12/22/14, 9:24 AMArendt and Datapolitik « Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities

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Arendt and Datapolitik

“The progress of modern science has demonstrated very forcefully to what an extent thisobserved universe, the infinitely small no less than the infinitely large, escapes not only thecoarseness of human sense perception but even the enormously ingenious instruments thathave been built for its refinement. The data with which modern physical research is concernedturn up like ‘mysterious messenger[s] from the real world.’ They are not phenomena,appearances, strictly speaking, for we meet them nowhere, neither in our everyday world norin the laboratory; we know of their presence only because they affect our measuringinstruments in certain ways. And this effect, in the telling image of Eddington, may ‘have asmuch resemblance’ to what they are ‘as a telephone number has to a subscriber.’ The point ofthe matter is that Eddington, without the slightest hesitation, assumes that these physicaldata emerge from a ‘real world,’ more real by implication than the world we live in; the troubleis that something physical is present but never appears.”

-- Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man”

Reading this passage today, Arendt’s insights risk seeming dated and quaint given our currenttechno-political culture. Partly this is because Arendt didn’t have, or did not articulate, anontology of the virtual, which is the sine qua non of our contemporary techno-politics. She istroubled by what the scientist calls the “real world.” This is because that world, it seems toher, does not have an apparitional character that humans can engage. The “more real,” orhyper-real, of the scientist is not experienced by humans but is registered by hyper-sensitivemachines. In this passage, then, we sense Arendt puzzled and amazed by the world of quanta– of the physical without appearance.

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DEC/14

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12/22/14, 9:24 AMArendt and Datapolitik « Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities

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A man on his phone (Source: Dark Politricks)

The rhetorical effect of the absurd thatcomes from quoting the Eddingtonpassage could easily escape us.Eddington’s metaphor works becauseit might have sounded unfathomableto Arednt’s readers. The digits of atelephone have absolutely norelationship – other than a purelyrandom one – to the identity of aperson, regardless of how youunderstand the qualities of humanidentity. You can accrue facts aboutpersons and have those facts count

towards an image you may or may not have about their physical, psychological, or politicalpresence in the world. But when Arendt penned her essay, you would never consider a personrelatable to data. Today the relationship between telephone number and subscriber isn’tmerely one of resemblance (as the passage implies). It is also a sentimental one. This isbecause a subscriber isn’t merely a subscriber; she is intimate with data. Data is emitted fromher gestures, her gait, her appearance, her digits, her sounds, and her blood.

Our “real world” has been transformed to such a degree that most of us, whether we like it ornot, consider our relationship with our telephone numbers to be one of the most intimaterelationships of our lives. It is so intimate, in fact, that we won’t change our telephonenumbers when we change cell phone carriers or geographical addresses, just as we wouldn’tconsider changing our names because we have moved to a different part of the country. PaceMarshall McLuhan, our telephone digits aren’t simply an extension of ourselves; they are asmuch a part of our selves as our anatomical digits are. Just consider this: an unofficial poll Ihave been conducting (every time I travel in airports) asks co-travellers at security checkpoints whether they would be more willing to lose their luggage or their cell phones. 100% ofmy sample group answered that they would rather lose their luggage. And this, withoutreflecting one second on it.

Data journalism (Source: OWNI.eu)

What’s more – and what’s crucially different from Arendt’s political culture – is that data isapparent – it is phenomenal – because the human is its material source. Data is harnessablematter, a fact that has been ensured by the intensification of memory storage size and

12/22/14, 9:24 AMArendt and Datapolitik « Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities

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CIA Torture Report (Source: International BusinessTimes)

tracking technology. Data occupies space and time. Every gesture, sound, vista, or look –anything that we might say belongs to human existence – is transformable into virtual bytesthat are captured and stored not only, or simply, for the purpose of surveillance and control(though that is always an option) but also for the purposes of interception, extraction,tracking, locating, and assessing.

Interception, extraction, tracking, locating, assessing – these relational activities signal theintensification of an underappreciated form of modern political power that we might calldatapolitik. Datapolitik is the unique constellation of political forms available to ourcontemporary techno-digital condition. These forms are not new, albeit their intensificationand proliferation is unique, as is the user’s willingness to generate and proliferate dataemissions. Datapolitik has a history and a media archeology well nested in the history of thecynegetic powers of the police. Those powers are oriented to capturing and detaining prey. Inour case, the prey is more often than not information itself, and the means and processeswhereby information is captured include pursuit, interception, and extraction.

Within the cynegetic techno-culture ofdatapolitik, the CIA Report on Torturemakes perfect sense. At one level, itexposes something we all alreadyknew: torture continues to be aprevalent form of state action,regardless of its illegality. But thatseems of minor relevance. When theextraction of data from bodies, fromresources, from activities, from minds– from life – is the central operatingsystem of our techno-political culture,then using whatever algorithmnecessary – including algorithms ofpain and horror – makes plaincommon sense. Let’s be honest withourselves: we have no problem extracting information from our clicks on the web or from ourGPS activities. Indeed, we encourage it. Without scandal, we regularly acquiesce to suchencouragements whenever we “agree” to the terms and conditions of an OS update orinstallation. And when we live in a virtual world where it is difficult to imagine a differencebetween our telephone digits and our selves – a political world entirely unlike Arendt’s – thenit must seem equally plausible to acquiescence to data interception, extraction, and capture(i.e., #datapolitik) in any form whatsoever.

The insensibility of this sensus communis is worrisome, no doubt. But even more worrisome isthe fact that while we are prepared to adopt and deploy – to partake in – datapolitik, we haveyet to develop a critical political vocabulary specific to the new media at hand. Our traditionalmoral vocabularies can’t help us very much because datapolitik is not a matter of good or badbehavior, good or bad technology. At best, we might say that our technology is being used forbad purposes, but when hasn’t that been the case? Our traditional critical vocabularies –indebted as they are to older media (especially print and cinema) – are equally strained in theface of datapolitik. And our political vocabularies and concepts are also limp given theirrecursive rehearsing of power as coercive and intentional, ideological, or disciplinary. In short,we have yet to engage and develop the relevant critical concepts specific to our algorithmiccultures.

There is no point in bemoaning these developments in the manner in which some of Arendt’spast colleagues bemoaned the devolution of humanity because of the rise of technical media.I certainly don’t want to be read as criticizing our digital turn. But I do believe it a task of oursas users to engage the political lives of digital media on their own terms – not because theyare part of our imagined futures, but because they have already shaped our actual pasts.

(Featured Image: "Staying Safe in the Virtual World"; Source: Business Computing World)

12/22/14, 9:24 AMArendt and Datapolitik « Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities

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Amor Mundi 12/21/14 » « An Arendtian Library – German, English, and Dutch

Davide PanagiaDavide Panagia is Associate Professor of Political Science atUCLA and Co-Editor of Theory & Event. His work focuses onthe relationship between aesthetics and politics. Hispublications include "The Poetics of Political Thinking" (Duke,2006), "The Political Life of Sensation" (Duke, 2009), and

"Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity”(Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).

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