I. Terrorism and war are periodic instantiations of the atmosphere of threat that structures the epistemological and logical underpinnings of the War on Terror (Massumi, Kindle Locations 795, 875). Detailed by Massumi in “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat,” this atmosphere is a technology of power that controls its subsumed population through the management of their fear at what could have been and could always still be. Under this system, the affective register of individual instances of mass violence is intensified by the self-sustaining logic of perpetual futurity – the argument that something worse always could still happen – that turns the specific event itself into a warning of possible future events.

Massumi’s atmosphere of threat is one of the primary experiences of contemporary western life. Thus it provides a rich conceptual foundation for visualizing the data of war and terrorism in a manner that accounts for the subjective realities connected to it. Specifically, this project asks how it can represent the omnipresent sense of threat lurking just over the horizon and turning actual events into proof of the validity of past, present and future fear? [1]

II. At this point, you may be wondering, what does any of this have to do with aesthetics? Aesthetics are here understood as the means by which sensory input mobilizes and manages attention and constructs possible and allowable subjectivities. For instance, aesthetics are at play in the means by which the layout of an office and the condition of its contents shape how employees understand themselves as employees and simultaneously understand the value of their labor. Aesthetics are likewise at play in how the physical detritus of war and the sounds of missiles exploding both near and far recode the contents of an environment to perpetually remind its inhabitants of their subjugation and thereby shape their conceptions of what is possible in that space. Between these two extremes and extending out into every nook and cranny of human experience, one’s attention and conception of the world is being ever managed. What we are dealing with here is not a rarified space for refined appreciation. Instead, the aesthetic “…encompasses the full range of human [] experience. Experiences [that] include not only the elevated and noble but the reprehensible, degrading, and destructive” (Berleant).

Thus, in considering how to represent Massumi’s atmosphere of threat, this project must attend to the aesthetics of that atmosphere; how exactly does it manage the attention of its governed populace and shape subjectivities grounded in paranoia, and what form might that take in a visualization? Firstly, this atmosphere is affect-based; it mobilizes and manages attention through the production and management of fear. Therefore, a visualization of it should attempt to itself use affect. Where a bar chart of the number of casualties per incident would be useful for understanding the present tabulation of injuries and deaths, it would not be useful for connecting those casualties to this overarching atmosphere in which they occur. To the extent that this atmosphere shapes the subjectivities within it, to disconnect it from the data that it engenders (through a pseudo-objective bar chart or similar) disregards the utility of those subject positions for making sense of that data in a way that only they can do; a point of view shaped by a thing will understand that thing differently than one shaped outside of it. Secondly, this atmosphere effaces the difference between the particular and the general, and between now and tomorrow (Massumi Kindle Locations 752, 795). In a visualization, this may mean blurring hard distinctions between individual events or in some way implying them before they happen.

III. This idea of subjectively inflected visualization is not unique to this project. Joanna Drucker has repeatedly sounded the call for humanistic thinking in data visualization. In, “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship,” she asks “what could the encounter of humanities ‘tools’ bring to digital contexts?” Continuing, she argues that “Humanities approaches would proceed from a number of very specific principles. The first of these is that interpretation is performative, not mechanistic – in other words, no text is self-identical; each instance or reading constructs a text; discourses create their objects; texts (in the broad sense of linguistic, visual, acoustic, filmic works) are not static objects but encoded provocations for reading” (Drucker Kindle Location 2427). The entire project of Terror and Aesthetics is to attempt a subjectively-inflected representation of data and as such it follows directly from and is deeply indebted to Drucker. Specifically, this project understands that data is always already and perpetually alienated from the subject, and as such to answer Drucker’s call is to increase the variety of forms that alienation takes in the hope that doing so will engender awareness of this distance and thereby allow the viewer to assume greater control over their subject position(s).

[1]In this essay, Massumi focuses on threat as related to terrorism, but his model is equally applicable to war. If wealthy nation-states were to turn their attention back to directly fighting each other, rather than fighting proxy wars in third-party countries and terrorist networks in many of those same places, the logic of affectually substantiated ‘facts’, perpetual futurity and, if resurrected, Bush-Cheney-era preemption would still just as easily apply.

TOOLS

P5.js, a library built to make the capabilities of Processing available in JavaScript, is the primary tool through which Terror and Aesthetics is currently being developed. It was chosen as much for the freedom of building from scratch as for the practicality of having a low barrier to entry for non-engineers. For similar reasons, earlier versions of this project were written in Processing, but the need for greater web-friendliness necessitated the change.

Where any number of other tools, such as CartoDB, Tableau Public, or even Excel would have required less time in the mud to transform raw data into readable visualization, they would do so at the cost of rendering that data in forms that are simultaneously too familiar – in the sense that graphs and charts of that nature are common – and deceptively neutral – in the sense that they render their objects from the standpoint of pseudo-objectivity. In order for Terror and Aesthetics to productively denaturalize data visualization, it was necessary to eschew more predefined tools and build from (close to) the ground up.