Spaces of Surveillance

This chapter engages with contemporary surveillance as it is conceived of in art and literature, responding to the contemporary media culture of ubiquitous watching. Artistic discourse and its concern with this facet of modern life is examined via a series of art works. The chapter aims to present a discussion of several of the early-career performance pieces and accompanying short writings of American multimedia artist Jill Magid. By situating Magid’s work within a theoretical frame which synthesises two crucial concepts from technocultural theory—Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson’s surveillant assemblage and Donna Haraway’s cyborg— this chapter proposes an alternative way of looking at the construction of a dividual self within surveillant spaces, one which rejects the dialectical limitations imposed upon our identities in the post- Orwellian, post-Foucauldian era of surveillance. In this way, the chapter opens a discussion about the practices of art as a subsystem of culture, which engages with the notions of selves and surveillance.

Continuing the discussion of artistic practices as a form of, or reaction to, surveillance societies, this chapter responds to new forms of visualization as they are conceived in art. Addressing the space of surveillance that contemporary technologies create, it examines the webcam and its attendant meanings for surveillance. It considers a metaphorical and social deconstruction of the webcam in contemporary art practice. It also challenges the notion of digital representation by arguing that networked practices are inherently dialogical and performative. Exemplified in Glenlandia (2005–2007), a digital media work, by British artist Susan Collins, the webcam becomes an embodied instrument that reproduces an identity through surveillance, mapping and digital crossover visualization. This chapter considers the ways in which Susan Collins uses the webcam as a performative device to complicate the entangled representations of real-time and real-place in contemporary digital art. With reference to poststructural theory and contemporary art historical discourses pertaining to media art and lens culture, particularly in the writings of media artist and Professor Christopher Salter and media choreographer Johannes Birringer, I reconsider how the digital lens performs a détournement through the power of the gaze.

As tomorrow’s Bluetooth device moves from innovation to necessity, the ever-eliding line of human/machine intimacy and the attendant loss of privacy continues to grow more intriguing and threatening. Ethical notions of artificial intelligence (AI) and cybernetic threats to the human indwelling of being have been a topic of mythic, literary, and filmic inquiry from ancient global creation myths to tomorrow’s multiplex film. Hollywood has expressed AI anxiety regarding the disappearing dividing line between human and machine and sinister hegemonic monitoring from Clarke‘s & Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Ex Machina (Garland 2015). Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) explores this anxiety by presenting its hero “falling in love” with his new operating system. Along the way, an analysis has ensued regarding the Snowden document dump revealing the massive bulk collection of US citizen phone records, Obama’s resulting USA Freedom Act and subsequent attempts by the CIA and FBI to undermine that protection. This chapter consults the so-called Turing Test, Asimov’s “The Three Laws of Robotics,” and current privacy concerns in order to analyze how the stylized contrast of deep and shallow focus illustrated in Jonze’s Her speaks to issues of identity and surveillance. The chapter concludes seeking to recover and define what it means to be human according to Her.

Frances Pheasant-Kelly’s chapter on the recent film Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow 2012) investigates the link between surveillance and the war on terror. This chapter, through engagement with the works of Thomas Mathiesen (Theoretical Criminology 1(2): 215–234, 1997) and Michel Foucault (Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Penguin, London, 1991), as well as military surveillance theorists, considers the multiple scopic regimes evident in Bigelow’s film, and the tensions between them in respect to theory. Pheasant-Kelly pays particular attention to the relationship between surveillance and terrorism and the spaces of post 9/11 America. She examines strategies for surveillance in Zero Dark Thirty and considers the ways in which these reflect changes in real-world monitoring of both public and terrorist activities since 9/11. The film is particularly relevant to a consideration of surveillance and space because it charts the ten-year search for Osama bin Laden across various locations, a mission that is accomplished through a combination of strategic physical and technological modes of observation. Indeed, its visual style and narrative trajectory are dictated by surveillance, the film thereby epitomising the prevalence of surveillance in contemporary visual culture since 9/11. Forms of surveillance exercised within the film embody a combination of the models articulated by Foucault and Mathiesen, which consider how the few view the many and how the many watch the few. The film’s expression of surveillance is accordingly concerned with the physical space between the observed and the observer, although often in terms of geographically greater, or more technologically controlled distances than articulated by Foucault and Mathiesen. As the film is based on real events, its analysis offers opportunities to consider the implementation of real-world surveillance, the multiple forms that this can take, and its potential inadequacies, as well as its increasing significance, in combatting terrorism.

