Abstract
The turn to materialism emerging in world politics scholarship promises fruitful ways of understanding power and political life by focusing on agency in the physical world. Yet immaterial information and ‘the virtual’ seem to dominate our lives. How can we understand the relationship between the material and the informational? Does this understanding promise any further insight into agency, power, and world politics? The focus in this paper is on the materiality (corporeality) and information of the human body as a special case. Embodied information is the information contained in the body that can potentially be accessed by others through an act of power. The way in which embodied knowledge is implicated in practices of world politics is exemplified by surveillance, DNA databases, and organ trade. Bodies are also the means by which information becomes sensible: we understand information from various sources and with various kinds of content through our bodies’ ability to sense. This knowing body is also implicated in power, as exemplified by the use of sound and the augmentation of the senses through technology. Drawing on the interpretation of embodied information and knowing bodies, this article provides a pragmatic model of world politics in which to control how information flows, how it is extracted from the body, how it is inserted or received, how quickly, and to what end, is to have power or to be powerful.
Introduction
This paper begins with an intellectual conundrum: The turn to materialism emerging in world politics scholarship promises fruitful ways of understanding power and political life by focusing on agency in the physical world. Yet immaterial information and ‘the virtual’ seem to dominate our lives. How can we understand the relationship between the material and the informational? Does this understanding promise any further insight into agency, power, and world politics? Materiality and information are always inextricably connected, regardless of whether we are speaking of biotic or abiotic things. The focus in this paper is on the materiality (corporeality) and information of the human body as a special case.
I seek to answer these two questions by looking at embodied information and knowing bodies. 1 Bodies are not just material things and are not just the physical containers of minds. Bodies are lively, 2 material, agentic, and informational. Embodied information is the information contained in the body that can potentially be accessed by others through an act of power. Surveillance is thus a world political practice of power that should be seen as much more complex than simply the gaze of the state on the person. On the other hand, a person sending forth his or her embodied information may also be a powerful act. Bodies are also the means by which information becomes sensible: we understand information from various sources and with various kinds of content through our bodies’ ability to sense. This knowing body is also implicated in power. In short, to control how information flows, how it is extracted from the body, how it is inserted or received, how quickly, and to what end is to have power or to be powerful.
The plan of the paper is as follows. I first provide a model of informational power as a useful intellectual construct. This is then followed by a discussion of three examples of embodied information and the associated practices 3 controlling the flow of that information that are instances of power in world politics. First, ubiquitous surveillance in the absence of suspicion is enabled by the digitised collection of traits (e.g. digitised fingerprints), that allows governments and other agents to swiftly identify (or misidentify) individual bodies. The second example explores how DNA is used powerfully, from manipulating content toward racist ends (as the critical intervention of artist Paul Vanouse demonstrates), to allowing the collection of and access to large databases of DNA for data mining purposes, to commodification of DNA through patents. The final example of embodied information problematises global practices of transplant tourism and body organs as information. The following section turns to the recipient of information: the knowing body. In this section I explore how information and sensation are implicated in power relations, drawing on two examples: sound and technologically augmented senses. I discuss the use of sound’s physical effects on the body in conflict situations and hip-hop music’s production of emotional attraction to neoliberalism. Technologically augmented senses allow bodies to sense more kinds of things over greater distances and to record more data. The ability of pilots to manipulate drone aircraft is perhaps the most obvious case of relevance of this to international relations, but more quotidian practices, such as people using social media technologies to see and act across borders, is also important for understanding how information flows and who is controlling that flow. Brief concluding comments summarise the findings and return to the question how embodied information, knowing bodies and power are important for our understanding of international relations.
Informational Power
The starting point of my analysis is to redefine power in terms of control of the flow of information, where flow of information refers to content, velocity (direction and speed), and access. I suggest that the informational model of power that I describe here is a way and not the way to define power. I argue below that my definition is useful for helping us to understand politics, a pragmatic criterion. 4
Scholars of international relations have often questioned the nature of power, and the answers they arrive at range widely. 5 Though realists differ in how they understand power (as relation, as resources, as a characteristic of states, as a fundamental human drive), they in general assume the validity of a plain-text reading of Thucydides’ bromide – ‘The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept’. 6 Approaches that stress the relational aspect of power draw on Dahl’s formulation of power as the ability of A to get B to do what it otherwise would not do. 7 This definition holds for both realists, who tend to emphasise the relative distribution of power, and liberals, who are more interested in outcomes and conditions of Pareto optimality. 8 Power, for liberals, tends to be a set of capacities or resources, and more is better, regardless of the quantities of power held by other states. Nye’s differentiation between the ‘soft power’ of attraction and persuasion, as opposed to the ‘hard power’ of military force and economic strengths, fits into a liberal model in which changed interests allow for cooperative outcomes under conditions that are fundamentally anarchic. 9
As Sterling-Foker and Shinko suggest, realists (and one might add liberals) and postmodern critical theorists see power ‘as a resource that is capable of simultaneously maintaining structures and inducing historical change, but what wields power and why it does so are seen to be very different’. 10 Critical approaches often rely on the soft Marxian analyses of Bachrach and Baratz, 11 Crenson, 12 Lukes, 13 and Gaventa, 14 who understand power in terms of social structures (including class) that enable and constrain not only behaviour but also consciousness of interests. Foucault plays a major role in critical approaches, as well, with biopower 15 and power/knowledge 16 forming the basis of understandings of power that work on the individual within society and therefore on society as whole. Power in this view is pervasive, inescapable. Feminist IR theorists similarly assume the ubiquity of power and bring to the table another critical perspective: that of how gender and identity constitute the context through which and on which power has effects. 17 Feminist theorists emphasise both the power relations within the scholarly discipline (what ‘counts’ as IR) and the gendered subjectivity of global politics. 18 Further, feminist theorists contest the assumed dichotomy of strong (having power) versus weak (lacking power), noting that all humans and consequently all collectivities of humans, like states are at once empowered to different degrees and vulnerable. 19
An overlapping approach to the definition of power comes from constructivists, who can fall into realist, liberal, or critical camps. Their question concerns how power comes to be defined as it is and what power does. Guizzini sees a relationship between the social construction of politics as conflictual to power ‘defined in a way to privilege manipulative features in the ‘art of the possible’, rather than the notion of a common good’. 20 For social constructivists, such as Bially Mattern, a key form of power is ‘representational’. Actors, through communicative exchange, ‘fight over representations of reality’, and the actor that is able to force others ‘[to submit] in word and in deed, to the terms of [the actor’s] viewpoint’ is powerful. 21
Constructivist and critical approaches focus attention on the materiality of realist and liberal conceptualisations of power. What is at stake is the social and inter-subjective meaning that the participants in the dialogue ascribe to their sensing of the material. Materiality of resources matters, but it matters in the context of a set of embodied social dynamics, shared understandings, and understandings that are not shared. Information somehow plays a role.
