidentify their targets due to the difficulties of coordinating disparate flows of information in real-time, but also as a result of the racialized modes of knowing that govern and are actualized through militarized drone strikes.12

This is made explicit, in part, through the aesthetics of drone vision. The scale and delay of satellite images turn all bodies into indistinct human morphologies that cannot be distinguished from one another. The representation of bodies as depersonalized pixels as well as the corresponding erasure of difference – ambiguity, complexity, and context – facilitates processes of dehumanization.13 These erasures generate a racialized homogeneity that collapses all individuals into an indistinguishable threat. The results are further concretized through the drone’s technological apparatus itself, as local and non-

Western characteristics are rendered illegible through the decidedly Western and

Eurocentric socio-technological codes available to drone operators (for example, in relation to social customs and clothing).14 In other words, drones are not designed to see humans, but rather to surveil the already racially dehumanized. This racializing logic persists as certain people’s territories, bodies, movements, and information are selected for monitoring, tracking, and targeting regularly enough to become “spectral

11 Jamie Allinson, “The Necropolitics of Drones,” International Political Sociology, 9 (2), 2015, 121. 12 Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary, 135. 13 Tyler Wall & Torin Monahan, “Surveillance and Violence from Afar: The Politics of Drones and Liminal Security-Scapes,” Theoretical Criminology, 15(3), 2011, 239-254. 14 Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary, 141. 115

suspects.”1516

Drawing upon the critical scholarship on drone warfare, this chapter argues that drones’ mistargeting of civilians is neither exceptional nor erroneous but is instead integral to the operationalization and rationalization of militarized drone strikes.

Instances of mistargeting should therefore not be overlooked merely as failures of design in need of fixing; rather, they are aligned with and actively materialize historical and structural issues associated with the colonial legacies and racialized logics that underlie the development and current applications of drone technology. The operationalization of a drone strike is predicated on telecommunication networks and ground stations (which require access to land) as well as ground surface, air, spectrum, orbit, labor and energy.17

Thus, militarized drone strikes not only operate through technologies of vision, navigation, and pattern recognition, but also rely upon a set of political, territorial, and juridical reconfigurations, which make the rationale of drone technology far more diffuse than the straight line between an aircraft and a target.”18 This is why Weizman identifies these edges of the established frames of jurisdiction, criminal justice system, and sovereignty as drone frontiers.19

15 Lisa Parks. “Vertical Mediation,” in Life the Age of Drone Warfare, ed. Lisa Parks & Caren Kaplan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 145. 16 With this term, Parks refers to the process of visualization of data (e.g. temperature) “that take on the biophysical contours of a human body while its surface appearance remains invisible and its identity unknown.” Parks examines aerial infrared drone imagery, which is able to isolate suspects according to the energy emitted by their bodies. In this regard, Parks argues that visual surveillance practices are extended beyond epidermalization while operating within a radiographic episteme and at spectral levels. 17 Ibid., 137. 18 Eyal Weizman, “Introduction, Part II: Matter against Memory,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, eds. Eyal Weizman, Anselm Franke, & Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 369. 19 Ibid., 116

Complicating the vertical field further, Lisa Parks reconfigures drones as technologies of “vertical mediation,” capable of registering the dynamism of materials, objects, sites, surfaces or bodies on Earth. Parks’ conceptualization of “vertical mediation” refers not only to “the capacity of drone sensors to detect phenomena on the

Earth’s surface,” but also to “the potential to materially alter or affect the phenomena of the air, spectrum, and/or ground.”20 The drone’s mediating work occurs extensively and dynamically through the vertical field, moving from geological layers and built environments to the domains of spectrum, the air and the outer limits of orbit. By emphasizing verticality, Parks underscores the materializing capacities and effects of drone operations that reorder, reform, and remediate life on Earth in the most material ways. This is how drones establish, materialize, and communicate “vertical hegemony,” the ongoing struggle for dominance and control over the vertical field.2122

Although he did not share a similar emphasis on the politics of verticality23, James

J. Gibson’s ecological understanding of affordance might prove a useful entry point for

20 Parks, Vertical Mediation, 135. 21 Lisa Parks, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1-24. 22 In her examination of U.S. hegemony after 9/11, Parks coins the term “vertical hegemony” which “involves efforts to maneuver through, active technologies within, occupy, or control the vast stretch of space between the earth’s surface and the outer limits of orbit as well as the kinds of activities that can occur there” (3). 23 Gibson’s theory of ecological perception was rooted in his wartime research with aircraft and pilots while appointed at the U.S. army. During the Second World War, Gibson became interested in pictures and films as a psychologist concerned with training young soldiers to fly airplanes (Gibson, [1979] 2015, 261-262). Gibson’s theory of vision also shifted the paradigm of early computer graphics later on. See Jacob Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as Material Object,” Journal of Visual Culture, 14 (1), 2015, 40-60. Gaboury argues that Gibson’s model of vision is indeed a simplified model of perception, which was not based on an embodied sense of place but on an informational engagement with the relational boundaries of the objects in a visual array (the external relationality of points, lines, surface). 117

addressing the vertical reconfigurations of militarized drone strikes. According to Gibson, the world is not a physical girding or a container of bodies in space, but is better understood through the complexity of environmental relations and the notion of the medium.2425 For Gibson, environmental interfaces, such as the earth, act as groundings for an organism’s action.26 We act and perceive at the level of mediums, surfaces, and substances, which is to say, in terms of affordances. An object is not that which it is “of itself,” but is conceived of instead as that which it might become in correspondence with other elements. Gibson underlines how these affordances are relative to the physical properties of both the environment and the organism in question, thereby emphasizing the relationality of affordances.27 This relationality, however, is not only comprised of physically instantiated objects. Indeed, Eric Snodgrass proposes the term “compositional affordances,” to underscore how:

[a]ffordances (e.g. of skin, silicon, the electromagnetic spectrum) form and are informed by inclusions and exclusions of further intersecting discourses (of politics, computer science, economics), the expressions and processual actualization of which can be seen in the situated, executing practices of any given moment.28

Thus, Snodgrass’ reformulation of affordance in compositional terms positions it as a form of mediation that cuts across material and discursive systems and the

24 Jussi Parikka Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 25 Parikka connects Gibson’s “ecology of visual perception” to the works of media/cultural theorists as well as philosophers, whose works contribute to what is characterized as “milieu-medium theory” (2010, 169- 171). 26 Gibson, J.J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, [1979] 2015), 119-120. 27 Ibid., 121. 28 Snodgrass, Executions, 25. 118

intersecting registers of power that become manifest in such moves. From this perspective, drone technology can be reconfigured as discursive and political apparatus as much as a material and technical one. What emerges from this context is a series of questions concerning how material and discursive systems shape the possibilities and actualizations of certain affordances over others, which is to ask, how the perceived affordances of a given technology emerge within and help to maintain, intensify, or negotiate existing regimes of power. As the asymmetrical relations that militarized drone strikes operate through might suggest, this is ultimately a question of “affordance for whom?”

In this regard, this chapter argues that the notion of affordance cannot be thought in isolation from the historicity of a given technical object and its operationalization, which is never merely technical but always already highly political. Correspondingly, I develop a position from which to assess and actualize what computational media might afford in terms of confronting state-sanctioned forms of drone-enabled violence. The potential for and terms of critical intervention will be explored through an analysis of investigative research undertaken by the multidisciplinary and collaborative research group Forensic Architecture. Forensic Architecture’s investigations of covert drone strikes address the material, media, and legal systems through which those strikes operate, and thus intervene into the time-space relations that characterize the politics of verticality and its entanglement with the one of visuality.29

29 Forensic Architecture conducted detailed case analyses of the U.S. and Israel’s drone strikes that took place in Pakistan, Yemen, and Occupied Palestinian Territories: Datta Khel, North Waziristan, March 16- 119

Within the scope of the current project, I demonstrate how Forensic

Architecture’s ongoing investigations enacts the right to look in Mirzoeff’s terms, and eventually, guide us to rethink what Jameson’s model of cognitive mapping entails today.

To this end, as I argue, Forensic Architecture repurposes computationally-informed technologies for connecting singular events to larger patterns of contemporary warfare.

Indeed, their investigations do not only render the events and sites of covert drone operations visible but also trace the continuum along seemingly dissociated spatial and temporal relations underlying the contemporary technologies of visuality, surveillance, and violence that are operational to the current neoliberal governance at large. For example, militarized drone strikes are based on predictive algorithms that are not unlike those used in the technical analysis of the financial stock market or environmental degradation, all of which interpret and display future outcomes by analyzing past patterns30.

Indeed, their aesthetic and political framework is also apparent in their website design, where they publicly share the relevant resources, techniques (e.g. open source code), and outcomes of their investigations. On their website, it is made easier to navigate through different investigations, based on their category, methodology, location and relatedness. They present information in varied forms including from video report and

17, 2011; Mir Ali, North Waziristan, October 4, 2010; Miranshah, North Waziristan, March 30, 2012; Beit Lahiya, Gaza, January 9, 2009; Jaar and al Wade’a, Abyan Province, Yemen, 2011. For further information on drone/air strike investigations, see: https://forensic-architecture.org/category/airstrikes 30 The associations, which algorithms work through, escape the laws of cause and effect, as they rely on correlational patterns, and thus operate in a fluid state of exception. Predictive algorithms encompass the financial sector, the military-security nexus, and the entertainment industry. See Manuel Abreu, “Incalculable Loss,” The New Inquiry, August, 2014. https://thenewinquiry.com/incalculable-loss/ 120

maps to timelines and external links while including information on their funding bodies and partnerships. In contrast to intangibility and dissociative logic, through which the state-capital nexus attempts to legitimize its violence, Forensic Architecture lays out the processes and results of their work transparently and collaboratively.

Surely, all these incidents are not the same; however, when mapped together, they demonstrate that any effective analysis of militarized drone technology as a complex technical, discursive, and political apparatus must explore the interconnections – spatial, vertical, and historical – that it exposes or produces. In this regard, the “right to look” in

Mirzoeff’s terms takes the form of this very mapping that resituates affordances of militarized drone technology within larger flows of aesthetics, violence, and capital. The affordances of any given technology cannot be thought in isolation from its compositional affordances, namely the affordances which it is enabled by and which it helps to make possible.

Preemptive Logic and Space of Exception

The U.S. has been conducting overseas drone strikes since October, 2001. In the aftermath of 9/11, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the American administration launched a secret program that put hundreds of unmanned surveillance and attack aircraft into the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan.31 Since then, the highly secretive Central Intelligence Agency and Joint Special Operations Command have

31 Priya Satia, “Drones: A History from the British Middle East,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 5 (1), 2014, 1-31. 121

carried out hundreds of strikes in countries outside U.S. declared war zones, including

Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, while Israel has been conducting drone attacks over Gaza since 2004.32 Advocates argue that the drone program reduced the need for messy ground operations like those associated with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. However, those militarized drone operations killed or injured hundreds, if not thousands, of suspected

“terrorists” and civilians, many of whom have never been counted or identified.33

After Barack Obama came into office34, drone use increased dramatically with the expansion of signature strikes based on a “pattern of life” analysis.35 Signature strikes target groups of adult men, who are believed to be militants affiliated with terrorist activity, but whose identities are not confirmed. These strikes, made without knowing the precise identity of the individuals targeted, rely solely on the target’s tracked behavior and how the corresponding pattern aligns with the “signature” of a predefined category that the U.S. military deems to be a suspected terrorist activity. The preemptive logic underlying these drone-enabled assassinations assumes that people can be targeted not for the crimes that they have legitimately committed, but rather for actions that may be committed in the future. As Grégoire Chamayou emphasizes, this marks a shift from the

32 The US conducted its first known drone strike Yemen in 2002 , which targeted Abu Ali al Harithi, a member of al Qaeda since the 1990s and the leader of the group's presence in Yemen: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/drone-war/data/yemen-reported-us-covert-actions-2018 33 The information is gathered from the following websites of Forensic Architecture: https://forensic- architecture.org/investigation/the-drone-strikes-platform and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war 34 The current U.S. President Donald Trump inherited the framework of drone operations outside the declared battlefields from his predecessor, Barack Obama. The Trump administration, however, expanded battlefield designation and escalated the numbers of strikes in Somalia and Yemen while having rolled back airstrike transparency. See https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/obama-drones-trump-killings-count/ 35 Grégoire Chamayou, Drone Theory, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 46. 122

category of “combatant” to “suspected militant.”36 The decision to target is based on the identification of a behavior or a pattern of life that merely suggests a potential affiliation with terrorism. Thus, the “predictive” algorithms used for determining targets, underscore the preemptive logic of drone warfare as symptom of the more general phenomenon of preemption – which often operates as a racializing technology within the context of

Global War on Terror.37 As Brian Massumi highlights, this preemptive logic indicates an ontologically and epistemologically “operative logic” (rather than causal one) that turn the objective uncertainty into a productive force.38

American and Israeli administrations rely on the indefinite elasticity of the terms that define a legitimate target to legitimize their military’s assassination programs. This currently brings most civilians living in so-called “troubled zones” under a constant state of surveillance and threat of drone strike.39 It is through a long history of colonial law in the Middle East and South Asia that such “frontier” and tribal zones are produced as places where the sovereignty of its people is intentionally overlooked, delineating a

“politically productive zone of exception.”40 According to Derek Gregory, The U.S. has capitalized on and contributed to a series of overt legal maneuvers through which the

FATA has been constituted as what Giorgio Agamben has called more generally a “space of exception”: a space in which “a particular group of people is knowingly and

36 Ibid., 145. 37 Andrea Miller, “(Im)material Terror,” in Life the Age of Drone Warfare, ed. Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 133. 38 Massumi, Ontopower, 15. 39 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 145. 40 Jacob Burns, “Persistent Exception” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, eds. Eyal Weizman, Anselm Franke, & Forensic Architecture, (Berlin: Stenberg Press, 2014), 400. 123

deliberately exposed to death through the political-juridical removal of legal protections and affordances that would otherwise be available to them.”41

Similarly, Madiha Tahir highlights that regional governance and U.S. drone warfare undertaken in tribal zones are extensions of British colonial administration and policing, tied to the spatial organization on the ground.42 In other words, far from being in a state of “lawlessness,” tribal zones are instead subject to what Sabrina Gilani calls “an overabundance of law.”43 This “respatialization” has produced what Keith Feldman refers to as “racialization from above,” recasting “Orientalist imagined geography” through new scales of relation and division.4445Therefore, the time-space relations that characterize drone warfare underscore the politics of verticality and its historical underpinnings.

Drones as an Apparatus of Racialized State Violence

The weaponized drone aircraft is not a mechanism of violence that came into being in a sudden moment of techno-military innovation. Instead, “drone bombings emerge and thus can be also critiqued as the latest episode of a more protracted process of state violence and domination.”46 While a thorough review of these histories exceeds the

41 Derek Gregory, “Dirty Dancing: Drones & Death in the Borderlands,” in Life the Age of Drone Warfare, ed. Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 28-29. 42 Tahir, Madiha. ‘The Containment Zone,’ Life the Age of Drone Warfare, ed. Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 221. 43 Gilani, Sabrina, “‘Spacing’ Minority Relations: Investigating the Tribal Areas of Pakistan Using a Spatio-Historical Method of Analysis,” Social and Legal Studies, (1), 2015, 371. 44 Parks & Kaplan, Life the Age of Drone Warfare, 4. 45 Keith P. Feldman, “Empire’s Verticality: The Af/Pak Frontier, Visual Culture and Racialization from Above,” Comparative American Studies, 9 (4), 2011, 325-241. 46 Afxentis Afxentiou, “A History of Drones: Moral(e) Bombing and State Terrorism,” Critical Studies on Terrorism, 11 (2), 2018, 302. 124

scope of this chapter, it is worth highlighting a few key historical episodes in the 20th century that informed the political emergence of aerial technologies, shaping their realization as racialized technical apparatuses. In this section, I will briefly cover the colonial era, the Cold War period, and the neoliberal turn with the goal of tracing the continuum across these periods. Nonetheless, I also choose not to divide the narrative into separate periods to underscore the idea that colonial practices are not the residuals of the past but are actively produced in the present while preying on existing but also shifting registers of coloniality.

Tracing the colonial histories of aerial technologies, Priya Satia proposes a continuity between the British rule in Iraq in the 1920s and the American invasion of Iraq

(with the UK as its ally) in 2000s.47 The British Mandate used aerial control and bombardment in early 20th century Iraq, where surveillance and punishment from above were intended as a permanent, everyday methods of colonial administration.48 The region was defined as somewhere “out of senses,” which created an epistemological and political problem out of an unknown that needed to be kept under control. Satia argues that cultural understandings of the region, shaped by unruly and illegible geographical conditions and a coinciding set of orientalist ideas, guided the invention and application of British aircrafts at the time of the British Mandate. Racist and imperialist understandings of cultural difference shaped the practical organization of surveillance in

47 Satia, Drones. 48 Ibid., 2. 125

the Middle East, giving rise to and in turn legitimizing its violent excesses.49

According to Satia, Royal Air Force officers justified the brutality of the interwar air control scheme in Iraq by relying on racist assertions. For example, F. H. Humphreys, the head of the British administration in Iraq, cautioned against distinguishing between non-combatant and combatant civilians as “the term ‘civilian population’ has a very different meaning in Iraq from what it has in Europe ... the whole of its male population are potential fighters as the tribes are heavily armed.”50 The idea that colonized populations were always already liable to being bombed was therefore a result of what was understood to be their inherently “disobedient” nature meant that air control did not simply denote a reactive military action, but also a preventative measure intended to keep colonial subjects under control; maintaining a state of horror, became an effective means of preserving colonial order in the long term.51

The U.S.’ current deployments of militarized drone operations indicate an effective reproduction of these historical and material conditions of colonial violence.

Even more broadly, contemporary tactics of “Global Counterinsurgency” call upon computational methods to racialize and categorize certain regions as threatening, weak, or failing states requiring permanent control.52 As Timothy Vasco argues, this formalization of space and the bodies within it (which he refers to as “reconnaissance- strike complexes”) performs ‘the labor of simultaneously separating friend from enemy,

49 Ibid., 11. 50 Ibid., 10. 51 Afxentiou, A History of Drones, 312-313. 52 Mirzoeff, Countervisuality, 307. 126

here from there, us from them, while at the same time exposing the latter to the self- evidently necessary violence of a drone strike in which the presence of a secured, singular, and universal power like the United States is fully realized.’53 Indeed, as

Mirzoeff makes a reference to Michel Foucault, the goal of counterinsurgency is not to generate stability but to normalize “the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war,” not as politics, but as “cultural,” the web of meaning in a given place and time.”54

Referencing Nishant Upadhyay’s notion of “colonial continuum,”55 Rhee explains that “drone strikes are evoked as events of exceptional violence that occur overseas, rather than part of a continuum of state-sanctioned racial violence that occurs in the West and is, as Upadhyay notes, both normalized and foundational to the production of the

West.”56 Indeed, Rhee draws a connection between overseas drone strikes and the histories and present realities of state-sanctioned violence within the U.S., thereby positioning the historical and continued influence of colonialism across nation-states and regions.57 Ultimately, Rhee argues that militarized drone technology works to affirm the continued dominance of the Western, Post-Enlightenment subject (of reason, autonomy) as an ontological and epistemological center, while rendering other populations

53 Timothy Vasco, “Solemn Geographies of Human Limits: Drones and the Neocolonial Administration of Life and Death,” A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture and Action 6 (1), 2013, 90. 54 Mirzoeff, Countervisuality 307. 55 Nishant Upadhyay, “Pernicious Continuities: Un/Settling Violence, Race and Colonialism,” Sikh Formations 9 (2), 2013, 267. 56 Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary, 148. 57 Here, Rhee refers to Wall and Monahan’s emphasis on the commonality of the strategies and disproportionate targeting between the U.S.’ domestic war on crime (e.g. New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk- program) and global war on terror. 127

disposable, exploitable, or exposable to racialized violence.5859

According to Rhee, racial dehumanization – various inscriptions and erasures of the human – is embedded in both the present drone technology/policies as well as in the earlier histories of cybernetics.60 As Peter Galison details, cybernetics, as a war science, was an entry point to the machine-human systems that were already shaped around the racialized discourses.61 The founding cybernetician Norbert Wiener’s work during the

Second World War was dedicated to anti-aircraft defense systems which aimed to track and predict the flight patterns of enemy pilots. As Galison demonstrates, however, enemies were not all alike.62 On one hand, there was the Japanese soldier who was barely human in the eyes of the Allied Forces. On the other hand, there was a more enduring enemy, a “cold-blooded and machine-like” opponent composed of the hybridized

German pilot and his aircraft.63 Galison calls this enemy the “cybernetic Other,” arguing that it led the Allied Forces to develop a new science of communication and control in line with the fantasies of omniscience and automation.

