ljkjembodied information and power conference version

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Embodied information and power

Rene Marlin-Bennett

Johns Hopkins University

Presented at the 2012 Millennium Conference, London.

Please note: The following is a draft for criticism. Please do not cite, but please feel free to send

critical comments to me at [email protected].

1. Introduction

This paper begins with an intellectual conundrum: The turn to materialism emerging in world

politics scholarship promises fruitful ways of understanding power and political life by focusing on

agency in the physical world. Yet immaterial information and "the virtual" seem to dominate our lives.

How can we understand the relationship between the material and the informational? Does this

understanding promise any further insight in to agency, power, and world politics? Materiality and

information are always inextricably connected, regardless of whether we are speaking of biotic or abiot

things. The focus in this paper is on the materiality (corporeality) and information of the human body a

a special case.

I seek to answer these two questions by looking at embodied information and knowing bodies.

Bodies are not just material things and are not just the physical containers of minds. Bodies are lively

(Fishel in progress), material, agentic, andinformational. Embodied information is the information

contained in the body that can potentially be accessed by others through an act of power. Surveillance

thus a world political practice of power that should be seen as much more complex than simply the gaz


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of the state on the person. On the flip side, a person sending forth his or her embodied information ma

also be a powerful act. Bodies are also the means by which information becomes sensible: we

understand information from various sources and with various kinds of content through our bodies

ability to sense. This knowing body is also implicated in power.1

In short, to control how information

flows, how it is extracted from the body, how it is inserted or received, how quickly, and to what end is t

have power or to be powerful.

The plan of the paper is as follows. I first provide a model of informational power as a useful

intellectual construct. This is then followed by a discussion of embodied information and how the body

comprises information. The following section examines the knowing body how information and

sensation are necessarily connected. Concluding comments are in the final section.

2. Informational power

The starting point of my analysis is to redefine power in terms of control of the flow of

information, where flow of information refers to content, velocity (direction and speed), and

access. I suggest that the informational model of power that I describe here is a way and not

the way to define power. I argue below that my definition is useful for helping us understand

politics, a pragmatic criterion.2

1I am drawing on and extending a conceptualization of privacy that I put forth in Marlin-

Bennett (2004). In that book, I examined privacy in terms of an information space, the

content of which is personal information (p. 169ff). In this paper, I highlight the idea that the

information space includes and surrounds a body.

2A discussion of the pragmatic, abductive methodology that I deploy can be found in Marlin-

Bennett (under review).


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The nature of power has long been a question of international relations scholarship

[insert more citations here]. A conventional IR response is Thucydides bromide: The strong do

what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept (Thucydides

1972, p. 402) as the ultimate prooftext for a realist conception of material power. Another

conventional response is that power is the ability of A to get B to do what it otherwise would

not do [cite Dahl?]. Yet neither definition works in the context of the Melian Dialog. The

Athenians may make their assertion, but the Melians, who are forced to accept death, cannot

be forced to surrender and accept subjugation. Further, the massacre at Melos is immediately

followed in the text by the Athenians disastrous Sicilian expedition, and the Athenians

ultimately lose the war (Deudney 2007). As Alker notes, the Melian Dialog is a morality play in

which an increasingly blind, arrogant, lustful, imperious Athens will pay for its failings with the

lives of many of its citizens and, eventually, with its independence as well (Alker, 1988, p. 817).

What is at stake is not solely the material, purportedly objective nature of resources,

comparing between the Melians and Athens. Rather what is at stake is the social and inter-

subjective meaning that the participants in the dialog ascribe to their sensing of the material.

Materiality of resources matters, but it matters in the context of a set of embodied social

dynamics, shared understandings, and understandings that are not shared. Information

somehow plays a role.

That information must be connected to materiality in a theory of power is even more

apparent in the Information Age. States continue to be important agents, but they are not the

sole agents that are powerful. One need only look at the consequences Nakoula Basseley

Nakoulas use of widely available information technology to produce an anti-Moslem film


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Innocence of Muslims, and to distribute the trailer via YouTube video. Nakoulas action to

disseminate hateful information sparked rage and violence in the Moslem world. It seems, on

the face of it, that Nakoula was, for a moment, powerful, though we can guess that his

powerful acts did not result in the outcome that he had intended. Acting powerfully to control

the flow of information and having results that coincide with intentions are distinct.

