Counterforensics/Counterlogistics: Seeing the Rot

Counterforensics/Counterlogistics: Seeing the Rot Patrick Brian Smith (bio) It has been argued that attempts to both comprehend and visualize formations of power predicated on exploitative movement and circulation have tended to rely on macro, totalizing, and often overwhelming imaginaries.1 From Fredric Jameson's tentative formulation of an aesthetic of "cognitive mapping" to recent developments in network and logistics theory, a tendency to try to "see things whole" when attempting to render visible the ruthless movement—of people, capital, and objects—remains firmly present.2 This is problematic because such modalities of power are in fact predicated on forms of visual abstraction and obfuscation for their continued exploitation and violence. Indeed, as Alberto Toscano has suggested, while diverse conceptions and uptakes of mapping, network, and logistical theory are often attempting to "force into being a certain kind of political visibility and thus to counter the objective, material effects of a dominant regime of representation," do they not risk simply slipping back into such forms of abstraction, (re)masking those machinations they attempt to expose and critique?3 These are perhaps examples of what have become predictable forms of paranoid vision, focused on painting broad, totalizing visions of such systems and infrastructures. For example, as Jameson evocatively argues, a poor man's cognitive map is one that is built around paranoid modalities of vision.4 [End Page 355] Similarly, Jon Simons suggests that "all the conspiracies that the paranoid fears, all the faulty, distorted, and degraded figurations of totality, refer obliquely or unconsciously to the 'absent cause.'"5 Consequently, is there a fundamental interdependence between the abstract and the paranoid? Are they mutually reinforcing modalities? To understand systems of power through abstraction potentially functions to further mask their operative and systemic logics. However, is there another way? This essay aims to more fully think through alternative forms of visualization and critique that might operate subversively.6 Focusing primarily on the machinations of both immigration detention-removal and transportation logistics—where such violences of abstraction and ruthless efficiency are relentlessly deployed—this essay argues that by intertwining the concepts of the counterforensic and counterlogistic, we can foster an aesthetic-political practice that undermines such forms of obfuscated and streamlined violence. These are forms of counterpraxis that switch the scale of their foci, paying attention to the microphysical, granular, and detail within such formations of power and aiming to apperceive the weaknesses inherent in such totalizing manifestations of control and violence.7 Here, I also build on Martin Danyluk's assertions that we must understand that contemporary forms of violent circulation are in fact built around a "fragmentary, unstable ensemble of physical and social infrastructures . . . bound together in complex relations of contingency and interdependence."8 The reality is that these modalities of circulatory power are always riven through with contradictions, fragilities, and a systemic rottenness (a concept I will return to later in relation to the paranoid). I argue that these alternative forms of examination can function as atypical or unpredictable forms of paranoid vision and critique, exposing such formations of power through a subversion of investigatory scale. Such granular modes of seeing allow us to perceive potential cracks and fissures within such modes of power and violence that are specifically built around imaginaries of totalizing abstraction, streamlining, and efficiency. These countervailing aesthetic and political strategies allow for the mounting of new forms of resistance and political contestation. Immigration Detention and Removal The Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre at Heathrow Airport, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) field house in London, and the Inflite Executive Jet Centre at [End Page 356] Stanstead Airport are the three sites investigated by James Bridle in his short video work Seamless Transitions (2015). As Bridle suggests, these sites are crucial nodes within the wider infrastructure of immigration detention and removal in the United Kingdom; however, they are increasingly invisible spaces of sovereign—and extrasovereign—violence: renditions and removals occur during the night, appeal trials are conducted in secret, and public access to the sites of detention is almost impossible.9 Bridle also argues that in recent years we have seen increasing collaboration between governmental and private-sector forces involved in immigration detention and removal as they attempt...