That information must be connected to materiality in a theory of power is even more apparent in the Information Age. States continue to be important agents, but they are not the sole agents that are powerful. One need only look at the consequences of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s use of widely available information technology to produce an anti-Moslem film, Innocence of Muslims, and to distribute the trailer via YouTube video. Nakoula’s action to disseminate hateful information sparked rage and violence in the Moslem world. It seems, on the face of it, that Nakoula was, for a moment, powerful, though we can guess that his powerful acts did not result in the outcome that he had intended. Acting powerfully to control the flow of information and having results that coincide with intentions are distinct.
At the heart of the Nakoula story and at the heart of the story about the use of social media and the Arab Uprisings is the sense that information matters in the world, that information acts on people. Violence happens; political change happens. Perhaps, too, if we scratch the surface a bit, interactions that seem to be about material forces acting on people might be fundamentally about information because the only way in which we are aware of material forces is because we have the ability to sense them. And what about the bullet that the kills the unsuspecting, unseeing person instantly, without time for conscious awareness? I think that information has a role here, as well, though my interpretation may be stretched. Information flows through our bodies, most obviously through the electrical impulses that travel along nerves, but also through the chemical signaling that flows in veins, in lymphatic tissue, from cell to cell. A way to think about the cessation of life is a final interruption of the flow of information in the body.
The irony that conventional IR notions of power fail to capture important instances of power that are readily apparent in the Information Age prompts me to offer a tentative reconceptualisation of power, one which works for current circumstances as well as for historical contexts. Power can be understood as the ability to control the flow of information, with flow of information understood in terms of content, velocity (direction and speed), and access. There are numerous points in this system at which content, velocity, or access can be controlled. To exert control over any of these dimensions is to act powerfully. Power manifests as instants of controlling the information flow – by acting on the content, the velocity, or the access.
The model I develop need not involve humans. In theory, a machine could be the recipient of information about some other machine (think of automated control systems), and the recipient machine could have enough (artificial) intelligence to qualify as a knowing recipient. Some other machine – perhaps one with faulty code 22 – could disrupt the flow of information and (arguably) have a powerful (if unintentional) effect on the system. Figure 1 presents a simplified rendering of the flow of information, abstracting from the complex information field 23 in which multiple agents (individuals, ‘the state’, collectivities) are sources and recipients of information. Figure 2 expands this model to represent in a slightly more complex way how information might flow among a group of people (Imagine the way information flowed in the Nakoula incident described above). In both these figures, one would represent power as that which affects the content, the velocity (direction, speed), and access at any point.
Simplified information flow model: content, velocity, access. Information flow can be understood in terms of content moving from a source at a certain velocity (comprising both direction and speed) and a recipient or some recipients having access to the content.
A more complex model of information flow. While an initial flow of information sends content from a source to a recipient, content can simultaneously and subsequently flow elsewhere. The fidelity of the content is represented, in stylised form, by the darkness of the shading.
For this paper, however, I am interested in the endpoints of the simplified system, and specifically in human sources and human recipients. Within a complex field of innumerable information flows among an uncountable number of bodies in a vast social field, we can take the analytical step of isolating a single stream as shown in Figure 1: Content flows from a source and to a recipient. What information can be taken from or given by the body of the source? What information can be taken in by or forced into the recipient? How can we conceptualise embodied information and knowing bodies and how will that enrich an understanding of world political practices? The corporeality of the human is central to this analysis and helps to fill what had been a lacuna within international relations theories. International relations happens to bodies – that bodies die as a consequence of global political practices is one obvious example – yet only rarely has the body been problematised within IR. 24 Scholarship on the body and world politics can be found within critical scholarship, with feminist IR scholarship, in particular, problematising the gendered body. 25
The system depicted above could look like an illustration of information flowing through the Internet only. After all, the purpose of the Internet is to enable the flow of information, and several scholars have examined different aspects of how global information flows enabled by the Internet have made various agents more or less powerful. 26 Indeed, I have written about the information and power in cyber environments in part because it is an easy case, but also because it is an important one. 27 There are two distinctions I make in the present work. First, the system illustrated here can be applied widely and does not need to be mediated by information technology. It works in face-to-face interactions, and the sensory rich environment of face-to-face interactions allows for different kinds of content to be moved from the source to the recipient. Second, the emphasis is on the relation of information, power, and corporeality.