At the heart of the Nakoula story, at the heart of the story about the use of social media

and the Arab Spring, is the sense that information matters in the world, that information acts

on people. Violence happens; political change happens. Perhaps, too, if we scratch the surface

a bit, interactions that seem to be about material forces acting on people might be

fundamentally about information because the only way in which we are aware of material

forces is because we have the ability to sense them. And what about the bullet that the kills

the unsuspecting, unseeing person instantly, without time for conscious awareness? I think

that information has a role here, as well, though my interpretation may be stretched.

Information flows through our bodies, most obviously through the electrical impulses that

travel along nerves, but also through the chemical signaling that flows in veins, in lymphatic

tissue, from cell to cell. A way to think about the cessation of life is a final interruption of the

flow of information in the body.

Because conventional IR notions of power fail to capture important instances of power

in the subject I study, the global political economy of information, I have been working on

reconceptualizing power as the ability to control the flow of information, with flow of

information understood in terms of content, velocity (direction and speed) and access.3

There

3Works in progress and undergoing revision include [insert conference papers here].


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are numerous points in this system at which content, velocity, or access can be controlled. To

exert control over any of these dimensions is to act powerfully. Power manifests as instants of

controlling the information flow by acting on the content, the velocity, or the access. The

model I develop (seen below in Figure 1) need not involve humans. In theory, a machine could

be the recipient of information about some other machine (think of automated control

systems), and the recipient machine could have enough (artificial) intelligence to qualify as a

knowing recipient. Some other machine perhaps one with faulty code4 could disrupt the

flow of information and (arguably) have a powerful (if unintentional) effect on the system.

Figure 1. Information flow model: content, velocity, access. Information flow can be

understood in terms of content moving from a source at a certain velocity (comprising both

direction and speed) and a recipient or some recipients having access to the content.

4Or what we might consider faulty code. Hal of2001: A Space Oddysseymight disagree.


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For this paper, however, I am interested in the endpoints of the system, and specifically

in human sources and human recipients. Content flows from a source and to a recipient. What

information can be taken from or given by the body of the source? What information can be

taken in by or forced into the recipient? How can we conceptualize embodied information and

knowing bodies and how will that enrich an understanding of world political practices?

It is tempting to think of the system depicted above only as an illustration of

information flowing through the Internet. After all, the purpose of the Internet is to enable the

flow of information. Indeed, I have written about the information and power in cyber

environments in part because it is an easy case, but also because it is an important one (Marlin-

Bennett under review). But the system illustrated here can be applied widely and does not

need to be mediated by information technology. It works in face-to-face interactions, and the

sensory rich environment of face-to-face interactions allows for different kinds of content to be

moved from the source to the recipient.

The next two sections connect this information flow model of power to bodies, both the

source body and embodied information and the receiving body, which I characterize here as the

knowing body.

3. Embodied Information

It is tempting to separate body and mind and (ironically) to locate embodied

information in a disembodied mind. I want to resist this temptation and instead consider the

body as a fully informational. The body is simultaneously material and informational: all the

material is also information; (perhaps?) all information is also material.


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Embodied information thus flows internally and externally. Internal flow is the bodys

communication with itself, but this should not be reduced to thinking or internal narration.

As the protagonist of a Coetzee story puts it:

To thinking, cognition, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being

not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking

thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation a heavily affective sensation of

being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world

(Coetzee 19977, p. 131)5

Antonio DAmasio (1999) notes that internal information flows are continual because

the living body constantly senses that it is alive and monitors its state. These sensations are

fundamental bits of information that the body constantly signals to itself. Internal information

flow is recursive, as in Figure 2. Our internal relationship to the information of our bodies

includes conscious comprehension, feelings and sensations that cannot be expressed in words,

and information (commands to proteins from our DNA, marching orders of our immune

systems, etc.) that operate well out of the range of the ability of our conscious mind to

understand or even notice.

5Coetzees Mrs. Costello, who utters these words, is rejecting a Cartesian notion that human

rationality is more important or grants moral standing. Instead, she is arguing that animals and

humans share the same sense of being-in-the-world and therefore are of equal moral worth.

Although I am discussing specifically the embodied information of humans, I am mindful that

non-human animals are similarly both material and informational.