As a legacy of the Cold War period64, cybernetics became a framework through which the idea of the human was increasingly conceptualized. Wiener and his

58 Ibid., 135. 59 Here, Rhee draws upon the works of Denise De Silva, Sylvia Wynter, and Nishant Upadhyay (135-136). 60 Ibid., 137. 61 Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,”Critical Inquiry 2 (1), 1994, 228- 266. 62 Ibid., 231. 63 Ibid., 231. 64 The cybernetics’ premises of predictability and control were closely tied to the politics of Cold War. According to Joseph Masco, the U.S. Global War on Terror mobilized a wide range of affective, conceptual, and institutional resources established during this period. See: Masco, Joseph. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 128

compatriots’ efforts to predict the future moves of the enemy airplane, became an effort to compute human action, and, ultimately, an aspiration to develop communication between a range of entities – humans, animals, and machines.65 Thus, early computational machines proposed that human behavior could be mathematically modeled and predicted. Rather than describing the world as it is, their interest was to predict what it would become, and to do it in terms of homogeneity instead of difference: “This is a worldview comprising functionally similar entities— black boxes—described only by their algorithmic actions in constant conversation with each other, producing a range of probabilistic scenarios.”66 According to Orit Halpern, the early cybernetics, as well as the information theory it inspired, relied on a “not-yet-realized aspiration to transform a world of ontology, description, and materiality to one of communication, prediction, and virtuality.”67

Drawing upon methods of techno-feminist critique68, Lauren Wilcox argues that cybernetic conceptualizations of “the human” that seek to promote an “other than” or

“more than” human reifies a particular normative version of humanity, which in turn enables distinctions between more or less worthy forms of life.69 According to Katherine

Chandler, much of the analysis of drone technology forefronts the technical systems that

65 Orit Halpern, “Dreams for Our Perceptual Present: Temporality, Storage, and Interactivity in Cybernetics,” Configurations, 13 (2), 2005, 281. 66 Ibid., 287. 67 Ibid., 285. 68 For this particular point, Wilcox draws upon Katherine N. Hayles’ book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999). 69 Lauren Wilcox, “Embodying Algorithmic War: Gender, Race, and the Posthuman in the Drone Warfare,’ Security Dialogue, 48 (1), 2016, 11-28. 129

undergird these “unmanned” and autonomous aircraft, while dismissing the decisive role that humans play in their operation.70 Drones are either positioned as “superhuman,” referencing drones’ capacity for performing various tasks “better” than humans, or they work to “de-humanize” drone warfare, by ostensibly replacing the humanity of the operator or targeted person with a set of technical operations. In either case, the analysis of drone aircraft as an assemblage of human-media-machine is reduced to a fascination with the technology’s capacity for replicating and improving upon human actions, which is also imagined as technologically inevitable.

Following upon Donna Haraway’s pioneering work in “A Cyborg Manifesto,”

Chandler reinterprets drones as cyborgs in order to reformulate binary worldviews embedded within the dominant rhetoric of “unmanning”:

Indeed, today’s drones might be cyborgs, a point that underscores the text’s cautionary reminder that the synthesis between human and machine it celebrates is first and foremost a product of the Cold War military- industrial complex. Yet cyborgs and drones remain bastards, never acknowledged for their mixtures.71

By complicating the cyborg nature of drones, Chandler demonstrates how drones are not dualistic, but rely instead on a dissociative logic that disconnects the parts – human and machine – that their operations actually link together.72 To illustrate this point, Chandler examines the jet-powered drone aircraft known as the ‘Firebee’, which was developed during the Cold War period to be deployed by the U.S. Army as a training

70 Chandler, K. “Drone Errans.” 71 Chandler, K. “A Drone Manifesto,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2 (1), 2016, 3. 72 Ibid., 4. 130

target for aerial combat. Borrowing from the cybernetic discourse of the period, drone aircraft were presented as automata despite the fact that humans remained imperative to their operation. Chandler’s analysis shows how the Firebee’s control system produced confusion between who or what responds to external conditions: “Written in the passive voice, the “black box,” not a human operator, transmits command signals to the drone’s

“electronic brain,” while suggesting the system’s apparent autonomy.”73

For Chandler, the drone is a cyborg, and yet, the connection between operator and aircraft is obscured, as it is understood simply as inputs and outputs filtered through a black box. Despite the syntheses that constitute the basis of drone operations, popular accounts are therefore able to dissociate human and machine, war and home, and friend and enemy. Indeed, the networked operations of so-called unmanned aircraft undo all these binary categories. In return, as Chandler argues, “the term cyborg reminds us that the problem is not the drone aircraft per se, but the ways drone systems tie into ongoing practices of patriarchal capitalism, the legacy of colonialism, and techno-determinism.”74

Accordingly, any effective challenge to weaponized drone technology as an apparatus of racial distinction must explore the dissociative logics that animate and justify the racialized violence of militarized drone operations.

In this regard, the Gulf War of the early 1990s marks another turning point in the entangled history of militarized aerial technologies and its accompanying regimes of visuality. The view through high-tech weapons, such as smart or seeing bombs, became

73 Ibid., 9. 74 Ibid., 19. 131

publicly available and came to dominate the Western perception of wars at a distance. As

Roger Stahl emphasizes, the “weaponized gaze” restructured the civic sphere as an extension of the military, governing the relationship between civil and military spheres in the West.75 Regarding the same period, Harun Farocki came up with the term

“operational” images referring to the images that do not represent an object but instead constitute a part of an operation.76 As Farocki suggested these images are devoid of social intent, not meant for a reflection. Similarly, Paul Virilio traces a co-constitution of military and cinematic ways of seeing in the 20th century with the rise of aviation technologies, subsumed by his notion of “logistics of perception.”77 Eventually, this gaze has evolved into “a powerful means through which the military-industrial complex apprehends civic consciousness.”78

In the age of global counterinsurgency, contemporary warfare technologies are no longer based on the primacy of human vision per se. For instance, signature drone strikes are based more on gathered data and calculated probability than what the drone operator sees through a lens. Along with Farocki’s emphasis on operational images, whatever the operator sees is already programmed according to those probabilistic models and calculations, reflecting the inherently racialized logic of preemption. Indeed, this

75 Roger Stahl, Through the Crosshairs: War, Visual Culture, and the Weaponized Gaze (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018). 76 Harun Farocki, “Phantom Images,” Public, 29, New Localities, 2004, 12-22. See also Trevor Paglen, “Operational Images.” e-flux Journal, #59, November 2014. https://www.e- flux.com/journal/59/61130/operational-images/ 77 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989. 78 Ibid., 3. 132

racializing assemblage needs to be situated within a broader context of the reinvention of humanitarianism since the early 1970s based on the principle of the lesser evil.79 This moderation enabled the continuity of state violence without facing too much resistance by justifying within the “humanitarian present,’ referring to the collusion of technologies of humanitarianism, human rights, and humanitarian law, always already entangled with military and political powers.80

According to Weizman, the very principle of the lesser evil, which is mobilized for the justification of state violence enabled by militarized drone attacks, is parallel to the growth of optimization in the field of machine learning. The problem of imperial space has evolved into what Eyal Weizman calls “the humanitarian assemblages,” referring to the integration of spatial organizations, physical instruments, technical standards, and systems of monitoring.81 In this regard, optimization in the form of computational proportionality refers to a cost-effective calculation based on scientific and probabilistic models. As a result, those machine learning systems are argued to be better than humans in terms of precision and no-bias.

As this chapter demonstrates, however, this idea of drones being more efficient than human operators does not hold and it is already entangled with the strategic moderation of direct violence and resistance around it. The thresholds, set for and by the computational proportionality, are based on the acceptable accounts of civilian

79 Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt and Gaza (London: Verso), 2012. 80 Ibid., 11. 81 Ibid., 20-22. 133

causalities, and thus we need to raise the question of what affordances for whom.

Moreover, the use of machinic systems in contemporary warfare also demonstrates that these are not singular instruments but parts of human-technical assemblages in Katherine

Hayles’ terms, which makes it harder to locate the responsibility. Finally, the need to keep the given threshold of civilian deaths necessitated a “surgical form of destruction” of buildings, and thus the principle of proportionality acquires an architectural manifestation.82 Ultimately, harming civilians is not a collateral product of military counterinsurgency but part of an overall logic of this form of urban warfare.

The Imperial Entanglements of Verticality and Visuality

Computationally-informed technologies of visualization, like drone imagery, operate through the material surfaces of the Earth and the physicality of the electromagnetic spectrum as well as the embodied grounds of human perception. These same technologies in turn render the earth and bodies intelligible as they are mapped, calculated, and managed. Gibson’s ecological understanding of mediation shifts our attention to the vertical operations of computational media. And yet, it needs to be reformulated in order to appropriately grasp the multifaceted struggles for the dominance and control over the vertical field; which is to say, the politics of verticality. I would therefore like to rethink Gibson’s ecological understanding of mediation through Lisa

Parks’ definition of drone technology as a mediating machine that appropriates the

82 Ibid., 373. 134

vertical as the medium of its movements, transmissions, and inscriptions. Parks defines vertical mediation:

…as a process that far exceeds the screen and involves the capacity to register the dynamism of occurrences within, on, or in relation to myriad materials, objects, sites, surfaces, or bodies on Earth. As a drone flies through the sky, it alters the chemical composition of the air. As it hovers above the Earth, it can change movements on the ground. As it projects announcements through loudspeakers, it can affect thought and behavior. And as it shoots Hell fire missiles, it can turn homes into holes and the living into the dead. Much more than a sensor, the drone is a technology of vertical mediation: the traces, transmissions, and targets of its operations are registered in the air, through the spectrum, and on the ground.83

Parks mobilizes the term verticality to highlight the infrastructural and perceptual registers through which militarized drone operations remediate life on Earth in an intensely material way. This is also why she looks at the forensic cases of drone crashes, where the drone’s relation to the material world becomes intelligible, and thus contestable. Parks’ emphasis on verticality resonates with the works of those media theorists who have employed Gibson in their work. For instance, Matthew Fuller asserts that “ecology” is the most expressive language with which to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, flows and matter in the field of media theory.84 As Fuller emphasizes, technology is both a bearer of forces and drives as much as it is made up of them; it is thus constituted by the mutual intermeshing of a variety of technical, political, economic, aesthetic and chemical forces, which pass between all such

83 Parks, Vertical Mediation, 135-136. 84 Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 2. 135

bodies and are composed through and among them.85

Similarly, Snodgrass reformulates Karen Barad’s “material-discursive” approach,86 which underlines the mutually constituted and generative forces of “matter and meaning”, to coin the term “compositional affordances,” as I have already noted.87

According to Snodgrass, compositional affordances directly inform the process and practice of making any given computational media executable:

These affordances can include those of skin, silicon, the electromagnetic spectrum, and further on into issues such as discursive norms within areas such as computer science, economics and politics, all of which can potentially participate in informing, to various degrees, the question of what is executable in any particular instance and how an executable process might specifically be composed.88

More importantly, Snodgrass brings the question of power into the picture by asking how particular affordances lead to particular enactments of power. This is ultimately a matter of asking for whom such networked and computationally-afforded practices work, and which bodies, relations and forms of expression are included and excluded through such practices.89 In response, Snodgrass emphasizes the politics of visuality that shape the underlying material-discursive networks through which computational media operate. For instance, he analyzes the techniques of control and accompanying migration politics that European countries have enacted over the

Mediterranean Sea in order to manage and control both this body of water as well as the

85 Ibid., 56. 86 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 3. 87 Snodgrass, Executions, 13. 88 Ibid., 13-14. 89 Ibid., 14. 136

vessels and bodies that travel across its space.9091 A variety of intersecting legal, economic, technological and enforcement-oriented practices, paired alongside and realized through the affordances of matter (of water, boats, the electromagnetic spectrum), shape the ongoing migration situation taking place within the Mediterranean

Sea. Snodgrass underlines how the affordances of particular forms of imagery, such as those that enable sea navigation (i.e. satellite mapping and GPS tracking of the territory) and those that circulate as a part of the racist media spectacle, enable the articulation of discriminatory discourses and troubling migration politics.92 This is how the entangled relationship between the cruel abstractions of surveillance technologies and racialized practices of media industry helps militarized states to enact and naturalize their violence.

Racializing logic is embedded in the history of surveillance technologies; which is to say, surveillance, as a technology of racial sorting and subjugation, shapes the dehumanizing tendencies of drone technology.9394 According to Judith Butler, the visual field is never neutral to the question of racial violence since seeing is not a matter of direct perception but “the racial production of the visible, the workings of racial constraints on what it means to ‘see.’”95 For example, drone vision turns all bodies into

90 Ibid., 235. 91 Snodgrass draws upon the Forensic Oceanography project, undertaken by Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani who are part of Forensic Architecture team. For further information, see https://forensic- architecture.org/investigation/the-left-to-die-boat 92 Ibid., 253. 93 Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary, 164. 94 Here, Rhee refers to Simone Browne’s book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, Duke University Press, 2015), which demonstrates how the history of surveillance is entangled with the history of transatlantic slavery and the continued targeting of blackness. 95 Judith Butler, “Endangered/endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. R. Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 16. 137

indistinct human morphologies that cannot be differentiated from one another. This pattern, however, does not render everybody equal because data are made visible in ways that can be made productive within existing regimes of power.96 Indeed, strategies of racial differentiation are restructured along the vertical axis of power since drone surveillance monitors and targets certain territories and people with a greater frequency and intensity. The abstractions of surveillance technologies and vision are violent, not only because of the destructive consequences of those abstractions, but also the racialized knowing that shapes the operationalization of those abstractions in the first place.

Militarized drone strikes enact an “exclusionary politics of omniscient vision,” through which ambiguous visual information is operationalized within “functional categories” that “correspond to the needs and biases of the operators, not the targets, of surveillance.”97 Tyler Wall and Torin Monahan have coined the term “drone stare” to mark a corresponding type of surveillance that abstracts people from contexts, thereby reducing variation and noise.98 “Governmental technologies” and “political rationalities” shape the process of target identification by turning the information on potential target’s behaviors, and by extension the human targets themselves, into analyzable patterns;99 this is a reduction that ultimately transforms them into what Giorgio Agamben has termed

“bare life”100. In the age of “big data,” uncertainty is presented as an information

96 Parks, Vertical Mediation, 145. 97 Wall & Monahan, Surveillance and Violence from Afar, 240. 98 Ibid., 243. 99 Ian G. R. Shaw, “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of U.S. Drone Warfare,” Geopolitics, 18, 2013, 548- 549. 100 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1995] 1998). 138

problem, which can be overcome with comprehensive data collection and statistical analysis that can identify patterns and relations between persons, places, and events.101102

The weaponized gaze does not deliver an image of events so much as it comprises an event itself with its built-in politics.103

The abstractions and erasures that underlie drone surveillance and vision rely on what Donna Haraway calls the “god-trick” of Western scientific epistemologies; they reproduce the illusion of being able to see everywhere from a disembodied position of

“nowhere.”104 As Jonathan Crary reflects on the transformed status of the observer with modernity, the optical devices are “points of intersections where philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic discourses overlap with mechanical techniques, institutional requirements, and socioeconomic forces,” therefore, understood not simply as the material object or “as part of history of technology, but for the way in which it is embedded within larger assemblages of events and powers.”105 Concomitantly, such dominant epistemologies underpin long and complicated histories of militarism, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

As Rhee argues, drone warfare points to a broader racial violence at work that affirms the continued dominance of the figure of the Western, post-Enlightenment

101 Wang, Carceral Capitalism, 238. 102 As Wang argues, data is interpreted and visualized not as a reflection of empirical reality; rather, data extraction and visualization actively construct the reality and predicts the future, which has material consequences in the present. 103 Stahl, Through the Crosshairs, 13. 104 Wilcox, Embodying Algorithmic War, 13. 105 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 8. 139

Subject, while rendering other populations governable and disposable. Indeed, the Other occupies a space in which there is “nothing to see.”106 According to Mirzoeff, the nonhuman/non-European became a space in which there was “nothing to see,” not only through the invisibility or dehumanization of the colonized, but also through the idea of man’s superiority – promoted by the ideal of conquest of nature (Immanuel Kant) and of sovereign (Thomas Hobbes).107

As Mirzoeff highlights, visuality is a technique for the reproduction of the imaginaries through which the state-capital nexus justifies and maintains itself.108

Interestingly, the opposite of the “right to look” is not censorship, but visuality:

This practice must be imaginary, rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images, and ideas. This ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the “normal,” or every day, because it is always already contested. The autonomy claimed by the right to look is thus opposed by the authority of visuality. But the right to look came first, and we should not forget it.109

In the case of militarized drone strikes, the oversight and secrecy of the operations generate instances of absence and intangibility through which militarized states attempt to legitimize drone violence.110 The ability to hide and deny a drone strike is not an

106 Mirzoeff, 2011, 1. 107 Ibid., 218. 108 According to Mirzoeff, “visuality’s first domains were the slave plantations, monitored by the surveillance of the overseer, the surrogate of the sovereign. This sovereign surveillance was reinforced by violent punishment and sustained a modern division of labor. From the 18th century onward, visualizing was the hallmark of the modern general, since the battlefield became too extensive and complex for any one person physically to see” (2011: 2). 109 Ibid., 2. 110 Kearns, Secrecy and Absence. 140

insignificant side effect of this technology, but is instead a central part of its official campaigns. As Parks argues, it is precisely the issue of not being able to verify or confirm the identities of suspects that fuels counterterrorism as a dominant paradigm and drone warfare as its method of response.111 According to Roger Stahl, the apparatus of drone or satellite imagery has presented a way of seeing not only as a tool of strategic surveillance but also a prism through state violence publicly manifests, which orients (the Western) publics’ relation to the state military complex through an array of signs, interfaces, and screens.112

It has become increasingly difficult to detect these practices of violence traversing across multiple scales and durations, which points to what Eyal Weizman calls “violence on the threshold of detectability.”113 For example, the relationship between image resolution and missile size allows military and state agencies to neither confirm nor deny the existence of such targeted assassination. The material and architectural signature of a drone strike (a hole on the roof that the missile went through) disappears under the threshold of detectability as the intricate particularities of physical damage are erased when rendered through the standard resolution that undergirds satellite imaging technologies and therefore also the publicly available images that they produce. This mode of erasure calls attention to the states’ efforts to exact control over the means through which its own violence is publicly documented and rendered accessible.

111 Parks, Vertical Mediation, 146. 112 Stahl, Through the Crosshairs, 67. 113 Eyal Weizman, Introduction: At the Threshold of Detectability,” Forensic Architecture: Violence on the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 13-47. 141

The pixelated resolution of these images is not only a technical result of optics and data-storage capacity, but it also determined legally within the framework of security-oriented rationales. Not only crucial details of strategic sites are camouflaged in the 50cm/pixel, but also the disastrous impacts of violence and violations.114 In other words, the denials of drone strikes are not only rhetorical gestures, but also amount to an active production of territorial, juridical, and visual characteristics that make this deniability possible. As depicted in the video report based on Forensic Architecture’ investigation of drone strikes that took place in Miranshah, North Waziristan on 30

March 2012, the team was unable to identify the hole in the roof because it was smaller than the size of a single pixel. As Kearns puts it, “residue signifies process of state violence that are ongoing in the present but that remain absent from the public sphere.”115

This is why, as Mirzoeff emphasizes, the “right to look” is not merely about seeing. Rather, the right to look claims autonomy, not in the form of individualism or voyeurism, but as a claim to political subjectivity and collectivity. As Derrida captured through his conceptualization of the “invention of other,” a recognition of the other is required in order to have a position from which to both claim a right and determine what is right. This claiming enacts a mode of subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of what is seeable and sayable. For Mirzoeff then, the right to look is not merely about seeing, but instead realizes a mode of subjectivity that is better able to confront the

114 Ibid., 29. 115 Kearns, Secrecy and Absence, 16. 142

police who say to us, “move on, there’s nothing to see here.”116 In this regard, Forensic

Architecture mobilizes acts of witnessing, documenting, and evidence-making as counter-visual practices that are capable of inverting the asymmetrical relationship between individuals and militarized states. It is at this juncture that artistic collaborations might be able to generate critical insights and meaningful actions for enacting the right to look. Forensic Architecture: Claiming the Right to Look

Forensic Architecture is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of

London and directed by Eyal Weizman. A group of architects, coders, journalists, artists, and lawyers undertake advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights organizations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organizations. With their investigation of drone strikes, they aim at describing, documenting, and proving the effects of these strikes on the ground. In each case, they cross-reference different types of data available to them, including satellite imagery, media reports, witness statements, and the on-the-ground images when and if they could obtain them. In turn, they have provided their analysis to different groups who have used it to help seek accountability for drone strikes or who are involved in pursuing legal processes against states using or aiding drone warfare.

116 Mirzoeff, Countervisuality, 1. See Ranciere, Jacques. Aux bords de la politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).