The next two sections connect this information flow model of power to bodies, both the source as embodied information and recipient as the knowing body.
Embodied Information
It is tempting to separate body and mind and (ironically) to locate embodied information in a disembodied mind. I want to resist this temptation and instead consider the body as simultaneously material and informational: all the material is also information; information may also be material. Embodied information flows internally and externally. Internal flow is the body’s communication with itself, but this should not be reduced to ‘thinking’ or internal narration. As the protagonist of a Coetzee story puts it:
To thinking, cognition, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being – not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation – a heavily affective sensation – of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world.
28
Antonio Damasio notes that internal information flows are continual because the living body constantly senses that it is alive and monitors its state. 29 These sensations are fundamental bits of information that the body constantly signals to itself. Internal information flow is recursive, as in Figure 3. Our internal relationship to the information of our bodies includes conscious comprehension, feelings and sensations that cannot be expressed in words, and information (commands to proteins from our DNA, marching orders of our immune systems, etc.) that operate well out of the range of the ability of our conscious mind to understand or even notice.
Internal flow of information. The living body continually communicates with itself. Content flows via multiple systems within the body.
Much of this information is in constant motion. One moment we may not be hungry, the next moment we may be. We smell something awful and we feel disgust. Our bodies are constantly sending and receiving information to maintain homeostasis. The information of our minds is in constant motion as well – we think thoughts and narrate to ourselves.
Some of our embodied information moves very slowly within us. Consider eye colour. From day to day it seems constant, yet over the span of a lifetime, it changes. Just as hair loses pigment and becomes grey, eye pigment degrades and eyes change colour. Disease and chemicals can also change eye colour. Nevertheless, it is often thought of as closely linked to the identity of the person – Frank Sinatra as ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’, for example. Multiple forms of identification require that eye colour be specified, even though linking an identity to a physical characteristic that can change over the lifespan seems short-sighted (pun intended). Eye colour is just one example of a corporeal trait that helps to link a particular body with a larger corpus of information. Bodily traits are one way to configure ‘the I as ID (the socially identifiable Self, with a gender, a job, a driving license, a marital status etc.)’. 30
Surveillance and Bodily Traits
Recording eye colour is an instance of moving information from the body and making it available to a recipient. Embodied traits like eye colour do not become instances of control of information flow until observed and transmitted, which is what happens with surveillance. Use of eye colour and other surveillance information for identification purposes requires that the information flow out from the body and be made sense-able to some Other. In Foucauldian terms, surveillance involves both biopower and power/knowledge. 31
Biometric measurements and fingerprints are other examples of information about a body that is collected in order to uniquely identify the person at a later time. Having such information is useful for the conduct of surveillance. Fingerprints, according to G.T.C. Lambourne, were described by a botanist named Dr. Nehemia Grew in a 1684 paper in Philosophical Transactions. 32 Lambourne traces the first known systems of collecting and organising information from the body in order to help with identifying criminals to Dr. Alphonse Bertillon, Chief of the Identification Bureau in Paris, and Sir Francis Galton in England, both working in the last years of the 19th Century. Bertillon created a system in which habitual criminals had measurements of various parts of their bodies taken. These measurements could then be filed and later retrieved to identify who had committed another criminal act. In 1892, Galton published a book on a way of categorising fingerprints for the same purpose. By 1894, Scotland Yard began using both biometric measurements and fingerprints to identify criminals. The keeping of such records is ‘a “power of writing” [that] was constituted as an essential part in the mechanisms of discipline’. 33 This is just one way in which power, as Foucault explains, produces knowledge. 34
Fingerprinting and other biometric measurements are now part of world political practices, especially as practices of the state for securing the border and combating crime. 35 In her thought-provoking discussion of biometrics and security, Louise Amoore suggests that ‘the allure of biometrics derives from the human body being seen as an indisputable anchor to which data can be safely secured’. 36 In her analysis, the state and the other agents (firms and individuals) charged with collecting the data on behalf of the state are powerful because, in a Foucauldian and Butlerian sense, they govern the body and determine (limit, allow) mobilities.
And one way in which they are particularly powerful is when they misread, misinterpret, or mistake the information in the body. Such errors are reproduced as truth. As Foucault asserts: ‘We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth’. 37 One such instance occurred in 2004, when Brandon Mayfield, an attorney in Oregon, was wrongly thought to be the source of a latent fingerprint on materials used in the bombing of the Madrid train station despite the fact that he had not been out of the United States. 38 Fingerprint analysis using data mining techniques (his fingerprints had been transformed into readable, digital images) combined with ‘expert’ analysis led to this false positive result. Weeks passed before Mayfield was cleared. In this instance, agents of the state (the fingerprint experts for the FBI) controlled the flow of information by acting on (corrupting) the content, by inserting unwarranted certainty into the false conclusions they drew from the physical evidence.
The use of data extracted from the body is the common experience of all of us who have been through airport security. As Lauren Wilcox describes, embodied information is made visible, scanable, analyzable through digitisation, and therefore subject to confiscation and transformation by the government. She concludes: ‘The airport security assemblages manage the threats of violence and insecurity by transforming embodied subjects into suspicious flesh that can be dissected digitally in a search for the truth of a person’s safety or dangerousness’. 39
Configuring the body into an identifiable assemblage of information is essential for global practices of surveillance. While an older set of social practices referred to surveillance as keeping a watchful eye on a suspect person, surveillance, as Gary Marx points out, has been disconnected from suspicion. 40 Everyone is surveilled; every body has information extracted from it through observation, through the recording and digitising of traits like eye colour, through the computer analysis of digital traces of practices (e.g. purchases), and the like.
