The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

66 Nodes
mentioned in our prolegomenon appears in a variety of forms:
information - based military conflict (“cyberwar”) and nonmilitary activity
(“hacktivism”), criminal and terrorist networks (one “face” of
the so - called netwar), civil society protest and demonstration movements
(the other “face” of netwar), and the military formations made
possible by new information technologies (C4I operations [command,
control, communications, computers, and intelligence]). What unites
these developments, other than that they all employ new technologies
at various levels?
For Arquilla and Ronfeldt, it is precisely the shapeless, amorphous, and
faceless quality that makes these developments noteworthy, for the topologies
of netwar and the “multitude” throw up a challenge to traditional
notions of enmity: they have no face; they are instances of faceless enmity.
Or rather, they have defaced enmity, rendered it faceless, but also tarnished
or disgraced it, as in the gentleman’s lament that asymmetrical guerrilla
tactics deface the honor of war.
These examples are all instances of swarming, defined as “the systematic
pulsing of force and/ or fire by dispersed, internetted units, so
as to strike the adversary from all directions simultaneously.” 35 Though
it takes inspiration from the biological domain (where the study of
“social insects” predominates), Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s study of swarming
is a specifically politico - military one. A swarm attacks from all
directions, and intermittently but consistently—it has no “front,”
no battle line, no central point of vulnerability. It is dispersed, distributed,
and yet in constant communication. In short, it is a faceless foe,
or a foe stripped of “faciality” as such. So a new problematic emerges.
If the Schmittian notion of enmity (friend - foe) presupposes a more
fundamental relation of what Levinas refers to as “facing” the other,
and if this is, for Levinas, a key element to thinking the ethical relation,
what sort of ethics is possible when the other has no “face” and
yet is construed as other (as friend or foe)? What is the shape of the
ethical encounter when one “faces” the swarm?
A key provocation in the “swarm doctrine” is the necessary tension that
appears in the combination of formlessness and deliberate strategy, emergence
and control, or amorphousness and coordination.