Fitness in Wartime: Americans on the Move
by Jordan Crandall
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.
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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.
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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.