DNA as a Special Kind of Embodied Information
As technologies for analyzing the information of the body have advanced, the role of DNA has become prominent. To be the recipient of DNA information about a source is to have identifying information linking the body to the person. I raise three different kinds of global problems that arise with DNA: the misuse of DNA for racist ends, the large amount of data held around the world and the probability of false positives, and commodification of DNA via patents.
Extracted DNA and scientific manipulation of it easily plays into racist political meanings. 41 In 2007 (and previously), James Watson, a discoverer of DNA, made comments about the genetics of black people and intelligence that were widely understood as racist. After the 2007 incident, he apologised and, according to an editorial in Nature, ‘he acknowledged that there is no evidence for what he claimed about racial differences in intelligence. But the damage has been done, lending succour and comfort to racists around the globe’. As the editorial notes, the world’s history of eugenics and racism, studying ‘the influence of genetics on human attributes and behavior’ is risky. 42 For Nature, the risk is that those who are interested in political correctness can use conclusions that scientists arrive at about the influence of genetics for shutting down such research as racist. Yet the other risk – the risk that Watson manifested – remains as well: Despite the widely held understanding among scientists that race is an ‘unscientific word’ (again quoting Nature), scientific findings based on DNA can be used to justify racist ideas.
Paul Vanouse, an artist who uses techno-science as a medium, subverts the relationship of DNA and race by racing DNA, quite literally. He writes:
Over the past few years, I have been specifically concerned with forcing the arcane codes of scientific communication into a broader cultural language. In The Relative Velocity Inscription Device (2002), I literally race DNA from my Jamaican-American family members, in a DNA sequencing gel, in an installation/scientific experiment that explores the relationship between early 20th Century Eugenics and late 20th Century Human Genomics. Specifically, the double entendre of race is intended to highlight the similarities and obsession with “genetic fitness” within these historical endeavors.
43
The installation projects the progress of the race to the viewers (See Figure 4). The irony of the disembodied DNA fragments running a race on an ‘inscription device’ challenges the viewer to re-inscribe meaning to race and the body and to the technology – the device – that is used to measure and evaluate characteristics of (dis)embodied information.
Paul Vanouse, The Relative Velocity Inscription Device. 2002. Reproduction of this image does not capture the original colours. A full colour version can be seen online at www.paulvanouse.com/rvid.html
Further, extracted DNA is considered to be reliable information for providing evidence, either damning or exculpatory, of an individual’s guilt, though the degree of reliability is subject to statistical margins of error. 44 Though global DNA databases may help identify miscreants, 45 the size of the databases is unavoidably connected to the number of innocents who will be misidentified as guilty. The more data in the database, the greater the number of false positives.
Another aspect of DNA and other forms of embodied information is the degree to which embodied information is commodified and becomes something that is traded globally. To commodify information is to change its content and to restrict access to the content. Myriad Corporation’s patents on isolated genes for breast and ovarian cancer have been the subject of contentious legal proceedings. At stake is whether an isolated piece of a DNA molecule should receive patent protection that would allow the company to restrict others’ use of the patented piece for clinical or research purposes. 46 Given the global nature of research and development, as well as the global diffusion of US-style rules for patentability, allowing patents for DNA may have a deleterious effect on innovation, contributing to ‘patent thickets’ that hinder other innovators. 47
Vanouse again provides the ironic critique. His work, Latent Figure Protocol, uses electrophoresis to ‘paint’ DNA into images. Of the series of images he presents, the copyright symbol (Figure 5) is the most telling. On one level, this works as a simple sight gag: It is funny to see the copyright symbol as a work of art itself rather than as protecting a work of art. But the critique quickly emerges. The image, as a creative work, is itself copyrighted. What about the DNA itself? Presenting the copyright symbol out of genetic material makes the viewer ask about the ownership of that material as well as of the art work it comprises. By using DNA and electric current to paint an image, Vanouse certainly has DNA acting in an innovative and (perhaps) useful way. Should it be patented? In this image, the artist is using DNA from bacterial plasmid pET-11a. How would human DNA (and the viewer’s knowledge of the use of human DNA) have changed the work?
Latent Figure Protocol, Paul Vanouse, 2007. (Just one of several images in the work is shown here). Reproduction of this image does not capture the original colours. A full colour version can be seen online at http://paulvanouse.com/lfp.html
Organs as Information
To be able to own and alienate embodied information is to be able control its flow, particularly in terms of content and access. This can be seen, as well, in the case of global trade in organs. 48 At first glance, organ trade may seem to be nothing more than material: a kidney moving from one body to another. Yet organ transplantation is embedded in a series of informational relations. First of these is the idea of the kidney as, itself, embodied information. It is the body part that knows how to filter the blood and remove impurities. Others of these are webs of information about where to find organs and transplant tourism, medical knowledge about how to conduct transplantation, awareness (or not) of global norms concerning transplantation. Transplant tourism refers to the practice of wealthy but ill bodies going to developing countries and purchasing kidneys from donors who are poor. The purchase of the kidney itself – being able to control the velocity (its direction and speed) of the embodied information (the organ) – is an instance of power. Transplant tourists get organs and they get them faster than they would otherwise. Further, the poor donor may not have true access to information about the risks to him or her from the donation procedure itself and from potential consequent medical issues. The consent will likely not be truly informed. Also, being poor, the donor may not be able to control the velocity (direction and speed) of information in the form of medical expertise that he or she might need in the future. Comparing the ways in which individuals in this case are able to control information flow highlights instances of power and points of powerlessness.
Surveillance and the collection of traits, DNA as information, and body organs understood as information are three examples of embodied information and how information is taken or sent from a source. In the next section, I turn to the recipient of information, the knowing body.