This chapter addresses the self, as it sees and is seen, in contemporary media culture, and the attendant compulsory identity changes which result from ‘vampiric’ surveillance. Pramod K Nayar in Citizenship and Identity in the Age of Surveillance (2015) links continual surveillance, with specific reference to CCTV and visual observation, directly to identity formation so that one’s sense of self is directly related to the acts of seeing and being seen. Christopher Slobogin states that the “inevitability of being observed and recorded” (2007, p. 94) changes people, which Nayer sees as an act of violence where one’s real self is aggressively replaced by an inauthentic identity that is created for and in the observing lens/camera. (Nayar 2015, pp. 1–2) There is much within this construction that can be considered undead in some way—that which is caught between being alive/real/ authentic and dead/unreal/inauthentic. How this might work and the way it affects the surveilled subject can be more clearly shown with a close reading of the scenes involving Count Dracula, his lair and his gaze in the seminal vampire novel, Dracula by Bram Stoker from (1897) and its first official screen adaptation by Tod Browning from (1931). These will highlight how the metaphor of the vampire is correlated to certain aspects of surveillance, which will then be applied to two more recent films, Afflicted (Lee and Prowse 2013) and Daybreakers (Speirig Brothers 2009). The present study will add to current research by showing how the ubiquity of surveillance in the twenty-first century cannot only be considered as vampiric, but that the identity changes it forces on those being observed leaves the subject, on some level, as undead.

This chapter reads Bret Easton Ellis’s only collection of short stories, The Informers (1994), as both an important account of what it means to be an overlooked—and often mutually surveilling—urban subject at the turn of the twenty-first century and also, crucially, as a pivotal text within Ellis’s own canon. Partially authored around the same time as Ellis’s debut novel Less Than Zero (1985), but developed until, and published at, what is currently the effective midpoint of his literary career, The Informers occupies an unusual position, reflecting and developing spatial concerns evident in Ellis’s early writing, but also taking on an eerie prescience in its initiation of the narrative representation of surveillant tendencies which would come to characterise his later fiction. The chapter identifies and explores a plurality of spaces depicted in the collection (including the airport, the homestead, and the thoroughfare), and overlooked and surveilling subjects located therein, foregrounding contemporary cityscapes—with particular focus on Los Angeles, and also with reference to Tokyo—as representative of what has been termed the “media city” (McQuire 2008), and, significantly, as spaces of surveillance, both repressive and potentially liberating. In so doing, it outlines that Ellis has much to teach us about the interplay, in the contemporary period, of a culture of surveillance; the city; and the overlooked and observant subject.

In this chapter, I argue that reading Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise alongside the emerging technologies of that pivotal year can help us better understand what I call the “surveillance of sousveillance”’ if we trace how those technologies have developed into our cultural moment now. Surveillance—being constantly monitored by “eye-in-the-sky” technology—today is now reciprocally complicated by what Steve Mann has termed sousveillance—monitoring back through “eyes-on-the-ground” technology. Where DeLillo’s novel comes in theoretical handy then is its reflection of a media-saturated society in a year that saw, as Ridley Scott’s famous Apple Macintosh commercial promised, “why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”’ The surveillance prophecy of George Orwell’s dystopia was replaced with a proto-sousveillance conceptualization which began to encourage interaction with the technologies feared to control us. What that looks like now, as DeLillo had already seen coming, is our culture built around “watching you” as much as it is around “watch me”. What I intend for this chapter is to consider DeLillo’s novel and its (not so) Orwellian year of 1984 in order to call attention to the ways we currently attempt sousveillant connections to the surveillance around us, the surveillance that we ourselves contribute to. Rather than categorize surveillance as only “them watching us,” I argue that it is just as much “us watching each other”; a clarification that nuances my idea that the surveillance of sousveillance constitutes our trend of being watchable to give others something to watch. Therefore, through specific applications of literary and media studies, my chapter contends that our cultural narratives are affected by not merely the surveillant gazes of multiple media, but our sousveillant desire to connect with those gazes.

To explore how surveillance is perceived and represented in contemporary literature, the present essay analyses three contemporary novels: whose ethical dimension involves digital technologies and their impact on privacy, human interactions and also literature itself: ​Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013), Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (2015) and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010). These post-postmodern novels, as they might be called, tell the opposite rhetoric of the one that emerged with the digital revolution (the rhetoric of a world improved by the Internet and social media). In these narratives, the Internet and social media help creating a dystopian society ruled by global surveillance. The first part of this chapter shows the interrelation of surveillance societies or surveillance systems with post-human characters and dystopian spaces. The second part explores the authors’ engagement with the same digital technologies criticized in their fictional narratives. It will argue for the need to discuss the ontological presence of the author in the digital world: Eggers’s, Franzen’s, and Shteyngart’s novels, with their strong ethical component, offer a good example of why this authorial presence or voice matters. Without aiming at providing a definitive overview of the connection between surveillance and post-postmodernism, this chapter explores how certain rhetorical resources and ethical issues offer a preliminary basis for future investigations on the literature/digital age nexus.