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Much of this information is in constant motion. One moment we may not be hungry,

the next moment we may be. We smell something awful and we feel disgust. Our bodies are

constantly sending and receiving information to maintain its homeostasis. Information of our

conscious minds is in constant motion as well: We think thoughts and narrate to ourselves.

Figure 2. Internal flow of information. The source of the information is also

the recipient.

Some of our embodied information moves very slowly within us. Consider eye color.

From day to day it seems constant, yet over the span of a lifetime, it changes. Just as hair loses

pigment and becomes gray, eyes pigment degrades and eyes change color. (Disease and

chemicals can also change eye color.) Nevertheless, it is often thought of as a bodily

description of the person, the stuff of adorationFrank Sinatra as Ol Blue Eyes or the


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Russian song, popular in its day, Otchi Tchor Ni Ya(Dark Eyes).6

Yet since eye color changes,

linking an identity (and attachment) to the physical characteristic seems short-sighted (pun

intended).

But for our purposes (understanding embodied information, power, and the global), the

most interesting kind of information of the body is constant and moves only when observed

and transmitted. This information simply exists as a characteristic of the body, something that

can be used as an identifier of the person. Use of this information for identification purposes

requires that the information flow out from the body and be made sense-able to some Other.

Consider anthropometric measurements and fingerprints, which are examples of information

about a body that are collected in order to uniquely identify the person at a later time.

Fingerprints, according to G. T. C. Lambourne (1977), were described by a botanist named Dr.

Nehemia Grew in a 1684 paper in Philosophical Transactions.7

Lambourne traces the first

known systems of collecting and organizing information from the body in order to help with

identifying criminals to Dr. Alphonse Bertillon, Chief of the Identification Bureau in Paris, and Sir

Francis Galton in England, both working in the last years of the 19th

Century. Bertillon created a

6The song was recorded by several artists, including the Barry Sisters in 1957

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHeShv1mf-s, accessed October 4, 2012) and Louis

Armstrong in 1958 (http://www.michaelminn.net/armstrong/index.php?section7, accessed

October 4, 2012).

7Lambourne asserts that this was mans first recorded awareness of fingerprints (1977, p.

95), a claim that is not plausible since there is no evidence that he searched all archives in the

world in every language.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHeShv1mf-shttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHeShv1mf-shttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHeShv1mf-shttp://www.michaelminn.net/armstrong/index.php?section7http://www.michaelminn.net/armstrong/index.php?section7http://www.michaelminn.net/armstrong/index.php?section7http://www.michaelminn.net/armstrong/index.php?section7http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHeShv1mf-s


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system in which habitual criminals had measurements of various parts of their bodies taken.

These measurements could then be filed and later retrieved to identify who had committed

another criminal act. In 1892, Galton published a book on a way of categorizing fingerprints for

the same purpose. By 1894, Scotland Yard began using both anthropometric measurements

and fingerprints to identify criminals.8

Fingerprinting and anthropometric measurements are now part of world political

practices, especially as practices of the state (legitimate uses of violence, to use the Weberian

definition) for securing the border and combating crime (Amoore 2006; Ceyhan 2002) [add

more citations!]. In her discussion of biometrics and security, Louise Amoore (2006, p. ?)

suggests that the allure of biometrics derives from the human body being seen as an

indisputable anchor to which data can be safely secured. In her analysis, the state and the

other agents (firms and individuals) charged with collecting the data on behalf of the state are

powerful because, in a Foucauldian and Butlerian sense, they govern the body and determine

(limit, allow) mobilities. And one way in which they are particularly powerful is when they

misread, misinterpret, or mistake the information in the body. In 2004, Brandon Mayfield an

innocent Oregon attorney, was wrongly thought to be the source of a latent fingerprint on

materials used in the bombing of the Madrid train station (Cole 2004) despite the fact that he

had not been out of the United States. Fingerprint analysis using data mining techniques (his

fingerprints had been transformed into readable, digital images) combined with expert

analysis led to this false positive result. Weeks passed before Mayfield was cleared. In this

8For Foucault, the keeping of such records is part of a power of writing *that+ was constituted

as an essential part in the mechanisms of discipline (Foucault 1977, p. 189).


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instance, agents of the state (the fingerprint experts for the FBI) controlled the flow of

information by acting on the content, inserting unwarranted certainty into the false conclusions

they drew from the physical evidence.

