Snarl: In Defense of Stalled Traffic and Faulty Networks

1. Introduction: Mechanical Constitutionalism

1 ✦ Introduction Mechanical Constitutionalism In August 2010, a traffic jam that lasted for over a week in the northern part of China produced hundreds of thousands of media stories.1 According to these stories, the jam was a “monster,”2 its reabsorption was a “miracle,”3 and its resistance to rational explanation was evidence of the selfperpetuating and superhuman character of both automotive congestion and digital vibrancy.4 Monstrous and miraculous as it was, the jam seemed to exist outside of the human realm, while the information that spread and proliferated in its wake superseded any purely human ability to communicate. But this relationship between broken mechanical networks and flowing information networks was not unique to the early twenty-first century. As a 1927 article in the New York Times asserted, on the streets of Peking, the capital without a country, the local gendarmerie wrestle with one of the most confused traffic situations in the world. Here is no sober line of limousines automatically halting upon the flash of a red light, but a mad welter of vehicles which range from the heavy carts of prehistoric China to the ubiquitous products of Mr. Ford.5 Historically as well, the decontextualized Chinese “capital without a country ” gave rise to failed physical networks alongside expanding information networks. In the early twentieth century, too, immobile machines in China made global data fluid. 2 ✦ Snarl China is not the only place where hyperactive information traffic emerges from stalled automotive traffic.6 Nor is it a case study that will appear with frequency in this book. But starting a study of mechanical constitutionalism with China makes sense because the rhetoric surrounding Chinese traffic— both automotive7 and informational8 —highlights a major theme of the following chapters. As much as the flow of information seems intuitively more worthy of study today than does the immobility of automobiles, the latter is and has been more relevant to democratic theory than the former. Indeed, to understand the complexity—both historic and ongoing, nonhuman and human—of democracy, it is crucial to switch focus away from flow and toward gridlock, away from humans communicating and toward machines grinding to a halt. Introducing nonhumans into democratic theory is not an original ethical or political move. A number of scholars have made convincing cases that, for example, the political representation of humans must join the scientific representation of nonhumans prior to any genuinely democratic engagement ,9 that politically performative speech belongs as much to machines running code as it does to humans speaking out,10 or that a properly egalitarian public sphere must incorporate “things” and “matter” as well as human citizens.11 The notion that democracy is not a solely human affair is thus by no means new. Three aspects of this growing body of literature, however, invite scrutiny. First, history or historical time is noticeably absent from it. The nonhuman or not solely human democracy theorized in this work seems more often than not to inhabit a permanent present, a single or sudden moment of technological change, or occasionally (and perhaps most troubling) a utopian , messianic future.12 Second, the public spheres that concern this work are frequently devoid of any serious legal engagement. The spaces delimited in this writing are without question political, but they have little to do with traditionally democratic legal commitments.13 Even the most careful studies of nonhuman, posthuman, not solely human, or simply materialist politics tend to leave legal or constitutional history to the side. If nonhumans do or should participate in contemporary democracies, this work seems to suggest, they must do so outside of time as well as outside of law. The third aspect of this literature that invites further attention is its emphasis on mobility. Scholars of posthumanist or materialist democratic theory as diverse as Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, N. Katherine Hayles, and Gilles Deleuze have all highlighted movement as a defining characteristic of their politics. Mobility, vibrancy, effervescence, flow, or simply connect- Introduction ✦ 3 edness typify the nonhuman or hybrid human things, environments, and spaces that participate in the democracies these scholars describe.14 Political engagement occurs in this materialist writing across constantly vibrating and mutating fields—across networks that work. The failed, faulty, or gridlocked network rarely appears, and the broken machine, if it does enter the story, is reconfigured into a type of fluid, vibrant metal.15 Movement in and of itself is nothing to challenge or...