The Knowing Body
The relationship of information to the body has to do with the fact that information, to matter, must be received by an agent who makes sense of that information. There are at least three ways to make sense of information, though most of the time making sense involves a jumble of all three. The first is making sense of semantic content. The knowing body with cognitive competence can process words and symbols – in other words, signs – and recognise their meanings. Albert Borgmann is referring to this kind of information when he writes that ‘information has to be a relation of at least four terms: a PERSON is informed by a SIGN about some THING within a certain CONTEXT’. 49 (Translating to my terms: a recipient is informed by content about some source. 50 ) His trichotomy of ‘information about reality’ (information in which the sign and the thing are intimately connected – a thundercloud signaling the likelihood of a storm, for example), ‘information for reality’ (information that can be used to produce reality, such as written instructions or maps), and ‘information as reality’ (information qua information, such as digitised datasets that are useful because they are collections of information) all fits within the category of semantic meaning.
Second, the knowing body can also make sense of received information through the emotions. Information moves, in both denotations of the verb – it moves as it travels across space, and it moves us emotionally. 51 For example, spectacular visual images can invoke emotional responses in the spectator, and awe and excitement can distract the spectators from other information. 52 Research on the embodiment of emotions has focused attention on perceptual, somatovisceral, and motoric experiencing of observed emotion. ‘Taken all together, recent findings provide a scientific account of the familiar contention that ‘when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you’. 53
The third way to make sense of information relies on neither semantic nor emotional meaning, but instead relates to the way the recipient is in the world. I will call this material meaning, though I am mindful that semantic and emotional meanings have material aspects to them as well. Jane Bennett (writing about food ‘as a self-altering, dissipative materiality’) discusses the power of food to change how we are in the world. 54 Though her point is about the agentic power of the non-human, non-living material, we can re-read her examples as informational power. Food that is ingested by the body communicates to the body, i.e. makes the body receive a certain kind of information and changes how information flows within the body itself. The body makes sense of the information through a change in being. As I noted above, physical harm to the body, including killing it, is an example of some outside agent controlling the flow of information, expressed materially as blood, nerve impulses, and other biological processes within a body, which is both the source and recipient of information. When the body receives information properly, the body is healthy. Some kinds of hindrances of information flow signal injury or death. Most of this internal information, with the notable exception of pain, is not something we are cognitively aware of. Nevertheless, the body itself makes sense of the information materially.
How bodies make sense of information semantically, emotionally, and materially can be further explained using the examples of sound and technologies that allow us to augment reality.
Sound and the Knowing Body
Sound refers to content (what we hear) and to the means by which the content travels (via sound waves, sometimes first mediated by analog or digital technologies). By content of the sound, I refer not just to the specific semantic message that is heard and that the knowing body can translate into a recognised word or melody or scream. The vibration, frequency, and volume of the sound is information as well. Steve Goodman examines ‘sonically provoked, physiological, and autonomic reaction of the body’. 55 His focus is on the way agents use sound to provoke fear in the recipients. In terms of my model, to be able to force the recipients to have access to this sound is an instance of power. Moreover, as Goodman notes, the sound need not be consciously heard and processed by the rational mind. Sound, including inaudible sound, works on the body and can force the body to feel. The body can be knowing even when the mind does not know that it knows – an example of material meaning. Goodman focuses on ‘sonic warfare’, which he describes in terms of a continuum of ‘sonic force’, with one pole as a use of sound to repel or disperse and the other pole as a use of sound to attract. 56 The sound cannon disperses the rioters, using sound to cause pain. The drumbeats and rhythm of the march (Hup 2, 3, 4!) encourage the army to move forward together.
At times, though, sound carries content that works on a semantic level, moving and convincing through words, melody, and rhythm – and the movement of bodies, as well. Lester Spence, in his analysis of black politics and hip-hop, writes of the ‘circulation’ of hip-hop and the way in which the music is productive of a certain kind of black parallel public sphere. Hip-hop spreads ‘the neoliberal narrative across space and the most dominant aspects of black politics across space and time’. 57 Neoliberal causal explanations of life become plausible because of the message carried by the attractive medium of hip-hop. Spence writes that hip-hop and its related embodied reproductions (rapping, DJ-ing, breakdancing, and tagging) ‘affirm … that another reality is possible’. 58 The negative outcome is that this other reality privileges extremes of neoliberal consumption and lack of regulation, leading to criminality and exploitation. In this case, the information in the music acts on the recipient as an emotional attractor to a particular kind of ethical and aesthetic judgment. Artists are able to act powerfully when they control the flow of content and are able to push semantic, emotional, and material meaning at the recipients. The fact that the artist and the recipient are embodied is critical to the way the transmission happens and to its attractiveness to the recipient.
Augmented Reality and the Knowing Body
A final example of the knowing body takes us into the realm of ‘augmented reality’ (I borrow this phrase from Nathan Jurgensen and P.J. Rey), 59 which is reality as augmented by technology. Our experience of information – sense data from the world – is dependent both on the ‘wetware’ of our bodies and the technologies we use to further enable our bodies. As we evolve (and we are continually evolving, especially through technology), we add means of extending our senses and sensations, of moving our bodies outward, or perhaps bringing the outside into our bodies and incorporating new sense organs. Donna Harraway’s cyborg idea is instructive. 60
There are two aspects to this: the extension of the senses and the recording of the sense data. The first is typified by eyeglasses. My experience of the world is fully integrated with the quality of my lenses. My reality is augmented beyond what I could sense without them. My computer is another obvious augmentation to my senses. When I ‘visit’ websites, I am the recipient of information, but I receive this information because the technology allows me to ‘go’ to the site. Technologies that extend the senses allow the knowing body to know more. This is important for an analysis of power because the technologies open new ways of controlling the flow of information, especially in this case in terms of access.