The use of data extracted from the body is the common experience of all of us who have

been through airport security. This kind of information is stable in the short run and can be

used for detecting the presence or confirming the absent of threat. Examples of this include

information that is extracted from the body at airport security checkpoints through pat-downs,

metal detectors, and back scatter radiation, all of which use a sense (touch for pat-downs,

hearing for metal detectors, and vision for back scatter radiation) to detect threats secreted on

the body. Lauren Wilcox describes, the technologically mediated searches are more powerful.

Technology makes embodied information visible, scanable, analyzable through digitization, and

therefore subject to confiscation and transformation by the government. She concludes: The

airport security assemblages manage the threats of violence and insecurity by transforming

embodied subjects into suspicious flesh that can be dissected digitally in a search for the truth

of a persons safety or dangerousness (Wilcox under review).

Advances in analyzing the information of the body have led to focusing on DNA tightly

connected to identity. Images that are widely reproduced link the microscopic molecule to an

aesthetic: DNA is portrayed as alluring and dangerous. The DNA, itself an elegant corporeal

form (represented as the double helix, undulating as if alive; see Figure 3), can be a traitor. It

can give dangerous information to the cell, instructing proteins to cause disease. Bad DNA

information means that the body is no longer at ease with the conflict sets of instructions that

are given to it. Geraldine Ondrizeks elegant synteny maps, striped arrays of gene sequences,


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capture both the beauty and the danger of DNA as her art depicts genetic markers of cancer.

She ironically returns the information of the genes, their visual representation, to the body by

making her images into scarves. (See Figure 4). She uses aesthetic representation of genes

against the very chromosomes she depicts by transforming images of for genetic markers of

cancers into scarves (placing the genes back on the body) and then donating the proceeds from

sales to cancer research in effect funding research that will undo or thwart the (malign, from

a human perspective) actions of the genes she paints.

Figure 3 DNA. Source:

http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/bas

ics/dna

Figure 4 Geraldine Ondrizek, 2012. Pancreatic

Cancer. Series: Chromosome Painting Scarves.

Source:

http://www.goforwarddesign.com/Scarf%20Manne

quin/3.jpg


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Conclusions drawn from extracted DNA and scientific manipulation of research results

easily plays in to racial and racialist political meanings (Vanouse 2009) a social cancer. In 2007

(and previously), James Watson, a discoverer of DNA, made comments that were widely

understood as racist. After the 2007 incident, he apologized and, according to an editorial in

Nature, he acknowledged that there is no evidence for what he claimed about racial

differences in intelligence. But the damage has been done, lending succour and comfort to

racists around the globe As the editorial notes, given the worlds history of eugenics and

racism, studying the influence of genetics on human attributes and behavior is risky

(Watson's Folly, 2007). For Nature, the risk is that those who are interested in political

correctness can use conclusions that scientists arrive at about the influence of genetics for

shutting down such research as racist. Yet the other risk the risk that Watson manifested

remains as well: Despite the widely held understanding among scientists that race is an

unscientific word (again quoting Nature), scientific findings based on DNA can be used to

justify racist ideas.

Paul Vanouse, an artist who uses techno-science as a medium, subverts the relationship

of DNA and race by racing DNA, quite literally. He writes:

Over the past few years, I have been specifically concerned with forcing the

arcane codes of scientific communication into a broader cultural language. In

The Relative Velocity Inscription Device (2002), I literally race DNA from my

Jamaican-American family members, in a DNA sequencing gel, in an

installation/scientific experiment that explores the relationship between early

20th Century Eugenics and late 20th Century Human Genomics. Specifically, the


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double entendre of race is intended to highlight the similarities and obsession

with 'genetic fitness' within these historical endeavors (Vanouse n.d.).

The installation projects the progress of the race to the viewers. (See Figure 5.) The

irony of the disembodied DNA fragments running a race on an inscription device challenges

the viewer to re-inscribe meaning to race and the body and to the technology the device

that is used to measure and evaluate characteristics of (dis)embodied information.

Figure 5 Paul Vanouse,The Relative Velocity Inscription Device. 2002. Source:

http://www.paulvanouse.com/rvid.html

Returning to the informational power model, Vanouses image highlights the way in

which DNA, a molecule, can be extracted from the body and used for its informational content.

