Abstract

Recognition is used here in its military sense of “reconnaissance”: reconnaissance is about territory and how, survey done and maps out on the table, one will proceed methodically, strategically to seize and control. Counterterrorism and surveillance protocols have been feeding on this basic idea without giving it any more thought than the addition of technologies.1 A couple of provisos: I do not use the word “recognition” in its Aristotelian sense of “anagnôrisis”, a dramatic catastrophe, a turning on its head of a plot, when a..