Surveillance Kritiks
“Surveillance” K
1NC
The visual metaphor of surveillance is the wrong starting point for political
engagement—the aff presents it as a monolithic locus of power which denies
opportunities for agency and resistance
Finnegan 6 -- Associate Professor in the Department of Communication @ The University of
Illinois, PhD, Conrad Humanities Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Cara A.,
“Communication as ...: Perspectives on Theory,” edited by Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John,
Sage Publishers, p.61-63, tony)
The metaphor of vision as surveillance frames communication as a dialectic of power
relationships. In the language of surveillance, someone (usually someone more powerful) is
watching, and someone else (usually less powerful) is being watched. Film and television scholars, for
example, productively have employed the metaphor of “the male gaze” to explore how the viewing experience is based upon a
gendered (and raced and sexed and classed) kind of surveillance. The “dominant gaze” is the male gaze, the white gaze, the straight
gaze; those who enact the dominant gaze are those who possess the most power in a given culture. Framing
communication as surveillance emphasizes the disparities between those who have the power
to gaze and those who do not. Beyond the gaze, surveillance can also be imagined more broadly as visual practices of
control. We are subjects of surveillance in many aspects of our everyday lives, yet we often internalize these practices
without a thought. Think about the video camera in the corner of the convenience store, or the number of visual documents
we are required to carry: driver’s license, passport, student ID card. In communication theories of surveillance, vision and the
technologies of vision exist to produce and produce institutional control. Imagine a documentary photograph of hundreds of poor,
scruffy-looking men in an unemployment line—a common image from our collective memory of the Great Depression in the United
States. They wait to enter an employment agency under the watchful gaze of a tight-lipped, stiff-looking officer of the law. An
analysis of such an image from the perspective of surveillance would pay attention to the power dynamic enacted in this picture. It
would encourage us to think about the “haves” and the “have-nots.” We might remark upon how the unemployed men are
subjected to the gaze of both the police officer and the photographer. We might argue that the police officer as a representative of
the state,embodies the institutional power that both provides and limits opportunities for these men. And we might consider how
the photographer, and by extension the viewer, participate in the subjection of this group of unemployed men simply through the
act of viewing and photographing them. Thinking about communication in terms of surveillance encourages us to think about power
and requires us to pay attention to the technologies of that power, such as the camera. It
reminds us that society is
often organized to reinforce these power dynamics despite our individual attempts to
transcend them. But we lose much if we theorize communication as vision solely in terms of
surveillance. Returning to the hypothetical photograph, might we not imagine the relationships among the photographer, the
police officer, and the unemployed men differently? Might it not be possible that the photographer and the unemployed men are in
fact complicit in the act of photographing this scene, both interested in displaying the misplaced nature of the uptight police officer’s
anxiety? Focusing solely
on traditional definitions of the gaze might impede our ability to imagine
these relationships in different ways. And, treating the image itself as a product of state
surveillance might blind us to other interpretations, such as the use of the camera to create
conditions for social justice. If we overemphasize the culture of surveillance, we miss the
opportunity to explore modes of communication apart from those dictated by the inevitable
influence of institutional power. The metaphor of communication as surveillance is, then,
ultimately iconophobic. It frames vision and the products of vision as a dangerous one-way
street of domination and does little to account for the countless ways in which people may
step outside the boundaries of (albeit very real) power dynamics to enact their agency
creatively.
The visual metaphor of surveillance shapes how we engage the law and must
be a prior question for debate—metaphors distort law and encourage social
passivity while devaluing others that don’t fall within the dominant
epistemology—no permutation is effective as long as it includes the
surveillance metaphor
HIBBITS 1994 (Bernard, Prof at University of Pittsburgh School of Law, “Making Sense of Metaphors:
Visuality, Aurality, and the Reconfiguration of American Legal Discourse,” 16 Cardozo Law Review 229,
http://law.pitt.edu/archive/hibbitts/meta_int.htm)
Metaphors embody and configure both the abiding and the changing preoccupations of an age.30
Metaphors explicitly or implicitly identify one phenomenon with another phenomenon from which the first is
literally distinct. A game of chess may thus be characterized as a "battle" of wits; a leading citizen may be described as a "pillar" of
the community. In each instance, the
metaphor suggests an image31 or experience that emphasizes a
specific quality (here, competition or support) of its referent. Metaphors are generally offered to illuminate their
referents' sense or significance; they are most useful and most successful in this respect when they associate an unfamiliar and/or
abstract referent with something familiar and/or concrete. At the same time, the very
specificity, familiarity, and
tangibility that may recommend a metaphor may incidentally enable it to obscure and distort.
Calling chess a battle distracts attention from the cooperative aspects of that game; calling a leading
citizen a pillar of the community hides the benefits she derives from leadership. Paradoxically, the better a metaphor
is, the worse this kind of problem threatens to become. In extreme circumstances, a good metaphor
may be so compelling that it altogether subverts its referent's original meaning. No longer
recognized as a metaphor, it redefines truth on its own limited terms.32
[1.2] Metaphors appear in virtually all branches of discourse. Assuming metaphors to be products of the imagination, conventional
wisdom has traditionally identified them with the arts of poetry and literature. Many metaphors certainly appear in these contexts,
but metaphors can also be found in other more overtly analytic realms. Historians routinely call a portion of the early medieval
period the "Dark Ages." There was, of course, no more darkness in the "Dark Ages" than in any other time, before or since; the term
"Dark" is a metaphor designed to suggest ignorance and barbarism. Scientists similarly speak of super-dense collapsed stars as
"black holes." But "black holes" are not really holes; the term "hole" is a metaphor chosen to communicate the fact that neither
matter nor light can escape the gravitational pull of these bodies.
[1.3] A string of recent articles and books has stressed that metaphors are
commonplace in law.33 The multiple
visual and aural metaphors with which I began this Article help to create and sustain what has imaginatively been
described as "a magical world . . . where liens float, corporations reside, minds hold meetings, and promises run with the
land."34 To say that jurisprudential metaphors exist and even flourish is not, however, to say that they have been uniformly
welcomed, even by the most creative lawyers and jurists. In the eighteenth century, England's Lord Mansfield commented that
"nothing in law is so apt to mislead than a metaphor."35 In the early years of this century, Yale legal theorist
Wesley Hohfeld agreed.36 In 1926, Benjamin Cardozo was willing to tolerate metaphors in law, but held that they had "to be
narrowly watched, for starting
out as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it."37
[1.4] As we have come to appreciate that metaphor is omnipresent, we have come to take it very seriously.38 Today, few would
dismiss it as mere semantic decoration, ornament, or rhetorical device. Some scholars have indeed gone so far in the other direction
as to suggest that metaphors are
fundamental tools of thought and reasoning-so much a part of the
deep structure of our mentality that "our ordinary conceptual system . . . is . . . metaphorical in
nature."39
[1.5] As an aspect of our mentality's deep structure, our metaphors
can reveal a great deal about us, both as
individuals and as members of a broader culture. I may use a certain metaphor because I am, or at least my
culture is, familiar with the metaphor's subject matter. Coming readily to my mind as a pole of comparison, the metaphor will be
meaningful to others sharing similar life experiences or backgrounds. For example, using the metaphoric expression "I struck out" to
communicate failure suggests a personal and/ or cultural familiarity with baseball. Alternatively, I may use a particular metaphor
because I and/or my society value or devalue its subject; using the metaphor can therefore accentuate positive or negative reaction
to the metaphor's referent. For instance, were I a libertarian, or were I living in a libertarian culture, I might label government a
"parasite." My choice of metaphor would not only communicate my dislike of government, but, by association, my dislike of
parasites as well.
[1.6] "Modal" metaphors of the sort examined in this Article can
be particularly revealing of our circumstances and
values. Modal metaphors directly or indirectly evoke specific modes or forms of human sensory
experience: sight, sound, touch, smell, or taste. For example, if I call an attitude an "outlook," I am using a modal metaphor
evoking visual experience. Alternatively, if I speak of the "texture" of an argument, I am using a modal metaphor evoking tactile
experience. Over time, individuals may develop or demonstrate a penchant for modal metaphors favoring a particular sense. Far
from being arbitrary, such a penchant may (as we shall see) reflect a broad cultural bias for that sense, an
association with a group which in a specific historical or social context has indulged or has been forced to privilege that sense,
and/or
an inclination towards values which that sense has been deemed to phenomenologically
support or promote.
[1.7] Ironically, we may reveal
more of ourselves by our general and our modal metaphors than by
statements and sayings that are the products of more calculated deliberation. Insofar as metaphors are
privy to our most profound thoughts and experiences, they may tap into cultural or personal truths of which we are
not at first aware, and into notions of which we may not even approve. Calling a mental crisis a nervous
"breakdown" may unwittingly manifest a modern tendency to regard the mind as a machine;40 calling an African American football
player "a little monkey" may unwittingly manifest racism.41 In this context, metaphors operate as
the "sonar" of our
minds, revealing deeply submerged-but nonetheless fundamental-realities that we cannot or
will not consciously acknowledge.
[1.8] As an integral part of our mentality, metaphors can also shape our thoughts and even our actions.42 Calling chess a
battle (or hearing someone else call it a battle) certainly encourages me to conceive of it, however inaccurately, as a harsh, even
potentially violent confrontation between grim-faced opponents. The psychological impact of the metaphor may be all the more
powerful if I have had little or no previous experience with the game. The way I think about chess may in turn affect my behavior. In
light of the metaphor, maybe I will decide to play, or maybe I will choose to do something less aggressive. If I do choose to play, the
metaphor I used or heard might well influence how I play. For instance, if chess is a battle, an intimidating, combative strategy may
seem appropriate. If the "battle" metaphor becomes popular, an entire culture may be led to the same conclusion, and play chess
accordingly.
[1.9] Modal metaphors can have an especially strong impact on how we think and what we do. If, for example, I call "thought" itself
"reflection," I am figuratively characterizing thought as a visual enterprise. Insofar as reflection literally presumes a visual subject,
the metaphor may subtly encourage thinkers to believe that they should look for intellectual stimulation, rather than listen for it; in
other words, the metaphor may affect their epistemological orientation. The
same visual metaphor may
alternatively imply that only individuals from visually biased backgrounds can properly engage in
thought, prompting individuals from other traditions that prize other senses to be dismissed (or
not to regard themselves) as legitimate or competent participants in intellectual inquiry. In this
context, the "casual" choice of a "simple" metaphor may have profoundly divisive social
implications. Describing thought as "reflection" may even induce thinkers to behave in a manner
considered appropriate to a visual process: for example, the metaphor may suggest that
thinkers should passively watch the world, rather than become actively engaged with it.
[1.10] Regardless of whether metaphors are considered as consequences or causes, the partial or total displacement of one
metaphor by another is a significant cultural event. As a general matter, such displacement may reflect the
development of new conditions or values, some of which may not, as yet, have risen above the horizon of awareness. Alternatively,
or even additionally, displacement
may help bring about new conditions or values. In law, a shift in
metaphor may indicate or promote a new doctrine or even a new jurisprudential theory that
cannot easily be brought into the fold of existing figures of speech. The reconfiguration of American legal
discourse that is the topic of this Article is, however, even more fundamental than this, for it involves the partial-displacement of
one entire family of modal metaphors (indirectly appealing to the eye) by another (indirectly relating to the ear). If the preceding
overview of the cognitive, cultural, and behavioral significance of metaphors in general-and modal metaphors in particular-is
accurate, such
a sensory shift would seem both to reflect and portend major paradigmatic changes
in American law and society.43 For this reason, it is well worth exploring.
As our age translates itself back into the oral and auditory modes . . . we become sharply aware of the uncritical acceptance of visual
metaphors and models by many past centuries.44
Understanding the contemporary shift away from visual towards more aural legal metaphors requires an initial
explanation of our traditional preference for visually oriented legal language. In this part of the Article, I
suggest that this preference is a product of three overlapping factors: first, a longstanding American cultural bias towards
visual expression and experience that is arguably based on the social prominence of the written word; second, the traditional
numeric and political domination of American law and legal literature by members of gender,
racial, ethnic, and religious groups which through their special command, control, or
endorsement of writing have in the course of American history developed and/or demonstrated
a particular respect for visuality; and, third, the accord that exists between orthodox American legal values and the
values we have come to associate with vision as a phenomenon. In the pages that follow, I will consider each of these factors in turn.
A. Seeing Culture
[2.2] In Part I of this Article I argued that metaphors can reflect the circumstances and attitudes of the society that generates them.
In light of this point, it seems reasonable to suggest that the traditional popularity of visual metaphors in American legal language
has much to do with the bias towards visual expression and experience that has traditionally characterized American culture and,
inevitably, American law.
[2.3] The traditional American bias towards the visual is aptly captured by the observation that "[i]n our society, . . . to be real, a
thing must be visible."45 We46 demonstrate our visual bias in numerous ways and in numerous contexts, usually without
recognizing that such a bias even exists. Every time we sing the first line of the national anthem, we ask a question about looking:
"Oh say can you see . . .?" We pay for goods and services with dollar bills that bear a staring eye on their backs.47 We go on vacation
not to hear the sounds, but to "see the sights"; we take along cameras, not tape recorders.48
[2.4] We give aesthetic priority to visual effect. Our glass and steel buildings are monuments to the power of sight, rather than
sound or touch.49 Our idea of personal beauty is primarily visual.50 So is our idea of art, to the point where, in ordinary discourse,
that term denotes purely visual painting, not music or dance.51 Our visual orientation even colors our approach to art forms which,
at least in theory, are not altogether dependent on visual appreciation: we regularly highlight the visuality of sculpture-and, at the
same time, neutralize its tactility-by posting signs in our museums and art galleries that read "Do Not Touch." Is it any wonder that in
such a context, our sculpture should have become "painterly,"52 i.e., designed much more for seeing than feeling?
[2.5] Less obviously, but more fundamentally, our visuality
shapes our sense of social identity and difference.
We tend to group one another more on the basis of similar visual appearance than on, say, similar accent.53 This is most
obvious when we categorize individuals according to the color of their skin: in our visualist culture, most
Americans are "white" or "black." Visual identity has indeed become so important to us that we not only
differentiate, but actually discriminate against one another on a visual basis. Having skin of a
certain color may in practice entitle us to, or alternatively, it may disqualify us from educational
opportunity, economic wealth, and political power.
Surveillance metaphors bad
Metaphors of Surveillance fail to accurately represent the way society functions
Olukotun ’14 -- Ford Foundation Freedom to Write Fellow at PEN American Center, JD from
Stanford Law School (Deji, “Mapping Metaphors to Fight Surveillance,” Pen America,
http://www.pen.org/blog/mapping-metaphors-fight-surveillance, April 11, 2014, tony)
How do we use language to describe surveillance? As an organization that promotes literature
and defends freedom of expression wherever it is threatened, PEN is especially concerned about
the effect of mass surveillance on creative freedom. We fought U.S. government surveillance all
the way to the Supreme Court in the case Amnesty v. Clapper, and our report Chilling Effects
documented that U.S. government surveillance is causing one out of six writers to self-censor
their research and writing. We may never know how many ideas are being lost every day
because of these programs. Judges and legislators are increasingly confronted with the need to
understand new surveillance technologies, and often resort to metaphor to do so. The Oxford
English Dictionary defines metaphor as “a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of
something else, especially something abstract.” The use of metaphors can result in quite strange
decisions, as Noam Cohen noted in a December 2013 New York Times article, when Supreme
Court Justice Scalia tried to illustrate how preposterous it would be to liken a tracking device on
the bottom of a car to a miniature policeman hitching a ride in the case U.S. v. Jones. The
inappropriate use of metaphors can distract from the fact that real lives are affected by them.
“Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched,” once warned Justice Benjamin Cardozo, “for
starting as devices to liberate thought, they often end by enslaving it.” To better understand
how metaphors are being used in coverage of surveillance, PEN embarked on a study of articles
by journalists and bloggers. Over 62 days between December and February, we combed through
133 articles by 105 different authors and over 60 news outlets. We found that 91 percent of the
articles contained metaphors about surveillance. There is rich thematic diversity in the types of
metaphors that are used, but there is also a failure of imagination in using literature to describe
surveillance. Over 9 percent of the articles in our study contained metaphors related to the act
of collection; 8 percent to literature (more on that later); about 6 percent to nautical themes;
and more than 3 percent to authoritarian regimes. On the one hand, journalists and bloggers
have been extremely creative in attempting to describe government surveillance, for example,
by using a variety of metaphors related to the act of collection: sweep, harvest, gather, scoop,
glean, pluck, trap. These also include nautical metaphors, such as trawling, tentacles, harbor,
net, and inundation. These metaphors seem to fit with data and information flows. Yet we have
also learned that George Orwell’s novel 1984 continues to dominate literary metaphors with
respect to surveillance; indeed, it was the only book referenced in our study. His dystopian
work, written in 1948, described a totalitarian state ruled by Big Brother. Nineteen Eighty-Four
in some ways describes the repression experienced by our writer colleagues in countries such as
Vietnam, Iran, China, and Syria. On our caselist, which we use to advocate on behalf of
threatened writers, these countries account for 58 of the 92 writers persecuted for their use of
digital media. But scholars and activists have observed that relating U.S. government
surveillance regimes to Big Brother overstates the case, because the U.S. is a more open society
than the one 1984 describes and, despite the NSA’s overreach, the country should not be
labeled authoritarian. Scholar Daniel J. Solove, for example, pointed out in a seminal article that
Kafka’s novella The Trial is probably better suited: We are not heading toward a world of Big
Brother or one composed of Little Brothers, but toward a more mindless process—of
bureaucratic indifference, arbitrary errors, and dehumanization—a world that is beginning to
resemble Kafka’s vision in The Trial. Other activists prefer to use Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the
panopticon, an institution that allows those with power to create the perception that their
subjects are under surveillance at all times. But for journalists and bloggers, the rich variety of
literature that has tackled surveillance—from science fiction to modern novels—is rarely
invoked. Orwell is the reigning king of the surveillance state.
Alternative Pedagogy Key
The role of academics should be to critically interrogate surveillance policies at
the level of the self rather than advocating legal reforms
Martin et al 9 – Professor at London School of Economics and Political Science (Other
contributing authors include Rosamunde E. van Brakel, Prof @ the University of Scheffield and
Daniel J. Bernhard, Prof @ London School of Economics and Political Science, “Understanding
resistance to digital surveillance Article Towards a multi-disciplinary, multi-actor framework,”
Surveillance & Society 6(3): pp. 221-222, tony)
From the 1960s onwards, education studies, led by Paolo Freire, has produced an abundance of
resistance literature, known as the ‘pedagogy of freedom’. In addition to a discussion of Freire’s
pedagogy of freedom, we look at some more recent publications on resistance pedagogy, where
Foucault’s influence can be discerned.Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) has heavily
influenced the conception of resistance in education studies. Reproductive accounts of
schooling underlined that schools could not derail the reproduction of the oppressive social
class relations inherent to capitalism (McFadden 1995, 295). For Freire, no form of education is
neutral. He proposes that student-centred pedagogy can create a critical consciousness capable
of facilitating action in pursuit of equality and democracy. Resistance is therefore integral to the
educational process, as all pedagogy is a call to action. Educational theorists depict resistance
through nuanced theoretical tools for intervening within structures of power in diverse contexts
across a range of institutional and ideological conditions. Beyond describing models of
oppression, they point to the possibility of intervening productively in educational settings that
are continually subject to manipulation by external authorities (Giroux 2003, 9). Education has
the power “to progressively transform the environment by attempting to undermine the
reproduction of oppressive social structures and social relations" (Walker 1985, 65). Freire’s
proposition and contributions by Walker and Giroux raise some very interesting levels of
analysis questions. How is it that a tightly-controlled relationship can cultivate a critical
consciousness with regards to macro-societal levels of organisation that do not apply at the
smaller unit level? That the referent object of resistance can change across levels of analysis –
authority at one level is acceptable while control at higher levels of organisation is not –
requires further attention. Resistance can be understood as a “multi-layered phenomenon that
not only takes diverse and complex forms among students and teachers within schools but
registers differently across contexts and levels of political struggle” (Giroux 2003, 9). The
contexts include resistance to authority/oppression and resistance to change, but also
Foucauldian self-(re)constitution, which provides an effective form of resistance to
normalization processes (Hyde 2007). That this resistance consciousness and the pedagogy of
freedom are themselves developed in a controlled environment speaks volumes about the
validity of Freire’s claim. Though the classroom provides a clear authority structure, if the
authority is legitimate and just, it is resisted less.
Visual Metaphors Bad
Visuality Turns
American legal thought is found on the idea of visuality – sight metaphors
foreground difference between individuals because visuality empirically
encourages the elite to ascribe themselves to or negatively identify with “The
Other” -- visuality and its expression in visual metaphor are both the origin and
mechanism of oppression.
Hibbitts 95 – Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh, Chancellor's Distinguished
Teaching Award, PhD (Bernard, “THE METAPHOR IS THE MESSAGE: VISUALITY, AURALITY AND
THE RECONFIGURATION OF AMERICAN LEGAL DISCOURSE,” International Journal for the
Semiotics of Law Vol. VIII no.22, p. 76-79, 1995, tony)
The third factor favouring the contemporary shift towards aural metaphors in American law may
be described as phenomenological. Traditionally, the values embraced and reflected in
American law have corresponded rather neatly with the values supposedly favoured by the
phenomenon of vision. Law, in the traditional sense, has been understood as abstract,
disengaging, objective, determinate, timeless and systematic. It has been understood as
abstract to the extent that its rules, principles and such legal constructs as "the reasonable man"
are generalizations independent of particular concrete circumstances. It has been regarded as
disengaging to the extent that it allows and even encourages parties to pursue their own
autonomous self-interests free from the involvement or interference with others (hence the
concept of "rights"). Law has been considered objective in that it exists apart from -- and is
supposedly applied regardless of-- the feelings or whims of individual judges or lawyers or their
personal attitudes towards the disputing parties. It has been held to be determinate insofar as it
has been assumed that proper legal analysis leads to "one right answer." Traditional American
legal thought has conceived of law as timeless insofar as its core principles- if not always its
specific rules- remain constant. Law has been viewed as systematic in that its rules and
principles are presumed to be related to each other in a coherent deductive pattern. Each of
these qualities of law has been matched by a characteristic of vision, at least as American and
other Western philosophers have encouraged us to understand that phenomenon. For instance,
vision is said to be an abstract sense because it does not depend on physical contact or
proximity with concrete reality, but rather on withdrawal. "The best view is by no means the
closest view; to get the proper view we take the proper distance, which may vary for different
objects and different purposes, but which is always realized as a positive and not a defective
feature in the phenomenal presence of the object. "86 To this extent, sight literally abstracts
one from the world- certainly not completely, but more than the other senses. Because it
depends on abstract withdrawal, vision is considered to facilitate social disengagement. Well
before one reaches the outer limits of visual (as opposed to aural or tactile) perception, the
urge, the need and sometimes even the ability to actively interact with one's potential
interlocutor is reduced. Unlike the "feeler" and the "hearer," the seer is not directly affected by
the individual perceived. In this context, seers readily assume an uninvolved, uncommitted,
indifferent, literally voyeuristic stance towards one another. 87 Passive, observing individuals
become more aware of themselves as autonomous "selves," while regarding their passive,
observed counterparts as distinct "Others. "88 Visual disengagement is in turn supposed to
promote objectivity. The visually-distanced and disengaged seer is able to contemplate other
persons or things without being burdened by the personal emotions or attitudes that might be
encouraged by physical proximity. Thus, the American artist Maurice Glasser has pointed out
the psychological diffi - culty of painting someone's portrait from within "touching distance": ...
at touching distance, the sitter's personality is too strong. The influence of the model on the
painter is too powerful, too disturbing to the artist's necessary detachment, touching distance
not being the position of visual rendition, but of motor reaction or some physical expression of
sentiment. 89 Sight has been thought timeless because it is not dependent on the dynamic
unfolding of events: unlike hearing, which depends on the next sound or phoneme to form a
coherent noise or word, or touch, which depends on the next feeling to discern a shape, sight
need not wait upon the next image to bring meaning. Vision can extract a tremendous amount
of information from a static, literally timeless scene. Indeed, rapid change in the environment
may make the visual extraction of information more difficult. Vision is therefore said to demand
a certain degree of constancy or "being"; in this sense, it peculiarly "lends itself to a static
conception of eternal truths'. " Largely because we have regarded sight as timeless, we have
regarded it as the principal systematizing sense. It is supposed to be the sense most capable of
appreciating or identifying the constant relations between different elements that make up the
very idea of "system." The visual bias of "system" was implicitly understood as early as the
eighteenth century, when Scottish philosopher David Hume commented that "to deliver a
system in conversation hardly appears natural. "91 The similarity between the values of
traditional American legal theory and the values we have traditionally associated with sight is
not coincidental. In the first place, traditional American legal theory was developed and has
prospered in a society which has itself been highly visualist. This broad cultural orientation has
made American law susceptible not only to the techniques and the language of sight, but also to
its phenomenological biases. In other words, with American culture dominated by a sense that
is understood as fostering (if not necessarily creating) abstraction, disengagement, objectivity,
timelessness and system, American legal theory -- necessarily operating within that culture -has been drawn to many of the same values. In the second place, traditional American legal
theory has been largely articulated and elaborated by individuals from American gender, racial,
ethnic and religious groups whose relative visuality has arguably biased them towards the values
that visuality has been held to favour. For example, the relative visuality of American men's
culture may have prompted American men as a group to claim a special attraction for (and/or
be pejoratively associated by many American feminists with) abstraction, disengagement, and
objectivity, even if American men's visuality has neither afforded them a monopoly over the
invocation or application of those values nor prevented many American men from adopting
different perspectives. 92 Likewise, the relative visuality of white American culture may have
encouraged white Americans (as a group) to ascribe to themselves and/or be negatively
identified by many African - American intellectuals with the same norms, although white
Americans' relative visuality has certainly not made those norms either their exclusive property
or their universal preference. 93 The long-standing numerical and political domination of both
the American legal community and the American legal professoriate by members of these and
other more visualist groups has in turn helped make "visualist" standards central to traditional
American legal theory.
Visuality and metaphors promote the idea that law is a single, objective and
abstract identity—rather, “law” should be interpreted as a subjective, alterable,
and knowable process
Hibbitts 95 – Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh, Chancellor's Distinguished
Teaching Award, PhD (Bernard, “THE METAPHOR IS THE MESSAGE: VISUALITY, AURALITY AND
THE RECONFIGURATION OF AMERICAN LEGAL DISCOURSE,” International Journal for the
Semiotics of Law Vol. VIII no.22, p. 76-79, 1995, tony)
The mutual affinity between vision and traditional American legal theory has arguably prompted
traditional legal scholars to embrace visual metaphors. For instance, what better sense
metaphorically to communi - cate (and reinforce) the systematic nature of law than the sense by
which "systems" are said to be most readily perceived? In this context, visual legal metaphors
like "seamless web" or "body of law" seem tailor-made. Likewise, what better way to
communicate law's objective nature than by evoking a form of sensory experience that we have
considered biased towards objectivity? In this light, referring to adjudication or appeal as
"judicial review" seems highly appropriate. At the same time, the most casual use of visual legal
metaphors may incidentally reinforce the phenomenologically-compatible values of orthodox
jurisprudence. Saying that a constitutional principle is a "fixed star" or that an area of
concurrent jurisdiction is a "zone of twilight" indirectly supports and even en - courages (by
virtue of the metaphors' visuality as much as their substantive content) the belief that law is
abstract and disengaged from concrete human experience. Today, of course, the traditional
view of jurisprudence is under attack. Many so-called "critical scholars" argue that law should be
understood as more concrete, relational, subjective, dynamic, and process-oriented. Law should
be concrete in that judges and jurists should take greater account of situated context and others
lived experience instead of depending upon abstract or theoretical constructs. It should be
relational in that it should be more concerned with preventing and resolving differences by
drawing people together in shared interaction and communal commitment instead of driving
them apart. It should be subjective to the extent that law-makers and adjudicators should be
more willing to recognize their own biases while making an effort to compensate for those by
empathetically adopting the points of view of the individuals who stand to be affected by
their rulings. Law should be dynamic in that it should be understood not as a timeless entity,
but as an event in time. By the same token, it should be understood as more of a process than a
system.
Visuality maintains a range of structural oppressions including along racial and gender
lines
HIBBITS 1994 (Bernard, Prof at University of Pittsburgh School of Law, “Making Sense of Metaphors:
Visuality, Aurality, and the Reconfiguration of American Legal Discourse,” 16 Cardozo Law Review 229,
http://law.pitt.edu/archive/hibbitts/meta_int.htm)
The traditional visuality of American legal metaphor has, however, been more than just a
function of general cultural circumstance. It has also been the product of power: the power of
American men over women, the power of American whites over blacks, the power of American
"Anglos" over Hispanics, and the power of American Protestants over Catholics and Jews. By
making special use of the written word to secure or extend their cultural authority, members of
the former groups have gained a special respect for vision and the visual that they have
unilaterally made the standard for "American" culture as a whole. In conditions where their
literacy has been involuntarily restricted or their own traditions have set limits to their trust of
writing, members of the latter groups have either been forced or have chosen to grant relatively
more respect to aural expression and experience.213 As American men, whites, Anglos, and
Protestants have used their cultural authority to first monopolize, and then numerically and
politically dominate the ranks of the American legal profession, they and those whom they have
coerced or co-opted have indulged their visuality in, among other things, a consistent
preference for visual legal metaphor. They have literally shaped American legal language in their
own images.
These metaphors are violently exclusionary to differently-abled persons. It’s
about how its received- to say otherwise ignores how these words are
interpreted by those who they affect
Cohen-Rottenberg 14 -- writer and content manager for the body is not an apology( Rachel
Cohen-Rottenberg, "Doing Social Justice: Thoughts on Ableist Language and Why It Matters,"
thebodyisnotanapology.tumblr.com/post/86596200516/doing-social-justice-thoughts-onableist-language-and, 5-23-14, tony)
Disability metaphors abound in our culture, and they exist almost entirely as pejoratives. You
see something wrong? Compare it to a disabled body or mind: Paralyzed. Lame. Crippled.
Schizophrenic. Diseased. Sick. Want to launch an insult? The words are seemingly endless: Deaf.
Dumb. Blind. Idiot. Moron. Imbecile. Crazy. Insane. Retard. Lunatic. Psycho. Spaz. I see these
terms everywhere: in comment threads on major news stories, on social justice sites, in
everyday speech. These words seem so “natural” to people that they go uncritiqued a great deal
of the time. I tend to remark on this kind of speech wherever I see it. In some very rare places,
my critique is welcome. In most places, it is not. When a critique of language that makes
reference to disability is not welcome, it is nearly inevitable that, as a disabled person, I am not
welcome either. I might be welcome as an activist, but not as a disabled activist. I might be
welcome as an ally, but not as a disabled ally. I might be welcome as a parent, but not as a
disabled parent. That’s a lot like being welcomed as an activist, and as an ally, and as a parent,
but not as a woman or as a Jew. Many people have questions about why ableist speech matters,
so I’ll be addressing those questions here. Please feel free to raise others. 1. Why are you
harping so much on words, anyway? Don’t we have more important things to worry about? I am
always very curious about those who believe that words are “only” words — as though they do
not have tremendous power. Those of us who use words understand the world through them.