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In the case of covert drone operations, the violence against people and their surroundings is often redoubled by violence against the evidence.117 The material ruins are usually the only visible traces of a covert drone strike, and yet, as the earlier discussion exemplified, they are often at the threshold of detectability. People are invisible in publicly available satellite images, which are degraded, for reasons of privacy and security, to a resolution at which the human body from the aerial view disappears within the square of a single pixel.118 As a result, the space and occurrence of strike events need to be reconstructed based on different kinds of evidence, ranging from a satellite image to an eye-witness report.

For instance, as depicted in the still from Forensic Architecture’s case documentation below, the witness guides the team for a digital reconstruction of her home, which is the strike scene, in a 3D environment (Figure 3).119 In this way, the obscured fragments of her life and the strike event came back to the surface for a testimony. The drone strike took place on the outskirts of Mir Ali, North Waziristan on 4

October 2010 that killed five people, including some suspected of involvement with acts of terrorism. The German woman living in the house with her infant at the time of the strike came back to Germany and began speaking about the incident to human rights advocates and media agencies. Upon an invitation from the European Center for

Constitutional and Human Rights, Forensic Architecture met her in Düsseldorf on 21

117 Weizman, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, 12. 118 Weizman,Violence on the Threshold of Detectability, 25-30. 119 For further information on the investigation case, see: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/drone-strike-in-mir-ali 144

May, 2013. The witness guided the team to reconstruct a digital model of her house, struck by missiles, and this exercise helped her to remember and narrate fragments of her life and details of the strike itself. As Forensic Architecture highlights, the virtual space became a medium for testimony, through which they develop a new model of witness interviewing that they call “situated testimony.”120

Figure 3: Forensic Architecture, Drone Strike in Mir Ali, video still, 2013 © Forensic Architecture, 2020 https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/drone- strike-in-mir-ali

Thereupon, a forensic-architectural problem arises, which forces a further examination of “the relation between an architectural detail, the media in which it could be captured, a general policy of killing, and its acts of denial.”121 Forensic Architecture reanimates material residue in an effort to expand the focus of analysis from the object to

120 https://forensic-architecture.org/methodology/situated-testimony See also: Weizman, Forensis, 373- 375; Weizman, Violence on the Threshold of Detectability, 44-47. 121 Ibid., Violence on the Threshold of Detectability, 27. 145

the field, which is characterized as “a thick fabric of lateral relations, associations and chains of actions between material things, large environments, individuals, and collective actions.”122 As Matthew Kirschenbaum highlights, we need a forensic approach to contest the mystifications of computational systems along the axes of physical, logical, and conceptual realms that their operations traverse.123

In order to process this expanded field of information, Forensic Architecture takes advantage of new methods of evidence collection and develops relevant means of verification. They achieve this by harnessing the affordances that computational and networked media offer to such investigations. For instance, they use 3D modeling as an optical device through which to evoke the eye-witness’ memories of the strike event and reconstruct the scene despite the lack or messiness of the evidence. Significant in this case is their appropriation and repurposing of the technologies of measurement that are primarily designed and used within the military-industrial complex. It is these reoriented technologies that enable their direct, critical and creative, interventions into broader techniques and applications of evidence.

Moreover, they present their formulated evidence at public forums like international courts and art exhibitions, while expanding the perceptual and conceptual frames of these institutions. Indeed, Forensic Architecture inverts the forensic gaze by intervening in the means and practices of evidence collection, analysis, and exhibition,

122 Weizman, Forensis, 27. 123 Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 3. 146

cutting across legal and media systems, to expose coinciding forms of racialized technologies of state violence. By ultimately claiming “the right to look,” they contest the politics of visuality and erasure, through which militarized states attempt to legitimize drone warfare. Therefore, their investigations act not only as disclosures of covert drone operations, but also serve as a direct intervention into the very operationalization of drone technology as a technical, discursive, and political apparatus.

In his book Discorrelated Images, Shane Denson articulates the idea of discorrelation to reflect on the transmissions between human and machinic agencies, thereby marking the ongoing transition from cinematic to post-cinematic media. Today, our sensory ratios (in Marshall McLuhan’s terms) and perceptual faculties are transformed with the new speeds and scales of imaging processes that are increasingly shaped by algorithmic networks.124 In this regard, Denson does not only highlight the nonhuman ontology of contemporary images (diverging from human perceptibility), but also their environmental, or what he calls “metabolic,” quality.125

Similarly, Forensic Architecture’s investigations underscore how ecological analysis helps to demonstrate the territorial, urban, and architectural dimensions of drone warfare; which is to say, its vertical mediations. As Weizman highlights, we can no longer rely on what is captured in single images, and should instead call upon what he refers to as “architectural image complex.”126 A time-space relation between hundreds of

124 Denson, Discorrelated Images, 1. 125 Ibid., 33-34. 126 Weizman, Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, 100. 147

still images and videos generate multiple perspectives of the same incident, including views from the ground, air, and outer space. The act of seeing through this form of

“image complex” is a multifaceted construction of a limitedly accessed strike event.

For instance, their investigations develop frame by frame analysis or panoramic views that they constitute by the use of varied visual materials. For example, as shown in the still below (Figure 4), the angle of shadow/sun or a subtle surface disturbance detected on an image helps them to locate the strike, model the building, and reconstruct the trajectory of the missile. Animating the shadows cast of different days and at different times helped the team to model the scene through the shadows visible in the satellite and video images. This assembling of the images imprinted upon and through architectural materials result in the emergence of what Weizman refers to as “architectural-image complex.”127

127 Ibid. 148

Figure 4: Forensic Architecture, Drone Strike in Miranshah, video still, 2014 © Forensic Architecture, 2020 https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/drone- strike-in-miranshah

The practice of detecting and making sense of the material registers of strike events, especially when mediated through architectural-image complexes, can benefit a lot from the artistic insight. As Lawrence Abu Hamdan, one of the artists involved with the group puts it, environmental thinking plays a key role in the architectural mode of inverting the forensic gaze:

There are ways that truth claims, which are expressed or made differently to how the law or science delineate the truth, can be folded into the production of an artwork. And that's a very important distinction to make, especially because law and science draw outlines around their objects. For example, law says: 'This here is a millimeter-thin wood veneer that covers this cupboard as an object that is separated from the world in which it's surrounded.' Whereas I think that an artistic process of telling the truth is the opposite: it's about blurring the line between the veneer, the door, the space and its reflections, taking into account its sound and all the other phenomena around it. This way of working is the extension of the way artists approach their work as a spatial and environmental practice; so that a video artist knows the electricity cable going to the screen is an important part of the work, or a painter knows the light conditions of the

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room are an element of the work. We are trained in this environmental way of thinking.128

Abu Hamdan’s emphasis on environmental thinking recalls Gibson’s ecological understanding of perception or what he calls “ecological optics.”129 In contrast with analytical and physical optics, which reduce objects and surfaces within the environment to points and atoms, ecological optics considers the reciprocal dynamics of environmental relations as well as the movement of the observer. Similarly, Forensic Architecture’s investigations retrieve the thickness of surfaces and bodies involved in the strike event, thereby rendering it tangible, and thus contestable.

In contrast to the abstractions and erasures through which drone technology operates as a racialized apparatus, Forensic Architecture’s counter-visual practice restores the context within which the operationalization of militarized drone strikes is embedded.

According to Weizman, Forensic Architecture aims at “building narratives, not only dismantling state ones, by cross-referencing different kinds of aesthetic products such as images, films, haptic materiality, memory, language and testimony.”130131 The forensic- architectural model is not composed of a series of visual perceptions in a given physical

128 Mohammad Salemy, “Interview with Lawrence Abu Hamdan,” 6 April 2018. https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/lawrence-abu-hamdan/ 129 Gibson, 59; 80-81. 130 Eyal Weizman, “‘I’d rather lose prizes and win cases: an interview with Eyal Weizman of Turner Prize- nominated Forensic Architecture,” in an interview with Ellen Mara de Wachter, Frieze, 2 May 2018, https://frieze.com/article/id-rather-lose-prizes-and-win-cases-interview-eyal-weizman-turner-prize- nominated-forensic 131 Even though this chapter’s focus is on the politics of visuality, both Weizman and Abu Hamdan’s emphasis on multimodality of aesthetic mode of analysis speaks to how violence and investigations of that violence can operate through the means other than the visual; like sound. For further examination of the role of sound in drone warfare, see: Susan Schuppli, “Uneasy Listening,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth., ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Stenberg Press, 2014), 381-392. 150

space, but is instead formed by a set of relations that combine information, imagination, and insight into a rendition of physical and psychic place. In contrast to the authoritarian and objective discourse of science, “counter-forensics”132 is politically committed and motivated by the sense of solidarity.133

Through their revisitation of the critical affordances of the ecological thinking,

Forensic Architecture heightens the investigative capacity of architectural methods and artistic insight. These are further elevated through their production and presentation of evidence through the form of public address and political claims. Unlike the recent trends within the field of human rights and international law, Forensic Architecture’s investigations do not identify a solid object as the provider of a stable and fixed alternative to the human uncertainties and anxieties that are part of the practice of testimony and evidence. According to Weizman, forensic aesthetics:

… is not simply a return to a pre-Kantian aesthetics in which the sensing object was prioritized over the sensing subject—rather, it involves a combination of the two. Material aesthetics is merely the first layer of a multidimensional concept that Thomas Keenan and I called forensic aesthetics. Forensic aesthetics is not only the heightened sensitivity of matter or of the field, but relies on these material findings being brought into a forum. Forensic aesthetics comes to designate the techniques and technologies by which things are interpreted, presented, and mediated in the forum, that is, the modes and processes by which matter becomes a political agent.134

Forensic Architecture expand the material residue over the thick fabric of relations between material things, discursive practices, and collective actions. In other

132 Thomas Keenan, “Photography and Counter-Forensics,” Grey Room, no. 55, 2014, 58-77. 133 Weizman, 2014, 13. 134 Weizman, Forensis, 15. 151

words, their investigations acknowledge the historicity of discursive and technological systems (legal, media, etc.) within which the material residue is generated, documented, and represented. In this vein, Forensic Architecture’s investigations activate the political affordances of the material trace. These affordances do not only retroactively restore the critical potential of matter, but the material traces that they hinge upon also become viable grounds through which to transmit information about strike events to the public, thus generating a possibility for a collective action.

What is ultimately at stake here is Forensic Architecture’s activation of the right to look. As noted before, the right to look is a claim to a political collectivity by reorganizing the fields of what is seeable and sayable, thereby opposing the authority which seeks to legitimize its domination with the practice of visuality. As Mirzoeff emphasizes, visuality supplements the violence of authority by presenting authority as self-evident, that “division of the sensible whereby domination imposes the sensible evidence of its legitimacy.”135136. In contrast, the counter-visuality opposes the

“unreality” created by the authority and proposing a real alternative.

Finally, Forensic Architecture repurposes computationally-informed technologies for connecting singular events to larger patterns of contemporary warfare. For instance, their investigations reveal connections between spatial patterns of drone strikes and the increased number of civilian casualties that are concretized within the militarized states’

135 Mirzoeff, Countervisuality, 3. 136 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. G. Elliott (New York: Verso, ([1998] 2007), 17. 152

reorganization of urban spaces and policing strategies.137138 Indeed, their investigations do not only render the events and sites of covert drone operations visible but also trace the continuum along seemingly dissociated spatial and temporal relations underlying the contemporary technologies of visuality, surveillance, and violence that are operational to the current neoliberal governance at a global scale. For example, militarized drone strikes are based on predictive algorithms that are not unlike those used in the technical analysis of the financial stock market or environmental degradation, all of which interpret and display future outcomes by analyzing past patterns.

137 In a collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Forensic Architecture developed a platform, which provides a spatial analysis of the drone strikes in the frontier regions of Pakistan between 2004 and 2014. This mapping shows that as buildings become the most common targets for drone operations, the casualties have predominantly occurred inside them, thereby indicating a relation between target type, location, and casualty count: http://wherethedronesstrike.com/ 138 Eyal Weizman discusses in depth about how a city can operate as an apparatus with which warfare is designed and conducted in the case of Israel’s architecture of occupation of Palestine: Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso, 2007). 153

The forms of presentation and manners of reception of Forensic Architecture’s investigations also vary while moving from one setting to another. As an example, I will briefly discuss Forensic Architecture’s project Triple Chaser which evolved into a short film in partnership with Praxis Films (Laura Poitras). The investigation tracks tear gas used against civilians in cities and border around the world (such as the US/Mexico border, and Gaza/Palestine).139 There are two intriguing characteristics of the project; first, their use of synthetic images to help the computer vision to search for real images within larger data sets. Secondly, their strategical presence at the Whitney Biennial (New

York City), which raised a lot of controversies around Warren Kanders’ involvement with the institution. Kanders is the owner of one of the largest manufacturers of munitions, Safariland, as well as the vice-chairman of the board of trustees at the

Whitney Museum of American Modern Art, which commissioned Forensic Architecture for the biennial.

The export of military equipment from the US is a matter of public record, whereas the sale and export of tear gas is not. As a result, it is only when images of tear gas canisters appear online that monitoring agencies and the public can find out about them. This condition of in/visibility constitutes a technical problem with political implications. The task of training a computer vision classifier to identify a particular object usually requires thousands of images of that object. The images of the munitions like the Triple-Chaser, however, are relatively rare to access on public domains. As the

139 See for detailed information on the project: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/triple-chaser

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monitoring agencies need more efficient systems to gather and analyze all the images/data collected, they rely on machine learning systems for such a task. To solve this problem, Forensic Architecture started generating and feeding machines with synthetic images (in collaboration with Adam Harvey, the artist who works on similar projects such as VFRAME developed for Syrian Archive).140

Accordingly, Forensic Architecture constructed a digital model of the Triple-

Chaser grenades, and created a set of ‘synthetic’ images by placing the model against varied patterned backgrounds and within photorealistic digital environments (Figure 5).

One of the sections in the video Triple Chaser is dedicated to an increasingly intense loop of shifting colors and shapes of synthetic images in the background of canisters to a level that it is physically disturbing to watch them on the screen, where Richard Strauss strings join David Byrne’s narration. In contrast to the usual aesthetics of video report, this intense section intends to show rather than tell about the disorienting and hazardous effects of the tear gas use by the police against thousands of civilians around the world.

140 See the website for VFRAME (Visual Forensics and Metadata Extraction: Computer Vision for Human Rights Researchers): https://ahprojects.com/vframe/ 155

Figure 5: Forensic Architecture in partnership with Praxis Films, Triple Chaser, synthetic image, 2019 © Forensic Architecture, 2020 https://forensic- architecture.org/investigation/triple-chaser

Forensic Architecture’s Triple Chaser speaks to a growing trend of adopting computer vision toolkit to manage larger image datasets by detecting objects of interest, classifying scenes, and creating training databases for customized recognition models, especially in the realm of human rights investigations (e.g. Syrian Archive).141 In this way, those agencies not only contest but also invert the imperial logic and visual regime of militarized states via machine-enabled forensic aesthetics. Interestingly, they end up utilizing advanced game engines (Epic’s Unreal Engine), which is often adopted by military-entertainment complex, for restoring the public’s relationship to truth and history regarding human rights violations and war crimes.142

141 See https://syrianarchive.org/ 142 See Forensic Architecture’s open source investigation in Triple Chaser: https://forensic- architecture.org/investigation/cv-in-triple-chaser 156

Writing about Adam Harvey’s VFRAME: Munition Detector (2017) and Kate

Crawford and Trevor Paglen’s ImageNet Roulette (2019),143 Linda Kronman argues that those human-technical systems build upon what Katherine Hayles calls nonconscious cognitive assemblages.144 Their operations are diffused across “photosensors, smartphones, Internet infrastructure, storage media, data centers, distribution platforms, machine learning algorithms, as well as witnesses, citizen journalists, activists, and those developing, maintaining, and controlling access to technical frameworks.”145 Along with my previous discussion on drone technology, Kronman reminds us that machine (vision)- based applications externalize the human mind across physical, biological, and social systems, as much as they attempt to enhance human eye while relying on human labor and epistemes to function as such. Thus, human agency shape how machine come to see, bounded by material reality, colonial legacy, as well as capitalist logic.

In contrast to the dissociative logic (in Chandler’s terms) that operationalize, obscure, and justify the use of militarized technologies, Forensic Architecture builds a thread that mobilizes varied affordances of material, technical, and social systems, which would not have come into contact otherwise – a geopolitical aesthetic of computational media. For instance, upon the request of an activist collective based in New York City,

143 See Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, “Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning,” https://www.excavating.ai/ 144 Linda Kronman, “How Machines See?” Research Networks, A Peer-Reviewed Newspaper, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020 https://transmediale.de/content/research-networks-1 The updated version will appear as: “Intuition Machines: Cognizers in Complex Human-Technical Assemblages,” A Peer Reviewed Journal About Research Networks (APRJA), eds. Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox, Volume 9, Issue 1, Forthcoming 2020. ISSN 2245-7755 Will be available at: https://aprja.net/ 145 Ibid., 126. 157

Decolonize This Place,146 Forensic Architecture shared their open-source investigation publicly in May 2020, just before the opening of the Whitney Biennial. Their investigation proved the presence and use of Safariland products by police during the protests in Puerto Rico in 2018, which is only one of the many incidents around the world. With the rise of controversies, a group of artists ended up withdrawing their works from the biennial. At that moment, Forensic Architecture decided to stay in the exhibition since their work was centered around the very focus of controversies. In the meantime, the team also shared new-found evidence that linked the weapons manufacturer, Warren

Kanders to the Israeli army’s uses of live ammunition (MatchKing bullets manufactured by Sierra Bullets) against civilian protestors at the Israeli-Palestinian border in Gaza.147

Thus, Forensic Architecture’s intervention not only renders the covert militarized operations visible but also disrupts the imperial divisions and rights that govern cultural institutions and urban spaces. After Whitney Museum’s failing to take a concrete step in response to the allegations against Kanders, the artists Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett published a statement, titled “The Tear Gas Biennial.”148 With shared

146 For further information about Decolonize This Place, who also has an active presence at the Black Lives Matter protests that broke out across the US, following the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis: https://decolonizethisplace.org/ Forensic Architecture also prepared a report on the continuing police brutality at these protests: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/police-brutality-at-the- black-lives-matter-protests 147 For further information on the investigation: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/matchking- warren-b-kanders-and-the-israel-defense-forces Throughout March-December 2018, Israeli army snipers killed 154 and injured more than 6000 civilian protestors on the Palestinian side of the border. According to a report presented by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry in late 2019, some of these violations may constitute potential war crimes or crimes against humanity. See the report’s summary: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=24226&LangID=E ) 148 See the statement: https://www.artforum.com/slant/a-statement-from-hannah-black-ciaran-finlayson- and-tobi-haslett-on-warren-kanders-and-the-2019-whitney-biennial-80328 158

concerns, Forensic Architecture decided to withdraw their works along with seven other artists.149 Eventually, the expanding protests within and outside the museum forced the resignation of Kanders from the board of members at the end of July, upon which artists brought their works back to the exhibition. All these events and statements throughout the

2019 Whitney Biennial mobilized civil initiatives and imaginations that would have an enduring impact across varied cultural institutions and practices.150

Visualities Countering Militarized States

In the rest of the chapter, I will situate Forensic Architecture’s countervisual practice within the broader field of artistic practices that claim a right to look in their particular context. First, I will compare Forensic Architecture’s investigations to the examples of so-called drone art. The film industry has already naturalized the violence of drone technology by dissolving it into its aesthetics. Therefore, I will draw upon Jennifer

Rhee’s definition of drone art, referring to “works of art and literature that explicitly respond to drone warfare.”151 In most of these examples, we see a gesture of reminding of

149 Zach Small, “Eight Artists Withdraw Their Work from 2019 Whitney Biennial,” Hyperallergic, July 2019: https://hyperallergic.com/510167/artists-withdraw-work-from-2019-whitney-biennial/ 150 Since 2018, Forensic Architecture has received growing public and media attention, especially when they were shortlisted for UK’s most important art award, Turney Prize in 2018. In 2019, Lawrence Abu Hamdan was awarded Turner Prize along with other shortlisted nominees, as the artists asked the jury for the prize to be awarded to them collectively. Hamdan’s award-winning projects evolved from the ear witness interviews that he conducted with former detainees of the Syrian Regime prison Saydnaya, as part of an audio investigation by Forensic Architecture and Amnesty International: https://forensic- architecture.org/investigation/saydnaya In February 2020, Eyal Weizman’s US visa was revoked “for triggering a security algorithm” and he could not attend the opening of Forensic Architecture’s first major survey exhibition at Miami’s Museum of Art and Design: Hakim Bishara, “Homeland Security Banned Forensic Architecture’s Director From Entry to US, Hyperallergic, 19 Feb 2020 https://hyperallergic.com/543006/eyal-weizman-visa-revoked/ 151 Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary, 136. 159

the Western audience the human side of the dehumanized Other. In other words, these works speak to people’s sensitivity towards the others who are in pain, which comes with an underlying statement of ‘imagine, if this had happened to you.’

