I’m off to London for the day. Among other things, I’ll be sorting out the A/V and podcasting requirements for our upcoming Battlespace/s event with Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) and Antoine Bousquet (Birkbeck College); discussing the possibility of recruiting interns from among UCL’s student cohort; and talking to a major publishing house about CTlab sponsorship.

I thought it was about time to establish a personal web presence and blogsite, so here it is.  Up to now I’ve been doing all my blogging at The Complex Terrain Laboratory. That project has evolved to the point that my writing output would disrupt its normal flow and distract from its thematic content (not to mention the great work being done by Tim Stevens as Managing Editor, and the thoughtful pieces being generated by its many contributors). So here we are, a new day, a new blog, a new personal site. I’ll still post off-the-cuff commentary and analysis at CTlab. Here, I’ll post comments, notes, updates and the like on various research, writing, and media projects that I have on the go, that are in development, or that I’m considering.

I’ve been toying with foretitling the sanctuary book “Location Zero” instead of “Global Roaming”. The latter has a hook to it, and implies a strong technology angle, but also suggests the book is about globalization and mobility – which it is, to a degree, but I don’t want that to be the point of it, or to raise those kinds of expectations in potential readers at the expense of the book’s core subject. The former was something that came to me on a flight back to Brussels from London. I don’t remember the stream of consciousness that took me to it, but the conceptual linkages include the obvious patient zero, the index case in any disease control investigation, and Suspect Zero, the 2004 movie built around an intriguing idea but flimsy storyline.

In an attempt to dig a little further into zero tropes, I offer the following – it was a serendipitous find of over a year ago, not the outcome of calculated research, but still, it came up through parallel digs into complexity science and war. It’s an August 2006 article in the London School of Economics’ IR journal Millennium, by Antoine Bousquet, entitled “Time Zero: Hiroshima, September 11 and Apocalyptic Revelations in Historical Consciousness.”

Exploring the Hiroshima bombing and September 11 as aesthetic ruptures in Western historical consciousness – not sure I agree (the Holocaust, anyone?), but he uses the word sudden, so I’ll concede the point for now – Bousquet notes:

Within hours of the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, the site became referred to as ‘Ground Zero’, a phrase previously used to designate the epicentre of the Hiroshima bomb’s explosion and the point from which its effects radiated.

Actually, that’s incorrect – or at least, inaccurate. So says Wiki. “Ground zero”, as with all labels that carry a measure of social, cultural, and political loading, has become fairly imprecise over the years, and is often “re-used for disasters that have a geographic or conceptual epicenter.” In its original meaning, however – and this is important, since Bousquet’s piece is all about historical consciousness and the original event – “ground zero” is the military jargon not for an explosion’s epicentre, but for it’s hypocentre: the location immediately below the event.

Unless they’re being tested underground, nukes are airburst weapons, detonated above their intended targets,so the difference matters. But the distinction between epicentre and hypocentre is even more significant when one considers the subsequent Cold War geostrategic thinking on cities as civilian sanctuaries.

It’s reasonable to argue, as Bousquet does, that there’s a conceptual linkage between one cataclysmic rupture of historical consciousness, and other zero tropes of a similar nature. Linking back to the notion that sanctuary is a politically subterranean or liminal space, betwixt and between, the more important discussion, in keeping with Koselleck, is whether zero tropes are epicentric or hypocentric. Or, to rephrase, determining the relationship between zero tropes on the one hand, and the epicentres and hypocentres of historical phenomenology, on the other hand. That’s a building block, I think.

Bousquet’s reading of historical cases for their symbolic or aesthetic impact is certainly interesting. Dropping a null value into the historical mid-stream is analogous to the West German Historikerstreit on the Holocaust in national consciousness, as a rupture or abberation in the national trajectory. Bousquet puts it this way, considering

the place of the Hiroshima bombing and the September 11 attacks as singular acts of violence constituting major points of rupture in the historical consciousness and chronological narratives of the Western world: Ground Zero is Time Zero. Geographically and temporally delineated instances of intense death and destruction, both acts have been construed as moments when the world ‘changed for ever’.

Describing “Time Zero” as “the specific location and instant of rupture in our chronological narratives,” he further explains:

Yet, despite the historical rupture constituted by these events, in many ways our recomposed worldviews have not broken decisively with any of the core assumptions that underpin our Weltanschauung. Thus the notion of Time Zero does not only refer to the temporal scission creating a ‘pre-’ era that counts down to the event and a ‘post-’ era which begins after the apocalypse that announces the birth of a new world. It is also the suspension of time experienced by the spectators of the events and the intense sense of ‘unreality’… manifestations of the temporary incapacitation of our schemata of interpretation. It is in this moment… that Time Zero offers the opportunity to internalise the full implication of those events and resituate our thought within history and outside the narratives that have so dominated Western consciousness.

The conflict between immediacy and attenuation of historical trauma suggests the posibility of alternate, liminal trajectories, running in parallel to but perhaps unseen or unremarked by the main or the centre…. if that logic holds, it reads a bit like a variation on a theme – a variant of Marxist history from below.

Then again, I’m not sure we can yet measure, qualitatively or quantitatively, 9/11’s impact on social or collective consciousness. Maybe I miss the point of Antoine’s piece – but Al Qa’ida’s public index case – the 9/11 attacks, the event at which it occupied both epicentre and hypocentre of Bousquet’s historical rupture – only happened a few short years ago.

The point on immediacy vs. attenuation is valid; more accurately,the underlying implication on the subject of time dilation appears to be that we, the West, all those who accepted 9/11 as a real and symbolic rupture sufficiently wide to fit almost any response, are guilty of buying into the political hyperreality of the moment. In the absence of sufficient clarity and perspective, giving 9/11 a mature placement in any historical consciousness (ours, theirs, whoevers) , as Bousquet does, takes quite a bit of intellectual dexterity.