Further, extracted DNA is considered to be reliable information for providing evidence, either

damning or exculpatory, of an individuals guilt, though the degree of reliability is subject to

statistical margins of error (Cole 2004). Though global DNA databases and fingerprints

(http://www.interpol.int/INTERPOL-expertise/Forensics/DNA, accessed October 4, 2012) may
http://www.paulvanouse.com/rvid.htmlhttp://www.paulvanouse.com/rvid.htmlhttp://www.interpol.int/INTERPOL-expertise/Forensics/DNAhttp://www.interpol.int/INTERPOL-expertise/Forensics/DNAhttp://www.interpol.int/INTERPOL-expertise/Forensics/DNAhttp://www.interpol.int/INTERPOL-expertise/Forensics/DNAhttp://www.paulvanouse.com/rvid.html


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help identify miscreants, the size of the databases is unavoidably connected to the number of

innocents who will be misidentified as guilty. The more data in the database, the greater the

number of false positives.

Another aspect of DNA and other forms of embodied information is the degree to which

embodied information is commodified and becomes something that is traded globally. To

commodify information is to change its content and to restrict access to the content. (Think of

digital rights management on music and videos; think also of Myriad Corporation patents on

isolated genes for breast and ovarian cancer

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/business/court-reaffirms-right-of-myriad-genetics-to-

patent-genes.html?_r=0, accessed October 4, 2012]).

Vanouse again provide the ironic critique. His work, Latent Figure Protocol, uses

electrophoresis to paint DNA into images. Of the series of images he presents, the copyright

symbol (Figure 6) is the most telling. On one level, this works as a simple sight gag: It is funny to

see the copyright symbol as a work of art itself rather than as protecting a work of art. But the

critique quickly emerges. The image, as a creative work, is itself copyrighted. What about the

DNA itself? Presenting the copyright symbol out of genetic material makes the viewer ask

about the ownership of that material as well as of the art work it comprises. By using DNA and

electric current to paint an image, Vanouse certainly has DNA acting in an innovative and

(perhaps) useful way. Should it be patented? (It is perhaps unfortunate that there is no

similarly evocative symbol for the patent, since using such a symbol would have been

particularly apropos.) In this image, the artist is using DNA from bacterial plasmid pET-11a.


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How would human DNA (and the viewers knowledge of the use of human DNA) have changed

the work?

Figure 6. Latent Figure Protocol, Paul Vanouse, 2007. (Just one of several images in the

work is shown here). Source:http://paulvanouse.com/lfp.html, accessed October 4, 2012.

To be able to own and alienate embodied information is to be able control its flow,

particularly in terms of content and access. This can be seen, as well, in the case of global trade

in organs (Marlin-Bennett and Fishel in progress). At first glance, organ trade may seem to be

nothing more than material: a kidney moving from one body to another. Yet it is embedded in

a series of informational relations. First of these is the idea of an organ, such as the kidney, as,

itself, embodied information. The kidney is the body part that knows how to filter the blood

and remove impurities. Others of these are webs of information about where to find organs

and transplantation tourism, medical knowledge about how to conduct transplantation,

awareness (or not) of global norms concerning transplantation. Consider the case of transplant

tourism when wealthy Westerners go to developing countries and purchase kidneys from poor

donors. The purchase of the kidney itself being able to control the velocity (its direction and

speed) of the embodied information (the organ) is an instance of power. Transplant tourists
http://paulvanouse.com/lfp.htmlhttp://paulvanouse.com/lfp.htmlhttp://paulvanouse.com/lfp.htmlhttp://paulvanouse.com/lfp.html


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get organs and they get them faster than they would otherwise. Further, the poor donor may

not have true access to information about the risks to him or her from the donation procedure

itself and from potential consequent medical issues. The consent will likely not be truly

informed. Also, being poor, the donor may not be able to control the velocity (direct and

speed) of information in the form of medical expertise that he or she might need in the future.

Comparing the ways in which individuals in this case are able to control information flow

highlights instances of power and points of powerlessness.

In the next section, I turn to the recipient of information, the knowing body.

4. The knowing body

The relationship of information to the body has to do with the fact that information, to

matter, must be received by an agent who makes sense of that information. Information can

be processed in our rational minds as important factual information. It also reaches us on an

emotional level. Information moves, in both denotations of the verb (Der Derian 2003) it

moves as it travels across space, and it moves us emotionally. Information acts on our

emotions and we feel, and the limbic system in the brain is engaged, as a consequence.

