Movement and the Ordering of Freedom , livre ebook

249

pages

English

Ebooks

2015

Écrit par
Kotef Hagar Kotef

Publié par
Duke University Press

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249

pages

English

Ebooks

2015

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

07 avril 2015

EAN13

9780822375753

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via "regimes of movement." Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of "liberty" in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

07 avril 2015

EAN13

9780822375753

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

Philosophy Philosophie et théologie

MOVEMENT AND THE ORDERING OF FREEDOM

perverse modernities

A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe

MOVEMENT AND THE ORDERING OF FREEDOM

On Liberal Governances of Mobility/HAGAR KOTEF

duke university press durham and london 2015

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kotef, Hagar Movement and the ordering of freedom : on liberal governances of mobility / Hagar Kotef. pages cm—(Perverse modernities) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN978-0-8223-5843-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN978-0-8223-5855-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Liberalism. 2. Freedom of movement. 3. Social mobility. 4. Liberty. I. Title. II. Series: Perverse modernities. jc585.k68 2015 323.44—dc23 2014033900 ISBN978-0-8223-7575-3 (e-book)

Cover art: Miki Kratsman,Erez #3, 2003 (Erez checkpoint, Gaza). Digital print, 70 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

CONTENTS

Prefacevii

Acknowledgmentsxi

Introduction1 / Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justiﬁcations 1 at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir27

/ An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads—On Freedom 2 and Movement52

/ The Fence That “Ill Deserves the Name of Conﬁnement”: 3 Locomotion and the Liberal Body61

/ The Problem of “Excessive” Movement87 4 / The “Substance and Meaning of All Things Political”: 5 On Other Bodies112

Conclusion136

Notes141

Bibliography203

Index217

PREFACE

There is a camera at the airport’s gate. Often, it is left unnoticed, but if one is asked she would probably know to say it is there. Many of us are by now familiar with such cameras and various security apparatuses that are installed in public spaces—airports, streets, pubs, train stations, shopping malls, or elevators. Most of the readers of this book are probably also familiar with the many critiques of the growing expansion of such mechanisms, their uses and abuses. But what does the camera monitor? Some cameras today can identify faces (to match the proﬁle of a runaway), body heat (to trigger an alert when detecting an anxious—and thus presumably a suspicious—person) or logos of cars (to identify the economic status of a person, in order to prompt the appropriate advertising on a billboard). But the vast majority of security appa-1 ratuses today monitormovement. These security apparatuses are based on algorithms that analyze the data accumulated via a variety of sensors. The algorithms are used, ﬁrst, to identify regular patterns of movement and then to ﬂag movements that deviate from this identiﬁed norm. The norm thus becomes a pattern of movement deduced 2 from sets of natural and social phenomena. Once established, every deviation from this norm is deﬁned as a problem or a potential threat. We therefore have “normal” and “abnormalairport travelers” movements: the movements of (and the airplanes themselves), of the business people or shoppers in their

daily routines, of subway passengers; but also the movements of those who seek to kill them or themselves (suicides on railways are apparently a major 3 economic hazard for transit companies), to steal, or perhaps simply to reside in a nonresidential space of movement (homeless people whose presence is undesired by municipal, governmental, and economical authorities). The ﬁrst (normal) movement is to be maximized; the second (abnormal movement), to be eliminated, or at least minimized. Monitoring movement began as a solution for a technical difﬁculty: the need to separate an object from its background. A security threat is often imag-ined as an object (usually a bag that is an index for the bomb presumably hid-den within it). Yet while the human eye can identify objects, the ﬁrst learning 4 algorithms could not. Like primitive brains, they could only see movement. Objects could thus be identiﬁed by these algorithms only once they moved, were moved, or stopped moving. Hence, questions had to be revised: suspi-cion could not be ascribed to objects but to theirregular movementsthat brought them to their suspicious location. This was the technological requisite that placed movement at the forefront of contemporary security apparatuses. How-ever, we will see that the tie between the two—movement and security—has a long history. Whereas these surveillance technologies undoubtedly create new desires for regulation and reframe old questions, the regulation of move-ment was the object of political desires at least since Plato. This book sets to trace these desires, as well as the different—and differentiated—bodies they seek to capture, but also produce and shape in this process. It is a book about movement—about motion, locomotion, and mobility as physical phenomena, images, myths, and ﬁgures, and ﬁrst and foremost about movement as an axis 5 of difference. The story of these technologies, however, does not end here, with a perva-sive regulation of movement that is founded on parting normal from abnor-mal patterns of movement or modes of being in space. Irregular movements are, after all, quite common, and these systems therefore trigger alerts con-stantly. So the question had to shift again. “The question is no longer how to identify the suspicious bag,” said aceoof a large security company whom I interviewed for this project. “Rather, the question is how to stop evacuating the airport every other week.” The objective was accordingly altered: neither identifying a suspicious object nor detecting suspicious movements, but se-curing the regular movement of goods, passengers, and airplanes. “Bombs don’t go off that often,” he remarked, “so it makes no sense to stop the activity 6 of the airport so frequently for this statistically negligible chance.” This may

viii

Preface

bring to mind the attribute of liberal security/biopolitical regimes identiﬁed by Foucault: an integration of threats—albeit minimized—into the normal order of movement. This integration rests on the assumption that any attempt to completely eliminate threats would bring to a stop the circulation of things and people whose furtherance is perceived as the most essential goal of poli-7 tics. Movementisthe order of things.

Preface /ix

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