Ultimately, time zero rupture suggests an historical analogue to the idea of sanctuary as a systemic gap, crack, void, or elision. A deeper elaboration of zero tropes and hypocentricity/hypocentrality (?) will definitely be a good way to bridge one to the other.

Let’s see if I can express this a little more clearly than have done, with some additional elaboration on terms and frames of reference that have come up. This should offer as close to a coherent summary as I can manage of recent posts entitled Location Zero (Pts I, II, III, and IV), with some prior points addressed in the Human Terrain Mapping thread.

1. Terrorist sanctuaries so defined since 9/11 are, or have become, “politically hyperreal” in the Baudrillardian sense of things. Policymakers and media pundits talk of cave complexes and urban redoubts, but few, other than a handful of special forces operators, have actually confirmed or experienced them as phenomena in the real. This isn’t to suggest that they don’t exist – the opposite, in fact. Politicization and mediatization of the phenomena has rendered them more real than real.

2. In this political representation, sanctuaries are also “spatial inversions”. Political hyperreality insists on our awareness of them, but we know of them in their absence. They are voids, gaps, cracks, ellisions. Sites, conditions, and processes of intermediacy, transition, and liminality. If we understand that, then we understand sanctuaries to be in the same conceptual arena as neutral ground/states, buffer zones, traffic deserts, scorched earth, or other geographies of exemption. If, in a security sense, such intermediate spaces are “cracks in the system”, then what’s the system? The entire logic chain demonstrates an imbalance of power, an inversion of meaning.

3. The political characterization of extremist sanctuaries has reduced (or elevated) them to representational simulacra – politically hyperreal spatial inversions. The postmodern longhand is a useful explanatory framework for the politics of it. But the notion that extremist sanctuaries are in fact mere fictions of political provenance should be rejected out of hand. Sanctuary concepts and practices are real. They aren’t liberal or realist manifestations, but transcend both. They’re neither benign nor malignant, but function simply as objects and subjects of political and human agency. There are humanitarian sanctuaries, just as there are terrorist sanctuaries. There are scales of sanctuary to consider: in physical terms, state, region, city, enclave, ghetto, house, jail cell, grave. There are disciplinary interpretations – law as sanctuary, culture as sanctuary, the theology of sanctuary, (or reverse the order of these three), etc. – to consider. There are baseline dimensional issues that have to be considered: sanctuary as a complex terrain, of physical (territory, environment), human, and cognitive dimensions. Overlap your interpretive considerations (ie scale of human terrain, scale of cognition, etc.) and the whole thing reveals itself to have been a grossly misrepresented and messy ball of confusion.

4. Sanctuary, as a form of exception or intermediacy, co-exists with the system from which it is exempt. This represents a power imbalance, whereby the system is defined by powerholders (at least initially), who also define the parameters of exception (or of Othering, in another context). That means that the occupants/users/seekers of “sanctuary” are unlikely to view sanctuary in the same way that powerholding system-definers do. So, despite the fact that they feed from and shape one another, there’s an asymmetry at play in these sorts of dyadic oppositions (as with the terrorist/freedom fighter or combatant/non-combatant pairs). This is what Reinhart Koselleck referred to as “asymmetric counterconcepts”. Nothing to do with “asymmetric warfare”, although I’m intrigued by the former’s embeddedness in the latter.

5. This too has limits. The postmodern longhand is a useful method for framing and explaining complex conceptual developments, expecially in longitudinal terms. But how does it translate to investigating contemporary problems? I wondered if it was possible, given the system/sanctuary dyad, to identify a precursor-type of index case. I’ll need to dig into Koselleck to see what he writes about the origins of asymmetric counterconcepts, a.k.a. historical antecedents. Thanks to Matt for a previous redirect on this; it seems to indicate a fundamental problem with attempting to identify a “location zero” through a genealogical approach – and that in itself suggests the futility of the political project.

6. This line of reasoning was based on the assumption that “index case” need refer to the original, first, primordial example of the issue – in a reverse-engineered, genealogical sense. But does it? “Index case” can also simply indicate the first case that brought the issue to our attention, which, depending on what approach we want to take or what considerations we give primacy to, can be just about anything. This suggests that location zero, in the genealogical sense, precedes or triggers the investigation, which then goes to antecedents; but that in a real world investigative sense, identifying location zero – to interdict, apprehend, disrupt, or destroy its user – is an entirely different problem-set.

7. As political theatrics, zero-tropes – ground zero, patient zero, suspect zero, location zero – are also politically reductivist exercises. The display of will, and expenditure of resources, to locate the ultimate terrorist in his ultimate hiding place, from macro to micro scale – and across physical, human, and cognitive dimensions – is, ultimately, self-nullifying. Drop a 500lb bomb to take out a location where might be located a single high value target, and there’s nothing left to confirm success or failure one way or the other. But the offending site’s been dealt with, therefore success, accompanied by media-worthy spectacle. The zero-trope zoetrope itself suggests an anti-Benthamite circum-optic in which the cracks, gaps, and ellisions flashed before our eyes blur and are made real all at the same time.

8. But for dealing with real world phenomena – in which networks of individuals act independently of states and with purpose – zero-tropes might also represent the sort of conceptual levers that can be used to better or more accurately pinpoint proverbial (was it a proverb?) needles in haystacks. This is where the post-structuralism ends and the social network analysis begins. I see one flowing naturally from the other, although I’m certain that I read somewhere that they aren’t reconcilable. Qualifying (and quantifying… I shudder at the thought, but recognize the need) “structural holes” and embeddedness, among other characteristics of small world topographies, could be the way to move past the explanatory impasse and better develop how we investigate evidence of sanctuary concepts and practices.