Even though these works bring the violence enacted on the lands and people far away back home, I would argue that those gestures are not enough to dismantle imperial thinking because they are still reproducing the very same division of us versus them, or here and there. Instead, the gesture I am interested in more is the one demonstrating how imperial techniques and modes of thought are integral to the functioning of neoliberal governance today, even though its differential impacts are felt and negotiated unevenly.

This point holds valid when most of these technologies (e.g. drones) are developed/tested in war zones and then adopted by police departments and warehouses back in Western countries.

Similarly, Rhee criticizes some of these artworks, such as Heather Layton and

Brian Bailey’s Home Drone (2012) and James Bridle’s Drone Shadow (2012–17), “the identificatory relation both equates the human with the Western Subject and obscures the colonial continuum by constructing racial state violence as exceptional, rather than normalized and constitutive of the West itself.” Instead, Rhee praises artworks which either “reject or destabilize an identificatory relation with the Other of drone strikes but demand an ethical relation nonetheless” in the first place.152 For this framework, Rhee takes upon Judith Butler’s call for recuperating the human by interrogating “the

152 Rhee, 29. 160

emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense.”153 Writing about Teju Cole’s Seven Short

Stories about Drones (2013), Omer Fast’s 5,000 Feet Is the Best (2011), and James

Bridle’s Dronestagram (2012–15), Rhee argues:

[a]s these works evoke, certain modes of identification are predicated on the same post-Enlightenment human that is constituted through racial violence and oppression; thus, the ethical injunction to identify with the Other can in fact maintain existing racialized logics and power relations that make possible the United States’ military drone program and the killing of thousands, including civilians. The art and literature I discuss move away from both identification and a conception of the human that privileges the familiarity of the Western Subject and the perception of resemblance that grounds the identificatory relation. Instead, in response to the racialized dehumanization of drone victims, these works locate an ethics of the human in its perpetual unknowability and unfamiliarity. Bringing AI’s and robotics’ reliance on constructions of the familiar, the norm, and the universal to the fore, works of “drone art” assert the tremendous stakes of this attachment to familiarity and the extensive dehumanizing erasures required to construct the human around notions of the familiar.154

Discussing Basma Al-Sharif’s Home Videos (2013), however, Shane Denson argues that the media-technical conditions of post-indexical images come to the surface through their frictions.155 In Al-sharif’s 25-minute-video, capturing the politicized domestic sphere of the Gaza Strip, glitches on the TV screen located in the city of Gaza embrace an “indexical function of their own,” as the Israeli military drone circling above the apartment disrupts the satellite signal: The glitch, in this case, is itself a material

153 Ibid., 29. Rhee cites: Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 42. 154 Ibid., 29-30. 155 Denson, 279. 161

index of the media-technics of occupation, surveillance, and militaristic aggression.156

For Akira Mazuta Lippit, avisuality is what enables a shadow archive that could expose

and confront the dominant modes of archive-making, by accumulating unintended

recollections and enfolded traces at the edge of visibility.157

Even though it requires a more detailed analysis in future works, I would like to

acknowledge the works of artists, who guide us to situate the imperial violence of drone

technology within a broader context of globally situated networks of power, including

Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, and Jananne Al-Ani among others. Farocki

was the pioneer of such investigative approaches Forensic Architecture that manifest

deeply rooted entanglements of aesthetics and politics. Farocki follows the thread of

historical and spatial continuities, thereby tackling the question of not only how this

violence is enabled technically and visually, but also how it is diffused across seemingly

disparate sites of capital and control, ranging from prisons to shopping malls.

In Farocki’s terms, operational images mystify the entangled mess of violence and exploitation at its very core.158 In this regard, Nace Zavrl brings Galloway’s emphasis on the embeddedness of power within the network itself into his analysis of Farocki’s aesthetic endeavor. Thus, Zavrl offers a reading of operational images from the perspective of envisioning capital in Susan Buck Morss:

In her 1995 text “Envisioning Capital”, Susan Buck-Morss writes of neoliberalism and free market capitalism, but her words inadvertently

156Ibid, 280. 157 Akira Mizuta Lippit. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 158 Nace Zavrl, "Counter-operation: Harun Farocki Against the Network," Afterimage, vol. 45, no. 1, June- Aug, 2017, 7-11. 162

capture something of the operative image as well: “Looking up from my work at this landscape of things, I cannot see the whole of its terrain. It extends beyond my ability to feel. And this blindness leaves me free to drop my sight to the short horizon of my own self-interest. Indeed, blindness is the state of proper action.”159

Within the Jamesonian framework, one could say that Farocki brings the historicity of those images to the surface by connecting a particular image to the very history underlying its production as such. Indeed, Thomas Voltzenlogel identifies

Farocki’s montage as a dialectical mode of associating as well as confronting a set of images with one another. 160 In contrast to the domination of the commodity-circulation of information, Farocki is interested in opening up time and space for countervisuality, contesting the techniques of visuality that blurs the line between war and industrial technologies.

Similarly, Jananne Al-Ani’s Shadow Sites I and II (2010-2011) unpacks the continuities across disparate spaces (the US and the Middle East) and times (colonial and neoliberal). These series are part of her research-driven body of work titled The

Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People,161 tackling the Western conception of the Middle East as the unfamiliar, empty land, which is mobilized frequently for the violence enacted in the region by the imperial powers such as Great Britain, the US, and

Israel. In Shadow Sites I (2010), Al-Ani adopted 16mm film for shooting a series of

159 Ibid., 10. 160 Thomas Voltzenlogel, “Harun Farocki (1944-2014), or Dialectics in Images,” Sense of Cinema, 73, 2014. Accessed May 6, 2020: http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/feature-articles/harun-farocki-1944-2014- or-dialectics-in-images/ 161 Follow the link for Al-Ani’s talk titled “The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People” given during the March Meeting, organized by Sharjah Art Foundation, and held in Sharjah between the dates of March 13-15th, 2010. https://vimeo.com/18263742 163

vertical aerial shots that blend into another. Inspired by Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema, and early reconnaissance photography/film, she mounted a camera on a small biplane flying over the contested locations around Jordan, sharing a border with Israel and

Occupied Palestinian Territories, as well as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. The aerial shots follow the remnants of historical periods from the Bronze Age to the Ottoman periods, traversing the traces of farming, battles, and industrial developments. In Shadow

Sites II (2011), she adopts digital technologies for the aerial shots, apparent in the buzz on the soundtrack. In the following parts of the series, she continued with similar treatments of landscapes from the United States (Groundworks (2013)) and Great Britain

(Black Powder Peninsula).

In the end, all these examples, from Farocki to Al-Ani, help us to situate Forensic

Architecture’s practice within a broader context of media archaeology, art history, and countervisuality at large. Forensic Architecture contests and reworks the imperial visual regimes, rights, techniques, and institutions, by attending to the complex histories and geographies that are tied together under the violent operations of the neoliberal state- capital nexus.

Conclusion

By drawing upon the critical scholarship on drone warfare, this chapter argues that drone’s mistargeting civilians is neither exception nor error but central to the operation of and rationale behind militarized drone strikes. The historical overview of its cultural imaginaries and biopolitical formations reconfigures drone technology as an apparatus of racialized state violence. Thus, militarized drone strikes operate through a 164

set of political, territorial, and juridical reconfigurations, which make the rationale of drone technology far more diffuse than the straight line between an aircraft and a target.162 Here, I find Lisa Parks’ notion of “vertical mediation” and Eric Snodgrass’ understanding of “compositional affordances,” useful to reformulate the concept of affordance as a form of mediation that cuts across material and discursive systems that animate militarized drone operations today. There arises the question of how material and discursive systems shape the possibilities and actualizations of certain affordances over others, which is to ask, how affordances of a given technology emerge within and help to intensify or negotiate the existing regimes of power.

Forensic Architecture inverts the forensic gaze by intervening in the means and practices of evidence within political, legal, and media systems that animated this specific form of racialized technology of state violence. By claiming “the right to look” in

Mirzoeff’s terms, they contest the politics of visuality, through which militarized states attempt to legitimize drone warfare. Therefore, their investigations act not only as disclosure of covert military operations but also a direct intervention into this very operationalization of militarized as a technical, discursive, and political apparatus. This is also why the Middle Eastern context is a fruitful setting to analyze the entangled trajectories of militarism and finance, manifesting the concomitant aesthetics of smart weapons and cities.

162 Weizman, Forensis, 369. 165

Chapter Three – Smart Urbanism and Gulf Futurism(s)

Today’s increasingly complex, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have rendered the task of cognitive mapping harder, if not impossible. Yet,

Fredric Jameson’s attentiveness to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations is still helpful for us to map the local instantiations of contemporary frontiers of global capitalism. In this regard, the Middle East becomes a fruitful setting to examine how the systems produced and maintained by computational media are integral to the ongoing investments in petro-politics, militarism, logistics, real estate, and high-tech industry. To this end, I draw upon Sandra Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s understanding of extraction in the expanded sense, which connects the seemingly abstract processes, such as data and finance, to the concrete sites of extraction – where capital hits the ground. Ultimately, I extend my focus from technics to the surrounds of computational capital, including the racialized and gendered patterns of dispossession, labor, waste, and care.

In this chapter, my analysis of computational media within the Middle Eastern context underscores the urgent need for a transnational perspective to critically assess the entangled relationship between the racialized patterns of devalued labor and the unevenly distributed impacts of environmental degradation. For instance, I ask: How can we connect the architectural spectacles of Dubai’s smart futures to the toxic cities of

Lebanon, whose economy has been dependent on Gulf rentierism in the post-war period?

How can we talk about migrant workers, who are trying to survive under the systemically exploitative kafala system, while envisioning sustainable futures? The answers to these

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questions are already flourishing on the city streets, and artistic practices could help us to incorporate those urban and labor struggles into media theories and histories we tell.

The Geopolitics of the Arabian Gulf

All the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a regional bloc of the six oil-rich Arab monarchies founded in 1981 – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi

Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – have been transformed over the past few decades into a tangle of highways, skyscrapers, and megaprojects.1 Those gigantic wonders of architecture are physical embodiments of almost universal adoption of the neoliberal agenda by Arab governments from the 1990s onwards. Challenging the rentier state framework which he finds simplistic, Adam Hanieh identifies a capitalist class that he calls “Khaleeji Capital”, which is dominated by a few massive conglomerates structured around a Saudi-Emirati axis.2 This local capitalist class draws its profits from its regional and international export of capital as well as the very deep exploitation of non-citizen labor.

Hence, the Middle East has been increasingly characterized by massive polarization of wealth, conflict, and displacement. In contrast to the high-tech and architectural spectacles of Dubai, I look at the war-torn and toxic cities that are spreading in the rest of the region, such as Beirut, due to the violent operations of militarized states as well as the disastrous impacts of ever-growing economic and ecological deterioration.

1 Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1. 2 Ibid., 2. 167

These cities constitute two sides of the same coin, bounded by more extensive structures of capital and power. When the people in Beirut protested garbage crisis, the banking or kafala system, they do not only target their own government for the flawed policies at the national level but also the wider class hierarchies in the region.

All of this is to suggest that those futuristic projections have material implications in the present. As Hanieh emphasizes, we need to look at the strategical role of telecommunication industries and logistics in such urban developments, which promoted capitalist expansion with a public-private hybrid model.3 For instance, the UAE expands its logistics space as a commercial, military, and humanitarian nexus.4 Besides its long- standing ties with the US military, “the growth of the UAE logistics space increasingly underpins the expansion of the country’s regional footprint,” especially accelerated in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings.5 With the emergence of new centers of global accumulation in countries such as China, the Gulf states have sought to position themselves within a fast-changing international order.

The expanding forms of imperialism involves the colonial powers’ explicit backing of authoritarian regimes in the MENA region that are faithful to the neoliberal agenda while repressing the risk of social upheaval.6 Destruction and displacement wrought since the political uprisings of 2010 have become means to recuperate the spread of market relations by opening new spaces of accumulation. Thus, the collective struggles

3 Hanieh, Money, Markets, and Monarchies, 86-90. 4 Ziadah, Circulating Power. 5 Ibid., 1691. 6 Aouragh & Chakravartty, Infrastructures of Empire, 563. 168

around the profoundly uneven urban landscape in the Middle East are inseparable from the hierarchies of the regional class formation, always constituted within the making of global capitalism and the particular position of the U.S. within it.

Post-Oil Spectacles

Upon their arrival, a visitor reads through numeric and schematic tables that offer a brief overview of what awaits us in the near future – the catastrophic impacts of climate change. While approaching the building that temporarily hosts exhibits of Museum of the

Future, the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah, a 7-star hotel and one of the landmarks of Dubai, catches the eye of the visitor in the distance. That year’s (2017) theme was “Climate

Change Reimagined,” which aimed at transforming challenges of climate change into opportunities, by addressing the issues like the shortage of water, energy, and food.”7

The visitor passes through a dark tunnel lighted up only with flickering small motifs, that opens to a wide-open room filled with a 360-degree screen. The immersive audio-visual display takes the visitor into an attractive narrative of today, as the past of the future – Dubai 2050. On the screen, one sees how forests turned into dust, and cities into ruins, depicted by trees and high-rise buildings literally collapsing on the ground, into particles to disappear by spreading out, accompanied by the darkened visuals and

7 The promotional video was produced for the exhibition Climate Change Reimagined (2017) by Tellart, an international design studio, in partnership with the Dubai Future Foundation. The exhibition was opened in Dubai at the annual World Government Summit on February 12, 2017. You can access the video via this link: https://www.tellart.com/projects/museum-of-the-future-climate-change-reimagined/ The described sequence is between 00:43 and 01:19. For further information on past exhibitions, see: https://www.museumofthefuture.ae/

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anxiety-provoking sounds of chaos. All this leads up to the scene of chaos, rebels and clashes on the streets. According to the presented narrative, in the face of these repeated crises and forecasted risks, the United Arab Emirates sees an opportunity to invest in science, technology, and entrepreneurship to turn the challenges of climate change into economic opportunities for export in the world. Eventually, climate solutions could become the UAE’s greatest exports. After the vividly depicted scenes and volumed-up music of chaos, there is a-few-second calmness that audio-visually finally arrives, a moment of breath between the chaotic past and the hopeful future.

This is the introductory narrative that engulfs the visitors at the 2017 edition of

Museum of the Future, the successive exhibits organized by the Dubai Future Foundation with the aim of envisioning hopeful and better futures. The 2017 edition focused on reimagining climate change by exhibiting futuristic projects that bring biotechnology with artificial intelligence including the genetically modified giant jelly fish for filtering water, fully automated farms for customizing food for each person and neighborhood (to avoid waste), and self-building building solutions for making cities efficiently with robots and drones. Obviously, the future is presented as a peaceful and sustainable place with polished images of abundant vegetation, high-tech transportation, and futuristic architecture. The immersive quality of the 180-degree film literally takes the visitor into the future, distorting the distinction between two sides of the screen, the moment of now and the future.

While facing post-oil futures, the UAE’s development plans adopt a newer emphasis on sustainable futures, partaking in a growing trend in the aftermath of the 2008

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global financial crisis. For instance, the Museum of Future8 is one of the many initiatives of Dubai Future Foundation9 founded by the sheikh himself, along with a larger vision for UAE 2071 to “fortify the country’s reputation and its soft power.”10 Mainly shaped by the key players of the Emirate across public and private sectors – Sheik, local government, transnational capitalist elites and major high-tech firms, the application of cutting-edge technologies covers a wide range that includes AI and robotics, 3D printing, genomics, and biotechnology.

The repetitive emphasis on transforming challenges of climate change into economic opportunities by investing in science and technology reflects the dominance of what Orit Halpern et al. calls the “smartness mandate,” which is strongly shaped by the trajectories of computation, urban planning, and crisis.11 Despite its popularity as such, smartness mandate does not aim at a future that is ‘better’ but at a smart infrastructure that can absorb constant shocks while maintaining the functionality of capitalist operations. Thus, smartness mandate colonizes space through the management of time.

Even though the growth of Dubai as a global city has been critically examined as exemplary of neoliberal urbanism, we need to attend to the underlying racial politics, especially from a transnational perspective. On the one hand, the spreading toxicity in

8 http://www.museumofthefuture.ae/ 9 https://www.dubaifuture.gov.ae/ 10 2071 UAE Centennial Plan is based on the vision that the UAE will be the world’s leading nation by the year 2071: https://u.ae/en/about-the-uae/strategies-initiatives-and-awards/federal-governments-strategies- and-plans/uae-centennial-2071 11 Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell, and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique,” Grey Room, 68, 2017, 106-129: http://www.greyroom.org/issues/68/72/the-smartness- mandate-notes-toward-a-critique/ 171

Beirut with the absence of required public services contributes to the increasing need for private care, including domestic care provided by non-citizen workers. On the other hand, the glowing city-island of “Dubai Healthcare City,” underlines the growing popularity of health tourism in the UAE, which again prey on non-citizen labor in the sectors of construction and service. The Kafala system, common in both countries as well as the rest of the GCC countries and Jordan, is regarded a system of modern-day slavery.12 Low- waged migrant workers, arriving mostly from South/Southeast Asia and Africa, are denied most of their labor and civil rights, and thus systemically rendered vulnerable to varied kinds of exploitation and abuse.

As Michele Acuto emphasizes, there is a need for a multiscalar analysis of Dubai that goes beyond the top-down or grounded-up approaches.13 Only then, will we be able address the multilayered geographies of Dubai as a global city. However, there arises a further question of how to grasp these different scales, historical processes, and cultural/aesthetic forms in their relationality as and within the matrix of global capital. To this end, I propose that Fredric Jameson’s notion of geopolitical aesthetic and its accompanying counter-visual method of cognitive mapping could be helpful for attuning to these conflicting tendencies of capital.

For instance, the promotion video for the Dubai Museum of the Future’s exhibition depicts the smart future of Dubai as a peaceful and sustainable place with

12 Laavanya, Kathiravelu. Migrant Dubai: Low Wage Workers and the Construction of a Global City. London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2016), 14. 13 Michele Acuto, “Dubai in the ‘Middle’” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 38.5, 2014, 1732-48. 172

polished images in a sharp contrast to the unruly and chaotic scenes that are currently taking place on the streets across the Middle East. Indeed, the visual aesthetic of the video overshadows the Arabian Gulf’s reliance on cheap migrant labor and its domination over the rest of the region. This contrast manifests the massively polarized accumulation of wealth and class formation in the region, marked by the domination of the Gulf and U.S. imperialism.

In opposition to the contemporary spectacles of Gulf Futurism, the practice of cognitive mapping seeks a counter-visuality that enables individuals to render their situatedness in a capitalist world system and its historicity intelligible. Jameson’s cognitive mapping goes beyond the deterministic or totalizing models since it ultimately indicates the individual’s active negotiation of urban space. Capital’s operations are inseparable from the relations of social difference, constantly producing and reworking hierarchies predicated on race, gender, citizenship, and geopolitics. This becomes even more significant today, as the intersecting trajectories of logistics and finance expand frontiers of valorization through the intensified networks and techniques of extraction.14

The Gulf’s Smartness Mandate

In the Arabian Gulf, the emirate of Dubai exemplifies the modern condition of spectacle, which is reflected in the city’s captivating architecture and lifestyle of luxurious consumption.15 Dubai is one of the seven semi-autonomous monarchies that

14 Mezzadra and Neilson, The Politics of Operation, 4. 15 Yasser Elsheshtawy, Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle (London: Routledge, 2010). 173

make up the UAE, a federation of Arab States formed in 1971. Due to the limited reserve of oil resources, Dubai’s long-term success has been depended upon plans for economic diversification and urban expansion, accompanied by strong branding strategies.16 The governing elite has put much emphasis on the creation of landmarks and world-class structures capable of developing a unique urban identity that is attractive to global capital. Dubai’s overreliance on imaginaries to sustain its aura of progress manifests the city’s worlding strategies, positioning itself as a global hub.17

While facing post-oil futures, the ongoing fragmentation of Dubai into multiple coming-soon themed areas has embraced a newer emphasis on sustainable futures.18 For instance, the initiative Smart Dubai 2021 aims at embracing the future in the now by offering “a more efficient, seamless, safe, and personalized city experience” for residents and visitors in tandem with all public and private stakeholders.19 Smart Dubai with its motto of “the happiest city on earth” is placed among other future-oriented initiatives

(Figure 6), such as Area 2071, Dubai Future Foundation, Museum of the Future, and The

16 Martin Jong De, Thomas Hoppe & Negar Noori. “City Branding, Sustainable Urban Development and the Rentier State: How Do Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai Present Themselves in the Age of Post Oil and Global Warming?” Energies. 2 (9), 2019, 1657-1682. 17 Hashim, Alamira Reem Bani; Irazábal, Clara; and Byrum, Greta. “The Scheherazade Syndrome,” Architectural Theory Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2010, 210–231. 18 There is a large-scale, eco-friendly smart city project, Masdar City, that is currently under construction in Abu Dhabi, the neighboring city of Dubai. Mainly built with economic rather than environmental concerns, however, Masdar City is criticized for its unsustainable and exclusive nature. In this chapter, I prefer to focus on Dubai’s city-wide smart infrastructures rather than a particular, bounded project. Nonetheless, the growing investments in high-tech and cultural industries in Abu Dhabi share some similarities with the issues I am raising here. Please see: Gökçe Günel, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abi Dhabi (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). 19 See the initiative’s official website: https://2021.smartdubai.ae/ 174

Digital Silk Road. Thus, Dubai’s smart futures are part of infrastructural worlding, enabled by digitization of urban spaces and services.20

Figure 6: Smart Dubai’s official website, screenshot by the author on July 1st, 2020 https://www.smartdubai.ae/

The governing elite, headed by one of the descendants of the ruling family, Sheik

Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler and the UAE Prime Minister, has held solid control over the expansion and diversification of the Emirate’s activities, where public and private sectors melt together. Thus, the state-capital nexus enables the expansion of capital in the face of recurring crises of capitalism by telling futuristic, speculative myths, mostly when they deem to fail. The problem of spatial fixity is temporarily resolved by the capitalization of future, time itself. Indeed, Alamira Reem

Bani Hashim et al. come up with the term “Scheherazade Syndrome” to characterize the developmental plans taking in Dubai since the early 2000s. Similarly, Dubai Future

20 Harris Breslow, “The Smart City and the Containment of Informality: The Case of Dubai.” Urban Studies (Special Issue: Worlding Smart Cities: Towards Global Comparative Research), 2020, 1-16. 175

Foundation’s futuristic projects tell speculative myths, just like the mythical figure

Scheherazade who postpones her ultimate end for a day by telling fictive stories to the king.21 Her main strategy is leaving stories incomplete and promising to be continued at the following night – just like the myths through which capitalism (temporarily) survives its ultimate end.