We use words to construct frameworks with which we understand experience. Every time we
speak or write, we are telling a story; every time we listen or read, we are hearing one. No one
lives without entering into these stories about their fellow human beings. As Arthur Frank
writes: “Stories work with people, for people, and always stories work on people, affecting what
people are able to see as real as possible, and as worth doing or best avoided. What is it about
stories – what are their particularities – that enables them to work as they do? More than mere
curiosity is at stake in this question, because human life depends on the stories we tell: the
sense of self that those stories impart, the relationships constructed around shared stories, and
the sense of purpose that stories both propose and foreclose.” (Frank 2010, 3) The stories that
disability metaphors tell are deeply problematic, deeply destructive, and deeply resonant of the
kinds of violence and oppression that disabled people have faced over the course of many
centuries. They perpetuate negative and disempowering views of disabled people, and these
views wind their ways into all of the things that most people feel are more important. If a
culture’s language is full of pejorative metaphors about a group of people, that culture is not
going to see those people as fully entitled to the same housing, employment, medical care,
education, access, and inclusion as people in a more favored group. 2. What if a word no longer
has the same meaning it once did? What’s wrong with using it in that case? Ah yes. The
etymology argument. When people argue word meanings, it generally happens in a particular
(and largely unstated) context. With regard to ableist metaphors, people argue that certain
meanings are “obsolete,” but such assertions fail to note the ways in which these “obsolete”
words resonate for people in marginalized groups. For example, I see this argument a great
deal around the word moron, which used to be a clinical term for people with an intellectual
disability. I have a great-aunt who had this label and was warehoused in state hospitals for much
of her brief 25 years of life. So when I see this word, it resonates through history. I remember all
of the people with this designation who lived and died in state schools and state mental
hospitals under conditions of extreme abuse, extreme degradation, extreme poverty, extreme
neglect, and extreme suffering from disease and malnutrition. My great-aunt lay dying of
tuberculosis for 10 months under those conditions in a state mental hospital. The term moron
was used to oppress human beings like her, many of whom are still in the living memory of
those of us who have come after. Moron — and related terms, like imbecile and idiot – may no
longer be used clinically, but their clinical use is not the issue. They were terms of oppression,
and every time someone uses one without respect for the history of disabled people, they
disrespect the memory of the people who had to carry those terms to their graves. 3. What’s
wrong with using bodies as metaphors, anyway? Think about it this way: Consider that you’re a
woman walking down the street, and someone makes an unwanted commentary on your body.
Suppose that the person looks at you in your favorite dress, with your hair all done up, and tells
you that you are “as fat as a pig.” Is your body public property to be commented upon at will?
Are others allowed to make use of it — in their language, in your hearing, without your
permission? Or is that a form of objectification and disrespect? In the same way that a stranger
should not appropriate your body for his commentary, you should not appropriate my disabled
body — which is, after all, mine and not yours — for your political writing or social commentary.
A disabled body should not appear in articles about how lame that sexist movie is or how
insane racism is. A disabled body should be no more available for commentary than a
nondisabled one. The core problem with using a body as a metaphor is that people actually live
in bodies. We are not just paralyzed legs, or deaf ears, or blind eyes. When we become reduced
to our disabilities, others very quickly forget that there are people involved here. We are no
longer seen as whole, living, breathing human beings. Our bodies have simply been put into the
service of your cause without our permission. 4. Aren’t some bodies better than others?
What’s wrong with language that expresses that? I always find it extraordinary that people who
have been oppressed on the basis of their physical differences — how their bodies look and
work — can still hold to the idea that some bodies are better than others. Perhaps there is
something in the human mind that absolutely must project wrongness onto some kind of Other
so that everyone else can feel whole and free. In the culture I live in, disabled bodies often fit
the bill. A great deal of this projection betrays a tremendous ignorance about disability. I have
seen people defend using mental disabilities as a metaphor by positing that all mentally disabled
people are divorced from reality when, in fact, very few mental disabilities involve delusions. I
have seen people use schizophrenic to describe a state of being divided into separate people,
when schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiplicity at all. I have seen people refer to
blindness as a total inability to see, when many blind people have some sight. I have seen
people refer to deafness as being locked into an isolation chamber when, in fact, deaf people
speak with their hands and listen with their eyes (if they are sighted) or with their hands (if they
are not). Underlying this ignorance, of course, is an outsider’s view of disability as a Bad Thing.
Our culture is rife with this idea, and most people take it absolutely for granted. Even people
who refuse to essentialize anything else about human life will essentialize disability in this way.
Such people play right into the social narrative that disability is pitiful, scary, and tragic. But
those of us who inhabit disabled bodies have learned something essential: disability is what
bodies do. They all change. They are all vulnerable. They all become disabled at some point.
That is neither a Good Thing nor a Bad Thing. It is just an essential fact of human life. I neither
love nor hate my disabilities. They are what they are. They are neither tragic nor wonderful,
metaphor nor object lesson. 5. I would never use the N-word because people of color are part of
an oppressed group. Disabled people aren’t really oppressed. Are they? Yes, disabled people are
members of an oppressed group, and disability rights are a civil rights issue. Disabled people are
assaulted at higher rates, live in poverty at higher rates, and are unemployed at higher rates
than nondisabled people. We face widespread exclusion, discrimination, and human rights
violations. For an example of what some of the issues are, please take some time over at the
Disability Social History Project. 6. If my disabled friend says it’s okay to use these words,
doesn’t that make it all right to use them? Please don’t make any one of us the authority on
language. It should go without saying, but think for yourself about the impact of the language
you’re using. If you stop using a word because someone told you to, you’re doing it wrong. It’s
much better if you understand why. 7. I don’t know why we all have to be so careful about
giving offense. Shouldn’t people just grow thicker skins? For me, it is not a question of personal
offense, but of political and social impact. If you routinely use disability slurs, you are adding to a
narrative that says that disabled people are wrong, broken, dangerous, pitiful, and tragic. That
does not serve us. 8. Aren’t you just a member of the PC police trying to take away my First
Amendment rights? No. The First Amendment protects you from government interference in
free speech. It does not protect you from criticism about the words you use. 9. Aren’t you
playing Oppression Olympics here? No. I’ve never said that one form of oppression is worse
than another, and I never will. In fact, I am asking that people who are marginalized on the basis
of the appearance or functioning of their bodies — on the basis of gender identity, race,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, size, age, and disability — get together and talk about the
ways in which these oppressions weave through one another and support one another. If you
do not want disability used against your group, start thinking about what you’re doing to
reinforce ableism in your own speech. If you do not want people of color to be called feebleminded, or women to be called weak, or LGBT people to be called freaks, or fat people to be
called diseased, or working-class people to be called stupid — all of which are disability slurs —
then the solution isn’t to try to distance yourself from us and say, No! We are not disabled like
you! The solution is to make common cause with us and say, There is nothing wrong with being
disabled, and we are proud to stand with you. 10. Why can’t we use disability slurs when the
target is actually a nondisabled person? To my knowledge, the president of the United States is
not mentally disabled, and yet his policies have been called crazy and insane. Most Hollywood
films are made by people without mobility issues, and yet people call their films lame. Someone
who has no consciousness of racism or homophobia will be called blind or deaf to the issues,
and yet, such lack of consciousness runs rampant among nondisabled people. So why associate
something with a disability when it’s what nondisabled people do every single day of the week?
As far as I can see, lousy foreign policy, lousy Hollywood films, and lousy comments about race
and sexual orientation are by far the province of so-called Normal People. So come on, Normal
People. Start owning up to what’s yours. And please remember that we disabled folks are
people, not metaphors in the service of your cause.
Ableism Framing
Ableism must be rejected – the issue is apriori
Siebers 9 -- University of Michigan, Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism (Tobin, “The
Aesthetics of Human Disqualification”, Lecture,
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCoQFjAA&url=
http%3A%2F%2Fdisabilities.temple.edu%2Fmedia%2Fds%2Flecture20091028siebersAesthetics_
FULL.doc&ei=LWz4T6jyN8bHqAHLkY2LCQ&usg=AFQjCNGdkDuSJkRXMHgbXqvuyyeDpldVcQ&sig
2=UCGDC4tHbeh2j7-Yce9lsA, Oct 28, 2009, tony)
Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That
oppression involves “groups,” and not “individuals,” means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression always
focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various
appearances. Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferiority—what some call “in-built” or
“biological” inferiority. Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of the
group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of biological inferiority is disability. The
representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the
body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics—not only because
oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where
aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. ¶ One additional thought must be noted before I treat some
analytic examples from the historical record. First, despite
my statement that disability now serves as the master
trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to
disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done by disability in
oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are
socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens
to be integral at the present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In
every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is represented in some
way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. “Racism”
disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. “Sexism” disqualifies
on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and physical inferiority. “Classism” disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and
socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status. “ Ableism”
disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical
differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case
the fact that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as
undeniable facts of nature. ¶ As
racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human
inferiority—and the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight
oppression—the prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the
belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will continue, I expect, until we reach a
historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of disability as we now
know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at
this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority.
Especially true in the context of rhetoric
Cherney 11 -- Wayne State University, Department of Communications, Assistant Professor¶
(James L, Disability Studies Quarterly, “The Rhetoric of Ableism”,Vol 31, No 3, http://dsqsds.org/article/view/1665/1606, 2011, tony)
I analyze ableism as a rhetorical problem for three reasons. First, ableist culture
sustains and perpetuates itself via rhetoric; the ways of interpreting disability and assumptions
about bodies that produce ableism are learned. The previous generation teaches it to the next and cultures spread
In this essay
it to each other through modes of intercultural exchange. Adopting a rhetorical perspective to the problem of ableism thus exposes
second reason for viewing ableism as rhetoric, as revealing how it
suggests ways of curtailing its growth and promoting its demise. Many of the strategies already
adopted by disability rights activists to confront ableism explicitly or implicitly address it as
rhetoric. Public demonstrations, countercultural performances, autobiography, transformative histories of disability and
disabling practices, and critiques of ableist films and novels all apply rhetorical solutions to the problem. Identifying ableism
as rhetoric and exploring its systems dynamic reveals how these corrective practices work. We
can use such information to refine the successful techniques, reinvent those that fail, and realize new tactics.
Third, I contend that any means of challenging ableism must eventually encounter its rhetorical
power. As I explain below, ableism is that most insidious form of rhetoric that has become reified and
so widely accepted as common sense that it denies its own rhetoricity—it "goes without saying." To
fully address it we must name its presence, for cultural assumptions accepted uncritically adopt
the mantle of "simple truth" and become extremely difficult to rebut. As the neologism "ableism" itself
testifies, we need new words to reveal the places it resides and new language to describe how it feeds. Without doing so,
ableist ways of thinking and interpreting will operate as the context for making sense of any acts
challenging discrimination, which undermines their impact, reduces their symbolic potential,
and can even transform them into superficial measures that give the appearance of change yet
elide a recalcitrant ableist system.
the social systems that keep it alive. This informs my
thrives
A2: Can’t Account for Power
The notion of lateral surveillance is an alternative to the aff which better
accounts for power
Albrechtslund ’15 – associate prof @ University of Aarhus, Denmark (Albert, “New Media
and Changing Perceptions of Surveillance,” found in “A Companion to New Media Dynamics,”
Chapter 19, p. 318-319, tony)
A term central to this discussion is, of course, “visibility,” inasmuch as the word “surveillance” is
etymologically associated with the French word surveiller, which translates simply as “to watch
over.” The verb suggests the visual practice of a person looking carefully at someone or
something from above. The visual metaphor implies a spatial hierarchy where the watcher is
positioned over the watched, and this situation is a favorable for the former as it makes it
easier to keep an eye on the latter. This visual metaphor is at the root of the interpretation of
surveillance as a power relation in which the watcher controls the watched. Consequently,
transparency is a weakness because those who are visible are at the same time vulnerable to
a controlling gaze. This conception of transparency as something that can be employed to break
down, control, and eventually rebuild people is well known from novels (not least Nineteen
Eighty-Four) cinema, and computer games. Moreover, surveillance is not only a frequently
visited theme in fiction but can also be said to structure films’ imagery and narration. Dietmar
Kammerer has pointed to a trend in mainstream Hollywood cinema over the past decades to
integrate the aesthetics of video surveillance as well as the imagery itself into films. Surveillance
footage, often grainy images from a raised point of view, can be part of the imagery of the film
and in that way influence the way films are structured. As Thomas Y. Levin put it: “surveillance
has become the condition of the narration itself.” The post-9/11 TV series 24, broadcast by Fox
Networks in the USA, illustrates the thematic and structural role of surveillance. The fast-paced
story and visual style of the series often depend on surveillance technologies, such as GPS
tracking and knowledge obtained by computer hacking, and imagery from satellites and CCTV
are integrated in all episodes. A characteristic mode of storytelling has Chloe O’Brien, the
computer expert, at her desktop and has Jack Bauer, the hero, somewhere in the field working
on a mission. In this set-up, Chloe facilitates Jack’s actions by providing him with information
obtained by surveillance. The cinematic gaze illustrates a paradox of surveillance, in that it
allows us to be fascinated with our shame of watching and fear of being watched. The cinema
facilitates a space where we, the audience, can explore and to a certain extent live out our
issues with and feelings about surveillance. This pluralistic way of understanding visibility is
equally appropriate for social media, since power relations are much more ambiguous than is
suggested by the etymology of surveillance. As discussed in the previous section, surveillance
does not necessarily imply a hierarchy, as the power relation can be “flattened.” The flat
surveillance relation has been described as peer-to-peer or “lateral surveillance.” Further, the
traditional power relation has been challenged and even inverted, either negatively, as actively
resisting the surveillance, or positively, as “exhibitionist empowerment.”
Aff Answers
A2 Ableism
Alteration of language away from “surveillance” doesn’t solve – ideology too
engrained
Harpur 12 – PhD from the Queensland University of Technology, research fellow at The
University of Queensland, Griffith Law School and the United Nations University (Paul, “From
disability to ability: changing the phrasing of the debate,” Disability & Society Volume 27, Issue
3, 2012, tony)
Persons with disabilities have been subjected to discrimination and social apartheid for
centuries. To address this discrimination, advocates have employed various strategies including
law reforms, public policy, education, language, and so on. This paper has argued for a change in
terminology to aid culture change. Over the proceeding decades, disability advocates have
gained control over how disability is defined through the promotion of the social model.
Advocates have worked to remove offensive terminology from the common vernacular. This
paper asserts that the time is right for disability advocates to adopt the label of ‘ableism’ as a
powerful label to describe the prejudice, discrimination and discounting of persons with
disabilities.¶ The labels of ‘disableism’ and ‘ableism’ have emerged to describe disability
discrimination. This paper has argued that disability scholars should embrace and promote the
use of the term ableism. While being used by some scholars, disableism serves two masters.
Disability nomenclature developed with ableist ideological influences. Despite moves by the
disability community to gain control of the term ‘disability’, this paper asserts that this term’s
historic antecedence detracts from the impact of disability advocacy. The label of ableism, in
contrast, is free from ableist ideological influences and offers greater advocacy potentials. By
taking control of the category away from the disability industry and by expanding people who
can utilise the term ableism, this paper concludes that ableist nomenclatures have the potential
of increasing the power of disability advocacy.¶ While altering the language used to describe
disability discrimination can assist in culture change, this is just one strategy. Oliver (1996) has
observed that it is not sufficient to simply abolishing the use of offensive words to describe
persons with disabilities. Rovner has observed that ‘[f]or over forty years, the disability rights
movement has sought to reframe the way people with disabilities are understood by American
law, social policy, and society’ (2004, 1043). Rovner explains that to achieve this outcome it will
be necessary for the image of disability to be remade in the eyes of those who make laws and
apply them (2004, 1090). If policy-makers and the judiciary do not embrace the culture change,
then reforms will have minimal impact (for a discussion of the impact disability models have
upon members of the judiciary consciously or subconsciously, see Cantor 2009, 401). Altering
the way in which language and culture constructs disability should be regarded as one useful
weapon in the battle to achieve equality. Coupled with other interventions, language can
contribute to the struggle for social equality. This paper has argued that using the term ableism
to describe disability discrimination is one step that can be used to assist in the wider struggle
against oppression.
Language is fluid – the aff re-appropriates harmful rhetoric
Davidson and Smith 99 – Department of Environmental Studies and Department of
Philosophy @ Queens University (Joyce N. and Mick;
Wittgenstein and Irigaray: Gender and Philosophy in a Language (Game) of Difference,” Hypatia
Volume 14 Number 2, tony)
The concept of a “language-game” links a particular employment of language with the “actions
into which it is woven” (Wittgenstein 1988, 7). Just as there are innumerable activities in which
we employ language, so there are countless kinds of uses of language, and these do not stay the
same. They are not “fixed, given once and for all; but new types of language, new language
games, as we may say, come into existence and others become obsolete and forgotten” (1988,
23). Wittgenstein lists a few of the many possible language games, including “making up a story .
. . play acting— . . . making a joke; telling it— . . . translating . . . asking, thinking, cursing,
greeting, praying” (1988, 23). What is more, the meaning of the words we employ will often
change as we put them to different uses in different language-games. Wittgenstein suggests
that to know the meaning of a word is not a matter of being able to define it, to fix its meaning,
but of knowing how to use it, that is, to have made the appropriate connections between
concept and language-game. It is only possible to demonstrate that we have understood a
word’s meaning by being able to apply it. For example, consider what there might be in common
between “deep sorrow, a deep sound, a deep well” (Wittgenstein 1964, 137), when to answer
“depth” is obviously tautological.
