The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

68 Nodes
example), the interesting thing about swarming is the nagging tension
in being “amorphous but coordinated.” How is it possible to control
something that is by definition constituted by its own dispersal,
by being radically distributed, spread out, and horizontal?
Answering this question in the context of conflict (military or civilian)
means addressing the question of enmity. That is, if “control” in conflict is
ordinarily situated around a relationship of enmity (friend - foe, ally - enemy),
and if this relation of enmity structures the organization of conflict (symmetrical
standoff, insurgency, civil disobedience), what happens when enmity
dissolves in the intangible swarm?
In part this is the question of how conflict is structured in terms of
more complex modes of enmity (“going underground,” “low - intensity
conflict,” the “war on terror”). Are the terms of enmity accurate for
such conflicts? Perhaps it is not possible for a network to be an enemy?
Without ignoring their political differences, is there a topological
shift common to them all that involves a dissolving or a “defacing” of
enmity? Can a swarm be handled? If there is no foe to face, how does
one face a foe? It is not so much that the foe has a face, but that the
foe is faced, that “facing” is a process, a verb, an action in the making.
This is Levinas’s approach to the ethical encounter, an encounter
that is based not on enmity but on a “calling into question” of the
self. But in a different vein, it is also the approach of Deleuze and
Guattari when they speak of “faciality.” Not unlike Levinas, they stress
the phenomenal, affective quality of “facing.” But they also take “facing”
(facing the other, facing a foe) to be a matter of pattern recognition,
a certain ordering of holes, lines, curves: “The head is included
in the body, but the face is not. The face is a surface: facial traits,
lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, triangular face; the face is a
map, even when it is applied to and wraps a volume, even when it
surrounds and borders cavities that are now no more than holes.” 38
Faciality is, in a more mundane sense, one’s recognition of other human
faces, and thus one’s habit of facing, encountering, meeting others
all the time. But for Deleuze and Guattari, the fundamental process
of faciality also leads to a deterritorialization of the familiar face, and
to the proliferation of faces, in the snow, on the wall, in the clouds,
and in other places (where faces shouldn’t be) . . .