According to Orit Halpern and Gökçe Günel, smartness mandate deploys this very idea of resilience while the constant deferral of future results sets its temporal logic.22

Smartness mandate mostly builds on an entrepreneurial myth having little to do with how actually existing cities operate. Its virtual state, always deferred potentiality is smart city’s fundamental mode of existence. The actuality of disasters is replaced by the preemptive anticipation of negative events and the preemptive hope of high-tech futures.

The ideals of smart city do the obvious ideological work of undermining the historicity within which it has come into being.23 As Mark Fisher coins the term “Science Fiction

Capital,” the forms and narratives of futurity are integral to the maintenance of global capitalism by producing both value and forms of knowledge.24 Global networks of power

21 Hashim et al., The Scheherazade Syndrome. 22 Orit Halpern and Gökçe Günel, “Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, & Preemptive Hope,” The Fibreculture Journal, no. 29, Computing the City, 2017. http://twentynine.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj- 215-demoing-unto-death-smart-cities-environment-and-preemptive-hope/ See also Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 23 Kevin Rogan, Anti-Intelligence: A Marxist Critique of the Smart City, MA Thesis in the Program of Theories of Urban Practice, Parsons School of Design, The New School, 2019: https://www.academia.edu/39125907/Anti-intelligence_A_Marxist_critique_of_the_smart_city 24 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Winchester: Zero Books, 2004). 176

operates through material, technical, and ideological infrastructures of generating experience, sense, and horizons of time.

These futuristic projections, however, are not limited to the splendid view of built environments. Within the cityscape, the ongoing penetration of computation exaggerates

Dubai’s control over its residents at the intersection of its conflicting neoliberal and autocratic agenda. As Hanieh highlights, we need to look at the strategical role of telecommunication industries in such capitalist expansions with a public-private hybrid model.25 This new orientation of the Gulf’s urban development is tied to its accelerated securitization of everyday life as well as its domination over the rest of the Middle East.

Accordingly, Dubai is exemplary of what Keller Easterling calls “extrastatecraft,” a set of zones, devices, and narratives that materialize a “infrastructural space.”26 In this way,

Easterling’s extrastatecraft concretizes the politics of Bratton’s platform sovereignty on the ground, or in other words, along with my adoption of Beller’s emphasis on the surround.

Since the late 19th century, the country formed a strategic node within the wider circulatory networks of British colonialism in the Gulf region.27 Following its independence in 1971, the country’s rapid urbanization was built on the metamorphization of postcolonial infrastructures into new regional alliances, besides its long-standing linkages with the US military. According to Ziadah, the UAE has become a

25 Hanieh, Money, Markets, and Monarchies, 86-90. 26 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. (London: Verso, 2014). 27 Ziadah, 1690.

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great example of how investments in war-making, humanitarian aid, and logistics merge under neoliberal governance. Moreover, the accelerated digitization of city spaces and services underscores an intensification of disciplinary control over already economically and socially marginalized communities, especially low-waged non-citizen workers.28

Consequently, it is not enough to criticize the projections of smart cities by revealing the material limits produced by its current instantiations or calling for liberal humanist values of inclusion and privacy.29 The context of Dubai, the Gulf, and the

Middle East at large, instead, promotes a transitional perspective to examine the flows of capital, labor, and logistics as well as the dynamics of class formation at regional and global scales. Ultimately, the current transnational perspective underscores the significance of marking computational media as an imperial apparatus that relies on and reproduces imperial divisions and regimes of visuality.

Gulf Futurism(s)

The current chapter investigates the geopolitical aesthetic of futuristic narratives arising from the Middle East that reflects the massively polarized wealth accumulation and class formation in the region. This is why I examine the entrepreneurial projections of Gulf capital on the one hand and counter-futuristic narratives on the other. Here, I draw upon Jussi Parikka’s pioneering work that historicizes speculative futurisms that have emerged within the context of urban planning and contemporary arts in the Middle

28 Breslow, “The Smart City and the Containment of Informality,” 6. 29 Maroš Krivý, “Towards a critique of cybernetics urbanism: The smart city and the society of control,” Planning Theory, 17 (1), 2018, 21. 178

East.30 The notion of Gulf Futurism, first coined by the artists Fatima Al-Qadiri and

Sophia Al-Maria, underscores the contradictory tendencies of accelerated urban development in the Arabian Gulf, fueled by the 1950s and 1960s oil boom.31

According to Parikka, Gulf Futurism has emerged within the shifting registers of geopolitical priorities and sociotechnical imaginaries that are evident, as Chad Elias describes, in the mixture of “desert city planning, hypermodern infrastructure, environmental collapse, premodern tribalism, and globalized cultural kitsch.”32 Indeed, the Gulf’s urban aesthetic expresses a historically specific vision of the future which was never actualized but, for Elias, characterized by “a projection of conditions the rest of the world is moving towards.” Interestingly, it also makes a twist with Jameson’s idealization of the Third World in the 1980s, by arguing that Gulf Futurism represents the world’s possible collapse in the future.

The urban scale symbolically acts as the Gulf’s projection of power, while restoring a cultural heritage and replicating the Western ideals of progress at once.33

Therefore, Gulf Futurism is better situated as “hauntology” in Mark Fisher’s terms, drawing upon Jacques Derrida, interrogating the failure of utopian promises of modernity

30 Jussi Parikka, "The Middle East and Other Futurisms: Imaginary Temporalities in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture." Culture, Theory and Critique 59 (1), 2017, 40-58. 31 Fatima Al-Qadiri and Sophia Al-Maria, “Al-Qadiri, Fatima & Sophia Al-Maria on Gulf Futurism,” November 14, 2012. Accessed March 2, 2020: https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/15037/1/al- qadiri-al-maria-on-gulf-futurism 32 Chad Elias, Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 172. 33 Hanieh, Money, Markets, and Monarchies, 73. 179

on both personal and collective registers.34 Writing about Sophia Al-Maria’s artistic work, Mike Frangos identifies the aesthetic of Gulf Futurism as a mode of retro-futurist nostalgia that is not for the past but for the future.35 In contrast to Afrofuturism which seeks to decenter the cosmologies of the West by reclaiming the techno-cultural agency of black bodies, as Gary Zhexi Zhang puts, Gulf Futurism “feels less of an emancipatory movement than the timely framing of a geopolitical aesthetic,” manifesting a nightmarish return of the repressed which cannot escape Orientalist fantasies.36

As some cultural theorists such as Mark Fisher37 and Franco Berardi38 argue, the future is canceled by the ideological imperatives of finance capitalism as well as the failed utopian projects that marked the end of the 20th century. As Parikka refers to Rosi

Braidotti,39 however, the idea of cancellation of the future should not end up overlooking communities, who have been always already dispossessed within the modernist tropes of time: “it needs to be specified whose future was cancelled and when it was (already) canceled, thereby connecting the issue of temporality to colonial and post-colonial analysis.”40 Even though the dystopic narratives of the economic and ecological apocalypse are usually articulated through the imaginaries of time-to-come, they already

34 Mike Frangos, “The Girl Who Fell to Earth: Sophia Al-Maria’s Retro-Futurism.” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings 5(3), 2017, 3. 35 Ibid., 3. 36 Gary Zhexi Zhang, “Where Next? Imagining the Dawn of the “Chinese Century.” Frieze, April 22, 2017. Accessed March 2, 2020: https://frieze.com/article/where-next 37 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life. 38 Franco Berardi, After the Future. Edited by Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011). 39 Here, Parikka cites: Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Polity. 40 Parikka, Middle East and Other Futurisms, 43. 180

reflect the painful histories of Western colonialism. This inquiry, however, as Kodwo

Eshun puts, is neither a return nor a longing for some essentialist past.41 Rather, it seeks a way to understand the historical and aesthetic role of dispossession, and distort how power functions through the management of reliable futures.

Instead of simply mourning a lost future, as Parikka highlights, artistic practices could examine the operations of temporality that is integral to the functioning of power.

According to Suleiman Majali, (Arab)futurism/s could signify a cultural break from the domination of Eurocentric narratives to overcome the hegemonic cultural nostalgias that trigger a political paralysis in the present.42 With the prospective titled “Towards

Arabfuturism/s,” Majali highlights this very necessity of decolonizing the logics and techniques through which Arab futures are envisioned. In this regard, as Parikka puts it, the possibility of Arabfuturism ultimately joins the struggle of other counter-futurisms:

What sort of narratives “are apt for a consideration of the current political moment, and what forms of time can harbor any sort of liberating potential that work against the already existing times?”43 Consequently, artistic practices aimed at imagining alternative futures necessarily attune to the expansion of social movements worldwide since 2011, such as the Arab uprisings and the Occupy Wall Street (in the background of the global financial crisis of 2008). According to Mirzoeff, those crowds signal the crisis of

41 Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3:2, 2003, 287–302. 42 Suleiman Majali, “Towards Arabfuturism/s”. Novelty Magazine #2, 2015: http://www.noveltymag.co.uk/towards-arabfuturisms/ 43 Parikka, Middle East and Other Futurisms, 43. 181

visuality, and its self-authorizing hegemony, and this is why the ever-growing securitization of everyday life, intensified with smart technologies, has been motivated by this “anxiety that imperial subjects might start to think and act in common.”44

Counter-Futurisms Arising from the Middle East

From the standpoint of a potentially apocalyptic present, the projected futures of dystopian fiction have become everyday touchstones for current political events and ongoing socio-technical formations. There is, however, a long history of alternative futures dreamed by people of color, feminists, and queers that challenge the hegemonic narratives of history and futurity. As Alexis Loithan proposes, there is a powerful speculative element in the genre of science fiction as a practice of counter-visuality, marked by the shift from deconstructing existing worlds to envisioning how the world might be. 45 I turn back to Jameson’s political commitment to utopia to demonstrate how cultural forms express the nature of social life, both as we live it now and as we feel how it ought to be lived. In this regard, a Beirut-based artist and writer with a background in architecture, Bassem Saad’s futuristic scene intermingles dystopian and utopian tendencies, lingering enough in the terrors of the present while manifesting how it can be transformed.

44 Mirzoeff, Visualizing the Anthropocene, 228. 45 Alexis Loithan, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 182

Saad’s work Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops) (2019)46 is an online, interactive, game-like setting that is based on a 3D model of a near-future fiction set in

Beirut. The dwelling space is that of a paranoid queer narrator, who is convinced about the presence of a localized emergent intelligence that initiates infrastructural projects, which are detrimental to biological health. 3D modeling, traversing the material and algorithmic realms of computation. In contrast, Saad’s virtual landscape depicts one of the most polluted neighborhoods of Beirut around the port area, the expanding dumpsites and suburbs of the city that host the economically and socially marginalized communities. Those landfill reclamations await real-estate investment in line with the government’s profit-making agenda.

In the face of slow violence in Rob Nixon’s terms and unreliable mechanisms of neoliberal state and humanitarian aid/discourse, the character carries out specific life- preserving rituals and utilizes objects such as spine-protecting medical belts and chest harness to talismanic garments. For instance, the first thing the viewer sees upon their entry is the billboard advocating for cancer awareness-related event with the motto of

“Love Heals” located in the middle of old, rusty industrial buildings. Within the virtual space, the cranes of docks along the coast appear in the distance from where the viewer probably could smell the garbage (Figure 7). Even in this very first glimpse of the site,

46 Saad’s work was presented as part of an online residency run by Akademie Schloss Solitude and ZKM. The sixth edition of the series is themed “Planetary Glitch” (Spring 2019), curated by Mary Maggic. Thoom and Pad Fut contributed to sound design, and W. F. Lee wrote the code. This web intervention was an early phase of a longer project Saad developed during his residency at the Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program. See the project’s website: http://systemcare.schloss-post.com/ For further information, see the artist’s website: http://www.bassemsaad.com/systemcare 183

Saad’s work marks the discrepancy between the urban and health plans projected by the officials including from local municipalities to international NGOs and the material realities of the city itself.

Figure 7: Bassem Saad, Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops), navigable online space screenshot, 2019, courtesy the artist. http://www.bassemsaad.com/systemcare

Saad geopolitically situates Beirut as a node within a variety of planetary chains, starting at the level of his vernacular experience in Beirut and tying it to the transnational patterns of dispossession and labor. Based on his research on multinational economies of waste and care, Saad follows a thread of “(un)care” amid the unevenly distributed impacts of waste disposal, high toxicity, and privatization of care. For instance, the close up of a fleshed out, deformed body lying on the ground (after a fall from a death drop), as if a network of nodes were mapped on it, maps out various statements: “housekeeping by refugees,” “very heteronormative family planning, or “close to no borders on capital or trash.” The totality of these locally manifested forms of debility in Jasbir Puar’s terms traverses varied biopolitical formations as and within the matrix of racial capitalism. On

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the one hand, Saad brings back the thickness of flesh and historicity onto these flattened categories and models. On the other, Saad connects those toxic, broken bodies to a broader scale of labor, care, and control that they are part of, ranging from the absence of required public services to the politics of social and sexual normativity in Lebanon.

Saad’s work becomes an act of cognitive mapping, as it maps out a global supply chain that cuts across the Global North/South divide. According to Saad:

China no longer imports trash but exports veritable technological thought and progress, further complicating any North/South divide. On the other hand, in the countries like Lebanon, emergency plans to fund waste-to- energy incinerators are being put forward that include the import of waste. (…) If not to China or Lebanon, the waste may still find its way to other countries in the Global South who may resort to importing out of material necessity, with safety standards that may vary from those in action in Europe. Waste may even find its way to one of the African and Asian countries that export devalued manual labor by way of migrating domestic care workers, who may end up providing domestic care services to aging or ill clients in Lebanon, the Arab world, and other countries under the notoriously exploitative Sponsorship (Kafala) system and its equivalents. Indeed, this system is an example of a global care chain that is not only a North-to-South but also a South-to-South chain.47

Saad’s appropriation of 3D imaging technologies, capturing the actual site and redesigning it in 3D literally ‘recycles’ Beirut, thereby reclaiming a digital medium which is often adopted by state offices or commercial firms for generating the spectacle of so-called better futures (as in the case of smart city). For instance, the Dubai Future

Foundation has announced that Dubai will become a 3D-printing hub in the near future.48

47 Saad, Bassem. “A Calamitous Node in a Planetary Chain: Interview with Bassem Saad by Sophie- Charlotte Opitz,” Issue No 0 Digital Culture, Theory & Art, March 07 2019, https://schloss-post.com/a- calamitous-node-in-a-planetary-chain/ 48See the project’s site: https://www.dubaifuture.gov.ae/our-initiatives/dubai-3d-printing-strategy/ 185

3D technologies-enabled smart architectures are proposed as a strategy to reduce labor and cut costs by large numbers across different sectors. These kinds of investments in the realm of urban planning demonstrate how smartness mandate is proposed as a solution to the recurring crisis of capitalism by employing a logic of resilience in the face of an uncertain future.

Figure 8: Bassem Saad, Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops), navigable online space screenshot, 2019, courtesy the artist. http://www.bassemsaad.com/systemcare

In Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops), Saad appropriates the aesthetic affordances of 3D modeling by partaking in the transformation of object-environment relations through which the dominant narratives of environmental collapses and possible solutions are presented (e.g. air pollution simulators). As depicted in the screenshot above, Saad transforms the objects within a 3D spatial construction, such as unwrapped faces and skin textures hanging and spilling over without having been projected onto a

3D object yet (Figure 8). In Saad’s fictional world, these surfaces act as talismanic 186

garments that are part of the self-care that protect the character from the hazardous impacts of the toxic environment. Similarly, transparent bodies held together by spine- protecting belt – a medical equipment to keep together the body falling apart – are transposed with the grey city in the background which is falling apart as much as the bodies inhabiting it. These bodily forms expose the limits of the enclosure of an organism, as one’s body gets mixed with the toxic environment that keeps leaking. Thus,

Saad’s intervention does not only bring back the thickness of bodies in the face of flattening abstraction of algorithmic media but connect those bodies to larger processes they are part of. In other words, Saad generates an aesthetic that links cellular and transnational scales.

For instance, Saad’s uses the circular pattern of an incinerator as a narrative tool, is utilized for converting the waste into ash, flue gas, or heat, thereby recycling it into something productive, like electric power. In Saad’s virtual world, however, what is in circulation as an input or output cover a range of socio-cultural references, such as “the

Westphalian sovereignty”, “queer cosmopolitanism”, or “machine learned brain drain”

(Figure 9). These categories, ranging from political concepts (sovereignty) to bodily actions (inhale), bridge the psychic and social realms, as well as material and abstract processes that underlie the extractive operations of computational capital.

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Figure 9: Bassem Saad, Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops), navigable online space screenshot, 2019, courtesy the artist. http://www.bassemsaad.com/systemcare

Saad’s remodeling of an incinerator as a narrative tool aims at contesting government’s ongoing efforts of converting trash into capital amid the ever-growing economic and environmental crises, as well as the rising health, and energy-related problems. The government is still investing in for-profit recycling, land reclamation, and waste-to-energy incineration imported from Europe, recalling Naomi Klein’s emphasis on the role of neoliberal state in profiting from disasters, whether economic or environmental. While unpacking the scales of such violence enacted by the state-capital nexus, Saad insists on reutilizing “systems thinking and information theory” for dealing with “the scale and inhumanism of these processes,” across the Global North/South divide: How to model or represent a toxic metropolis, waste migrating North-South

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across the planet, or an ill population, be it from a cancer epidemic or from latent psychopathologies?49

Historically situated, Lebanon’s garbage crisis exposed varied patronages underlying the neoliberal trajectories of the country, which have led to the high levels of economic and political instability as well as urban inequality. Lebanon’s postwar economy is marked by its integration into Gulf rentierism through banking and real estate.50 As a result, postwar economy benefited rentier capitalists at the top, created a precarious middle class, and perpetuated poverty, with the ever-growing symptoms of public debt and currency crisis. Therefore, the explanations that focus solely on the conception of sectarian “weak state” neglect the crucial importance of Lebanon’s dependence on Gulf rentierism.51 Beirut is one of the examples of how the internationalization tendencies of Khaleeji Capital have been penetrating all Arab social formations beyond the Gulf region,52 and Hariri Group of Lebanon, for instance, should be considered part of this capital since the prime minister Rafic Hariri’s ties to the Saudi regime played a determinative role in the reconstruction of central Beirut.53

The politics of waste is a global issue that is shaped by planetary shifts, international regulations, and national plans. For instance, the current problem of toxicity

49 Saad, Bassem. “A Calamitous Node in a Planetary Chain: Interview with Bassem Saad by Sophie- Charlotte Opitz,” Issue No 0 Digital Culture, Theory & Art, March 07 2019, https://schloss-post.com/a- calamitous-node-in-a-planetary-chain/ 50 Hannes Bauman, “The Causes, Nature, and Effect of the Current Crisis of Lebanese Capitalism.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 25 (1), 2019, 61-77. 51 Ibid., 62. 52 Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States, 160. 53 Saree Makdisi, “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere,” Critical Inquiry, 23 (3), 1997, 661-705. 189

around Beirut can be traced back to the period of the civil war (1975-1990) during which multiple European countries illegally sent their toxic waste to Lebanon.54 The strength of

Saad’s work, however, is his mapping the racialized patterns of care, waste, and labor across the Global South/North divide, thereby tying his local case of Beirut to global capital’s relationship to its multiple outsides.