Dissent good
Dissent necessary – attempts to silence dissent are commandeered by the
government to ensure relative stability
Richards 13 -- Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law, (Neil M. “THE
DANGERS OF SURVEILLANCE , Harvard Law Review Vol. 126:1934, pp. 1953-54, 2013, tony)
Information collected surreptitiously can be used to blackmail or discredit opponents by
revealing embarrassing secrets. American political history over the past hundred years furnishes
numerous examples of this phenomenon, but perhaps the most compelling is the treatment of
Martin Luther King, Jr., by the FBI. Concerned that Dr. King was a threat to public order, the FBI
listened to his private telephone conversations in order to seek information with which to
blackmail him. As the official government investigation into the Dr. King wiretaps concluded in
1976: The FBI collected information about Dr. King’s plans and activities through an extensive
surveillance program, employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau’s
disposal. Wiretaps, which were initially approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were
maintained on Dr. King’s home telephone from October 1963 until mid-1965; the SCLC
headquarter’s [sic] telephones were covered by wiretaps for an even longer period. Phones in
the homes and offices of some of Dr. King’s close advisers were also wiretapped. The FBI has
acknowledged 16 occasions on which microphones were hidden in Dr. King’s hotel and motel
rooms in an “attempt” to obtain information about the “private activities of King and his
advisers” for use to “completely discredit” them.100 Imagine a dissident like Dr. King living in
today’s information age. A government (or political opponent) that wanted him silenced
might be able to obtain not just access to his telephone conversations, but also to his reading
habits and emails. This critic could be blackmailed outright, or he could be discredited by
disclosure of the information as an example to others. Perhaps he has not been having an affair,
but has some other secret. Maybe he is gay, or has a medical condition, or visits embarrassing
web sites, or has cheated on his expenses or his taxes. All of us have secrets we would prefer
not be made public. Surveillance allows those secrets greater opportunities to come out, and it
gives the watchers power that can be used nefariously. The risk of the improper use of
surveillance records persists over time. Most of the former communist states in Eastern Europe
have passed laws strictly regulating access to the surveillance files of the communist secret
police. The primary purpose of such laws is to prevent the blackmail of political candidates who
may have been surveilled under the former regime.101 The experience of these laws reveals,
moreover, that the risk of such blackmail is one that the law cannot completely prevent after
the fact. Professor Maria Los explains that “[s]ecret surveillance files are routinely turned into a
weapon in political struggles, seriously undermining democratic processes and freedoms.”102
Dissent is essential – key in allowing for democratic consensus
Anderson 6 – Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan (Elizabeth, “The
Epistemology of Democracy,” Cambridge University Press, Volume 3, p. 9-11, tony)
Diversity and disagreement are central features of democracy. An adequate epistemic model of
democracy needs to represent its functions at all stages of decision-making: during deliberation,
at the point of decision (voting), and after a decision has been made. Dewey’s experimentalist
account of democracy, uniquely among the three models reviewed here, provides roles for
dissent at each of these stages. Consider first disagreement during group deliberation, prior to
decision-making. We have already seen that the expression of disagreement during group
deliberation draws decision makers’ attention to asymmetrically distributed information and
diverse problem-solving strategies that may be relevant to the solution of public problems. Both
Dewey’s experimentalist model of democracy and the DTA theorem capture this epistemic
function of disagreement, while the Condorcet Jury theorem neglects it. In addition, the
comprehensive expression of diverse points of view is needed to define through compromise
(Richardson 1997, 360-3) what counts as a problem of genuinely public interest, rather than
merely private or sectarian interest. Dissent prior to decision-making is a necessary condition for
the formation of a genuinely collective will consistent with the autonomy of each member. This
point may seem surprising. We are tempted to think that for a collective to genuinely will
something, each of its members must already will it individually and wholeheartedly. Gilbert
(1989) has shown that collective willing does not require such unanimity at the individual level,
but simply a willingness to accept the collective decision as authoritative for the group (even if
one privately dissents), and to do one’s part in upholding the decision. Westlund (2003) has
shown even more: that the formation of a collective will consistent with the autonomy of each
of the group’s members requires some resistance at the individual level to anyone else’s
proposal, so that the eventual object of joint willing is the product of mutual accommodation
and compromise rather than blind subordination. Pure deference to a leader who claims to
embody the collective will, however wholehearted it may be, is incompatible with the autonomy
of individual members. Translated into political terms, the contrast drawn here is that between
democracy and the politics of mass enthusiasm familiar to us from the French Revolution
through 20th century fascism and communism. However important epistemic diversity might be
to discovering the solution to problems of public interest, and even to constructing the very
definition of these problems, we still might wonder whether it has any function at the stage of
decision-making itself. Why allow the decision of a majority to stand as the decision of all? Why
settle for this, rather than unanimity? The conventional answer is that groups could hardly ever
decide anything, if unanimity were required. But this answer is not fully satisfactory, given that
some groups—Quaker meetings, for instance—do make decisions by consensus. A more
satisfactory answer considers the costs of achieving consensus. Precisely because collective
decisions are so often necessary and urgent, conditioning decisions on the achievement of
consensus often leads to undue pressure on and even coercion of dissenting minorities. Such
coercive pressure is objectionable in itself. It also carries severe epistemic costs. Consensus
implies that everyone agrees that all objections to a proposal have been met or at least
overridden by more important considerations. The parties to a consensus are therefore
expected to hold their peace once a decision is made, on the pretense that all their reservations
were met. The norm suppresses public airing and responsiveness to the continuing reservations
individuals may have about the decision. Majority rule, while it permits majorities to override
minority objections, does not pretend to have fully answered those objections. Minority dissent
remains open rather than suppressed, reminding us that any given decision remains beset by
unresolved objections (Manin 1987, 359). For this reason, individuals must be free to dissent not
just at the voting stage, but after a decision is made. This requires institutionalization of a “loyal
opposition.” Without an opposition to remind the public of continuing objections to collective
decisions, and to pose alternatives, accountability of decision makers is impossible. Nothing
would force decision makers to reconsider their decisions. Only with such continuing opposition
can fallibilism and the institutional capacity for experimentation—revising one’s decisions on
the basis of experience with their consequences—be realized. Epistemic accounts of democracy,
such as the Condorcet Jury Theorem, that represent the majority as virtually infallible, fail to
explain the epistemic importance of post-decision dissent. Such dissent is needed not simply to
keep the majority in check, but to ensure that decision-making is deliberative—undertaken in an
experimental spirit—rather than simply imposed. A power that faces no obstacle will have both
less cause to deliberate on its decisions and less need to justify them. The true goal of the
pluralism of counterforces is not equilibrium; it is deliberation itself (Manin 1987, 361). Hence,
any assessment of the epistemic powers of particular democracies must pay close attention to
its institutions and norms of dissent: are there diverse, open, accessible channels for people
from all walks of life, in all social positions, to publicly express dissent? Do social norms welcome
the expression of dissent by all discontented parties? Do they require decision makers to take
dissent seriously, and hold them accountable if they don’t? Negative answers to these questions
indicate epistemic weaknesses in political decision-making
Legal Reform good
Legal Reform is essential – also no circumvention
Richards 13 -- Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law, (Neil M. “THE
DANGERS OF SURVEILLANCE , Harvard Law Review Vol. 126:1934, pp. 1958-59, 2013, tony)
One of the most significant changes that the age of surveillance has brought about is the
increasing difficulty of separating surveillance by governments from that by commercial entities.
Public- and private sector surveillance are intertwined — they use the same technologies and
techniques, they operate through a variety of public/private partnerships, and their digital fruits
can easily cross the public/private divide. It is probably in this respect that our existing models
for understanding surveillance — such as Big Brother and the Panopticon — are the most out of
date. Even if we are primarily worried about state surveillance, perhaps because we fear the
state’s powers of criminal enforcement, our solutions to the problem of surveillance can no
longer be confined to regulation of government actors. Any solutions to the problem of
surveillance must thus take into account private surveillance as well as public. In this respect,
Professor Orin Kerr is correct when he argues that federal statutory law has advantages over the
Fourth Amendment in guarding against surveillance in the digital age.117 Not only is statutory
law easier to change, but it also can be applied to bind both government and nongovernment
actors. A good model in this context is the federal ECPA and its state-law equivalents. These
laws prohibit wiretapping by private actors and require the government to obtain a warrant
under a standard higher than probable cause before it can engage in wiretapping.118 ECPA has
many defects, both in terms of the level of protection it offers and in its often-bewildering
complexity, but in transcending the public/private divide, it represents a good model for dealing
with surveillance. Additional legal protections will be needed to cope with developments in
surveillance practices. Because the government can sidestep many legal restrictions on the
collection of data by buying it from private databases, we should place additional restrictions
on this growing form of state surveillance. Such regulations could operate in both directions. In
relation to government, we could place restrictions both on the government’s ability to buy
private databases and on its ability to share personal information with the private sector.
Privacy law already has numerous models for this latter category, ranging from the Driver’s
Privacy Protection Act of 1994, 119 which limits the government’s ability to sell drivers’ license
records to industry, to the Privacy Act of 1974, 120 which prevents the government from
disclosing many kinds of records about individuals that it has in its possession. In relation to
private actors, we can place special obligations of confidentiality upon the holders of personal
information related to intellectual privacy, treating them as information fiduciaries. Our law has
long had a tradition of confidentiality rules, placing nondisclosure obligations on lawyers,
doctors, trustees, librarians, and other information custodians.121 On the Internet, many
companies already promise not to share personal information with governments unless
compelled. It would be but a small step to make such promises the default, or even the
mandatory practice, for certain kinds of particularly sensitive information.122
Macropolitics good
Macropolitical solutions key – the alternative is powerlessness in the face of
violence and limitless exploitation
Monbiot 4 – Journalist, Academic, and Political and Environmental Activist (George,
“Manifesto of a New World Order,” pp. 11-13, tony)
The quest for global solutions is difficult and divisive.
Some members of this movement are deeply suspicious of
all institutional power at the global level, fearing that it could never be held to account by the world’s people. Others are concerned
that a single set of universal prescriptions would threaten the diversity of dissent. A smaller faction has argued that all
political programmes are oppressive: our task should not be to replace one form of power with another, but to replace all
power with a magical essence called ‘anti-power’. But most of the members of this movement are coming to recognize that if we
propose solutions which can be effected only at the local or the national level, we remove
ourselves from any meaningful role in solving precisely those problems which most concern
us. Issues such as climate change, international debt, nuclear proliferation, war, peace and the balance of trade
between nations can be addressed only globally or internationally. Without global
measures and global institutions, it is impossible to see how we might distribute wealth from rich nations to poor
ones, tax the mobile rich and their even more mobile money, control the shipment of toxic waste, sustain the ban on landmines, prevent the
broker peace between nations or prevent powerful states from forcing
weaker ones to trade on their terms. If we were to work only at the local level, we would
leave these, the most critical of issues, for other people to tackle. Global governance will
take place whether we participate in it or not. Indeed, it must take place if the issues which
concern us are not to be resolved by the brute force of the powerful. That the international institutions
use of nuclear weapons,
have been designed or captured by the dictatorship of vested interests is not an argument against the existence of international institutions,
but a reason for overthrowing them and replacing them with our own. It is an argument for a global political system which holds power to
In the absence of an effective global politics, moreover, local solutions will always be
undermined by communities of interest which do not share our vision. We might, for example,
manage to persuade the people of the street in which we live to give up their cars in the hope of
preventing climate change, but unless everyone, in all communities, either shares our politics or is
bound by the same rules, we simply open new road space into which the neighbouring
communities can expand. We might declare our neighbourhood nuclear-free, but unless we are simultaneously working, at the
account.
international level, for the abandonment of nuclear weapons, we can do nothing to prevent ourselves and everyone else from being threatened
By first rebuilding
the global politics, we establish the political space in which our local alternatives can
flourish. If, by contrast, we were to leave the governance of the necessary global institutions to
others, then those institutions will pick off our local, even our national, solutions one by
one. There is little point in devising an alternative economic policy for your nation, as Luis Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva, now president of Brazil, once
by people who are not as nice as we are. We would deprive ourselves, in other words, of the power of restraint.
advocated, if the International Monetary Fund and the financial speculators have not first been overthrown. There is little point in fighting to
protect a coral reef from local pollution, if nothing has been done to prevent climate change from destroying the conditions it requires for its
survival.
Metaphors good
Accurate metaphors of surveillance are productive
Olukotun ’14 -- Ford Foundation Freedom to Write Fellow at PEN American Center, JD from
Stanford Law School (Deji, “Mapping Metaphors to Fight Surveillance,” Pen America,
http://www.pen.org/blog/mapping-metaphors-fight-surveillance, April 11, 2014, tony)
How do we use language to describe surveillance? As an organization that promotes literature
and defends freedom of expression wherever it is threatened, PEN is especially concerned about
the effect of mass surveillance on creative freedom. We fought U.S. government surveillance all
the way to the Supreme Court in the case Amnesty v. Clapper, and our report Chilling Effects
documented that U.S. government surveillance is causing one out of six writers to self-censor
their research and writing. We may never know how many ideas are being lost every day
because of these programs. Judges and legislators are increasingly confronted with the need to
understand new surveillance technologies, and often resort to metaphor to do so. The Oxford
English Dictionary defines metaphor as “a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of
something else, especially something abstract.” The use of metaphors can result in quite strange
decisions, as Noam Cohen noted in a December 2013 New York Times article, when Supreme
Court Justice Scalia tried to illustrate how preposterous it would be to liken a tracking device on
the bottom of a car to a miniature policeman hitching a ride in the case U.S. v. Jones. The
inappropriate use of metaphors can distract from the fact that real lives are affected by them.
“Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched,” once warned Justice Benjamin Cardozo, “for
starting as devices to liberate thought, they often end by enslaving it.” To better understand
how metaphors are being used in coverage of surveillance, PEN embarked on a study of articles
by journalists and bloggers. Over 62 days between December and February, we combed through
133 articles by 105 different authors and over 60 news outlets. We found that 91 percent of the
articles contained metaphors about surveillance. There is rich thematic diversity in the types of
metaphors that are used, but there is also a failure of imagination in using literature to describe
surveillance. Over 9 percent of the articles in our study contained metaphors related to the act
of collection; 8 percent to literature (more on that later); about 6 percent to nautical themes;
and more than 3 percent to authoritarian regimes. On the one hand, journalists and bloggers
have been extremely creative in attempting to describe government surveillance, for example,
by using a variety of metaphors related to the act of collection: sweep, harvest, gather, scoop,
glean, pluck, trap. These also include nautical metaphors, such as trawling, tentacles, harbor,
net, and inundation. These metaphors seem to fit with data and information flows. Yet we have
also learned that George Orwell’s novel 1984 continues to dominate literary metaphors with
respect to surveillance; indeed, it was the only book referenced in our study. His dystopian
work, written in 1948, described a totalitarian state ruled by Big Brother. Nineteen Eighty-Four
in some ways describes the repression experienced by our writer colleagues in countries such as
Vietnam, Iran, China, and Syria. On our caselist, which we use to advocate on behalf of
threatened writers, these countries account for 58 of the 92 writers persecuted for their use of
digital media. But scholars and activists have observed that relating U.S. government
surveillance regimes to Big Brother overstates the case, because the U.S. is a more open society
than the one 1984 describes and, despite the NSA’s overreach, the country should not be
labeled authoritarian. Scholar Daniel J. Solove, for example, pointed out in a seminal article that
Kafka’s novella The Trial is probably better suited: We are not heading toward a world of Big
Brother or one composed of Little Brothers, but toward a more mindless process—of
bureaucratic indifference, arbitrary errors, and dehumanization—a world that is beginning to
resemble Kafka’s vision in The Trial. Other activists prefer to use Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the
panopticon, an institution that allows those with power to create the perception that their
subjects are under surveillance at all times. But for journalists and bloggers, the rich variety of
literature that has tackled surveillance—from science fiction to modern novels—is rarely
invoked. Orwell is the reigning king of the surveillance state. What do these rghesults mean?
