The images in this volume are a collaboration with people who, like myself, have had the experience of being surveilled by the police or the state. Strangers and accomplices were invited to “take a photo that reveals absolutely nothing about you” and contribute that image to a growing archive. This prompt is intentionally useless – it proposes no solutions to the all encompassing reality of surveillance, no method of counter-surveillance, no tools for evasion. It is intended to produce a sequence of feelings, first of despair at the impossibility of accomplishing this assigned task and second a resurfacing of the embedded trauma that is the inevitable result of this continuous violation that has become the norm of contemporary life. This project will not heal anyone, but it might remind us of the violence that is woven into our lives through this mediated voyeurism, perpetrated as much by the state and corporate systems of control as by our our own engagements in everyday social relationships.
Surveillance is an interpolative act. Being surveilled by the police or the state makes us the subject that is being sought – the threat to society, the enemy of the state – before we choose such a relationship for ourselves. This is only partly why the moralizing demands for ‘privacy’ and an indignant defense of political dissent are so pathetic. Both rely on a fantasy of a non-antagonistic, non-exploitative relationship with the state. It imagines that we are the victims of mistaken identity, that we have not been targeted intentionally, that someone in government has gone rogue. The truth: it is not that the state is clumsily targeting us in a misguided as it attempts to protect us; it is defending itself. To quote some friends, counter-insurgency has become a principle of government, and there should be no doubt who we are in this relationship.
Following David Lyon, we might define surveillance as “the focused, systematic, and routine attention to personal details for the purpose of influence, management, protection or direction.” Surveillance is focused in that it directs its attention to individuals; systematic in that it is not random, occasional, or spontaneous; and routine in that it is a part of everyday life and essential to (some have argued constitutive of) modern, bureaucratic societies. It is always a set of practices which are connected to a set of purposes, even if its efforts to influence, manage and control are not always malignant or unsocial.
The banality of Lyon’s definition should not temper our reaction tosurveillance’s harm, but rather, to illustrate how widely it is distributed. Most of our assumptions about surveillance are wrong, nostalgically tied to George Orwell’s Big Brother or Michel Foucault’s consideration of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. This picture of the all-seeing eye, of the singular state, is inadequate. Surveillance is more quotidian and more ubiquitous than these models. There is no single watcher any more, but a multitude, – a network of managers distributing bodies as needed from one side of the wall to another. Even more proliferate through the casual social surveillance of being online. We are all watchers, and we are all watched by the many: the synopticon.
The insurgent in the street has witnessed the self-fulfilling prophecy of the liberal declaration that “we are the media” and that “the whole world is watching” lead to a toxic obliteration of secrecy that few utopians predicted. The black mask is necessitated by the marriage of total documentation and chemical policing. But it is less and less our physical bodies that are being surveilled, and more and more its double: our data body. The ocular primacy of surveillance has not been totally usurped by dataveillance, but instead, we could say that another form of vision takes shape through our data body: the composite self that is both us and not us.
This data body includes all of our various forms of ID – our financial transactions, our network of social relations as revealed by phone calls and email exchanges, our social media, YouTube views, Twitter feeds, Facebook likes, as well as patterns of movement which can be depicted through GPS in our phone, purchases made on credit, crossing borders, and any other instance where a digital process is simultaneously sited in a place. This data body is a bounty for social sorting, where groups of people are organized by various exclusions and privileges relating to economic access, mobility, criminalization, access to information and even incarceration. Our data body enables the state and corporations to do what we already do voluntarily, as we steadily disappear into our esoteric subcultures and narrow political milieus. We sort ourselves readily enough, making it all the easier to limit our reach and mitigate risk. All of these phenomena are only possible because of the surveillance practices and requisite technologies of this time. Changing technologies matter, and the change in our own distinctions between what is public and private have responded in kind.
In his 1972 book, Marxist art historian John Berger made an argument that our “way of seeing” is both ideologically formed and forming, and that what we look at is both constructive of and constructed by how we look. He argued that the technology of oil painting and perspective shaped our perception and our relation to property in a way that was interdependent with the rise of the capitalist system. He also argued (following Benjamin) that mass media and photography transformed those relationships further, subverting the aura of the art object and re-distributing its image in such a way that individuals had a new agency in determining what is looked at and in what context. The question I propose, then, is what is our way of seeing now? My answer is that our way of seeing is defined by surveillance. We look at the world as surveillant, and we produce ourselves for the world to be surveilled. We produce this through the endless digital avatars and social documentation we are compelled to create. We produce this through the way in which we pose and gesture for the camera, priming ourselves to be seen by strangers. Even our actions are not intended for those who might encounter them in the moment of their event: we produce them to produce an image – a photo, a video, a meme – that will circulate and be seen by the many. Every banner drop, every bloc, every riot is a photo shoot.
What is lost in every critique, including this one, is the actual effect that surveillance has on people as individuals whose personal autonomy is being violated. Surveillance is assault. It only serves the perpetrators of surveillance to deny that there are emotional repercussions that stem from their actions. I am romantic enough to believe it is empowering to acknowledge our experience as survivors of surveillance and to break from the isolation that can come from this experience. To process our trauma in order that we might carry on without fear. Not to submit to control, but to accept the synopticon as our battlefield, and to come to terms with what limits occultation might have. Speaking of surveillance is a necessary part of resisting repression and finding other spaces of exodus. As Deleuze told us decades ago, controls are a modulation, that change to meet us on every platform from which we choose to engage. There is always a gap between modulations, a break in the rhythm, and in those spaces. All we have to do is use them to our advantage.