Controlling the Crisis

Abstract

If it were possible to ventriloquize power today it would only talk over itself, anxiously announcing that “the whole of our world is in crisis” while austerely assuring that “everything is entirely under control.” This contradiction suffuses our present, a historical moment in which elaborate reports on the disintegration of this or that structure or institution double as advertisements for security programs that promise to ever more intensely, impenetrably, and intimately safeguard a seemingly threatened world. These twin voices of crisis and control mutually constitute the principal rationality of contemporary governmentality and power more generally, a logic within which crisis does not follow from the absence or failure of control, but rather is dependent upon — and is the condition of possibility for — control’s instantiation. This text seeks to elucidate how the emergent centrality of crisis in contemporary life, rather than being the consequence of crises beyond control, is instead an output of societies organized by the desire to control crises. Resonating through technical, discursive, aesthetic, and juridical strategies, the crisis-control conjuncture operates as a planetary force that is transformatively re-orchestrating the operations and organizations of power in the present. The first section of this text will draw upon Donna Haraway’s charting of the “informatics of domination,”2 Gilles Deleuze’s prognosis of the coming “societies of control,”3 and the “autonomous world of apparatuses” described in Tiqqun’s Cybernetic Hypothesis in order to theorize the operations of control as well as chart how they’ve been mobilized by Frontex, the agency tasked with policing Europe’s internal and external borders and a truly paradigmatic expression of the dynamics described above. After analyzing Frontex’s networked surveillance and policing of migrants — as well as the regulation and circulation of data resulting from those measures — in the second section of this text I outline how the control and crisis of Europe’s borders have emerged sympoietically, diagramming the crisis-control conjuncture within the historical specificity of the 2015–16 migrant crisis. In the third and final section of the