The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one ’ s apartment, one ’ s street, one ’ s neighborhood, thanks to one ’ s ( dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person ’ s position — licit or illicit — and effects a universal modulation.
Now such urban interfaces — some carrot, some stick — are commonplace platforms for overexcited social media innovation, for mixtures of locative media, augmented reality, biometric and digital security, personal tracking and mapping, fitness Apps, automated point-of-purchase check-out, and the products and services based on their convergences and combinations.
He concludes, “ The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports, ” and indeed the drift through this version of the control city is an encounter with layers of visible and invisible interfaces, mapping you and rendering the world as an image map and image instrument for your particular idealized conception of it. The scenario he describes is one where the only apparently rhythmless intersections of free agents surfing across smooth urban canyons are in fact governed by the highly striated weave of dense differential connections in specific networks: one only because of the other. This city is not managed from some central command position in the cybernetic equilibrium machine, like the Alpha 60 master computer in Jean-Luc Godard ’ s Alphaville, but rather the inverse. Dispersal of authority into hypergranular interfacial fields is the constitutional power; each “ dividual ” is cast as a sort of cellular automaton, expressing absolutely specific intentions and instructions for an emerging territory in formation. That territory in turn is driven from the bottom up according to the limited frames of thought, action, access, and expression that its own aggregate field of interfaces presents to each User. The interfacial array of the City layer is designed according to these conditional pragmatics of interfacial access and communication points, each of which is both a particular discretely tuned portal and an instance within a larger array. <sup>16</sup> A totality of interfaces is then more than the sum of these single encounters, as it also comprises the active power that divides peoples and cities according to regular spatial and temporal programs; such totalities emerge through the repetition of activation of particular combinations of interfaces and are thereby a medium through which control distributes Users in turn. As they serve as both indexes of interfacial connection and as media by which those connections are given shape, these networks also establish new territories by smothering precedent territories or interweaving with them asymmetrically. The soft violence of this establishment is, once more, the constitutional logic of the City layer as a social system and geopolitical framework, a logic of incorporation more than imposition. As discussed below, some visual interfaces also work as regularized cognitive maps of the urban interfacial territories in which they are situated, and as such, their semantic content can function as a binding collective representation of The Stack ’ s geography (or even of a projected jurisdiction or an idealized polity), providing for its social regularity and durable structure.
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City Layer