In the case of Beirut, the violence wrought by toxic drift takes place gradually and often invisible. This is what Rob Nixon defines as “slow violence” – the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises in contrast with the sensation-driven technologies of our image world and public activism today.55 For Nixon, slow violence exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and communities, who are already dispossessed, especially in the Global South. There arises a problem of “how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects and invisible harms.”56 Nixon’s emphasis on the problem of representation corresponds to the dilemma of giving a figurative shape to formless threats that are dispersed across time and space. Their lack of specificity and tangibility has a dangerous impact on what counts as violence and casualty. This is why Nixon connects the aesthetic problem of slow violence to the environmentalism that often only the poor, the most vulnerable, can see – like Saad’s fictional character in Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops).

54 Nils Hägerdal, “Toxic Waste Dumping in Conflict zones: Evidence from 1980s Lebanon," Mediterranean Politics, 2019, 1-21. 55 Nixon, Slow Violence, 6. 56 Ibid., 3. 190

As Blake Atwood points out, the most vulnerable populations of Beirut reside alongside the city’s dumpsites, who are already marginalized within Lebanon’s sectarian structures of social and spatial organization.57 For instance, one of these sites is Dahieh

(the Costa Brava Landfill), which is historically stigmatized as an Islamist ghetto of poor rural migrants, and recently known to be a “Hezbollah stronghold”. Thus, Atwood raises the question of “[w]hat happens to a vibrant space like Dahieh when it becomes the dumping ground for tons of trash, including waste from the very media devices that promise to challenge sectarian politics.”58 This question applies to another landfill site,

Bourj Hammoud, a working-class neighborhood with an Armenian identity. The historical development of neighborhood started with a refugee camp for Armenians fleeing genocide in central Anatolia at the beginning of the 20th century, and it is currently a destination for both migrant workers and Syrian refugees.

Hence, as Atwood argues, if we want to tell a story of media use in urban struggles, these populations are also part of the story we tell since media are material as much as our conditions are.59 The disuse of media also preys on the same politics of invisibility, marked by the entangled relationship of waste with dispossession and labor.

Therefore, as Nixon puts, we need to ask:

Who gets to see, and from where? When and how does such empowered seeing become normative? And what perspectives—not least those of the poor or women or the colonized—do hegemonic sight conventions of visuality obscure?60

57 Blake Atwood, Uncovering Beirut’s Media Waste. 58 Ibid., 60. 59 Ibid., 65. 60 Nixon, Slow Violence, 15. 191

Saad’s work is better situated along with the counter-visual practices flourishing in Lebanon, especially in the rise since 2015, led by environmental activists and grassroots groups, to contest the government’s profit-making agenda.61 Unpacking the registers of slow violence, artists tackle the aesthetic manifestations of the ongoing waste crises and increasing toxicity, as a way of rendering it tangible and historical, and thus contestable. Some of these works include: Jessika Khazrik’s The Blue Barrel

Grove (2013-ongoing), Marwa Arsanios’s Falling Is Not Collapsing, Falling is

Extending (2016), Fadi Mansour’s Sealand (2018), and and Nadim Choufi’s Golden

Hour Bodies (2019).

Within this trend, Saad’s virtual scenery of Beirut recalls Shannon Mattern’s critique of “the dream of an informatic urbanism,” the ideals underlying the smartness mandate.62 According to Mattern, the totalizing image of “city as computer” blinds us to the countless other sites of intelligence-generation ranging from municipal departments and laboratories to universities and hospitals. The informatic image of a city carries the risk of reifying information by obscuring the ways in which urban information is made, commodified, accessed, obscured, and politicized. In response, as Mattern highlights, we need to shift our gaze towards how data are distributed within a varied ecology of urban sites and subjects who interact with it in multiple and mostly conflicting ways.

61 Saad has written a text on this matter, historically and aesthetically situating his practice along with the accelerated waste crisis as well as ongoing struggle for countervisuality since 2015. See: Bassem Saad, “No Entropy: Cassandra 2020,” Unbag Fall 2019. https://unbag.net/in-tension/no-entropy-cassandra-2020 62 Mattern, Shannon, “A City Is Not a Computer,” Places Journal, February 2017. Accessed March 2, 2020. https://placesjournal.org/article/a-city-is-not-a-computer/ 192

For instance, in The Ritual I Wish You Could See (2018-2019), Saad collaborates with Edwin Nasr for extensive research on the adoption of 3D technology, ranging from architectural rendering and game design to virtual reality applications, by various state, sectarian, and (para-)military agents affiliated with the political context of Lebanon, including “political Shiism’s uses of virtual reality and video games as ostensibly counter-hegemonic to the domination of the American and Israeli military- entertainment complexes.”63 By interrogating the political affordances of imaging technologies, they build a geopolitical thread that traverses material and ideological infrastructures of political violence, increasingly mediated by computational aesthetics.

The political affordances of these techno-capitalist practices, taking the form of conditioning at the level of embodiment, either for managing war traumas (e.g. VR- enabled expose treatment for veterans who returned from Iraq) or for grounding futures wars, ultimately re-narrates historical and current events as well as prescribe futures that shape collectivities and territories along with their political agenda. Saad and Nasr’s elaborate analysis underlines Mirzoeff’s emphasis that the visuality is a technique for the reproduction of the imaginaries through which hegemonic authority maintains and justifies itself, and thus, the violent transformation of our relationship to history and reality, even at levels beyond our perceptual threshold.

63 Bassem Saad and Edwin Nasr, “This Ritual I Wish You Could See (Render and File),” lecture- performance, Asia Contemporary Art Week’s Annual Forum Field Meeting, Dubai, 25-26 January, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3s&v=E9iHJbujO4w For further information see the artist’s website: http://www.bassemsaad.com/triwycs 193

Accordingly, Saad’s critical and creative endeavor offers a countervisual practice by shifting our gaze toward how visuality is fabricated and data is distributed within a varied ecology of urban sites and subjects who interact with it in multiple, mostly conflicting ways. In this regard, Monika Halkort encourages us to critically examine the role of datafication in materializing objects, environments, and bodies “into historically situated measure-value relations that both enable and constrain possibilities for existence within the registers of market and state.”64 For example, her analysis of the Palestinian refugee camps, or the irregular migration in the Mediterranean Sea, grasps the complexity of data relations on the ground at the intersection of shifting registers of rationality, aesthetic regimes, and asymmetries of power. Vital urban intelligences survive within bodies, minds, and communities across time, as opposed to the accelerated speed of financial markets and news cycles.

For example, Saad included sound recordings within the virtual space from the interviews he conducted with local actors involved in waste and care economies, respectively (Figure 10). One could listen to those voice recordings, or read translated transcripts. On the one hand, some stakeholders either benefit from or contribute to the exploitative and abusive mechanism of the kafala system, such as recruiting agencies, employers, and sending/receiving countries. On the other hand, there is a growing mobilization around unionization and the abolition of the kafala system, building upon the ongoing struggles of migrant workers themselves, activist groups, and NGOs. As

64 Halkort, “Decolonizing Data Relations,” 321. 194

migrant workers are overworked, underpaid, abused, deported, and left to vanish in the hands of employers and recruiting agencies as much as in the background of architectural spectacles and publicity efforts. Thus, their condition is another manifestation of slow violence in Nixon’s terms, and thus, it is ultimately part of countervisual practices accompanying anti-government protests in Lebanon.

Figure 10: Bassem Saad, Syscare (All cared for by chains and loops), navigable online space screenshot, 2019, courtesy the artist. http://www.bassemsaad.com/systemcare

Consequently, Saad’s work speaks to a broader context of counter-visual practices arising from the streets of Beirut, where people continue protesting the waste crisis, the banking system, and the kafala system. During the country-wide anti-government protests that have taken place since October 2019, people chant for the resignation of the sectarian political class and the abolition of the kafala system, thereby targeting the wider class hierarchies altogether. The sectarian system being opposed on the streets is inherently 195

tied to the same racist structures that oppress marginalized communities, most notably foreign domestic workers and refugees, and the same patriarchal structures that oppress women and LGBTQ+.65

The Leaking Subjects

Regarding the emergent networked publics across the MENA region in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, Tarek Al-Ariss brings forth the figure of the leaking subject. Breaking away from the self-contained subject of modernity, the leaking subject’s agency is subdued now by the coded, fragmented, and viral nature of computational media. Their desires for exposing, hacking, leaking, clicking, and sharing transforms the registers of how stories are told and dissent is expressed. As El-Ariss describes, “the event of leaking reveals a scene, a drama and a web of interconnections that tie in fiction and affect, bodies and texts, and aesthetics and politics.”66

Consequently, the leaking subject, who intervenes into the codes of culture and politics, becomes shaped by their own interventions.

The leaking event is uncontainable, and thus, it always creates a threat to the authority which seeks ultimate control over the bodies that it governs. What makes the narrative of the leak so powerful is not its revelation of information but rather its disruption of the very containment of information, thereby producing a sudden rupture of control. Therefore, El-Ariss’ interpretation of the leak event departs from the discourse of

65 Joey Ayoub, “The Lebanese revolution must abolish the kafala system.” Al-Jazeera, November 14, 2019. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/lebanese-revolution-abolish-kafala- system-191114115435950.html 66 El-Ariss, Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals, 28. 196

enlightening information;67 instead, presents it as a political affect. The “concrete data” in a “felt present” moves readers and publics affectively, like the leaked videos of and tweets about police brutality on the streets and even, on the way to the police station:

“The body is cut up and circulated online or reduced to slapping hands and shaky knees associated with the security systems of Arab regimes.”68

Indeed, the leaks can be historically anchored in cultural traditions that have cast leaking body functions as threatening to the community, and have prevented the body from revealing its leaks, thereby contaminating the social.69 Thus, El-Ariss demonstrates how the leaker is framed as the redeemed subjects of the liberal or autocratic state in need of fixing. Eventually, the leak is an embodied confrontation for its actors due to the anticipated material consequences such as torture, deportation, and incarceration.

Therefore, leaking cannot be taken for granted as a promise of techno-salvation.70 While opening up a possibility of change, it involves dangerous openings that risk engulfing actors of the leak.

67 Ibid., 38. Here, El-Ariss makes a reference to Julian Assange’s reading of Wikileaks in continuity with the Gutenberg project of the printing press, and Slajov Žižek’s reading of it as part of a global enlightenment project, comparing Wikileaks to Encyclopédie (18). 67 Žižek argues that the information associated with the leak is always already known, and thus, situates the significance of the leak in the process of getting “concrete data”. Here, El-Ariss appropriates Žižek’s reference to “concrete data” in terms of material and affective registers of data. In this regard, El-Ariss refers to Mohammed Bamyeh’s analysis of the early stages of the Arab uprisings – more specifically, his emphasis on the role of “a directly felt present” in building communal bounds beyond the idealized and exclusive models of patriotism (p.86). 68 Ibid., 179. 69 Ibid., 39. 70 Ibid., 173. 197

As artists, activists, and theorists, how do we conceive the subject coupled with machines that is unable to control its flows and narratives? How to read the leaking body that is both threatening and threatened? Similarly, Saad argues that:

For better or worse, forms of uprising mirror the dominant forms of power, and if governance has internalized failure in the face of an increasingly malfunctioning world, then we must attempt to find opportune moments at the breaking points. What if before the storm or flood clears, as we lie wasted and destitute, we might in that moment hope to destitute power itself? If we imagine ambient toxins as being able to perfuse across the barriers of the individual, we are reminded of the fragile continuity of flesh and organ and fluid between our isolated, individual selves.71

By extrapolating contemporary economic, ecological and political concerns into a post-apocalyptic future, Saad’s work juxtaposes utopic and dystopic tendencies to bear on the present moment by exemplifying cycles of care and violence across individual and collective registers. This reading of Saad’s work recalls Donna Haraway’s idea of

“staying with trouble,” probing the possibilities of life amid capitalist ruins and collaborative survival in Anna Tsing’s terms through “response-ability”.72 The logic of resilience, however, is operative to the functioning of global capital itself – as smartness mandate demonstrates. 73Ultimately, Saad’s work moves towards this very question of what it means to survive in the presence of apocalyptic futures and to seek shelter that is only unevenly distributed.

71 Bassem, No Entropy: Cassandra 2020. 72 Donna. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 37-38. Haraway refers to: Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015). 73 Halpern, Hopeful Resilience. 198

Conclusion

In this chapter, I demonstrate how the geopolitical aesthetic of the Middle East reflects the extractive mechanisms and socio-technical imaginaries through which both global capital and computational media operate. The aesthetic of cognitive mapping in

Jameson’s terms cannot be thought in isolation from colonial histories and their neoliberal expansions that have shaped the accompanying racialized regime of visuality.

The contemporary forms of slow violence require a mapping of literal and expanded modes of extraction, as Mezzadra and Neilson elaborate, across its material, discursive, and algorithmic processes. Since they have material consequences in the present, we cannot underestimate the powerful impact of images, narratives, and virtual worlds that shape the social-technical imaginaries for the future. Indeed, those cultural imaginaries have counterparts on the streets, the long-lasting urban struggles in the Middle East.

This is where the aesthetic and political strengths of Saad’s work come forth, which contests the racialized patterns of care, waste, and labor from a transnational perspective, thereby sculpting the plasticity of scale beyond the binary models of

Center/Periphery, or South/North. As Suleiman Majali’s manifesto provocatively puts forward, imaginary futurisms emerging in the Middle East (and the Arab World) can speak of dislocations and diaspora, rather than of essentialized national or ethnic identities, and generates a cultural aesthetic that exceeds over the logic of state-capital nexus. According to Parikka, futurisms arising from the Middle East could perform a link across very diverse political struggles where many of them have to do with the themes of race, territory, and contested histories, closely entangled with the mechanisms of

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extractive capitalism. This is why, for example, the crowds on the streets during the recent protests in Beirut did not only chant for the resignation of the sectarian political class but also the abolition of the kafala system.

As Achille Mbembe puts forward, colonialism was a planetary project, and thus decolonial movement also needs to act out at a planetary scale.74 To this end, it is important to look at how material differences, caused by colonial histories and their neoliberal expansions that constitute regions and communities differently but always already dependent and uneven, are expressed in cultural forms. Therefore, claiming the right to imagine alternative futures is entangled with the act of mapping the historicity of those forms as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present. It is simultaneously archaic and futuristic, opening up the possibilities of not only deconstruction but also regeneration in the present.

74 Mbembe, Achille. “Thoughts on the Planetary: An Interview with Achille Mbembe,” Interview by Sindre Bangstad and Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen. September 5, 2019. Accessed March 2, 2020: https://www.newframe.com/writer/torbjorn-tumyr-nilsen/ 200

Chapter Four – Computational Colonialism and the End of the World

The ever-growing economic and ecological crisis in the contemporary world has led up to the dominance of technical rationality, whose primary goal is the cybernetic management of an uncertain future. We can trace the current crisis of uncertainty back to the early history of cybernetics in World War II, which invested in creating order out of chaos by way of communication and modeling-based prediction. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation situated computers as powerful tools and metaphors for promising “total oversight, exacting standards of control, and technical-rational solutions to a myriad of complex problems.”1 Rather than describing the world as it was, the cyberneticians’ interest was to predict what it would become.2 The construction of cybernetic knowledge relied on scientific efficacy, privileging the quantifiable and calculable over the messy and complex. For instance, the contemporary implementations of militarized drone technology seek to minimize the contingent nature of context and materiality, which they necessarily operate through. The case of militarized drones also demonstrates how imperial thinking, embedded within the techniques of science and domination, is incorporated into machines.

In response to the ideals of cybernetic management of the crisis, I am interested in contemporary artistic practices as sites of experimentation that rework the cybernetic

1 Antoine Bousquet, The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 124. 2 Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: The History of Vision and Reason Since 1945. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 46. 201

aspirations by bringing back the material and historical context, and appropriating systems-thinking for developing countervisual practices: What are the modes of

“unlearning imperialism” in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s terms that emerge from human- technical assemblages, diverging from colonial and patriarchal epistemologies? What are the aesthetic forms that may not be reducible to the instrumental logic of capital and computation, but generative in the process of decay?

In this chapter, I address these questions by looking at theoretical and artistic approaches that tackle the relationship between the phenomenon of the Anthropocene and computational media within the context of the Middle East. Thinking about the future of computers and Earth is inherently tied to the act of re-historicizing this relationship and resituating the totality it is actively part of in the present. For instance, the systems produced and maintained by computational media, ranging from military to financial systems, are integral to the petro-politics taking place in the Middle East. Those systems operate through investments in wars, logistics, security, real estate, arts, and high-tech industry in the region all at once. Therefore, it is necessary to trace the connections between aesthetics, violence, and capital while speculating on what futures await the region and beyond.

For the current chapter, my inspiration comes from Reza Negarestani’s book from

2008, Cyclonopedia. The book is a horror-fiction-theory that bridges contemporary world politics and the U.S. War on Terror with the archaeology of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. Similar to the idea that Gulf Futurism evokes, as coined by the artists Fatima Al Qadiri and Sophia Al-Maria, the decay in the Middle East

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manifests something about world history, as well as the projection of its future trajectories.3 The Middle East might be a marginalized geo-political decay, but the developed world, too, might be the decaying Middle East as an epidemic and global scale.4 In this regard, Morehshin Allahyari’s artistic interventions do not fetishize but dig into the under- or misrepresented histories of the Middle East as hidden writing in

Negarestani’s terms for shifting the perspective through which the current socio-political events are narrated. Ultimately, Allahyari seeks a counter-archival practice to support cultural commons, whether inspired by or based in the region, while complicating the dominant narratives of contemporary socio-technical imaginaries and possible futures.

Decolonizing the Terms of the Anthropocene

I use the term Anthropocene to identify the relationship between humans and nature, as it is shaped by the profit-oriented, capitalist mode of production today.

Historically situated, environmental crises have been not an unintended consequence but a constitutive part of the colonial domination. Settler colonialism and its contemporary extensions into petro-capitalism have severed of the relationship between “people and soil, plants and animals, and minerals and our bones.”5 As Heather Davis and Zoe Todd argue, this condition is not a byproduct but a manifestation of the logic of the

Anthropocene itself. For instance, Eyal Weizman, writing about climate change concerning Palestinian Bedouin communities, could equally be writing about the

3 Al-Qadiri & Al-Maria, Gulf Futurism. 4 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 187. 5 Heather Davis. & Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME 16 (4), 770. 203

Anthropocene: “If, however, following historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, we look at climate change from the point of view of the history of colonialism, we no longer simply see it as a collateral effect of modernity, but rather as its very target and aim. Indeed, colonial projects from North America through Africa, the Middle East, India, and Australia sought to re-engineer the climate. Colonizers did not only seek to overcome unfamiliar and harsh climatic conditions, but rather to transform them.”6

As Sean Cubitt demonstrates in his book Finite Media, the material conditions that support digital and networked media have disproportionately impacted developing nations and indigenous populations, such as the toxic result of mining uranium and disposing radioactive waste.7 The global governance of waste and Internet, largely regulated by international institutions (e.g. the World Bank), has antidemocratically served corporate interests. These regulations further empowered the wealthiest nations while diminishing the input of marginalized communities in a manner that Cubitt characterizes as a “continuation of coloniality by other means”8. As a result, the logic of profit (and we may add the logic of resilience via smartness mandate in Orit Halpern’s terms9) rationalizes worldwide tolerance for infrastructural systems that suppress sustainable forms of living and energy consumption.

6 Eyal Weizman, The Conflict Shoreline, (Göttingen: Steidl, 2015), 36, as cited in Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, 770. Within this quote, Weizman refers back to Dibesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2, 2009, 197–222. 7 Cubitt, Finite Media, 46. 8 Ibid., 150. 9 Halpern, Hopeful Resilience. 204

Hence, the notion of the Anthropocene obscures the colonial legacies and global inequalities underlying the material conditions and discursive formations that constitute the term itself. The Anthropocene is the name given by scientists to the new era in geology, which marks the dominance of human intervention, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. In opposition to this neutralized narrative of history, there has been a growing critique of the term. For instance, in Against the Anthropocene, T.J. Demos argues that the term hides the underlying colonial history and capitalist logic which are based on the processes of extraction and accumulation through dispossession.10As a universalizing project, the iconography of the Anthropocene (e.g. Google Earth) serves to re-invisibilize the power of Eurocentric narratives, thereby rendering them neutral and inevitable.

Consequently, the term Anthropocene manifests broader violence at work that affirms the continued dominance of the figure of the Western, post-Enlightenment

Subject, while rendering other populations and ways of life disposable. As Paula

Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva emphasize, the production of social difference and hierarchy has been always integral to the functioning of capital in all the shapes it has taken.11 It is precisely the capacity to objectify, measure, and quantify life on earth enabled by the human/nature binary that has formed the foundation for the Western, modern subject who only sees the world relative to themselves and others as extensions

10 Thomas J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (New York: Sternberg Press, 2017). 11 Chakravartty, & Ferreira da Silva, Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt. 205

of their will, thereby reducing racialized others, women, workers as well as the Earth itself to the level of objects valued for their extraction and exploitability.12

This selective narration of the past ultimately restricts the socio-technological imaginaries for possible futures, which has material consequences in the present.