The fact that 91 percent of articles contain metaphors suggest that writers will continue to use
metaphors to help us understand advances in technology. They also use a diverse range of
metaphors. However, as advocates develop new messaging on surveillance and look to
literature for inspiration, they should not stop at Orwell: there are many more literary treasures
to be explored. The human rights community and, now, private businesses are emphasizing the
importance of encryption and digital hygiene to protect against government intrusion. Soon we
will need metaphors to explain how these tools work, and how they might be abused. As
security expert Bruce Schneier has observed, people “tend to base risk analysis more on stories
than on data. Stories engage us at a much more visceral level, especially stories that are vivid,
exciting or personally involving.” Choose the wrong story, and you can overstate the risk. This
means journalists should be vigilant in deciding which literature should serve as metaphors. As
we grapple with new technologies and continue our work to fight illegal government intrusion
into our privacy, we’ll have to think carefully about how to explain complex, high-tech programs
in an easily comprehensible way. Literature is a logical resource for finding metaphors. Aaron
Santesso and David Rosen, for example, have shown that the Eye of Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings better captures the current surveillance state, but so too do plays by
Shakespeare , such as The Tempest. Our study suggests we need better metaphors while not
losing sight of the implications of government action that affect real human beings. Meanwhile,
we’ll continue fighting bulk surveillance in the courts and promoting legislation that respects
privacy and enables creative freedom to flourish.
“Surveillance” Good
Framing politics in terms of surveillance is good – the alternative elides the
focus of the conversation, resulting in blackmail, coercion, and discrimination
Richards 13 -- Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law, (Neil M. “THE
DANGERS OF SURVEILLANCE , Harvard Law Review Vol. 126:1934, pp. 1935-1936, 2013, tony)
At a practical level, I propose a set of four principles that should guide the future development
of surveillance law, allowing for a more appropriate balance between the costs and benefits of
government surveillance. First, we must recognize that surveillance transcends the
public/private divide. Public and private surveillance are simply related parts of the same
problem, rather than wholly discrete. Even if we are ultimately more concerned with
government surveillance, any solution must grapple with the complex relationships between
government and corporate watchers. Second, we must recognize that secret surveillance is
illegitimate and prohibit the creation of any domestic-surveillance programs whose existence
is secret. Third, we should recognize that total surveillance is illegitimate and reject the idea that
it is acceptable for the government to record all Internet activity without authorization.
Government surveillance of the Internet is a power with the potential for massive abuse. Like its
precursor of telephone wiretapping, it must be subjected to meaningful judicial process be-fore
it is authorized. We should carefully scrutinize any surveillance that threatens our intellectual
privacy. Fourth, we must recognize that surveillance is harmful. Surveillance menaces
intellectual privacy and increases the risk of blackmail, coercion, and discrimination; accordingly, we must recognize surveillance as a harm in constitutional standing doctrine. Explaining
the harms of surveillance in a doctrinally sensitive way is essential if we want to avoid sacrificing
our vital civil liberties. I develop this argument in four steps. In Part I, I show the scope of the
problem of modern “surveillance societies,” in which individuals are increasingly monitored by
an overlapping and entangled assemblage of government and corporate watchers. I then
develop an account of why this kind of watching is problematic. Part II shows how surveillance
menaces our intellectual privacy and threatens the development of individual beliefs in ways
that are inconsistent with the basic commitments of democratic societies. Part III explores how
surveillance distorts the power relationships between the watcher and the watched, enhancing
the watcher’s ability to blackmail, coerce, and discriminate against the people under its scrutiny.
Part IV explores the four principles that I argue should guide the development of surveillance
law, to protect us from the substantial harms of surveillance.
Deleuze Surveillance K
1NC Thesis and Impact
Modernity is premised on a radical shift from disciplinary power to the societies
of control, characterized by the escalation of highly invasive surveillance
techniques; this development has entrenched neoliberal violence and resisting
it requires novel strategies of insurgency
Deleuze 90 (Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” L’autre Journal 1, May 1990)
**Edited for gendered language
1. History Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they
reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The
individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the
school (“you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school"); then the factory;
from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the
prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa '51 could exclaim, “I
thought I was seeing convicts." Foucault
has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments
of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time;
to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component
forces. But what Foucault
recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the
societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize
production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the
large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the
benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a
disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be. We are in a
generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure—prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,"
in crisis like all other interiors—scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in
charge never cease announcing
supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed
forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their
expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed
until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control,
which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies. “Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new
monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of freefloating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need here to invoke the
extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter
into the new process. There
is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it’s
within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in
the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day
care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of
control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but
only to look for new weapons. 2. Logic The different internments or spaces of enclosure through which the individual
passes are independent variables: each time one is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these
places exists, it is analogical. On the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of
variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds,
distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously
change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point. This is
obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at a level of
equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a
society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas.
Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to
impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through
challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so
successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body
to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance;
but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that
opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according
to merit“ has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just
as the corporation replaces the factory,
perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the
examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation. In the disciplinary societies
one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the
societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed
services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial,
Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of
juridical forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of
the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridical life, and if
our law is hesitant,
itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter into the other. The disciplinary societies
have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her
position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same
time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the
individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest—the
flock and each of its animals—but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay “priest.”) In
the societies of
control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code:
the code is a password, while on the other hand the disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point
of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that
mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair.
Individuals have become “dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks." Perhaps it is money that
expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold in as
numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of
standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of
control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in
our manner of living and in our relations with others. The
disciplinary [person] was a discontinuous producer of
energy, but the [person] of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere
surfing has already replaced the older sports. Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society—not that machines
are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of
sovereignty made use of simple machines—levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with
machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate
with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy and the introduction of
viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar
mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-
century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration,
for production and for property. It therefore erects the factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the
owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's
familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes
by lowering the costs of production. But,
in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in
production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or
oil production. It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells
the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is
services and what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for
the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus it is essentially dispersive, and the factory has
given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct
analogical spaces that converge towards an owner—state or private power—but coded figures—
deformable and transformable—of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of
enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing
control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs,
by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby
gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the “soul" of the corporation. We are
taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of
markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and
of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long
duration, infinite and discontinuous. [The subject] is no longer [someone] enclosed, but
[someone] in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of
three quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not
only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos. 3.
Program The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given
instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction.
Félix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to
one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be
rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the
computer that tracks each person’s position—licit or illicit —and effects a universal modulation.
The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe
what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be
that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications.
What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of “substitution,” at
least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the
school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of
all university research, the introduction of the “corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine
“without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation—as
they say—but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a “dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate
system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small
examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the
progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One
of the most important questions will
concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the
spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance
against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of these coming forms,
capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being
“motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to
discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without
difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the
burrows of a molehill.
Link
Assemblage
Surveillance constitutes an assemblage which cannot be unraveled through
particular curtailments but rather must be addressed as a larger whole – their
piecemeal approach normalizes the societies of control
Haggerty and Ericson 2000 (Kevin D. Haggerty Department of Sociology University of
Alberta and Richard V. Ericson Principal of Green College Professor of Law and Sociology
University of British Columbia, “The Surveillant Assemblage”, British Journal of Sociology Vol. 51
Issue No. 4 pg. 608–610, December 2000)
THE SURVEILLANT ASSEMBLAGE The philosopher Gilles Deleuze only occasionally wrote directly on the topic of surveillance,
usually in the context of his commentaries on Foucault’s work (Deleuze 1986; 1992). In conjunction with his colleague Félix Guattari,
however, he has
provided us with a set of conceptual tools that allow us to re-think the operation
of the emergent surveillance system, a system we call the ‘surveillant assemblage’. While Deleuze and Guattari were
prolific inventors of concepts, we embrace only a few of their ideas. Undoubtedly, this means that we are not fully representing their
thought. However, our approach is entirely in keeping with their
philosophy which animates one to ‘think
otherwise’: to approach theory not as something to genuflect before, but as a tool kit from
which to draw selectively in light of the analytical task at hand (Deleuze and Foucault 1977: 208). Deleuze and
Guattari introduce a radical notion of multiplicity into phenomena which we traditionally approach as being discretely bounded,
structured and stable. ‘Assemblages’
consist of a ‘multiplicity of heterogeneous objects, whose unity
comes solely from the fact that these items function together, that they “work” together as a
functional entity’ (Patton 1994: 158). They comprise discrete flows of an essentially limitless range of
other phenomena such as people, signs, chemicals, knowledge and institutions. To dig beneath
the surface stability of any entity is to encounter a host of different phenomena and processes
working in concert. The radical nature of this vision becomes more apparent when one realizes how any particular
assemblage is itself composed of different discrete assemblages which are themselves multiple.
Assemblages, for Deleuze and Guattari, are part of the state form. However, this notion of the state form should not be confused
with those traditional apparatuses of governmental rule studied by political scientists. Instead, the state form is distinguished by
virtue of its own characteristic set of operations; the tendency to create bounded physical and cognitive spaces, and introduce
processes designed to capture flows. The
state seeks to ‘striate the space over which it reigns’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 385), a process which involves introducing breaks and divisions into otherwise freeflowing phenomena. To do so requires the creation of both spaces of comparison where flows can be rendered alike and
centres of appropriation where these flows can be captured. Flows exist prior to any particular assemblage, and
are fixed temporarily and spatially by the assemblage. In this distinction between flows and assemblages,
Deleuze and Guattari also articulate a distinction between forces and power. Forces consist of more primary and fluid
phenomena, and it is from such phenomena that power derives as it captures and striates such
flows. These processes coalesce into systems of domination when otherwise fluid and mobile states become
fixed into more or less stable and asymmetrical arrangements which allow for some to direct or govern the actions of others (Patton
1994: 161). It
is desire which secures these flows and gives them their permanence as an
assemblage. For psychoanalysts, desire is typically approached as a form of lack, as a yearning
that we strive to satisfy. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari approach desire as an active, positive
force that exists only in determinate systems. Desire is a field of immanence, and is a force
‘without which no social system could ever come into being’ (May 1993: 4). As such, desire is the inner will of
all processes and events; what Nietzsche refers to as the ‘will to power’. As we demonstrate below, a range of desires now
energize and serve to coalesce the surveillant assemblage, including the desires for control,
governance, security, profit and entertainment. The remainder of this paper documents attributes of the
surveillant assemblage. Some caution is needed, however, at this point. To speak of the surveillant assemblage risks fostering the
impression that we are concerned with a stable entity with its own fixed boundaries. In contrast, to the extent that the
surveillant assemblage exists, it does so as a potentiality, one that resides at the intersections of
various media that can be connected for diverse purposes. Such linkages can themselves be differentiated
according to the degree to which they are ad hoc or institutionalized. By accentuating the emergent and unstable
characteristic of the surveillant assemblage we also draw attention to the limitations of
traditional political strategies that seek to confront the quantitative increase in surveillance. As
it is multiple, unstable and lacks discernible boundaries or responsible governmental
departments, the surveillant assemblage cannot be dismantled by prohibiting a particularly
unpalatable technology. Nor can it be attacked by focusing criticism on a single bureaucracy or
institution. In the face of multiple connections across myriad technologies and practices,
struggles against particular manifestations of surveillance, as important as they might be, are
akin to efforts to keep the ocean’s tide back with a broom – a frantic focus on a particular
unpalatable technology or practice while the general tide of surveillance washes over us all.
Perhaps we risk having something still more monumental swept away in the tide. Recall Foucault’s (1970: 387) controversial (and
frequently misunderstood) musings at the end of The Order of Things. In this conclusion to his archaeology of how the
understanding of Man has been transformed in different epochs as humanity came into contact with different forces, Foucault
suggests that If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more
than sense the possibility . . . were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth
century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (Foucault 1970:
387) Among the proliferation of late-modern forces which are candidates for contributing to such a radical transformation we can
include the intensification of technologized forms of observation. COMPONENT PARTS The analysis of surveillance tends
to focus on the capabilities of a number of discrete technologies or social practices. Analysts
typically highlight the proliferation of such phenomena and emphasize how they cumulatively
pose a threat to civil liberties. We are only now beginning to appreciate that surveillance is
driven by the desire to bring systems together, to combine practices and technologies and
integrate them into a larger whole. It is this tendency which allows us to speak of surveillance
as an assemblage, with such combinations providing for exponential increases in the degree of
surveillance capacity. Rather than exemplifying Orwell’s totalitarian state-centred Oceana, this
assemblage operates across both state and extra-state institutions. Something as apparently
discrete as the electronic monitoring of offenders increasingly integrates a host of different
surveillance capabilities to the point that “no one is quite sure any longer what [Electronic
Monitoring] is. Voice, radio, programmed contact, remote alcohol testing, and automated reporting station (‘kiosk’)
technologies proliferate and are used both singly and in a dizzying array of combinations.”
(Renzeman 1998: 5)
Rhizome
State surveillance is a hydra and the Aff severs one of its heads but the
rhizomatic nature of the surveillant assemblage ensures that more insidious
forms of surveillance sprout up in its place
Haggerty and Ericson 2000 (Kevin D. Haggerty Department of Sociology University of
Alberta and Richard V. Ericson Principal of Green College Professor of Law and Sociology
University of British Columbia, “The Surveillant Assemblage”, British Journal of Sociology Vol. 51
Issue No. 4 pg. 614–616, December 2000)
RHIZOMATIC SURVEILLANCE Deleuze and Guattari (1987) outline how ‘rhizomes’ are plants which
grow in surface extensions through interconnected vertical root systems. The rhizome is contrasted
with arborescent systems which are those plants with a deep root structure and which grow along branchings from the
trunk. The rhizome metaphor accentuates two attributes of the surveillant assemblage: its
phenomenal growth through expanding uses, and its leveling effect on hierarchies. Rhizomatic
Expansion Rhizomes grow across a series of interconnected roots which throw up shoots in
different locations. They ‘grow like weeds’ precisely because this is often what they are. A rhizome ‘may be
broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new
lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9). Surveillance has comparable expansive and regenerative
qualities. It is now estimated that there are 500,000 surveillance cameras operating in Britain (Freeman 1999), where a city
dweller can now expect to be caught on film every five minutes (Duffy 1999). Paul Virilio argues that this
growth in observation has transformed the experience of entering the city: ‘Where once one necessarily entered the city by means
of a physical gateway, now one passes through an audiovisual protocol in which the methods of audience and surveillance have
transformed even the forms of public greeting and daily reception’ (Virilio 1997: 383). Resounding echoes of his point can be heard
in the effusive boastings of an operation’s director for a British surveillance firm who recounts how ‘The minute you arrive in
England, from
the ferry port to the train station to the city centres, you’re being CCTV’d’ (Freeman
ostensibly unitary
technology is in fact an assemblage that aligns computers, cameras, people and
telecommunications in order to survey the public streets. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize how
‘the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots’ (1987: 21). No single
technological development has ushered in the contemporary era of surveillance. Rather, its
expansion has been aided by subtle variations and intensifications in technological capabilities,
and connections with other monitoring and computing devices. Some of the rhizomatic
offshoots of the surveillant assemblage derive from efforts to seek out new target populations
that ostensibly require a greater degree of monitoring. The list of such populations is limited only by
1999). The study by Norris and Armstrong (1999) of British CCTV also demonstrates how this
imagination, and currently includes, for example, the young, caregivers, commuters, employees, the elderly, international travelers,
parolees, the privileged and the infirm. Much
of this expansion is driven by the financial imperative to find
new markets for surveillance technologies which were originally designed for military purposes
(Haggerty and Ericson 1999). For Orwell, surveillance was a means to maintain a form of hierarchical
social control. Foucault proposed that panoptic surveillance targeted the soul, disciplining the masses into a form of selfmonitoring that was in harmony with the requirements of the developing factor y system. However, Bauman (1992: 51) argues that
panopticism in contemporary society has been reduced in importance as a mechanism of social integration. Instead of being subject
to disciplinary surveillance or simple repression, the
population is increasingly constituted as consumers and
seduced into the market economy. While surveillance is used to construct and monitor
consumption patterns, such efforts usually lack the normalized soul training which is so characteristic of panopticism.