The second aspect is in the recording of sense data. The idea is that our brain’s memory cells are not our sole means of recording and preserving information. The technology used to be papyrus, parchment, quills, and the like. 61 It is now, of course, computers. Camera technology fixes the visual aspects that fixes a moment in time. It too gives us an ability to record information and changes the way the memory of the moment is lived. 62 Power is implicated here especially in terms of content (the quantity and quality of content) and the velocity (the speed at which information can be accessed), as well as in terms of the other aspects of control of information flow.
The use of piloted drones in warfare depends on the knowing body operating in augmented reality, with extended senses and the ability to record that sense data. Lauren Wilcox understands the relation of the drone pilot through the drone to the targets as a redefinition of human bodies in terms of the “posthuman” that makes possible the political conditions of life and death for both the targets and civilians. Specifically, the attempted (but ultimately incomplete) transformation of the human body into an information processor enables a certain moral and political calculus of which bodies “count”.
63
The pilot is supported by others who receive the recorded images, who try to use the video to refine strategies, much in the way that game films are used by coaches. A problem not yet resolved is that too much data is being received. The New York Times reported that in the US, the CIA and the military have been struggling with too much data to analyze effectively. 64 The inability to control the volume of content demonstrates a lack of power. In this case, trying to receive the flow of content is like drinking from a fire hydrant. Though few are drone pilots, the overwhelming majority of us are recipients of information via digital technology. Social media, in particular, is alluring to us, and the use of Facebook and other social media continues to rise rapidly. These sites fully incorporate the extension of sensing ability and the expansion of memory retention, leading us to live differently. We sense, remember, and live more widely (I am not sure about more deeply). We are hybrids; we are cyber-humans. As our senses reach out through cyber environments, we become (partially) what Jane Bennett, following Deleuze and Guattari, calls ‘bodies-without organs’. 65
Concluding Comments
In short, we are embodied information and we are knowing bodies. We serve as sources and recipients of information. One way to conceptualise power is to understand it as the ability to control the content and velocity of information as well as access to it as information flows from embodied sources to knowing recipient bodies. As we have recently seen (most of us at a distance and through external storage of memory) videos can go viral, and the viral contagion can be for good or ill. The metaphor of contagion brings us back to the corporeality of our informational selves, both as embodied information and as knowing bodies.
The examples discussed here – surveillance, DNA, the global organ trade, sounds for coercion and for attraction, and technologies that augment the human body’s senses – serve as illustrations of why paying attention to the relation of corporeality and information is useful for recognising and analyzing how power manifests in world politics (and indeed, in social relations that are not necessarily global). I have intentionally chosen examples that touch upon topics of world politics in the widest sense – conflict and security, global political economy, global political sociology, global communication. By focusing on embodied information and knowing bodies and how information flows (content, velocity, access), who successfully acts to control the flow and who does not becomes apparent. Who is speeding or slowing the flow of information? Who is taking (accepting/wresting) it from bodies? Who is sending it to (forcing it into/making it available to) bodies? Are such practices affecting bodies as violence or as care or as exchange? Individuals and collectivities can be capable of powerful actions, and micro-instances of power can be seen within a larger global context. However, the argument here is not that states no longer matter in our information rich global environment, since states figure prominently in stories of controlling information flows. States conduct surveillance, they engage in both traditional and public diplomacy, they seek to control access to the Internet, they grant rights to intellectual property, and so forth. States are both sources and recipients of information, and they act powerfully on the flow of information. Rather, the argument I have set forth here is that to look just at the artificial person of the state and other abstractions would be to miss the corporeality inherent in information flow. While not all information of political importance is about some body, our embodied information is important in global politics. Further, knowing bodies (often on behalf of the state) ultimately make sense of content to which they have access. While it may at first seem like we, as embodied information and knowing bodies, have little control over information flow and are therefore powerless, the story is not all bleak. Though others may sometimes act to control the content and velocity of information and our access to it, we are also agents empowered to control the flow of information that swirls around and through our bodies. Our control is not total and could not be, yet there are moments when we can act to exert control.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am especially grateful to the many scholars and students who have graciously provided feedback as I worked through the ideas in this article. Even though I know I must be forgetting someone who ought to be mentioned, I must name Lauren Wilcox, Stefanie Fishel, Rosemary Shinko, Jessica Auchter, Benjamin Meiches, Nicholas Onuf, Yehonatan Abramson, Kavi Joseph Abraham, members of the audience at the Millennium conference, and participants in the Hebrew University International Relations PhD forum (and special thanks to Piki Ish-Shalom for making that possible). A lecture by Paul Vanouse given at Johns Hopkins University in 2012, crystalised several ideas that previously were inchoate, and I thank him for his gracious agreement to allow the use of his images. Morgan Glaze, a talented undergraduate engineering student at Johns Hopkins, took my ugly attempts at depicting theory in figures and turned them into much nicer graphic art.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
1.
Reneée Marlin-Bennett, Knowledge Power: Intellectual Property, Information, and Privacy (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004),169–238. In this previous work, I theorised ‘personal information’ and privacy in terms of an informational space that includes and surrounds the body. The present work is consistent with my earlier effort, though the emphasis here differs.
2.
Stefanie Fishel, ‘New Metaphors for Global Living’ (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2011).
3.
Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, eds. International Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
4.
