From discipline to control.

PROTOCOL: HOW CONTROL EXISTS AFTER DECENTRALIZATION

BY ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY

CAMBRIDGE AND LONDON: MIT PRESS, 2004

248 pp./$32.95 (HB), $16.95 (SB)

Alexander R. Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization is an example of interdisciplinary work that explores the complex convergence of media, technology, and culture. Written from a critical theory perspective, Protocol is patiently instructive of the way in which the Internet functions, and how we may theoretically and politically engage with the new mediascape. Galloway calls this framework, or operating procedure, protocol. He explains, "These conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system are what computer scientists call protocol. Thus, protocol is a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment" (7). With this handy definition of protocol, Galloway then proceeds to use various metaphors derivative of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the rhizome to explain the ways in which code functions. What emerges is an interesting application of critical theory to the Internet and serves well as an introduction to the confluence of new media and critical theory.

The argument that Galloway offers up about the logic of protocol that defines the Internet, and on which basis the Internet functions, is a convincing one. In fact, the applicability of protocol extends beyond the Internet, and Galloway observes this in his conclusion:

As one learns more and more about the networks of protocological

control, it becomes almost second nature to project protocol into

every physical system: Traffic lights become the protocol for

successful management of moving vehicles; a grocery store queue is the

protocol for a successful checkout; airport security points are the

protocol for prohibiting weapons; and so on. Protocol pops up

everywhere (244).

Protocol, as defined by Galloway, is also evident in much of contemporary media, culture, and politics. For example, the plot of the Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix (1999, by the Wachowski Brothers) is premised on the existence of a repressive system that abides by a protocological logic. In politics, delusional governments stir up anxiety about terrorism with claims about the network of autonomous al-Qaeda cells and labyrinthine cave dwellings stuffed with weapons of mass destruction. In the struggle for control of global media, protocological logic reigns in, for example, the relationship between censorious authorities, activist Web sites, and the open media.

One of the issues that emerges from the ubiquity of protocological logic is that of its totalitarian nature, although this is not something that Protocol deals with. The book's subtitle, How Control Exists after Decentralization, seems somewhat pessimistic and digressive. While the book presents the argument that control inheres within the logic of protocol, Galloway's central thesis should perhaps be more explicit about its focus on the enactment of politics within the logic of protocol--a move that would attend directly to the issue of ethics that Eugene Thacker discerns in his foreword. The way Protocol is expressed and structured, Galloway finds himself having to deal with, however marginally, value judgements and the rhetoric of morality, such as when he muses, "People ask me if I think protocol is good or bad. But I'm not sure this is the best question to ask. It is important to remember first that the technical is always political, that network architecture is politics" (245). In short, there appears to be some conflict between an implicit technophilia and the work of criticism.

Galloway distinguishes between the disciplinary society of Michel Foucault and the control society to which Deleuze's writing alludes, and stresses that Internet protocol belongs resolutely to a post-Foucauldian age, that is, the Deleuzean century. Thacker writes in the foreword that, "the question is not one of morality, but rather of ethics" (xx), and the last part of the book goes on to discuss hacking, tactical media, and Internet art variously as the taking on of ethical positions within the logic of protocol. Indeed, the continual enactment of politics and ethical positions within protocological logic marks the discursive departure from semiotics and fixed meanings. In linguistic terms, it shifts the attention from the noun to the verb and changes the issue from "what it means" to "how does it do." As Galloway notes, "Protocol is a circuit, not a sentence" (53). Although the book could have addressed the totalitarian nature of this protocological circuit in greater detail, Protocol is a significant realization of Deleuze's philosophy on the Internet and instructive for the formulation of appropriate and effective responses to the playing out of politics in the contemporary mediascape.

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SHARON LIN TAY is a lecturer in Film Studies at Middlesex University in London, United Kingdom, where she teaches film theory, digital culture, and world cinema.