In both Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Claudia Rankine considers spaces of surveillance in the post-9/11 period. In particular, Rankine explores how the citizenship of black Americans consists of a confused conjunction: on the one hand forms of invisibility, or even social death, and on the other hand, the hypervisibility that results from contemporary regimes of policing and social control. This chapter shows how Rankine’s work frames these moments that insistently turn “recognition” from empathetic identification into surveillant oversight. What could reverse this trajectory? Rankine answers at two levels: first by insisting that hers is an American lyric, and taking recourse to ideas like voting and citizenship, which Rankine positions against the spectatorial attitudes of both the well-intentioned and the media-glutted. This rather conventional approach, which emphasizes civic virtue and the virtue of civics, is further tied to Rankine’s intensive interrogation of pronoun usage in these same works, an exploration I read as an extended comment on the contemporary meanings of the lyric form. I propose that Rankine’s pronoun work can be understood as a reflection on the increasing proximity of surveillance society to the society of the spectacle, which work together in a new “aesthetics of transparency,” one that hobbles classical liberal demands for political representation and personal expression.

The terror attacks of 9/11 in the United States of America greatly intensified a cultural era already mired in surveillance. Contemporary culture has come to view surveillance as part of the sociopolitical economy of great nations. Amongst those nations, Canada struggles with notions of multiculturalism and diversity. Leaning on Simone Browne’s (2015) recent work on Blackness and surveillance, which highlights the oft-ignored intertwined histories of race and surveillance, the following chapter utilizes Browne’s theoretical framework, along with a psychoanalytically constructed understanding of castration, to exhibit how Canada’s vaunted national integration policy (Multiculturalism 1971) results in the management, exclusion, and psychic oppression of Black people. Historically, and in comparison to the US, Canada is often presented as an oasis of racial equality and multiculturalism. Contrary to the touted qualities of Canada as open, accommodating, and integrated, the authors highlight the daily threats of castration through mechanisms of control that operate to limit Black lives within a paradoxical narrative of national hopefulness and singular oppression. For Browne, even when shrouded in invisibility, Blackness and surveillance have always been constitutive of each other. The authors view racial profiling as a form of neoliberal management; and extend the critical examination of surveillance into three politicized spheres and social spaces, namely higher education, popular culture, and activism. The critical analysis of Canadian socialization, policies, and politics uncovers how Blackness persistently signifies problemhood (DuBois 1904) within Canada’s multicultural logic and discourse.The PhD students from York University’s collaborative paper uncovers the realities of the unsound placing of blackness (and by extension, black bodies) in multicultural discourses, as well as the profound difficulties of black life in Canada. Within the context of multiculturalism, mechanisms of control operate to contain black bodies, both physically and psychically, within a paradoxical reality of national hopefulness and singular oppression.

In this section of the collection, the intrusion that surveillance or sousveillance performs on the body and the self are explored. This chapter explores the potential of sousveillance, or the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity, to facilitate the notion of the American democracy. Given that sousveillance is a relatively modern form of surveillance, this chapter unveils the historical background of sousveillance, noting its connections to surveillance and classic discussions of power and political theory. Next, this chapter discusses how the intersection of technology, art, and politics, residing in a nexus between public and private, reveals how surveillance permeates contemporary culture. I contend that a conceptualization of what an engaged citizen looks like in the twenty-first century requires a good grasp of sousveillance and its attendant meanings. Sousveillance is inculcated in modern citizenship, as previous chapters have discussed, and so its prevalence is has consequences for communities, policy makers, artists, writers and academics more than ever before. This form of monitoring has body-specific and social reactions which deeply affect the performance of personhood in the twenty-first century.

Advances in information technology have made surveillance less obtrusive and simultaneously data-rich. This chapter investigates the reconfiguration of people in medical surveillance technologies, both in the traditional “negative” sense of the interruption of bodily privacy through surveillance regimes, such as biometrics and the “positive” sense of the possibilities that surveillance of the body at an intimate level offers. Medical surveillance, through biometrics, digital imaging and diagnostic techniques, brings new forms of knowledge which are shaping our understanding of ourselves. The debates about privacy are rife around new technologies, such as genetics and the study of bio-markers, brain imaging, wearable sensors and sensor networks, social media, smart phones, closed circuit television, government cybersecurity, RFID tags, Big Data and search engines. That this has caught the public imagination is evident in the proliferation of novels, films and artworks which populate the cultural sphere. While there is an inherent market-driven ethos which demands consideration, such forms of democratic surveillance offer some freedoms within the parameters of the medical gaze. This form of surveillance is not monolithic, in fact, using Bauman’s term; this new form of surveillance is liquid. This chapter attempts to reconceptualise surveillance as both sustaining biological integrity and maintaining individual intellectual freedom. Although the graph can be seen as an artefact in processes of control, here I counter that the graph takes what it needs and leaves our individuality to our own control.