Fitness
in Wartime:
Americans
on the Move
Not
so very long ago, in America, we were in danger of becoming embalmed by the
image. The specter of the “couch potato,”
propped up in front of the television set, haunted what seemed to be an increasingly
sedentary culture. Fused with the
image in a kind of mind-meld, the body became a fulfillment vehicle for the
desire-creating machine that is television. But it very often just became fat. In the early days of cyberspace, this figure
morphed into a “meatself” parked at the computer monitor -- a viewer who,
released from the restraints of the body, frolicked gleefully in the matrix.
In both cases, we had a nearly inert lump of flesh whose only life
signs were tiny eye and finger flickers.
With television, the body was immobilized; with early cyberspace, there
was the premonition of its abandonment -- in a “lifestyled” culture increasingly
at odds with the reality of its flesh. We
wondered: what would become of the body rendered obsolete
in the playgrounds of virtuality?
Those
days, for better or worse, were soon over.
The rallying cry became: Time
to get in shape! Wrested from the
chair and launched into circulation within new mobile communications landscapes,
we were to get our asses in gear, outfitted with arrays of portable devices. Mobile phones that were Web-enabled. Palm PCs outfitted with modems. Wearable GPS systems. Internet-enhanced eyegoggles. Smart shoes. Personal satellites. Implants.
It
made one long for the days when one could just sit there.
Once
upon a time in America there was an immobilized viewer, a fixed screen, and
a stream of visuals that seemed to course in between, pulling the arrested
viewer along a landscape that increasingly seemed as “travel.” We went “to” the image -- or rather traveled
through it, to its offerings, whether by Web or television or by the Fulfillment
Vehicle of the automobile. Lodged
within a shelter outfitted with ports, we were held in thrall by the screen
yet mobilized in terms of the places that could be accessed through its confines.
Through the image, the shelter was secured yet made portable.
We carried it with us as a shield.
It protected us from the elements and from danger, while with the remote
control or the mouse we fired bullets at the screen in order to defend that
for which it stood. Our house stands
for something. We stood for something. Through this tapping of the finger and the
mini-projectiles it launched, friend/enemy divisions coalesced, helping to
determine the contours of shelter and self.
Fueled by the disaster imaginary -- Hollywood, videogames, CNN -- combat
dynamics were filtered through an easy logistics of Choice. To select a channel and to meld with the image
flow was to create a “for” and an “against” -- a feeling that “I” stood here
against “them” -- and a means of eliminating that which did not fit within
the barricades of the here-and-now. “We
will have none of that in this house,” one’s parents would say, banishing
opposition to the exterior. The automobile
extended the im/mobile home: we steered
through the image, cushioned occupants soothed within the travel-flow.
The car allowed a shiny projectile to be launched across the commons,
its immobile occupant sealed inside, as it raced en route toward the fulfillment
of its duty: to gather resources from afar in order to fortify
the home-in-mobility.
The
home-shield and the transmission/transport-weapon. Both corporealizing, in whatever degree of inertia. The finger-taps on the remote control, the
hands on the wheel, or the hand turning off of the cathode ray tube as the
light fades and the womb of the shelter cradles its occupant in a soothing
net of safety.
To
Hunt, and to be Not Harmed
The
vision of legions of Web-enabled citizens on the move in the name of commerce
has morphed into that of a populace armed with communications appliances,
taking to the streets with a warrior spirit, bunkering down in the name of
protectionisms, or engaging in some combination of both. (We carry our shields with us.) We are assured of our right to hunt -- to shop
-- and to be protected from danger, in a world that seems increasingly fraught
with peril. Under the possibility
of danger -- danger defined in terms of corporeality as well as transmissions
assault -- a hybrid body is generated to require new fortifications. The logic of protection intertwines with that
of enhancement: to improve is to make
safer; to bring the body up to par is to make it adequate to meet new production
demands as well as to make it adequate to meet new threats. Inefficiency, the contouring agent of business,
combines with danger, the contouring agent of militarization -- though the
distinctions erode as they outsource together. What does it mean to be a “fit” individual? What does it mean to be “safe”? What does its “outside” tell us?
Justified
in the name of convenience and defense, we are promised a vast extension of
the net, where appliances of all kinds are tied into one another and where
new kinds of observing networks extend a deceptively soothing gaze of protection.
It is an infrastructure where every movement -- not only just mouse-clicks
but street-level activity -- is trackable and potentially contoured through
the advent of location-based services and new ideologies of preventivity.
Through net-enabled devices, GPS-systems, and monitoring networks connected
to shared databases, we are able to be locked onto for the purpose of targeting
information, creating a desire, steering us in a specific direction, finding
us should Help be necessary, or containing us if we are suspected of a crime.
Combined with the increasing precision of surveillance technology,
the rise of proactive policing, the lowering of governmental restraints, and
the increasing acquiescence of a public that has been numbed to the threats
this might impose, we face a situation where the body has not been immobilized
by the image, or caused to abandon itself in the face of the image, but is
in very many real senses replaced by it.
In turn, the image is replaced by something else.
The mobile user is imaged, transformed into a calculus of patterns,
habits, opinions, and functions by an observing system that ~compels~ movement
-- a movement very often called forth and enacted by those whom it hails.
Frozen
in an image, or replaced by one. Detective
strategies are always met with new means of deception. New agencies are spawned. The seemingly immobilized body at the television
or monitor was the site of the production of new mobilities: a stepping stone toward the fracturing of mobility,
toward the splintering of corporeality into layers of embodiment, and toward
the multidimensional layering of the immediate. Forms and motions follow one another in an
elaborate dance: bodily orientations
and behaviors change in relationship to communications devices, as they revolve
about the body and are intertwined with specific concepts of what it means
to move and to move well. What it
means to move efficiently, what it means to move safely. Different kinds of movements, technological interventions, combat
conventions, and bodily faculties help to continually shape and constitute
one another, interlacing a “here” and a “there,” resolving disparity by warping
distance and space. And further: helping
to determine and “us” and a “them,” filtering into the very basis of the political.
Relays
between movement and technologies of registration loop through a newly figurable
viewer. Foes are produced; a shelter
coalesces; and a subject appears. Install
a projectile and a shield, and one can always count on a body to appear in
the circuit. The projectile maps its
vectors of movement and desire; the shield its bodily and subjective contours.
Exit couchpotato and screen, meatself and monitor, at home and clicking away upon command. We no longer have subjects and objects that sit; we have relays or clusters through which forms and movements coalesce. We have body/machine/movement clusters, into which a fitting (weapon-gadget) is introduced, and which is enmeshed in an incorporative/integrative dynamic: its visual faculty extended through the network, its rhythms intertwined within the demands and enhancements offered by communications and battle machines, its body lodged within a protective encasing or squeezed within an invasive projectile.
In
this space of mobility, mutations are left in the aftermath, like a whisk
of air from a passing car that coalesces in a form.
The
New Inertia
Fellow
Americans: think about these things
the next time you feel the pressure to move.
Defend your right to sit still! There
are too many people moving around already. With all this mobility, no one is going to
be home any more.
And
remember that it is war out there. Right
in the palm of your hand.
--
originally
published on CTHEORY
ctheory.net
December
2001