Information that does not reach a knowing body has not been communicated.

As I noted above, disrupting those flows is an example of having power to harm or even

kill the body. Yet less brutal control of internal flows is also powerful. Jane Bennett (writing

about food as a self-altering, dissipative materiality *2009, p. 145]) discusses the power of

food to change how we are in the world. Though her point is about the agentic power of the

non-human, non-living material, we can re-read her examples as informational power. Food


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that is ingested by the body communicates to the body and changes how the body

communicates with itself.

Sound is also information. I refer not just to the specific message that is heard and that

the knowing body can translate into a recognized word or melody or scream. The vibration,

frequency, and volume of the sound is information as well. Steve Goodman examines sonically

provoked, physiological, and autonomic reaction of the body (Goodman 2010, Kindle loc. 111).

His focus is on the way agents use sound to provoke fear in the recipients. In terms of my

model, to be able to force the recipients to have access to this sound is an instance of power.

Moreover, as Goodman notes, the sound need not be consciously heard and processed by the

rational mind. Sound, including inaudible sound, works on the body and can force the body to

feel. The body can be knowing even when the mind does not know that it knows. Goodman

focuses on sonic warfare, which he describes in terms of a continuum of sonic force, with

one pole as a use of sound to repel or disperse and the other pole as a use of sound to attract

(Kindle loc. 266-274).9 The sound cannon disperses the rioters, using sound to cause pain. The

drumbeats and rhythm of the march (Hup 2, 3, 4!) encourage the army to move forward

together.

At times, though, sound carries content that works on a cognitive level, moving and

convincing through words, melody, and rhythm and the movement of bodies, as well. Lester

Spence, in his analysis of Black politics and hip-hop, writes of the circulation of hip-hop and

the way in which the music is productive of a certain kind of Black parallel public sphere. Hip-

hop spreads the neoliberal narrative across space and the most dominant aspects of black

9Future revisions of this paper will include a discussion of Virilio and possibly Walter Benjamin.


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politics across space and time (Spence 2011, p. 11). Neoliberal causal explanations of life

become plausible because of the message carried by the attractive medium of hip-hop. Spence

writes that hip-hop and its related embodied reproductions (rapping, DJing, break dancing, and

tagging) affirmthat another reality is possible (p. 17) a neoliberal one of consumption and

lack of regulation. A sad consequence can be the promotion of a reality that is criminal and

exploitative. In this case, the information in the music acts as an attractor to a particular kind

of ethical and aesthetic judgment. Artists are able to act powerfully when they are able to

inculcate an acceptance of that kind of ethical and aesthetic judgment. Again, this is not a

passive transmission of information from one node to another. The fact that artist and the

recipient are embodied is critical to the way the transmission happens and its attractiveness to

the recipient.

A final example of the knowing body takes us into the realm of augmented reality (I

borrow this phrase from Nathan Jurgensen and PJ Rey),10

reality as augmented by technology.

Our experience of information sense data from the world -- is dependent both on the

wetware of our bodies and the technologies we use to further enable our bodies. As we evolve

(and we are continually evolving), we add means of extending our senses and sensations, of

moving our bodies outward, or perhaps bringing the outside into our bodies and incorporating

new sense organs. Donna Harraways cyborg idea is instructive (Haraway 1997).

10My comments on augmented reality had their origin in my discussants remarks to a

presentation by Jurgensen and Rey at the Digital Capital Conference at Johns Hopkins University

in 2012.


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There are two aspects to this: the extension of the senses and the recording of the

sense data. The first is typified by eyeglasses. My experience of the world is fully integrated

with the quality of my lenses. My reality is augmented beyond what I could sense without

them. My computer is is another obvious augmentation to my senses. When I visit websites,

I am the recipient of information, but I receive this information because the technology allows

me to go to the site.

The second aspect is in the recording of sense data. The idea is that our brains memory

cells are not our sole means of recording and preserving information. The technology used to

be papyrus, parchment, quills, and the like (Deibert 1997). It is now, of course, computers.