Instead, monitoring for market consumption is more concerned with attempts to limit access to places and information, or to
allow for the production of consumer profiles through the ex post facto reconstructions of a person’s behaviour,
habits and actions. In those situations where individuals monitor their behaviour in light of the thresholds established by such
surveillance systems, they are often involved in efforts to maintain or augment various social perks such as preferential credit
ratings, computer services, or rapid movement through customs. Foucault’s larger body of work displays an appreciation for the
multiple uses and targets of surveillance. Most discussions of surveillance fixate on his analysis of the panopticon, with its
individualized disciplinary form of bodily scrutiny. However, Foucault also analysed aggregate forms of surveillance. Institutions are
involved in the production and distribution of knowledge about diverse populations for the purpose of managing their behaviour
from a distance (Foucault 1991). In this way, surveillance also serves as a vital component of positive population management
strategies. The concept of ‘surplus value’ has traditionally been associated with Marxism. For Marx, it designated how the owners of
the means of production profit from workers’ excess labour power for which they are not Žfinancially compensated.
Surveillance plays an important role in this process, as it allows managers to establish and monitor
production norms at previously unheard of levels. Today, however, surplus value has escaped from a purely
labour-oriented discourse and can now also be located in the language of cybernetics. Increasingly important to modern
capitalism is the value that is culled from a range of different transaction and interaction points between individuals and
institutions. Each of these transactions is monitored and recorded, producing a surplus of information. The monetary value of
this surplus derives from how it can be used to construct data doubles which are then used to create consumer
profiles, refine service delivery and target specific markets. There is a growing trade in the
corporate sale of such information. Governments are also keen to profit from the sale of
information stored in scattered official databases. Millions of dollars are already being made through the sale of data from
license bureaus, personal income data and employment records (Kanaley 1999). In a cybernetic world, surplus value increasingly
refers to the profit that can be derived from the surplus information that different populations trail behind them in their daily lives.
The public is slowly awakening to the profits that are being made from the sale of their data doubles. One consequence of this
recognition has been the further commodification of the self. Parallel to how the emergence of the wage economy necessitated the
fixing of monetary prices to labour power, citizens and economists are now contemplating what, if any, compensation individuals
should receive for the sale of their personal information. Dennis (1999) reports on a recent study which found that 70
per cent
of Britons were happy to have companies use their personal data, on the condition that they
receive something in return, such as more personal service or rewards. Privacy is now less a line
in the sand beyond which transgression is not permitted, than a shifting space of negotiation
where privacy is traded for products, better services or special deals. In addition to a desire for
order, control, discipline and profit, surveillance has voyeuristic entertainment value. Clips from
CCTV’s are now a staple of daytime talk shows while programmes such as America’s Dumbest
Criminals have helped soften the authoritarian overtones of mass public surveillance (Doyle 1998).
The proliferation of hand-held video cameras has also given rise to America’s Funniest Home Videos, as well as the more morbid
Faces of Death videos which portray a procession of accidental fatalities which have been captured on film.
Alternative
Hacking
The Aff’s communicative strategy is inevitably interpolated by the societies of
control, our alternative is a cyber-insurgency which forgoes communication to
prioritize creation of a new subversive politics
Deleuze and Negri 90 (Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri, “Gilles Deleuze in conversation
with Antonio Negri,” http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm)
Negri: In your book on Foucault, and then again in your TV interview at INA,6 you suggest we should look in more detail at three
kinds of power: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and above all the control of "communication " that's on the way to becoming
hegemonic. On the one hand this third scenario relates to the most perfect form of domination, extending even to speech and
imagination, but on the other hand any man, any minority, any singularity, is more than ever before potentially able to speak out
and thereby recover a greater degree of freedom. In the Marxist Utopia of the Grundrisse, communism takes precise-ly the form of a
transversal organization of free individuals built on a tech-nology that makes it possible. Is communism still a viable option? Maybe
in a communication society it's less Utopian than it used to be? Deleuze: We're
definitely moving toward "control"
societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. Foucault's often taken as the theorist of discipli-nary societies and
of their principal technology, confinement (not just in hospitals and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks). But he was
actually one of the first to say that we're moving away from dis-ciplinary societies, we've already left them behind. We're moving
toward control societies
that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous
control and instant communication. Bur-roughs was the first to address this. People are of course constantly talking
about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking down. But they're breaking down because they're
fighting a losing battle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealth-ily
introduced. Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage
education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as anoth-er
closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful con-tinual training, to continual
monitoring7 of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of
the school system, but it's really its dismantling. In a control-based system noth-ing's left alone
for long. You yourself long ago suggested how work in Italy was being transformed by forms of part-time work done at home,
which have spread since you wrote (and by new forms of circulation and distribution of products). One can of course see how
each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple mechanical machines
corresponding to sovereign societies, thermo-dynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and
computers to control societies. But the machines don't explain any-thing, you have to analyze
the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component. Compared with the
approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harsh-est
confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for "uni-versals of communication"
ought to make us shudder. It's true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms
of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer pira-cy and
viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nine-teenth century called "sabotage"
("clogging" the machinery) .8 You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resis-tance that
might reopen the way for a communism understood as the "transversal organization of free individuals." Maybe, I don't know. But it
would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe
speech and communication have been corrupted.
They're thoroughly per-meated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We've
got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something dif-ferent from communicating. The
key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude
control. Negri: In Foucault and in The Fold, processes of subjectification seem to be studied more closely than in some of your
other works. The subject's the boundary of a continuous movement between an inside and outside. What are the political
consequences of this conception of the subject^ If the subject can't be reduced to an externalized citizenship, can it invest
citizenship with force and life? Can it make possible a new militant pragmatism, at once a pietas toward the world and a very radical
construct. What politics can carry into history the splen-dor of events and subjectivity. How can we conceive a community that has
real force but no base, that isn't a totality but is, as in Spinoza, absolute? Deleuze: It definitely makes sense to
look at the
various ways individuals and groups constitute themselves as subjects through processes of subjectification: what counts in such processes is the extent to which, as they take shape, they elude both
established forms of knowledge and the dominant forms of power. Even if they in turn engender
new forms of power or become assimilated into new forms of knowledge. For a while, though, they
have a real rebellious spontaneity. This is nothing to do with going back to "the subject," that is, to something invested
with duties, power, and knowledge. One might equally well speak of new kinds of event, rather than processes of
subjectification: events that can't be explained by the situations that give rise to them, or into which they lead. They appear
for a moment, and it's that moment that matters, it's the chance we must seize. Or we can simply talk
about the brain: the brain's precisely this boundary of a continuous two-way movement between an Inside and Outside, this
membrane between them. New cerebral pathways, new ways of thinking, aren't explicable in terms of microsurgery; it's for science,
rather, to try and discover what might have happened in the brain for one to start thinking this way or that. I think subjectification,
events, and brains are more or less the same thing. What we
most lack is a belief in the world, we've quite lost
the world, it's been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however
inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface
or volume. It's what you call pietas. Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be
assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people.
Pedagogy
The alternative is a radical pedagogy in opposition to the unprecedented
violence normalized by societies of control
Evans and Giroux ‘15 (Brad Evans is a senior lecturer in international relations at the School
of Sociology, Politics & International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol, UK, Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the
English and Cultural Studies Department and the Paulo Freire Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The
McMaster Institute for Innovation & Excellence in Teaching & Learning and he is also a
Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “"Disposable Futures": Critique of
Violence” http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30589-disposable-futures-critiqueof-violence, 5/6/15)
Imagine a world where spectacles of violence have
become so ubiquitous that it is no longer possible
to identify any clear civic, social, or ethical qualities in the enforced social order. Imagine a world
where those who live on the margins of such a social order are condemned for their plight, while those
who control the political processes prosper from those very policies that bring about social
abandonment and human destruction. Imagine a world where the technological promise of human
connectivity is supplanted by forms of surveillance that encourage citizens to actively participate
in their own inescapable oppression. Imagine a world that proclaims an end to the brutality of colonialism, all the while
continuing to consciously vilify, target, incarcerate, and kill those of a different color. Imagine a world where the forces of militarism
have become so ingrained that they are inseparable from the daily functioning of civic life. Imagine a world where the
institutions tasked with producing the most brilliant and publicly engaged minds are put to the
service of an uncompromising war machine. And imagine a world that has lost all faith in its ability to envisage - let
alone create - better futures, condemning its citizens instead to a desolate terrain of inevitable catastrophe. The great tragedy of the
current historical moment is that we can imagine this world all too easily, for it is the picture of the world that dominates the
realities of our present condition. It is a world most people experience on a daily basis - a world that has become normalized and for
which there is no immediate alternative - a world we understand as neoliberalism. Neoliberal
power is unmediated in
its effects on people as it operates throughout the global space of unregulated flows. Whereas in an
earlier industrial period capital was largely rooted and peoples migrated, for the most part today capital flows while peoples are
contained. What becomes of sovereignty in this economically driven environment is a military and policing protectorate put to the
service of global capital in ways that work by condemning the already condemned. At the same time, neoliberal ideology, policies,
and modes of governing are normalized as if there is no outside or alternative to capitalism. As
corporate power replaces
political sovereignty, politics becomes an extension of war and all public spaces are
transformed into battle zones. Not only are all vestiges of the social contract, the safety net, and institutions
of democracy under siege, but so too are all public spheres that support non-market values such
as trust, critical dialogue, and solidarity. How else to explain Heartland Institute President Joseph Best denouncing
public schools as "socialist regimes." Paul Buchheit is right in arguing that "privatizers believe that any form of working together as a
community is anti-American. To them, individual achievement is all that matters. They're now applying their winner-take-all profit
motive to our children." They are also punishing those individuals, groups, and institutions that refuse the individualized and cut
throat values of a market-driven casino capitalism. At the same time, under the interlocking regimes of neoliberal power, violence
appears so arbitrary and thoughtless that it lacks the need for any justification, let alone claims to justice and accountability. It is
truly as limitless as it appears banal. All that matters instead is to re-create the very conditions to further and deepen the crises of
neoliberal rule. Violence,
with its ever-present economy of uncertainty, fear, and terror, is no
longer merely a side effect of police brutality, war, or criminal behavior; it has become
fundamental to neoliberalism as a particularly savage facet of capitalism. And in doing so it has turned out to be central to
legitimating those social relations in which the political and pedagogical are redefined in order to undercut
possibilities for authentic democracy. Under such circumstances, the social becomes retrograde,
emptied of any democratic values, and organized around a culture of shared anxieties rather than
shared responsibilities. The contemporary world, then - the world of neoliberalism - creates the most monstrous of illusions, one that functions by hiding
things in plain sight. We see this most troublingly played out as its simulated spectacles of destruction are scripted in such a way as to support the narrative that violence itself is
enjoying a veritable decline as a result of liberal influence and pacification. Howard Zinn understood this perversion better than most: I start from the supposition that the world
is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out
of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start
from the supposition that we don't have to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside
down.[1] There is no greater task today than to develop a critique of violence adequate to our deeply unjust, inequitable, and violent times. Only then might we grasp the
magnitude and depths of suffering endured on a daily basis by many of the world's citizens. Only then might we move beyond the conceit of a neoliberal project, which has
normalized violence such that its worst manifestations become part of our cultural "pastimes." And only then might we reignite a radical imagination that is capable of
diagnosing the violence of the present in such a manner that we have the confidence to rethink the meaning of global citizenship in the twenty-first century. Following on from
the enduring legacy and inspiration of Zinn and other cautionary voices of political concern such as Paulo Freire, our critique begins from the supposition that mass violence
today must be understood by comprehending the ways in which systemic cruelty is transformed into questions of individual pathology. What is more, with the burden of guilt
placed on the shoulders of the already condemned, those whose lives are rendered disposable, we must question more rigorously the imaginaries of violence, which instigate a
forced partaking in a system that encourages the subjugated to embrace their oppression as though it were their liberation. Nowhere is this more apparent today than in the
doctrine of "resilience" which, as critiqued elsewhere, forces us to accept our vulnerabilities without providing us with the tools for genuine transformation of those systematic
processes that render us insecure in the first place.[2] Neoliberalism's culture of violence is reinforced by what Zsuza Ferge calls the "individualization of the social,"[3] in which
all traces of the broader structural forces producing a range of social problems such as widening inequality and mass poverty disappear. Under the regime of neoliberalism,
individual responsibility becomes the only politics that matters and serves to blame those who are susceptible to larger systemic forces. Even though such problems are not of
their own making, neoliberalism's discourse insists that the fate of the vulnerable is a product of personal issues ranging from weak character to bad choices or simply moral
deficiencies. This makes it easier for its advocates to argue that "poverty is a deserved condition."[4] Systematic violence has never been "exceptional" in the history of
capitalistic development. How might we explain David Harvey's apt description of capitalist expansion as "accumulation by dispossession,"[5] if the rise of capitalism did not
signal the advent of a truly predatory social formation? Indeed, even the contemporary advocates of neoliberal markets recognize that their notion of a "just world" depends on
coercion and violence as a way to enforce capitalism's uneven distribution of wealth and impoverishment. As the Oxford economic historian Avner Offer explained to Chris
Hedges, "those who suffer deserve to suffer."[6] The neoliberal model is, after all, "a warrant for inflicting pain."[7] The regime of neoliberalism is precisely organized for the
production of violence. Such violence is more than symbolic. Instead of waging a war on poverty it wages a war on the poor - and does so removed from any concern for social
costs or ethical violations. Such a brutal diagnosis argues in favor of a neoliberal model despite its perverse outcomes: "It is perhaps symptomatic that the USA, a society that
elevates freedom to the highest position among its values, is also the one that has one of the very largest penal systems in the world relative to its population. It also inflicts
violence all over the world. It tolerates a great deal of gun violence, and a health service that excludes large numbers of people."[8] Its effects in the United States are evident in
the incarceration of more than 2.3 million people, mostly people of color. Not only are 77 percent of all inmates people of color, but, as Michelle Alexander has pointed out, as
of 2012 "more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting
laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race."[9] The necropolitics of neoliberal policies is evident in the unnecessary deaths of up to 17,000 more Americans
each year because partisan ideologues opted out of the expansion of the Medicare program offered by the Obama administration.[10] Across the globe, violence creeps into
almost all of the commanding institutions of public life, extending from public schools to health care apparatuses. Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano knew the impacts of
neoliberalism's theater of cruelty better than most: "Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the
prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neo-colonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison."[11] Zygmunt
Bauman has taken this further by showing us how the most appalling acts of mass slaughter have been perfectly in keeping with the modern compulsion to destroy lives for
more progressive times to come.[12] Acts of non-violence, in fact, are the exceptional moments of our more recent history. They also confirm Hannah Arendt's insistence that
power and violence are qualitatively different.[13] There is no doubt something truly powerful, truly exceptional, to the examples set by Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks,
Mahatma Gandhi, and indigenous movements such as the Zapatistas of Mexico, whose choice of non-violence as an insurgent strategy reveals more fully the violence of
oppressive contemporary regimes. Violence easily deals with violence on its own terms. Carlos Marighella was wrong to suggest otherwise.[14] What violence, however, cannot
deal with, except by issuing more violence, remains the power of a dignified response and movements of collective resistance by those who refuse to get caught up in a cycle of
cruelty that corrupts every good intention. Frantz Fanon was most clear in this respect.[15] Who are the "wretched," after all, if not those who fail to see that their recourse to
violence only produces a mirror image of that which was once deemed intolerable? Our history - the history of our present - is a history of violence. Beneath the surface of every
semblance of peace, it is possible to identify all too easily the scars of sacrifice and the bloodshed of victims whose only error was often to be born in a cruel age. There are many
ways in which we could try to make sense of this burden of sacrificial history. Why do so many continue to die for the sake of the living? Why do we continue to protect inhuman
conditions through the endless wars fought in the name of humanity? Why is killing so often presented as necessary? How is it that the police in the United States can kill blacks
at a rate twenty-one times higher than whites and not only act with impunity but respond to protests by the larger public almost exclusively with massive militarized responses,
as if the use of violence is the only legitimate form of mediation to any problem that emerges in the larger society? While all these questions are important, it is precisely the
spectacle that most perturbs us here. For it is through the spectacle of violence that we begin to uncover the abilities to strip life of any political, ethical, and human claim.
Violence seeks to curate who and what is human even though the physical body might still be in existence. When violence becomes normalized and decentered, the disposability
of entire populations becomes integral to the functioning, the profiteering, and the entrenchment of the prevailing rationalities of the dominant culture. Such violence, in other
words, offers the most potent diagnosis of any political project by revealing what is deemed culturally acceptable and socially normalized. There is an important point to stress
here regarding the logics of brutality. Violence is easily condemned when it appears exceptional. This also unfortunately precludes more searching and uncomfortable questions.