A discussion of the pragmatic, abductive methodology that I deploy can be found in Renée Marlin-Bennett, ‘Governing the Flow: Power, Information, and Rules Online’ (under review).
5.
This was the subject of a Millennium special issue: Felix Berenskoetter and Michael J. Williams, eds. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005): Special Issue on Power. Scholars continue to weigh in on this subject from across the perspectives in international relations. Consider the following non-comprehensive set of diverse examples of 21st century scholarship on power. Mainstream approaches include: James N. Rosenau and J. P. Singh, Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002); Joseph S. Nye, Power in the Global Information Age: From Realism to Globalization (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Joseph M. Grieco and G. John Ikenberry, State Power and World Markets: The International Political Economy (1st edn. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003); Sean Kay, ‘Globalization, Power, and Security’, Security Dialogue 35, no. 1 (March, 2004): 9-25; Jeffrey Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 253; Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, ‘Power in International Politics’, International Organization 59, no. 1 (2005): 39-75; Ian Hurd, After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Critical approaches include: Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, and Class (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no. 1 (2005): 1-24; Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times (London: Verso, 2010).
6.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, ed. M.I. Finley (introduction and notes), trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 402; also Brian C. Schmidt, ‘Competing Realist Conceptions of Power’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005): 523-49. But see heterodox interpretations that instead read the Melian Dialog as Thucydides’ indictment of the Athenians and approval of the Melians’ principled sacrifice. Hayward R. Alker Jr, ‘The Dialectical Logic of Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue’, The American Political Science Review 82, no. 3 (1988); Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Levine critiques the constitution of the field of IR on this (mis)reading of Thucydides. Daniel Levine, ‘International Theory and the Problem of Sustainable Critique’, Borderlands 10, no. 1 (2011). Available at: 
7.
Robert A. Dahl, ‘The Concept of Power’, Behavioral Science 2, no. 3 (1957).
8.
An example of the overlapping assumptions about the nature of power between neorealist and neoliberal approaches can be found in Keohane’s discussion of a ‘modified structural theory’ of international relations. Robert O. Keohane, ‘Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond’, in Neorealism and its Critics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
9.
Nye, Power in the Global Information Age.
10.
Jennifer Sterling-Folker and Rosemary E. Shinko, ‘Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005): 642.
11.
Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, ‘2 Faces of Power’, American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (1962): 947-52.
12.
Matthew A. Crenson, The Un-Politics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non-Decisionmaking in the Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).
13.
Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (2nd edn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
14.
John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980).
15.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).
16.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (1st American edn. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
17.
Jan Jindy Pettman, ‘Feminist International Relations After 9/11’, Brown Journal of World Affairs 10, no. 2 (2003): 85-96.
18.
19.
Fiona Robinson, ‘Stop Talking and Listen: Discourse Ethics and Feminist Care Ethics in International Political Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 3 (2011): 845-60.
20.
Stefano Guzzini, ‘The Concept of Power: A Constructivist Analysis’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005): 495-521.
21.
Janice Bially Mattern, ‘Why Soft Power Isn’t so Soft: Representational Force and the Sociolinguistic Construction of Attraction in World Politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005): 586.
22.
Or what we humans might consider faulty code. HAL 9000, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, might disagree.
23.
J. David Johnson, James E. Andrews and Suzie Allard, ‘A Model for Understanding and Affecting Cancer Genetics Information Seeking’, Library & Information Science Research 23, no. 4 (2001): 335-49.
24.
David Campbell and Michael Dillon, ‘Postface: The Political and the Ethical’, in The Political Subject of Violence, David Campbell and Michael Dillon (Manchester, UK and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1993),162.
25.
Notable critical examples include: Jan Jindy Pettman, ‘Body Politics: International Sex Tourism’, Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1997): 93-108; V. Spike Peterson, ‘Shifting Ground(s): Epistemological and Territorial Remapping in the Context of Globalization’, in Globalization: Theory and Practice, eds. Eleonore Kofman and Gillian Youngs (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008), 11-28; Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, ‘Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, no. 1 (January 2001): 41-66; Vivienne Jabri, ‘Pinter, Radical Critique, and Politics’, Borderlands e-Journal 2, no. 2 (2003); Vivienne Jabri, ‘War, Security and the Liberal State’, Security Dialogue 37, no. 1 (2006): 47-64; Charlotte Epstein, ‘Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders’, International Political Sociology 1, no. 2 (2007): 149-64; Rosemary E. Shinko, ‘Ethics After Liberalism Why (Autonomous) Bodies Matter’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no. 3 (2010): 723-45; Fishel, New Metaphors for Global Living; Wilcox, Practices of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations (forthcoming); Jessica Auchter, ‘Border Monuments: Memory, Counter-Memory, and (B)ordering Practices Along the US-Mexico Border’, Review of International Studies CJO Firstview Article (2012), doi:10.1017/S0260210512000174. Last accessed March 12, 2013. I have also written on this theme: Reneée Marlin-Bennett, Marieke Wilson and Jason Walton, ‘Commodified Cadavers and the Political Economy of the Spectacle’, International Political Sociology 4, no. 2 (2010): 159-77.
26.
Examples include: Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 292; Sandra Braman, Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 545; Lene Hansen and Helen Nissenbaum, ‘Digital Disaster, Cyber Security, and the Copenhagen School’, International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2009): 1155-75; Ronald Deibert et al., eds. Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (Kindle edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Brandon Valeriano and Ryan Maness, ‘Persistent Enemies and Cybersecurity: The Future of Rivalry in an Age of Information Warfare’, in Cyber Challenges and National Security, ed. Derek Reveron (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012), 139-58; Henry Farrell, ‘Regulating Information Flows: States, Private Actors, and E-Cornmerce’, Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006): 353-74; Kenneth S. Rogerson and G. Dale Thomas, ‘Internet Regulation Process Model: The Effect of Societies, Communities, and Governments’, Political Communication 15, no. 4 (1998): 427-44.