Therefore, the question of what we should do now is closely tied to the one of how we could re-narrate those histories and re-map those concepts at first. Upon the critique of the term Anthropocene, a variety of concepts have emerged, ranging from Jason Moore’s

“Capitalocene” to Donna Haraway’s “Chthulucene”13. What is common to all these attempts of redefining histories and terms of the Anthropocene is that they seek to underline the responsibility of the capitalist system for the ruins we live in now, and provoke imaginaries that help us to imagine alternative systems, “reworlding,” in

Haraway’s terms.

This is also where my reformulation of cognitive mapping as “unlearning imperialism” in Azoulay’s terms could come into play.14 Azoulay highlights the necessity of overcoming imperial regimes of knowledge and visuality to transform the capitalist order of the society since the histories and future trajectories of coloniality and capital are closely entangled within racial capitalism. Fredric Jameson’s conception of culture as a historical form offers a dialectical model to expose capital’s erasure of the immediate history of its development while functioning. Eventually, Azoulay’s “potential history”

12 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life. 13 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. 14 Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. 206

gives a more political tone for Haraway’s reworlding by emphasizing the idea of departure that is ultimately a refusal to accept the neoliberal world-buildings that contemporary forms of imperialism manufacture as inevitable or irreversible.

Past Futures of Oil

Within the scope of this chapter, it is crucial to acknowledge the role of petro- politics in the historical development of the Middle East since the early 20th century, and the particular position of U.S. imperialism in the post-WWII era.15 The convoluted histories and conflicting tendencies of capital demonstrate that the region’s relationship to oil is much more complex than a usual critique of petrocapitalism in terms of fossil fuel dependence. As Timothy Mitchell argues in his book Carbon Democracy, the political economy of oil needs to be examined not only in terms of oil money, but also across the sites of extraction, distribution, labor, and social existence shaped around it.16

For example, oil has been a trigger for colonial and imperial endeavors, ranging from wars to military coups, as well as a catalyst for nation-building, modernization, and development, and ultimately, ever-growing ecological disasters.17 Thus, the oil creates and sustains imaginaries, whether nationalistic or futuristic, while accumulating culture and knowledge production itself (e.g. bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials).

The compilation of such sites, actors, and documents are part of tracing where oil hits the

15 Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States. 16 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso. 2011). 17 Murtaza Vali. Crude, Art Jameel Exhibition Catalogue, 2018, 9-10. Crude is published by Art Jameel, on the occasion of the group exhibition titled Crude at Jamel Arts Centre, Dubai (November 11, 2018 – March 30, 2019). 207

ground. Just like capital, oil resists representation as well: “As Imre Szeman suggests,

‘one of the major difficulties faced by any aesthetic encounter with oil is the apparent capacity for the substance to absorb all critique, in much at the same way that it absorbs light.’”18

The oil, and its surroundings, have produced a spectrum of representation, including from architecture to photography, that offers a deeper view of the past futures of oil. Much of these historical materials lie buried in various national, corporate, and media archives. For instance, the group exhibition Crude was curated by the art historian

Murtaza Vali and held at Jameel Arts Center, Dubai in the season of 2018-2019.19 The exhibition brought together multiple artists, who partook in this ongoing exploration of material history of modernity in the region that has evolved around the technological systems and material cultures, within which oil is embedded.

Moreover, contemporary artists such as Heba Y. Amin, Monira Al Qadiri, Fatima

Al Qadiri and Sophia Al-Maria among others explore the spatial-temporal politics in the

MENA region by tackling the convergence of technology and material culture in the realm of desert/oil imaginaries, ranging from media archaeological research to speculative design. Their multimedia practice rework Arab and Gulf Futurism(s) as the matrix of geopolitical aesthetic in Jameson’s terms, thereby complicating the utopic and

18 Ibid., 9. Here the author cites Imre Szeman, “How to Know about Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures,” Journal of Canadian Studies 47, no. 3, 2013) 155. 19 For further information on the exhibition curated by Murtaza Vali: https://jameelartscentre.org/whats- on/crude/ 208

dystopic narratives arising within, from, and of the region. These kinds of counter- narratives are exemplary of rehearsing what Azoulay calls potential histories (of the region), which expands the geopolitical perspectives within which the Middle East is often placed.20

Within this art historical context, Allahyari’s work also reflects on the fevers of oil and archive while mapping its various actors, objects, and institutions across the

Middle East and its extended geopolitical context. To this end, her life divided between

Iran and the US is an interesting point of entry for her efforts to re-narrate contemporary socio-political events within a larger geopolitical perspective. In this way, Allahyari’s work illustrates Negarestani’s “hidden writing” as a countervisual practice, which refers to the reading of stories through their plot holes.21 In other words, reading the Middle

Eastern context in connection to the World (the visible or base plot) requires a reinvention of this main plot to host, transport, nurture, or camouflage other plots.

Interestingly, Allahyari adopts oil as the very medium of her aesthetic practice with 3D technology, which again underscores the historical entanglements of oil, media, and aesthetics. In Negarestani’s book, the oil becomes a “narration lube,”22 a narration organizer; which proposes a narration that delineates the ontogenesis of global dynamics according to the lubricating chemistry of oil. In other words, the oil as narration lube provides a model for reworking the political connotations of the Middle East. As

20 For a more detailed discussion, see: Parikka, Middle East and Other Futurisms. 21 Ibid., 60. 22 Ibid., 19. 209

Benjamin Bratton puts it23, Negarestani reformulates a geopolitical aesthetic in Jameson’s terms, bridging the local and the global, that is customized for the Middle East. Allahyari does the same by building upon the performative capacities of digital media and story- telling.

Material Speculations

Morehshin Allahyari, born and raised in Iran, and based in the U.S. for more than a decade now, adopts 3D technology to develop physical tactics for contesting digital colonialism.24 With the series “Material Speculation: ISIS” (2015-2016), Allahyari reconstructed a dozen of centuries-old original artifacts (statues from the Roman period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh) that were destroyed by ISIS (The

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/The Levant, also known as Daesh) at the Mosul Museum in 2015. For 3D modeling, Allahyari needed still images to reconstruct those artifacts but there were not enough data to start with. These artifacts are already a part of looted archives and obscured histories. So, she needed to design those models from scratch based on the limited, and sometimes inconsistent data that could be gathered regarding the histories and material qualities of these artifacts. To this end, she collaborated with historians, archeologists, and museum staff for extensive research.

As we see in the figure of King Uthal (Figure 1), she designed replicas as time capsules for the future with a flash drive or a memory card protected inside. Those cards

23 Benjamin, Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia, 45. 24 Morehshin Allahyari. “Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism,” performance lecture, commissioned and co-presented by New Museum affiliate Rhizome, 28 February 2019. https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/morehshin-allahyari-physical-tactics-for-digital-colonialism 210

preserve gathered images, maps, and videos about those sites from the time before their destruction. Allahyari released the digital files related to the first of the models, King

Uthal, so that others could download and print their versions, which created an archive scattered around the world. Allahyari still seeks an institutional archive for the rest of the replicas in the Middle East to support cultural commons based in the region.

Through her artistic practice, Allahyari defines digital colonialism as “the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations.”25 For instance, the replica of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph, destroyed by

ISIS in 2015, reconstructed by the Institute of Digital Archeology in a joint project between Oxford and Harvard universities and Dubai Future Foundation.26 In less than a year, the Palmyra’s Arch, modeled by 3D technology and made from Egyptian marble in

Italy, was first presented to the public in London in 2016. The unveiling ceremony was presented as a symbol of solidarity with Syrians. The monument then traveled around the world from New York to Dubai, except the area where it was originally located.

To tackle this trend of neo-colonialism of ancient artifacts as placeless objects in a close affinity with rendering refugees as placeless people, the artist Ryan Woodring altered the publicly available videos of these unveiling ceremonies.27 For instance,

Woodring used visual effect techniques, such as digital removal, to make changes in the

25 Morehshin Allahyari, Digital Colonialism (2016-2019), http://www.morehshin.com/digital-colonialism- 2016-2019/ 26 Please see the project’s website for further information: https://www.dubaifuture.gov.ae/our- initiatives/3d-replica-of-palmyra-arch/ 27 Ryan Woodring, ‘“…the oldest new structure in the history of this city,”’ 2017, http://ryanwoodring.com/oldest-new-structure/ 211

unveiling scenes of the replicated Triumph Arch of Palmyra. One of the altered videos is based on the ceremony at Trafalgar Square, London, held on April 19, 2016, where the world tour took off. In the altered version, after London Mayor Boris Johnson28 completes his speech with the motto of “…the oldest new structure in the history of this city,” nothing appears underneath the veil. According to the artist, this emptiness indicates what haunts these replicas, such as the refugee bans and xenophobic mistrust that are hidden beneath the magic tricks of techno-capitalism.

Similarly, these high-budget reconstruction projects dominate the historical narratives of ancient times as well as the present conflicts.29 For instance, the Dubai

Future Foundation, one of the main funding bodies of the Institute of Digital Archeology, is currently building the Museum of the Future in Dubai, which has the most advanced, partially 3D printed building in the world. The architectural spectacle of the museum reflects Dubai’s goal of becoming a global hub for sustainable futures, as part of the

UAE’s strategical plans for positioning themselves within a fast-changing international order. The Foundation has also invested in the project of “Million Image Database,”30 which digitally documents and preserves cultural heritage in the areas that are affected by militarized conflicts or natural disasters. Their motto of “Google Earth for heritage,” glimpses at the colonial logic underlying logistical infrastructures today. As Allahyari’s

28 As of May 2020, Boris Johnson is the prime minister of the United Kingdom. 29 Vivian Hua, “Morehshin Allahyari & Ryan Woodring Artist Interviews: Ghost Prints – A Joint Conversation About Destroyed Objects,” in an interview with Morehshin Allahyari and Ryan Woodring, REDEFINE, April 22, 2016: https://redefinemag.net/2016/morehshin-allahyari-ryan-woodring-artist- interviews-3d-printing-destroyed-artifacts/ 30 Their partners include UNESCO, Oxford University Physics Department, Harvard University, and Classics for All charity among others: https://www.millionimage.org.uk/ 212

work demonstrates, it is crucial to ask the question of who could claim the right (to look) over these heritage materials. This question ultimately recalls the historicity of the field of archaeology itself, which has been closely tied to the colonial history of the region and its looted archives.

My conception of computational media as an imperial apparatus indicates this very embeddedness of its instrumentalization within a varied set of imperial divisions, rights, and regimes of visuality in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s terms. 31 For Azoulay, there is a long history underlying the entangled relationship between “well documented” objects and “undocumented people” that are tied together by the violent history of imperialism starting with the biopolitics of the 15th century, the exploration and destruction of the

New Worlds by European colonizers.32 The imperial divisions and rights are materialized in institutions (e.g. archives, museums), captured by key political terms (e.g. citizenship, democracy), and embedded within practices (e.g. preservation, study) that reproduce the continuing violence of the forced dissociation between people and objects. Only through these imperial practices, the fiction of Western progress perpetuates itself in the face of its recurring crises while resting on the very erasure of the histories of others.

In this sense, Allahyari’s use of 3D technologies does not only repair the archive but also generates a cognitive mapping that ties up the convoluted geographies and systems (monetary, technological, or symbolic) through which petro-capitalism operates.

Thus, she expands from the individual artifact or technology to the broader systems

31 Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. 32 Ibid., 24. 213

within which they are embedded, thereby re-narrating their historicity as such. For instance, most of the destroyed ancient artifacts in Syria and Iraq were smuggled by ISIS to finance its militant operations via Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel among others, to the Western countries;33 which is to say, those artifacts soon will appear in private collections. Besides, techno-capitalist spectacles overshadow the U.S. and other

Western colonial powers’ ongoing violence and strategic interests in the region, which led to the formation of ISIS in the first place. In Allahyari’s terms, if ISIS claims these objects by destroying them, and techno-capitalists reclaim them by replicating them, she offers a third way, restituting power and ownership of dispossessed communities.34

Interestingly, plastic becomes a narrative tool in both literal and expanded sense since it completes the whole cycle, starting with extracting from geological layers of the earth and ending with producing a 3D printed object (as plastic is the most commonly used raw material). Upon her critique of digital colonialism, Allahyari released the digital files related to the first of the models, King Uthal, so that others could download and print their versions. Allahyari seeks an institutional archive for the rest of the replicas in the Middle East to support cultural common based in the region. In the end, the strength of Allahyari’s work is attentiveness to the historicity of the medium itself, its situatedness

33 Tom Westcott, Destruction of Theft? Islamic State, Iraqi Antiquities and Organized Crime, March 2020, 30-39. This is a research report prepared by Global Initiative: Against Transnational Organized Crime. https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Destruction-or-theft-Islamic-State-Iraqi-antiquities- and-organized-crime.pdf 34 Morehshin Allahyari, “Digital Colonialism, Re-figuring, and Monstrosity,” the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series, the School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, 2 November 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcK9K4Yty74 214

within the material and discursive systems that shape its production and reception as such.

In 3D Additivist Manifesto, Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rouke identify 3D technology as a profound metaphor for our times that “aims to disrupt material, social, computational, and metaphysical realities through provocation, collaboration, and science fictional thinking.”35 Indeed, Allahyari’s work constitutes what Negarestani calls ()hole complex36, a twisted body of the Earth, non-holistic terrestriality. The Middle East is a sentient being with its leaky oil, nomad dust, and seductive demons; thereby it

“ungrounds the whole; the solid body by corrupting the coherency of its surfaces”37. In the ()hole complex, depth exists as the ambiguity or the gradient between inner and outer, solid and void, one and zero, or in other words, as a third scale, an intermediary agency which operates against the unitary or binary logics of inclusion and exclusion. Likewise, the Middle East always leaks out of its containment as the deserted land to be occupied, or the land of madmen of religion, oppressive dictators, and victims to be saved.

According to Eric Swyngedouw, the imaginary of potential collapse produces an ecology of fear, danger, and uncertainty and undermines the fact that many people in many places of the world are already living (and trying to survive) amid the socio-

35 In a collaboration with Daniel Rouke, Allahyari also released “The 3D Additive Manifesto” in 2015 (https://additivism.org/manifesto). The main desire for the project was to put together an open-source “cookbook” of blueprints, designs, 3D print templates, and essays on the relevant topics (https://additivism.org/cookbook). 36 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 42-44. 37 Ibid., 43. 215

ecological catastrophe.38 We must, therefore, be wary of the techniques of risk-mitigation practices that overdetermine the Anthropocene narratives in today’s world, where those risks are unevenly distributed and calculated. Moreover, those techniques and narratives could be adopted by militarized states to sustain and justify inequalities and violent acts that they operate through. For instance, predictive policing software PredPol is developed out of algorithms that are modeled after equations used to determine earthquake aftershocks.39

In this regard, the heightened moment of nuclear warfare during the Cold War period has constituted the historical underpinnings of scientific models and aesthetic techniques that have shaped the development of predictive knowledge systems today. The reproduction of the Other (racialized, communist) as an ambiguous and pervasive threat to national security created collective affects that are remobilized to justify the US-led

Global War on Terror in the post 9/11 era.40 Nuclear warfare also underlies the conception of the world as a biosphere with the emerging techniques of tracking its movements and simulating its future moves, which has led to the dominant conception of the Anthropocene as a planetary threat.

According to Bratton, “[i]nstead of locating the post-Anthropocene after the

Anthropocene along some dialectical timeline, it is better conceived as a composite

38 Eric Swyngedouw, “Apocalypse Now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24 (1), 2013, 9-18. 39 Wang, Carceral Capitalism, 240. 40 Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 216

parasite nested inside the host of the present time, evolving and appearing in irregular intervals at a scale that exceeds the Eros/Thanatos economy of the organism.”41 From this perspective, which recalls Haraway’s idea of “staying with the trouble,” art and design can take a constitutive role rather than merely mirroring or metaphorizing the current conditions. In this sense, design architectures are geopolitical constellations since they operate at the level of conceptualization and materialization all at once.42 This way is how cognitive mapping as a mode of countervisuality takes on a speculative tone.

To illustrate my point, I will talk about Allahyari’s most recent series of work that she develops under the title: She Who Sees the Unknown (2017-). Allahyari employs the varied techniques of 3D modeling, scanning, and printing to “re-create monstrous female/queer figures of the Middle Eastern origin, using the traditions and myths associated with them to explore the catastrophes of colonialism, patriarchism, and environmental degradation in relationship to the Middle East.”43 Allahyari’s work can be situated along with the broader practice of counter-futurisms, which articulate the convoluted histories of dispossession as part of imaginary futures to prescribe a postcolonial future for times to come, such as various creative and critical practices that gather around the idea of Afro-futurism. As Jussi Parikka argues, Allahyari’s work aims

“to archive the histories of particulate parts of those mythologies but also to insert them

41 Benjamin H. Bratton, “Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics,” E-flux Journal, #46, June 2013. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/46/60076/some-trace-effects- of-the-post-anthropocene-on-accelerationist-geopolitical-aesthetics/ 42 Bratton. The Stack. 43 For further information, see the project website: http://www.morehshin.com/she-who-sees-the-unknown/ 217

into current forms of activism both as narrative figures feminist resistance and 3D-printed visual forms, thereby “remediating them as part new contexts and conversations.”44

Allahyari coins the term “re-figuring” to identify a feminist and activist agenda of retrieving and reimagining the past through which we could re-figure another narrative for the present and model for the future. With the aim of tackling the forgotten or misrepresented histories of the past, she adopts the figure of Jinn, which is the name given for supernatural creatures in Islamic culture. These figures appear in various

Middle Eastern ancient tales and myths while taking up different shapes and roles. The first figure that initiated the project She Who Sees the Unknown is Huma, who is known for brining heat to the human body and causing the common fever, corresponding to the contemporary horror of climate change.45

Based on Allahyari’s re-narration, Huma becomes a figure who balances out all temperature and environmental injustice. As depicted in the video still, Huma often appears as a demon with three heads and one or two tails (Figure 11). Within her narrative, Allahyari expands on the symbolic meanings of three heads, representing the entangled trajectories of past, present, and future. This very dynamic of historicizing the present by the means of re-telling ancient myths in line with the current political events carries the task of cognitive mapping to a more speculative realm. Nonetheless, this speculative mode is always bounded by the material history of the region as well as the

44 Parikka, Middle East and Other Futurisms, 42. 45 The project’s website for Huma: http://shewhoseestheunknown.com/huma/

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materiality of the medium itself. For modeling these figures, Allahyari follows multiple steps that constitute the varied registers of the project, ranging from archival research and preservation to story-telling across various mediums and settings. Allahyari brings the materiality of objects (e.g. talismans as objects that bridge the spatial-temporal gaps) and the symbolic worlding of the video (processual imagery, narration, and sound) together.

Figure 11: Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Huma, video still, 2016, courtesy the artist. http://shewhoseestheunknown.com/huma/

We could observe some parallels between Allahyari’s immersive installations and the possessive nature of Jinn, which opens a new kind of portal, just like how Negarestani describes xeno-agents in Cyclonopedia. In Negarestani’s world, xeno-agents are unknown threats from the Outside, which are usually depicted as demons, aliens, cyborgs, or refugees. These figures dismantle identity without its total eradication,

219

thereby providing a direct link to the cosmic blasphemy and the queer current of the

Outside.46 According to Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown represents:

… the monstrous other, the dark goddess, possessive Jinn, and the dividing persona. She restores myths and histories, the untold and forgotten, the untold and forgotten, the misread and the uneven; those of and from the Near East.47

From this perspective, Allahyari’s queer figures speak to the accelerationist agenda of the xenofeminist manifesto with their provocative idea that we are not alienated enough.48 According to the authors, we all suffer from alienation but we need to rework the terms of alienation, which necessarily involves a departure from the colonial and patriarchal epistemologies, which are integral to contemporary capitalist society that alienates us. Accordingly, Allahyari’s works offer a theory of aesthetics and politics that addresses the contemporary wake of xenophobia in the Western world in more concrete terms. Indeed, Allahyari’s reworking ancient figures and myths for re-narrating contemporary politics highlights the fact that speculative futures for some, whether utopic or dystopic, have already constituted the presents of many other dispossessed communities.

For instance, Allahyari’s figure of “Ya’jooj Ma’jooj,” according to the Quran, spreads great mischief on earth and represents chaos.49 As the story goes, this is why

Allah gave Zulqarnain the power to build an iron wall to detain and separate Ya’jooj

46 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 119-120. 47 The quote comes from a set of introductory remarks that is common to the different figures of the series. The passage can be also found here at the VR documentation: http://shewhoseestheunknown.com/yajooj- majooj/#video 48 https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/ 49 For further information on the figure: http://shewhoseestheunknown.com/yajooj-majooj/ 220

Ma’jooj’ from humans. In the prophecy, the Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj presents a looming threat – that “one day the wall will crumble and they will be released at the end of days”.50 Finding herself literally “walled out” of the United States during Donald

Trump’s first attempt at the Muslim Travel Ban51, this story has a particular relevance for

Allahyari. In her videos, Allahyari narrates the story with her own voice unless it is embedded as a text format within the video, where sound design also plays a significant role in the creation of these unsettling worldings.