Camera technology fixes the visual aspects that fixes a moment in time. It too gives us an

ability to record information and changes the way the memory of the moment is lived.11

The use of piloted drones in warfare depends on the knowing body operating in

augmented reality, with extended senses and the ability to record that sense data. Lauren

Wilcox understands the relation of the drone pilot through the drone to the targets as a

redefinition of human bodies in terms of the posthuman that makes possible

the political conditions of life and death for both the targets and civilians.

Specifically, the attempted (but ultimately incomplete) transformation of the

11

An extreme example: A recent news feature about Mathematica developer Stephen Wolfram

has him disclosing 20 Years of Personal Analytics

(http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/, accessed

October 4, 2012).
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/


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human body into an information processor enables a certain moral and political

calculus of which bodies count.

The pilot is supported by others who receive the recorded images, who try to use the

video to refine strategies, much in the way that game films are used by coaches. A problem not

yet resolved is that too much data is being received. The New York Times reported that in the

US, the CIA and the military have been struggling with too much data to analyze effectively

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss,

accessed October 4, 2012.) The inability to control the volume of content demonstrates a lack

of power. In this case, trying to receive the flow of content is like drinking from a fire hose.

Though few are drone pilots, the overwhelming majority of us are recipients of

information via digital technology. Social media, in particular, is alluring to us, and the use of

Facebook and other social media continues to rise rapidly. These sites fully incorporate the

extension of sensing ability and the expansion of memory retention, leading us to live

differently. We sense, remember, and live more widely. (I am not sure about more deeply.)

We are hybrids; we are cyber-humans. As our senses reach out through cyber environments,

we become (partially, only partially) what Jane Bennett, following Deleuze and Guattari, calls

bodies-without organs (Bennett 2001, p. 24).

5. Concluding comments

In short, we are embodied information and we are knowing bodies. We serve as

sources and recipients of information. One way to conceptualize power is to understand it as

the ability to control the content and velocity of information as well as access to it. Using this
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rsshttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rsshttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rsshttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss


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definition, we can instances of power as information flows from embodied sources to knowing

recipient bodies.

As we recently saw (most of us at a distance and through storage of memory) in the

murder of the US ambassador and other consulate workers in Libya in September 2012, videos

can go viral, and viruses can be fatal. The metaphor of contagion brings us back to the

corporeality of our informational selves, both as embodied information and as knowing bodies.

As bodies, we can catch viruses, even viruses that seem not to be material, and they can have a

damaging effect on our lives.

But all is not bleak. In our lives we are often empowered to control the flow of

information that swirls around and through our bodies. Our control is not total and could not

be, yet there are moments when we can act to exert control.


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References (not yet cleaned up)

Amoore, L. (2006). Biometric borders: Governing mobilities in the war on terror. Political

Geography, 25(3), 336-351.

Bennett, J. (2009). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press Books.

Bennett, J. (2001). The enchantment of modern life : Attachments, crossings, and ethics. .

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Ceyhan, A. (2002). Technologization of security: Management of uncertainty and risk in the age

of biometrics. Surveillance & Society, 5(2)

Cole, S. A. (2004). More than zero: Accounting for error in latent fingerprint identification.

Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 95, 985-1078.

Deibert, R. J. (1997). Parchment, printing, and hypermedia : Communication in world order

transformation. Columbia University Press.

Der Derian, J. (2003). The question of information technology in international relations.

Millennium-Journal of International Studies, 32(3), 441-456.

Fishel, S. (in progress). Book manuscript.

Goodman, S. (2010). Sonic warfare : Sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. . Cambridge, Mass.:

MIT Press.


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Haraway, D. J. (1997). [email protected]

MeetsOncoMouse : Feminism and technoscience. . New York: Routledge.

Marlin-Bennett, R. (under review). Governing the Flow: Power, Information, and Rules on Line.

Marlin-Bennett, R. (2004). Knowledge power :Intellectual property, information, and privacy. .

Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Spence, L. K. (2011). Stare in the darkness : The limits of hip-hop and black politics. .

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Vanouse, P. (2009). The relative velocity inscription device. In E. Kac (Ed.), Signs of life: Bio art

and beyond(2009 Trans.). (pp. ?-?) MIT Press.

Wilcox, L. (under review). Securing bodies: Violence, bodies and subjectivity in international

relations (book manuscript). Unpublished

ljkjembodied information and power conference version

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