27.
Reneée Marlin-Bennett and E. Nicole Thornton, ‘Governance within Social Media Websites: Ruling New Frontiers’, Telecommunications Policy 36, no. 6 (2012): 493-501; Marlin-Bennett, ‘Governing the Flow’.
28.
J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 131. Coetzee’s Mrs. Costello, who utters these words, is rejecting a Cartesian notion that human rationality is more important or grants moral standing. Instead, she is arguing that animals and humans share the same sense of being-in-the-world and therefore are of equal moral worth. Although I am discussing specifically the embodied information of humans, I am mindful that non-human animals are similarly both material and informational.
29.
Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1st edn. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).
30.
Luciano Floridi, The Philosophy of Information (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8.
31.
Two exemplars of the many insightful works examining surveillance as Foucaudian biopower are Epstein, ‘Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders’; Ayse Ceyhan, ‘Surveillance as Biopower’, in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, eds. Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty and David Lyon (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2012). Maguire provides a nuanced interpretation of biopower as an analytical starting point that ought not to exclude ‘the remarkable persistence of racialization.’ Mark Maguire, ‘Biopower, Racialization and New Security Technology’, Social Identities 18, no. 5 (2012).
32.
G. T. C. Lambourne, ‘A Brief History of Fingerprints’, Journal of the Forensic Science Society 17, nos. 2–3 (1977): 95-98. Lambourne asserts that this was ‘man’s first recorded awareness of’ fingerprints (95), a claim that is not plausible since there is no evidence that he searched all archives in the world in every language.
33.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 189.
34.
Foucault, Power/Knowledge.
35.
Louise Amoore, ‘Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror’, Political Geography 25, no. 3 (2006): 336-51; Ayse Ceyhan, ‘Technologization of Security: Management of Uncertainty and Risk in the Age of Biometrics’, Surveillance & Society 5, no. 2 (2002); Mark Maguire, ‘The Birth of Biometric Security’, Anthropology Today 25, no. 2 (2009): 9-14; David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
36.
Amoore, Biometric Borders.
37.
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 93.
38.
Simon A. Cole, ‘More than Zero: Accounting for Error in Latent Fingerprint Identification’, Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 95 (2004): 985-1078.
39.
Wilcox, Practices of Violence.
40.
Gary T. Marx, ‘What’s New about the “New Surveillance”? Classifying for Change and Continuity’, Surveillance & Society 1, no. 1 (2002).
41.
Paul Vanouse, ‘The Relative Velocity Inscription Device’, in Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, ed. Eduardo Kac (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 277-84; Sujatha Byravan, ‘DNA Typing: A Technology of Fear’, Development 49, no. 4 (2006): 28-32.
42.
‘Watson’s Folly’, Nature 449, no. 7165 (2007): 948.
43.
44.
Cole, ‘More than Zero’.
46.
Jim Greenwood, ‘Gene Patents do Not Hinder Academic Research’, Nature Methods 9, no. 11 (2012), doi:10.1038/nmeth.2245 Last accessed March 13, 2013; Reuters, ‘Court Reaffirms Right of Myriad Genetics to Patent Genes’, The New York Times, 16 August 2012. Available at: & Last accessed November 12, 2012.
47.
Carl Shapiro, ‘Navigating the Patent Thicket: Cross Licenses, Patent Pools, and Standard Setting’, in Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 1, eds. Adam B. Jaffe, Josh Lerner and Scott Stern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 119-50.
48.
D. Budiani-Saberi and F. L. Delmonico, ‘Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism: A Commentary on the Global Realities’, American Journal of Transplantation 8, no. 5 (2008): 925-29; Misao Fujita, Brian Taylor Slingsby and Akira Akabayashi, ‘Transplant Tourism from Japan’, American Journal of Bioethics 10, no. 2 (2010): 24-6; Rosamond Rhodes and Thomas Schiano, ‘Transplant Tourism in China: A Tale of Two Transplants’, American Journal of Bioethics 10, no. 2 (2010): 3-11.
49.
Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 20.
50.
I do not deal with context directly, though velocity of the transmission of the content could be considered context.
51.
James der Derian, ‘The Question of Information Technology in International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 32, no. 3 (2003): 441-56.
52.
Marlin-Bennett, Wilson, and Walton, ‘Commodified Cadavers’; Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994). This description of both semantic and emotional meaning refers, of course, to the human information recipient. Other kinds of actants make different kinds of sense of the information. Companion animals have limited ability to make sense of information semantically (Sit!), but they have a strong ability to make sense of emotional information flows. The term ‘actant’ is borrowed from Bruno Latour, We have Never been Modern (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).
53.
Paula M. Niedenthal, ‘Embodying Emotion’, Science 316, no. 5827 (2007): 1002-5.
54.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2009),145.
55.
Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Kindle edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), Kindle loc. 111.
56.
Ibid., Kindle loc. 266-74.
57.
Lester K. Spence, Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 11.
58.
Ibid., 17.
59.
My comments on augmented reality had their origin in my discussant’s remarks in response to a presentation by Jurgensen and Rey at the Digital Capital Conference at Johns Hopkins University in 2012.
60.
Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997).
61.
Ronald J. Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
62.
63.
Wilcox, Practices of Violence, chapter 6.
64.
Christopher Drew, ‘Military is Awash in Data from Drones’, The New York Times, 10 January 2010. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Last accessed November 12, 2012.
65.
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 24.