Normalized violence, by contrast, represents a more formidable challenge, requiring a more sophisticated and learned response. Exposing more fully how these normalized
cultures of cruelty shape the historic moment is the main purpose of this work, as it is integral to the critical imagination and those forms of political agency necessary for
successfully living in a nonviolent and civilian future. Our motivation for writing this book is driven by a commitment to the value of critical pedagogy in countering mechanisms
of dehumanization and domination at play in neoliberal societies and beyond. We have no time whatsoever for those who reason that violence may be studied in an "objective"
or "rational" way. There are no neutral pedagogies indifferent to matters of politics, power, and ideology. Pedagogy is, in part, always about both struggle and vision—struggles
over identities, modes of agency, values, desires, and visions of the possible. Not only does the apologetics of neutrality lead to the most remiss intellectualism when the
personal experience of violence is reduced to emotionless inquiry, but it also announces complicity in the rationalizations of violence that depend upon the degradation of those
education is by definition a form of political
intervention. It is always disentangling itself from particular regimes of power that attempt to
authenticate and disqualify certain ways of perceiving and thinking about the world. The larger issue
is that not only is education central to politics, but the educative nature of politics begins with the assumption that how people
think, critically engage the world, and are self-reflective about the shaping of their own
experiences and relations to others marks the beginning of a viable and oppositional politics. We
qualities that constitute what is essential to the human condition. Thus,
dare to perceive and think differently from both neoliberal rule and the increasingly stagnant and redundant left, which does little to
counter it. The
world that we inhabit is systematically oppressive and tolerates the most banal and
ritualistic forms of violence. It educates us of the need for warfare; it prizes, above all, the values of militarism and its
conceptual apparatus of "civic soldierology." It sanctions and openly celebrates killings as if they are necessary to prove our
civilization's credentials. It takes pride, if not pleasure, in punishing peoples of distinct racial and class profiles, all in the name of
better securing society. It promotes those within that order with characteristics that in other situations would be both criminalized
and deemed pathological.[16] And it invests significantly in all manner of cultural productions so that we develop a taste for
violence, and even learn to appreciate aesthetics of violence, as the normal and necessary price of being entertained. This book
inevitably draws upon a number of critical visionaries whose fight for dignity cannot be divorced from their intellectual concerns.
The spirit of the late Paulo Freire in particular is impressed upon each of these pages.[17] His critical pedagogy was unashamedly
tasked with liberating both the oppressed and their oppressors from the self-perpetuating dynamics of subjugation. Freire's prose
echoed the humanizing call for a more just, literate, and tolerant world. He remains a strong influence in the field of education and
in other areas of practice that require thinking about the possibility of an ethics of difference that resists violence in all its forms. The
power and forcefulness of Freire's works are to be found in the tensions, conflicts, poetry, and politics that make it a project for
thinking about (non)violence meaningfully. Siding with the disempowered of history - those at the raw ends of tyranny - Freire's
work calls for a more poetic image of thought that is a way of reclaiming power by reimagining the space and practice of cultural and
political resistance. His work thus represents a textual borderland where poetry slips into liberation politics, and solidarity becomes
a song for the present begun in the past while waiting to be heard in the future. Freire, no less trenchant in his critique of
illegitimate rule, refuses to dwell in hopelessness. His resistance
is empowering because it is infused with a
fearless belief in people's abilities and finds reasons to rejoice in the transformative possibilities of
living: The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform
it. This
individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not
afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider
himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but
he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.[18] Freire is not only our
source of inspiration. Nearly a century ago Walter Benjamin responded to the tyranny of his times by writing his famous "Critique of
Violence."[19] Ours is a different age. And yet the need for a critique adequate to our times is as pressing as ever. We are not lacking
in knowledge of our own oppression. Let's be sure of that. Oppressive power reveals enough of its violent traces for even a casual
cartographer to expose its deceptions or else retreat into conspiracy. What
we do lack is a rigorous critique of the
historical moment and its varied modes of imaginative resistance. Such modes of artistic imagination are as
important as contemporary sources of oppression are in mediating suffering in the service of established contemporary
power. This requires a critique of violence that once again encourages us to think beyond its necessity, so as to
make clear that in a world in which violence is normalized, it once again becomes possible to imagine the unimaginable,
particularly the notion that collective resistance not only is possible but can transform the world with
confidence.
Framework
ROB
The ballot is the choice of Edward Snowden—will your ballot imply
complacency or using your situated position to build a network of popular
insurrection?
Connolly 13. William Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower professor of political science at Johns
Hopkins, “‘The East’ and Corporate Terrorism,” The Contemporary Condition, July 7, 2013
http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-east-and-corporate-terrorism.html,
accessed September 4, 2013
Eventually Sarah develops a strategy of public expose and activism that draws some sustenance
from her two identities and resists the traps each sets for her. I will let that part unfold when
you watch the film. Is it enough? Probably not. Could more of us participate in such acts to
augment the potential they hold? Yes, we could. Many of us are what Michel Foucault called
“specific intellectuals”, people with special knowledges and skills because of the work we do in
law firms, medical practices, college teaching, blog writing, pharmaceutical companies,
intelligence agencies, the media, school boards, churches, geological research, corporate
regulatory agencies, and so on, endlessly. Each of us has specific modes of strategic information
and critical skill linked to our role assignments. We can expose horrendous practices, as
Snowden has done recently. We can also support others who do so as we seek to build a
critical assemblage of public insurrection together.
Discourse First
Discourse informs values and attitudes – examining power relations in this
space is a prerequisite to engaging institutions
Bleiker ‘3 Roland, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland “Discourse
and Human Agency” Contemporary Political Theory. Avenel: Mar 2003.Vol. 2, Iss. 1; pg. 25
Confronting the difficulties that arise with this dualistic dilemma, I have sought to advance a positive concept of human agency that is neither grounded
in a stable essence nor dependent upon a presupposed notion of the subject. The ensuing journey has taken me, painted in very broad strokes, along
the following circular trajectory of revealing and concealing: discourses are powerful forms of domination. They frame the parameters of thinking
processes. They shape political and social interactions. Yet, discourses are not invincible. They may be thin. They may contain cracks. By moving the
gaze from epistemological to ontological spheres, one can explore ways in which individuals use these cracks to escape aspects of the discursive order.
To recognize the potential for human agency that opens up as a result of this process, one needs to shift foci again, this time from concerns with Being
to an inquiry into tactical behaviours. Moving between various hyphenated identities, individuals use ensuing mobile subjectivities to engage in daily
acts of dissent, which gradually transform societal values. Over an extended period of time, such tactical expressions of human agency gradually
transform societal values. By returning to epistemological levels, one can then conceptualize how these transformed discursive practices engender
processes of social change. I
have used everyday forms of resistance to illustrate how discourses not only
frame and subjugate our thoughts and behaviour, but also offer possibilities for human agency.
Needless to say, discursive dissent is not the only practice of resistance that can exert human
agency. There are many political actions that seek immediate changes in policy or institutional
structures, rather than 'mere' shifts in societal consciousness. Although some of these actions
undoubtedly achieve results, they are often not as potent as they seem. Or, rather, their
enduring effect may well be primarily discursive, rather than institutional. Nietzsche (1982b, 243) already
knew that the greatest events 'are not our loudest but our stillest hours.' This is why he stressed
that the world revolves 'not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new
values.' And this is why, for Foucault too, the crucial site for political investigations are not
institutions, even though they are often the place where power is inscribed and crystallized. The
fundamental point of anchorage of power relations, Foucault claims, is always located outside
institutions, deeply entrenched within the social nexus. Hence, instead of looking at power from
the vantage point of institutions, one must analyse institutions from the standpoint of power
relations (Foucault, 1982, 219-222).
Right to Look K
Links
Genealogy
The AFF’s Genealogical reading of surveillance presupposes clear teleology
within history, however history isn’t linear. Their panoptic understanding of
surveillance is ignorant of the foundational site of surveillance: the plantation,
wherein the historical context of totalitarianism was established.
--- Genealogy link. Also sets up your arguments about power being diffuse under the watchful
eye of the overseer.
Mirzoeff 11. Nicholas, professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at
New York University, “The Right to Look”, Duke University Press 2011.
COMPLEXES OF VISUALITY
The substance of this chapter—it is more than an introduction to the rest of the book, although
it is of course also that—explores how to work with the interfaces between visuality and
countervisuality within and between complexes of visuality from a decolonial perspective.
“Complex” here means both the production of a set of social organizations and processes that
form a given complex, such as the plantation complex, and the state of an individual's psychic
economy, such as the Oedipus complex. The resulting imbrication of mentality and organization
produces a visualized deployment of bodies and a training of minds, organized so as to sustain
both physical segregation between rulers and ruled, and mental compliance with those
arrangements. The complex that thus emerges has volume and substance, forming a life-world
that can be both visualized and inhabited. I consider the complexes of visuality to be an
articulation of the claim to authority in what decolonial theory has called “coloniality,” meaning
“the transhistoric expansion of colonial domination and the perpetuation of its effects in
contemporary times.”16 As Achille Mbembe has shown, such coloniality is formed by modes of
“entanglement” and “displacement,” producing “discontinuities, reversals, inertias and swings
that overlay one another.”17 This sense that the “time is out of joint,” appropriated by Derrida
from Hamlet, has come to be seen as the expression of the contradictions of globalization.18
Identifying these entanglements and moments of displacement are central to defining the
genealogies of visuality and form the material for the chapters that follow. Such networks also
remind us that no such genealogy can be comprehensive. Mbembe's emphasis on complex
temporality further suggests that one modality of visuality was not simply succeeded by
another, but rather that their traces linger, and can be revived at unexpected moments. The
present is precisely one such moment, in which the legacies of the plantation complex are once
again active in the United States, due to the Obama presidency, while imperial dreams are being
worked out globally in full interface with the military-industrial complex. The very emergence of
all the modalities of visuality at once suggests an emergency, as both the condition of a critique
of visuality and the possibility of the right to look. The symptom of that emergency is precisely
the ability to detect the crisis of visuality, such that the visibility of visuality is paradoxically the
index of that crisis.
The authority of coloniality has consistently required visuality to supplement its deployment of
force. Visuality sutures authority to power and renders this association “natural.” For Nelson
Maldonado Torres, this colonial violence formed a “death ethic of war,” meaning the extensive
presence of war and related social practices, such as mass incarceration and the death penalty,
to which I would add slavery, understood as being derived from “the constitutive character of
coloniality and the naturalization of human difference that is tied to it in the emergence and
unfolding of Western modernity.”19 This decolonial genealogy means that it will not be
sufficient to begin a critique of visuality in the present day, or in the recent past, but that it must
engage with the formation of coloniality and slavery as modernity.20 As Enrique Dussel has
aptly put it: “Modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon but one constituted in a dialectical
relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content.”21 In order to challenge the
claimed inevitability of this history and its hegemonic means to frame the present, any
engagement with visuality in the present or the past requires establishing its counterhistory. In
fact, I suggest that one of the very constitutive forms of visuality is the knowledge that it is
always already opposed and in struggle. To coin a phrase, visuality is not war by other means: it
is war. This war was constituted first by the experience of plantation slavery, the foundational
moment of visuality and the right to look. In antiquity, authority was literally a patriarchal
modality of slavery. The modern hero's authority restates the ancient foundations of authority
as slave-owner and interpreter of messages, the “eternal” half of modern visuality, to
paraphrase Baudelaire, the tradition that was to be preserved.
Authority is derived from the Latin auctor. In Roman law, the auctor was at one level the
“founder” of a family, literally the patriarch. He was also (and always) therefore a man
empowered to sell slaves, among other forms of property, which completed the complex of
authority.22 Authority can be said to be power over life, or biopower, foundationally rendered
as authority over a “slave.”23 However, this genealogy displaces the question: who or what
empowers the person with authority to sell human beings? According to the Roman historian
Livy, the indigenous people living on the site that would become Rome were subject to the
authority (auctoritas) of Evander, son of Hermes, who ruled “more by authority than by power
(imperium).” That authority was derived from Evander's ability, as the son of the messenger of
the gods, to interpret signs. As Ranciere puts it, “The auctor is a specialist in messages.”24 This
ability to discern meaning in both the medium and the message generates visuality's aura of
authority. When it further becomes invested with power (imperium), that authority becomes
the ability to designate who should serve and who should rule. Such certainties did not survive
the violent decentering of the European worldview produced by the multiple shocks of “1492”:
the encounter with the Americas, the expulsion of the Jews and Islam from Spain, and the
heliocentric system of Copernicus. At the beginning of the modern period, Montaigne could
already discern what he called the “mystical foundation of authority,” meaning that it was
ultimately unclear who or what authorizes authority.25 As Derrida suggests, “Since the origin of
authority, the foundation or ground, the position of the law can't by definition rest on anything
but themselves, they are themselves a violence without a ground.”26 Authority's presumed
origin in legality is in fact one of force, the enforcement of law, epitomized in this context by the
commodification of the person as forced labor that is slavery. This self-authorizing of authority
required a supplement to make it seem self-evident, which is what I am calling visuality.
Generic
Western deployed surveillance technologies originated from the planation
Mirzoeff 11. Nicholas, professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at
New York University, “The Right to Look”, Duke University Press 2011.
The Ordering of Slavery
The deployment of visuality and visual technologies as a Western social technique for ordering
was decisively shaped by the experience of plantation slavery in the Americas, forming the
plantation complex of visuality.1 If it has often been claimed that modernity was the product of
slavery, there has been insufficient attention to the ways in which the modern “ways of seeing”
also emerged from this nexus.2 What one might call the received genealogy of modern visual
culture begins with the major change in the mid-seventeenth century in the European division
of the sensible. It created what Foucault called “the division, so evident to us, between what we
see, what others have observed and handed down, and what others imagine or naively believe,
the great tripartition into Observation, Document, and Fable” In this new formation, there was a
gap between things and words, a gap that could be crossed by seeing, a form of seeing that
would dictate what it was possible to say. As the seeing preceded the naming, that which
Foucault called the “nomination of the visible” (132) was the central practice. He emphasized
that this was not a question of people suddenly learning to look harder or more closely, but a
new set of priorities attached to sensory perception. Taste and smell became less important,
now being understood as imprecise, hearsay was simply excluded, while touch was limited to a
series of binary distinctions, such as that between rough and smooth. This new “order of things”
was itself produced by the necessities of European expansion and encounter, above all in the
plantation colonies. As W. J. T Mitchell has cogently put it, “An empire requires not just a lot of
stuff but what Michel Foucault called an ‘order of things,’ an epistemic field that produces a
sense of the kinds of objects, the logic of their speciation, their taxonomy.”4 Empire thus claims
objectivity. What we need to insist on here, at the risk of seeming blunt, is that the primary
“thing” being ordered was the “slave.”5 The “slave” was first classified by natural history, which
created a relevant modality of “species,” then separated from “free” space by mapping, while
the force of law embodied in slave codes that sustained the logic of the division, enforced it
against challenge, thereby making it seem “right,” and hence aesthetic.
This transformation has been clearly summarized by David C. Scott: “The slave plantation might
be characterized as establishing the relations and the material and epistemic apparatuses
through which new subjects were constituted: new desires instilled, new aptitudes molded, new
dispositions acquired.”6 Such changed relations were not uniform among the European
colonizing powers but were enacted primarily in British and French colonial space by the
Barbados slave code (1661) and the Code Noir (1685) respectively. In Spanish America, a violent
visual transformation had begun as early as the sixteenth century, seeking to transform the
“idols” of the indigenous into “images.”7 While that history is far from irrelevant here and
indeed will keep insisting on being included, it has not been within my powers to include it
throughout and retain coherence within the compass of a manageable book. On the sugar
islands of the Caribbean, the colonizers were more concerned with slaves than with the
indigenous, whose genocide was all but complete by the time that the seventeenth-century
“sugar revolution” shifted emphasis within the “plantation complex” from Dutch Brazil to the
French and British possessions in the Caribbean.8 It was not by chance that these were the
locations that influenced Carlyle's formation of the discourse of visuality. So the slavery under
discussion in this book is not a metaphysical condition of servitude (as in Hegel, for example),
but the legally regulated, visually controlled, hyperviolent condition of forced labor in Atlantic
world cash- crop plantations. What results is therefore not that which Foucault has called the
classical order of representation, derived from the great image of Spanish absolutism,
Velazquez's Las Meninas (1651 ).9 The ordering of slavery was a combination of violent
enforcement and visualized surveillance that sustained the new colonial order of things. I call it
here “oversight,” meaning the nomination of what was visible to the overseer on the plantation.