In She Who Sees the Unknown: Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj, the figure feels “the burden of her people’s exhaustion upon on her own shoulders” and repetitively struggles to break the wall on a daily basis (Figure 12).52 As the sculpted figure with multiple heads coming out of a single body demonstrates, Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj becomes one with the world by being divided by herself. The chaos taking place in the Near East (which is the geographical term Allahyari adopts in her narrative) spills over the confines of the

East/West. In Negarestani’s terms, the narrative “acts as a blasphemy of the Middle East

50 Ibid. 51 The original order was issued on January 27, 2017 by President Donald Trump, which banned people from seven majority-Muslim countries - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya - from entering the US for 90 days. It also halted refugee resettlement for 120 days and banned Syrian refugees indefinitely. The travel ban, also known as the Muslim ban, created chaos at airports due to the confusion about enforcement. Along with the growing protest and social mobilization against the ban, some federal courts blocked the ban on the basis of the ruling that set it unconstitutional. For further information on the revised orders and the timeline, please see the related website of American Civil Liberties Union, who has fought against the ban on multiple fronts since then: https://www.aclu-wa.org/pages/timeline-muslim-ban 52 The video She Who Sees the Unknown: Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj, (2017) was commissioned by The Photographers’ Gallery, London. The excerpt is also found at: https://vimeo.com/342063763 The VR set is commissioned and made in collaboration with the Digital Museum of Digital Art and sound design by Prince Harvey, and the VR documentation is found at: https://vimeo.com/296029355 In the VR version, Allahyari narrates the whole story with her own voice. For videos related to the project, see: http://shewhoseestheunknown.com/yajooj-majooj/#video 221

against all modes of global hegemony and political models” that prey on various forms of othering. Thus, Allahyari’s work raises the question of what represents chaos for whom, as well as who embraces the otherness, thereby complicating the exclusionary bounds of here and there, and us vs. them. Interestingly, Allahyari’s research also reveals that the interpretations of the figure Ya’jooj Ma’jooj have changed over time and space, since it has taken up different ethnic, national, or religious connotations affiliated with the idea of who is a threat within a particular context.

Figure 12: Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Ya’jooj Ma’jooj’, video still, 2017, courtesy the artist. http://shewhoseestheunknown.com/yajooj-majooj/

What is striking about the mythical narrative is that people, who want Ya’jooj

Ma’jooj contained behind the wall (like distant war zones), eventually become one with it. The chaos will be spread across the borders; across the walls, like the spread of the displaced populations due to ongoing military conflicts and the worsening impacts of

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climate change, including environmental racism. This chaotic scene speaks to the epigraphs I started this dissertation with, claiming that we are all, always and already, in it. According to Allahyari, in the Islamic narratives of Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj, the moment of ending is defined as “at the end of day,” rather than the end of time, or of the world.53

As Allahyari emphasizes, the notion of “the end of days” gives a glimpse of a new beginning that will come after rather than worrying over a total end. It might seem dark, especially for the ones who enjoy the status quo now, but it also exposes the necessity of building alternative economic systems and political models that attune to the ongoing struggles of those, who never ceases to be leaky, rebellious, and subversive.

In Cyclonopedia, the Middle East is depicted as developing a life form of its own, anti-creationist creativity in midst of decay: “The undercover softness of the Middle East defies both the vitalistic model and the necrocratic submission to death”54. Decay cannot be captured as destruction since it is not external to survival; it is neither wipes out nor terminates, but it keeps alive.55 In decay, the being survives by blurring into other beings, without losing all its ontological registers. It yields the awakening of different species from a corrupting entity which is inherent to the process of decay56 – like Haraway puts it: staying with the trouble opens up new possibilities of being, encountering, and knowing. By degenerating all aspects of formation, decay ungrounds the very ground

53 See Morehshin Allahyari’s artist talk “She Who Sees the Unknown: Ya-jooj and Ma’jooj,” held at The Photographers’ Gallery Geekender on May 5th, 2017. The part that she speaks about the notion of “the end of days” starts at 6:18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KKjn91r0sA&t=2s 54 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 181. See also Reza Negarestani, Undercover Softness: An Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay, Collapse VI, 2010, 6 (2). 55 Ibid., 182. 56 Ibid., 184-5. 223

upon which power is conducted, distributed, and established. Thus, decay is the differentiation of being into other beings as well as the act of decomposition at the scale of parasitic dimensions, or in the magnitude of the unknown.

Although these scales are already present in the body, decay unbinds them with new rates of differentiation and spreads them over. This unsettling feeling comes from the fact that the process of decay cannot be contained by the one in decay but it simultaneously belongs to the Whole World. The Middle East might be an obscure geopolitical decay, but the developed world, too, might in fact be the decaying Middle East as an epidemic and global scale.57 In this regard, Allahyari’s interventions do not fetishize the forgotten histories of the Middle East but shifts the perspective through which the current socio-political events are narrated. Ultimately, Allahyari’s practice rework the right to “look” in Mirzoeff’s term, which entails re-narrating reality and history to be able to re-imagine alternatives for the future.

Likewise, it is important to historically situate Allahyari’s work along with various feminist creative endeavors that are interested in building techno-utopian futures, including from Haraway’s cyborg and early cyberfeminism to contemporary xenofeminism and feminist ecocriticism. Indeed, Allahyari seeks to open up the histories through which the term cyborg could be “re-figured” in Allahyari’s terms:

When thinking about technology, potential futures and new worlds, it is perhaps time to think outside of Donna Haraway’s concept of the ‘cyborg’ in order to stretch our imagination to a new set of figures that do not come from white/western knowledge structures. If Haraway claimed to be “a

57 Ibid., 187. 224

cyborg rather than a motherly/earthy goddess”, I claim to be a jinn rather than a cyborg.58

For instance, one of the figures from the series “She Who Sees the Unknown,”

Aisha Qandisha is “one of the most honored and fearsome jinn in Islam (originally from

Morocco).”59 Like xeno-agents in Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, which Allahyari cites as a source herself, the figure of Aisha Qandisha is known as the “opener” and “the jinn of rivers”:

When Aisha possesses men, she creates a crack on their body. She does not take over the host but rather opens them to the outside; to a storm of incoming jinn and demons; making them a traffic zone. She never leaves; she resides in the man to guarantee their utter openness. The only way to stay sane when possessed by her is to participate with her, to listen to her. If one does not open up for this process of destruction and rebuilding, it will result in incurable delirium and madness.60

While addressing the violent history and present of patriarchy, Allahyari remobilizes the feelings of anger and resentment as a “source of agency,” for subverting the asymmetries of power relations and social codes, which harm and stigmatize women of color further. As I previously highlight, these speculative narratives have counterparts on the streets, and in everyday life. For instance, Tarek El-Ariss turns back to the ancient figures of mystics and jinn for his analysis of the contemporary figures of hackers and leakers.61 In this way, he makes fruitful connections between digital and subversive cultures in the Arab culture (which is his context of analysis).

58 This quote is from the artist’s statement: http://shewhoseestheunknown.com/ 59 See the web page for the figure: http://shewhoseestheunknown.com/aisha-qandisha/ 60 Ibid. The quote is from the artist’s statement. 61 Tarek El-Ariss, Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 225

The figure of the leaking subject comes forth as it breaks away from the self- contained subject of modernity whose consciousness is distributed via, and whose agency is subdued now by the coded, fragmented, and viral nature of contemporary mediascapes.

Indeed, the leaks can be historically anchored in literary and cultural traditions that have cast leaking body functions as threatening to the community, and have prevented the body from revealing its leaks, thereby contaminating the social.62 For El-Ariss, leaking, however, is not a promise of techno-salvation.63 It only opens up a possibility of change but also involves dangerous openings that risk engulfing actors of the leak.

Accordingly, Allahyari’s transforms the expressions of alienation and othering that structure our contemporary world into the process of envisioning of alternative commons and futures. In Azoulay’s terms, Allahyari’s works manifest an ongoing aesthetic inquiry for “unlearning imperialism,” through which the task of cognitive mapping has become one of countervisuality. In this way, Allahyari’s gesture shifts the registers of visual culture and knowledge production by contesting the structures of imperial thinking that dooms different people who share a world not to coincide in it ontologically or politically.

Condensing Imagination Within Material Reality

My revisiting Jameson’s cognitive mapping demonstrates that we cannot think of it in isolation from the colonial history and its neoliberal expansions that shape the

62 Ibid., 38. 63 Ibid., 173. 226

accompanying regime of visuality. This is also where the processes of digital colonialism and environmental degradation intersect. The forms and processes of slow violence that closely link material and digital worlds, as well as spatial and temporal continuities. In this regard, 3D technologies become a technical medium or aesthetic force for remapping spatial and temporal continuities (and how they are entangled) and more importantly, generating alternative forms of perception, thought, and narrative.

Indeed, Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rouke refer to Donna Haraway’s idea of

“condensing imagination within material reality” in their renowned The 3D Additivist

Manifesto. Their manifesto is mostly a call for pushing the limits of emerging technologies into the realm of the speculative while underscoring the political implications of building networks of infrastructures and commons.64 Since they have material consequences in the present, we cannot underestimate the powerful impact of images, narratives, and virtual worlds that shape the socio-technological imaginaries for the future. As Lucy Suchman argues regarding the contemporary human-machine configurations, the concept of imaginary designates a realm of speculation, whether through artistic or techno-scientific practices. Therefore, the concept of imaginary:

…references the ways in which how we see and what we imagine the world to be is shaped not only by our individual experiences but also by the specific cultural and historical resources that the world makes available to us, based on our particular location within it. And perhaps most importantly for my purposes here, cultural imaginaries are realized in material ways.65

64 Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rouke, “The 3D Additivist Manifesto,” 2015: https://additivism.org/manifesto Here, they refer to Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. 65 Lucy Suchman, Human–Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2. 227

With the series of She Who Sees the Unknown, Allahyari coins the term “re- figuring,” referring to the imagination of another kind of present and future by means of re-narrating the forgotten and destroyed histories and building poetic and performative archive.66 According to Elizabeth Grosz, the past, which underlies the present forms of domination and oppression, is also the recourse for overcoming those violent histories.67

Reworking Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time for the politics of future, Grosz highlights the political significance this untimely activation of the virtuality of the past as challenge to the actuality of the present.”68 Allahyari’s practice of “re-figuring” becomes a “site for the unraveling of the givenness of the present.”69 The gesture of going back to the monstrous figures of ancient times in the context of the Middle East does not derive from a fetishizing claim that these practices have been already there. Instead, those histories allow us to develop new intimacies, temporalities, and narratives that help us to make sense of our current conditions as well as to enact alternative futures.

For instance, by building a thread of historical ties and conceptual resonances between new media art and classical Islamic art, and Islamic philosophies that informed it, Laura U. Marks grasps the dynamic nature of computational aesthetics as well as

66 Morehshin Allahyari & Christiane Paul. “Re-figuring Ourselves – A Conversation,” Stages #8, Liverpool Biennial: Beautiful world, where are you?, ed. Joasia Krysa, January 2019, https://www.biennial.com/journal/issue-8/refiguring-ourselves-a-conversation 67 Elizabeth Grosz. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and The Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) 68 Ibid., 186. 69 Ibid., 253. 228

history.70 Inspired by Deleuze’s reworking of the Baroque aesthetics of Leibniz, and the

Peircian triadic model of semiotics, Marks proposes an enfolding-unfolding aesthetics, traversing the realms of image, information, and infinity, which situates the past as not forgotten but enfolded, yet to be unfolded. Allahyari’s performative engagement with computational media and obscured histories comes closer to a gesture of transforming the powers of the present by playing with the folds of history that connects disparate places and struggles to one another, or “rehearsing” unlearning imperialism in Azoulay’s terms, in line with her idea of potential history.

In Allahyari’s work, one could trace the thread of “re-figuring” in both literal and expanded sense. She adopts 3D technology as her primary medium of artistic inquiry, which is always entangled with her interest/background in creative writing and performance.71 Allahyari’s multimedia practice materializes these ancient monstrous figures in multiple forms with varying perceptual and affective registers, including from video and sculpture to virtual reality and public performance.72 Allahyari’s figures as talisman, which take the form of figural objects and images, embrace the role of opening to other worlds and powers in the face of apocalyptic present. For example, the technologically mediated other-worldliness of sound design by Prince Harvey in the

70 Laura U. Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010). Along with the book, Marks founded an international research network with Azadeh Emadi in 2018. This network aims at bringing into contact the scholars and practitioners interested in a cross-cultural exploration of digital media and philosophy, attuning to media archaeological and intellectual resonances across Islamic and Western philosophy and art. For further information, see https://substantialmotion.org/ 71 For further examples, please see the project website for the events that Allahyari calls “re-figuring events”: http://shewhoseestheunknown.com/public-events/#refiguringevents 72 As an example, see the ritual and refiguring session for the figure Huma: https://vimeo.com/197204963 229

video production for the figures of Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj and Aisha Qandisha reinforces the sense of transmission, opening to other possibilities of time, space, and body.

In some of her videos, Allahyari presents the processes of production to the viewer as part of the narrative itself rather than mere documentation. As earlier depicted in the Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj video still (Figure 12), Allahyari presents the 3D scanning of the sculpture that she previously modelled and printed in 3D. The dissolved structure and view of the multi-headed sculpture not only strengths the narrative of becoming one with others but also speaks to Allahyari’s concept of “re-figuring” obscured histories as well as techno-capitalist ideals of seamless futures. Thus, Allahyari also contests the neocolonial uses of 3D technology, which demystify the materiality and politics underlining these acts of production (as well as preservation). 3D technology becomes the camera’s shutter, in Azoulay’s terms, which acts “like a verdict—a very limited portion of information is captured, framed, and made appropriable by those who become its rights holders.”73 In response, the tension between the aesthetics of amorphous forms in the making and the calculated framing of machinic layers brings the speculative mode of cognitive mapping forth.

Ultimately, the imaginative worlds presented by the artists retell the obscured histories, and critically map the flows of capital, labor, culture, and technology that expand the prevailing critique of imperialism beyond the East-West or North/South dichotomy. Contemporary media have to be understood in their historical and global

73 Azoulay, Unlearning Imperialism, 23. 230

dimension, not as a homogenous mediascape of Western urban contexts, but rather as determined by local, regional, and transnational constellations. This resonance underlines the role of geopolitical histories that complicate the culturally essentialist readings of the postcolonial world and even the critiques of cultural imperialism (which carries the assumption of one-way influence). In this regard, it is important to look at how material differences, caused by colonial practices and their neoliberal expansions that constitute the communities, regions, and countries differently but always already dependent and uneven, are expressed in cultural forms. In the wake of ecological and urban collapse, accelerated by the ongoing global pandemic, there is a pressuring need for rehearsing the acts and narratives of “re-figuring” how we live, work, consume, and relate to one another. It is simultaneously archaic and futuristic, bringing the possibilities of not only deconstruction but also regeneration.

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Conclusion – Rehearsing the Aesthetic That Does Not Exist

The idea of condensing imagination within material reality, which I end my last case study with, would be a suitable place to start the conclusion of my dissertation. The inexhaustible gap between materiality and thought has become one of the main endeavors of my project since it seeks an aesthetic that attends to the dialectical nature of computational media, simultaneously enabling and prohibiting certain political encounters and subject formations. In the end, Jameson formulates cognitive mapping as an aesthetic problem by affirming the possibility of art that does not yet exist. He asks,

“what kind of an operation this will be, to produce the concept of something we cannot imagine.”1 Cognitive mapping is an ongoing inquiry, which I locate closer to Azoulay’s method of rehearsal for unlearning the spatial-temporal logics, divisions, techniques, and rights underpinning the imperial operations of computational capital. Therefore, claiming the right to imagine alternative futures is closely tied to the act of bringing back the historicity of those forms and attuning to the totality they are actively part of in the present.

The political implications of Mezzadra and Neilson’s idea of extraction in the expanded sense guide the current project, which connects the abstract terms of data and finance to the material processes of extraction of land, natural resources, labor, and social existence. We need to delve into the realm of computational aesthetics that exceeds the technics of the interface as well as the obvious, direct operations of capitalist

1 Jameson, Cognitive Mapping, 347. 232

accumulation. To this end, Jameson’s dynamic model of the relationship between economic and cultural categories, as well as local and global scales grasps the dialectical nature of computational capital, relying on resources and relations that are external to itself. These multiple outsides, however, cannot be merely understood as physical territories since they also involve social hierarchies predicated on race, gender, citizenship, and geopolitics.

Jameson’s geopolitical aesthetic identifies cultural production as an expression of these expanding frontiers and conflicting tendencies of global capital. This dialectical twist is important to show how aesthetics and politics are inherently entangled within capitalist operations, whose obscured historicity reveals the fact that they are neither given nor inevitable. Ultimately, my project designates computational media as an imperial apparatus within the matrix of racial capitalism and unpacks its geopolitical aesthetic to reconfigure the image of historicity and globality today.

We need to aesthetically and politically “rehearse” in Azoulay’s terms to overcome imperial thinking that is integral to the operative integration of infrastructures, techniques, and institutions under the capitalist logic and their role in reshaping subjective and geopolitical constellations. My analysis of computational media within the context of media arts in the Middle East gathers all these parts that are necessary to build a deeper analysis of the extractive mechanisms of computational capital today. In return, this dialectical move is crucial for overcoming peripherical interpretations of the Middle

East. Counterbalancing the ever-expanding abstractions of computation, artists could attend to its material operations and performative executions that rework the bounds of

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materiality and thought, as well as probing locally established universalities in their praxis.

All the artworks I discuss in my dissertation respond to the same inquiry in their distinct ways, which help me to address the larger question of revisiting cognitive mapping as a countervisual practice. Not despite but because of their embeddedness within the same relations of market and power, these artistic practices could expose, contest, and rework a multitude of systems, through which computational media are instrumentalized as and within the matrix of racial capitalism. In other words, the artistic practice could allow some insights about the economic and social forms that govern our immediate and partial experience, thereby guiding media theory to navigate through the convoluted cartographies of computational capital today.

As my project demonstrates, there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space.

We need to trace resonances across the ongoing urban struggles in and the radical futures arising from the Middle East along with messy practices. Those struggles will persist, always exceeding the bounds of our theories. My project affirms an aesthetic that does not exist yet, not because it is impossible but, rather, it cannot be encapsulated in a formula since it is always already in the process of making on the streets.

Upon emphasizing the incompleteness of my task as a media theorist, I would like to conclude my dissertation with a few possible trajectories that this project could take.

My project engages several concepts that have contributed to my thinking in depth. One of these terms, for example, is Mirzoeff’s term counter-visuality. Mirzoeff claims himself

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that this term is not limited to the bounds of visuality. The micro and macro-scale operations of contemporary media systems force us to rethink what visuality and political consciousness entail today. Indeed, my project of revisiting cognitive mapping encourages further investigations of the entangled relationship between visuality, verticality, and temporality in order to tackle the geopolitical aesthetics of computational media.

In the end, my analyses affirm the necessity of conceptual tools that could attune better to the increasingly complex, abstract, and algorithmically organized media systems. This point could only further emphasize the relevance of revisiting cognitive mapping, which underlines the critical role of aesthetics in contemporary political endeavors. The extensive body of creative and critical work arising from and affiliated with the Middle East on the convoluted histories of capital, violence, technology, and aesthetics, offers a ground for rehearsing countervisual practices as well as transnational class politics.

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Biography

Özgün Eylül İşcen’s work explores the alternative histories and speculative narratives of computational media and media arts within the context of the Middle East.

Along with her research on computational media, she has a background in art history, film, and soundscape studies. For her dissertation fieldwork, she received the Duke

Graduate School’s Julian Price Fellowship in Humanities and History. In her last year at

Duke, she received the Evan Frankel fellowship to complete writing her dissertation. She has presented her work at multiple academic and art institutions, as well as published in a variety of edited book volumes, academic journals, and art catalogs. Her publications include: “‘Once Upon A Time in Anatolia’: The Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics of

Confronting the Past in Turkey” in eds. Hande Gürses and Irmak Ertuna Howison,

Animals, Plants, Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film, New York:

Routledge, 13-47; and “The Mediated Sounds of Palestinian Exile: Technics and Memory in Bernard Stiegler and Soundscape Studies,” in eds. Milena Droumeva and Randolph

Jordan, Sound, Media, Ecology. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 199-216. She holds a BA in Sociology from Koç University, Turkey, and MA in Interactive Arts and Technology from Simon Fraser University, Canada. Upon completion of her PhD, she will be joining the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Berlin as a postdoctoral fellow.

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