Panopticonism
Panoptic understandings of surveillance are incapable of response to the
globalized counter-insurgency predicated on visualizing colonial struggles. We
exist in a post-panoptic era of visuality, in which information proliferation feeds
into a visualized and sensationalized mass-media conglomerate.
--- Link Panopticon
--- Power (surveillance) is no longer singular, but rather diffuse.
--- modern surveillance has a different intent than the panopticon
Mirzoeff 11. Nicholas, professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at
New York University, “The Right to Look”, Duke University Press 2011.
THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: GLOBAL COUNTERINSURGENCY AND POST-PANOPTIC
VISUALITY
While in Western Europe the end of the Second World War marked a break in this domination,
these conditions were not changed in the colonies. This continuity was exemplified by the
violent French repression of a nationalist demonstration, in 1945, in the town of Setif, Algeria,
on V-E Day itself (8 May 1945), with estimated casualties ranging from the French government
figure of 1,500 to Fanon's claim of 45,000, following Arab media reports of the time. However,
the war of independence that followed (1954-62) was not simply a continuance of imperialism.
For the French, Algeria was not a colony, but simply part of France. For the resistance
movement, led by the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), much energy was expended in trying
to gain the sympathies of the United Nations, including the legendary general strike known as
the “battle of Algiers.” Algeria marked the failure of the imperial aesthetic to convince its
subject populations that their domination was right. As part of the wave of decolonization, it
was a central moment in the failure of the classification of “civilized” and “primitive” that was
asserted as clinical fact by colonial psychology of the period. Despite their best efforts, the
French were unable to sustain the physical and mental separation between the colonizer and
the colonized. Counterinsurgency in Algeria began the practice of “disappearing” those
suspected of aiding the insurgency in material or immaterial fashion, beginning the sorry
genealogy that reaches from Argentina and Chile to today's “renditions” of suspected terrorists
to so-called black sites by the CIA and other U.S. government agencies. Yet today French cities
and villages are increasingly decorated with monuments and inscriptions to what are now called
the wars in North Africa, marking the consolidation of global counterinsurgency as the
hegemonic complex of Western visuality.
The emergence of the Cold War division between the United States and the Soviet Union almost
immediately forced metropolitan and decolonial politics into a pattern whereby being
anticolonial implied communist sympathies and supporting colonial domination was part of
being pro-Western.51 This classification became separation in almost the same moment, at
once aestheticized as “freedom” The Cold War quickly became a conflict so all-enveloping by
1961 that even President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of the “total influence—
economic, political, even spiritual” of what he called “the military-industrial complex.”52 In
1969, the novelist and former president of theDominican Republic Juan Bosch, who had been
deposed in a coup seven months after his election, in 1963, warned that “imperialism has been
replaced by a superior force. Imperialism has been replaced by pentagonism”— Bosch saw this
“pentagonism” as being separate from capitalism, a development beyond Lenin's thesis that
imperialism was the last stage of capital. In common with the Situationists, Bosch envisaged a
militarization and colonization of everyday life within the metropole. While his analysis is rarely
remembered today, the global reach of counterinsurgency since 2001 and its ability to expand
even as capital is in crisis has borne him out. The tactics of the now notorious COINTELPRO, or
Counter-Intelligence Program (1956-71), of the FBI have now been globalized as the operating
system of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Launched at the end of the Cold War, the
RMA was at first conceived as high-technology information war, but has intensified into a
counterinsurgency whose goal is nothing less than the active consent of the “host” culture to
neoliberal globalization.
The entanglements and violence of counterinsurgency that began in Algeria and continued in
Vietnam and Latin America have intensified into today's global counterinsurgency strategy,
known to the U.S. military as GCOIN, which combines the cultural goals of imperial strategy with
electronic and digital technologies of what I call post-panoptic visuality. Under this rubric,
anywhere may be the site for an insurgency, so everywhere needs to be watched from multiple
locations. Whereas during the Cold War, there were distinct “battle lines” producing “hot spots”
of contestation, the entire planet is now taken to be the potential site for insurgency and must
be visualized as such. Thus Britain, the closest ally of the United States, has also produced a
steady stream of violent insurgents. Despite this literal globalization, visualizing remains a
central to counterinsurgency. The Field Manual FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, written at the
behest of General David Petraeus, in 2006, tells its officers in the field that success depends on
the efficacy of the “commander's visualization” of the Area of Operations, incorporating history,
culture, and other sets of “invisible” information into the topography. This visualization required
of the commander in Iraq or Afghanistan—of the flow of history as it is happening, formed by
past events with an awareness of future possibilities—would have been entirely familiar to
Carlyle, even if the digital metaphors and technologies would have eluded him GCOIN is an
entanglement of nineteenth-century strategy with twenty-first century technology. The
counterinsurgency commander is further recommended to read T. E. Lawrence (of “Arabia”),
whose First World War heroics were the apogee of imperial visuality, and such works as Small
Wars, by a nineteenth-century British general. Today's counterinsurgent is encouraged to see
him or herself in a continuum with wars ranging from Algeria to Malaya (as was) and Latin
America, and cognitively part of a history that is held to begin with the French Revolution, in
1789. In a further amalgam of past strategies of visuality, the distinction of “culture” that
spatialized the imperial complex has now become the very terrain of conflict. Anthropologists
are attached to combat brigades under the rubric of Human Terrain Systems so as to better
interpret and understand local cultures. It has been with the counterinsurgency phase of the
military-industrial complex that the “soul” of the (neo)colonized has most fully entered the
frame. In this form of conflict, the counterinsurgent seeks not simply military domination, but an
active and passive consent to the legitimacy of the supported regimes, meaning that regime
change is only the precursor to cultural change. This desire for consent reaches across the entire
population. As Carlyle would have wanted, today's global hero wants both to win and to be
worshipped.
The post-panoptic visuality of global counterinsurgency produces a visualized authority whose
location not only cannot be determined from the visual technologies being used but may itself
be invisible. This viewpoint can toggle between image sets, zoom in and out of an image
whether by digital or optical means, and compare them to databases of previous imagery.54 It is
able to use satellite imagery, infrared, and other technologies to create previously unimaginable
visualizations. In everyday life, the prevalence of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance
marks this switch to post-panoptic visualization, with its plethora of fragmented, time-delayed,
low-resolution images monitored mostly by computer, to no other effect than to make the
watching visible. For while CCTV has been able to track the path of the 9/11 or 7/7 terrorists
after the fact, it did nothing to prevent those attacks, let alone reform those observed, as the
panopticon was intended to do. The signature military technology of GCOIN is the Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle (UAV), a computer-controlled drone armed with missiles that is manipulated by
operators at any location, usually in safe spaces within the United States, rather than in
proximity to the battlefield itself. The rise of the UAV has caused controversy among the
theorists of GCOIN, such as David Kilcullen, who feel that the tactic undermines the strategic
goals of winning the consent of the population. As James der Derian has eloquently argued:
“The rise of a military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET) has increasingly
virtualized international relations, setting the stage for virtuous wars in which history,
experience, intuition and other human traits are subordinated to scripted strategies and
technological artifice, in which worst-case scenarios produce the future they claim only to
anticipate.”55 Ironically, the script of using cultural understanding from history and experience
to win consent has now simply been declared to have been enacted. The 2010 campaign in
Afghanistan was marked by extraordinary theater in which General McChrystal announced his
intention to capture Marja and Kandahar in advance, hoping to minimize civilian casualties, but
this tactic also reduced Taliban casualties, so that it is entirely unclear who is really in charge on
the ground. This suggests GCOIN is now a kind of theater, with competing stunts being
performed for those who consider themselves always entitled to see. The U.S. military are
having an intense internal debate about which form of GCOIN is the future of military tactics. It
is clear that UAV missile attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been notably accelerated.
These tactics increasingly resemble those of the Israeli Defense Force, in which the real goal is
maintaining a permanent state of crisis, rather than achieving a phantasmatic victory. In the
game context in which war is now visualized, the point is less to win than to keep playing,
permanently moving to the next level in the ultimate massively multiplayer environment.
Surveillance
The AFF misunderstands surveillance – it’s not an abstract result of domestic
discourse or power relations, but it’s an all out attempt at domestic counterinsurgency In a racist attempt to destroy alterity.
--- Surveillance is actually domestic counter-insurgency
Mirzoeff 11. Nicholas, professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at
New York University, “The Right to Look”, Duke University Press 2011.
COIN has become a digitally mediated version of imperialist techniques to produce legitimacy. It
insists that the “commander's visualization” is the key to success in the conflict against
insurgents, but there is “paradoxically” less visual content (traditionally defined) to such
visualization. It centers on the cultural and historical elements of a particular place, imagined
and accessed as a network within a digital framework. Such paradoxical visualization seeks to
generate legitimacy by means of population control, blending imperial strategy with the
governmentality of developed societies. The doctrine is defined as a return to the cultural
politics of war and to the concept of war as culture.37 A digitally enabled military, using
surveillance and information as its primary tools, seeks to dominate culture using a networked
leadership, in patterns set by imperial regimes, that is invisible to those led. Unlike the
Panopticon or plantation, the place of surveillance is not just invisible, but unknown, what one
might call its undisclosed location. This is post-panoptic visuality for a new era, a neovisuality
enabled by global digital technology that nonetheless understands itself to be part of a
centuries-old tradition. In the first pages of the Field Manual insurgency is defined as existing on
a continuum from the French Revolution of 1789, with insurgency as one “extreme” and a “coup
d'etat” as the other. Not by chance, figures from Napoleon on can now be presented as
counterinsurgents, a version of history that would have been congenial to Carlyle.
Counterinsurgency, imagining itself quashing all modern revolts from the French Revolution to
the military coup, thus figures itself as legitimacy. It seeks both to produce an acquiescent
national culture and to eliminate insurgency, understood as any challenge to power. It does so
not simply by means of repression, but by the progressive application of techniques of consent
under the imperative “culture must be defended.” The Field Manual offers an instrumental
definition of power as “the key to manipulating the interests of groups within a society” (3-55).
But power alone is not enough: “Victory is achieved when the populace consents to the
government's legitimacy and stops actively and passively supporting the insurgency” (1-14).
Dominance must be accompanied by a consensual hegemony that generates the legitimacy of
counterinsurgency in thought and deed. This ideological idealism is still offered as a political
justification for the war, even as the tactics have become directed at a necropolitical
management of hostile populations.
While COIN wants to be framed as a heroic narrative—a story of overcoming resistance—it can
best be analyzed as a set of related techniques. Resting on visualization as a military tactic
enabled by digital technologies, COIN seeks to render a culture in its own image that will actively
want to be subject to biopolitical imperial governance. Visualization is the key leadership tactic
that holds together the disparate components of counterinsurgency into what one might call
“visualized information war.” Indeed, according to the counterinsurgency manual, it is policy
that “the commander's visualization forms the basis for conducting... an operation” (A-20). In
the section of the manual intended to be read by officers in the field, this visualization is defined
as the necessity of knowing the map by heart and being able to place oneself in the map at any
time. Nowhere is the legacy of the history of visuality described in this book clearer than in
these instructions. Media and other imagery are components of the visualization, rather than its
substance. For instance, “media activities” can be the primary activity of an insurgency,
according to the army, while “imagery intelligence” in the form of still and moving images are
vital to counterinsurgency (3-97). Visualization by contrast requires commanders to know “the
people, topography, economy, history, and culture of their area of operations” (7-7). The
counterinsurgent thus transforms his tactical disadvantage into strategic mastery by rendering
unfamiliar territory into a simulacrum of the videogame's “fully rendered actionable space.”38
Counterinsurgency cultivates optical invisibility in support of a digitized surveillance and
command structure. Its favored tactics include “disappearances,” renditions, the “invisible”
prison camp, no-fly lists, no-fly zones, electronic surveillance, and non-accountable
interrogators, known as Other Government Agency personnel. When counterinsurgency deploys
itself as a visualized field, it does so by means of representation in which the place of
observation is invisible or obscured, for the state of exception is a non-place, like the mystical
perception of Carlyle's Hero. Comprised of digitized images, satellite photographs, night-vision
goggles, and map-based intervention, post-panoptical space creates a 3-D rendition of the
insurgency that corresponds to the counterinsurgent's experience of space in a grid accessible
only to the “commander,” the modern-day Hero. Taken together, these abilities are summarized
as the “commander's visualization,” using Carlyle's own term, but this visualization is now
comprised of data and imagery invisible to the unaided human eye.
Impact
Control Society
***The model of disciplinary power is insufficient to grapple with a society in
which control is the principle. Speech acts and genealogies lose their potency as
information and visuality are rendered subservient to a racist necropolitics
invested in counter-insurgency waged on all fronts.
--- Deleuzian control thesis
--- Obama era necropolitcs// this could be an impact to a policy oriented K as well.
--- drones link
--- racism impact
Mirzoeff 11. Nicholas, professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at
New York University, “The Right to Look”, Duke University Press 2011.
The goal of such governance is not to produce disciplined, docile bodies, so much as to manage
what Deleuze called the “society of control.” In the parlance of counterinsurgency, this terrain is
known as “culture,” sometimes even defined and described using poststructuralist and culturalstudies theorists—including Deleuze. This post-panoptic imaginary operates a control that
seeks to separate the “host population” from the “insurgent,” as if quarantining the former from
infection by the latter. This necropolitics is invisible to the insurgent, with no expectation of
reforming or disciplining that person, hence the sense that it is post-panoptic. For Bentham's
Panopticon was designed above all to reform and improve the inmate, pupil, or factory worker,
while post-panoptic visuality centers on population control. Despite an apparent but carefully
stage-managed success in Iraq, which seems to be coming unstuck after the failed elections of
2010, global counterinsurgency has struggled to deliver basic services and public safety in its key
areas of operations from Afghanistan to Pakistan and Yemen. These quantitative shortcomings
are perhaps the corollary of the qualitative failure to define the practice of counterinsurgency
beyond the classification and separation of the insurgent. Precisely because this is the era of
globalization, characterized by transnational migration and electronic media, the digitized
“border” between insurgent and host population consistently fails to hold. In the resulting crisis,
the very pattern that counterinsurgency is trying to sustain is unclear: a centralized nation, a
client state, or a global market? Although the U.S. military continue to use a moralized rhetoric
of nation-building, their practical administration of counterinsurgency has significantly shifted
to the management of disaster by means of targeted killing of insurgents using Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Special Forces, and private contractors. Ironically, perhaps, the Bush-era
pursuit of governmentality in regions like Afghanistan has yielded to Obama's necropolitics, in
which killing enemy leaders is the priority, epitomized by the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The long-standing project of defining the social from the perspective of militarized visuality has
been deliberately made incoherent. Today's technologically mediated means of material
visualization do not generate information about the presence of the human visualizer, if indeed
there even is one. If we look at the drawings made by Bagetti for Napoleon, and other such
battlefield visualizations of the Clausewitz era, the viewpoint of the commanding general was
critical to the technical production of the map. By contrast, a satellite image, or one taken from
a UAV, tells us nothing at all about those who wanted the visualization made. In a somewhat
uncanny fashion, the Medusa effect, which I ascribed to Carlyle's concept of visuality, has now
found a technological analogy. By the Medusa effect, I intended to convey visuality's politics of
making the separation between autocrat and ruled so permanent that it was, as it were, set in
stone. A new military device known as the “Gorgon Stare” has been devised to generate twelve
separate visual feeds from one UAV platform, covering four square kilometers of territory. Each
feed can be viewed separately and concurrently. While the feeds are low-grade, they can be
used to direct the full-motion video feed to specific targets.4 With perhaps surprising satire, the
device is named after the mythical Gorgon, whose castrating stare turned people to stone. It is
intended in part, then, to intimidate and to make it seem that whatever insurgents might do is
visible and will be seen. Dehumanized weapons are certainly fear-inducing, for, in Thomas
Pynchon's famous phrase, “a screaming comes across the sky.”5 Journalistic reports indicate a
similar anger in present-day Pakistan, where airborne drone attacks have increased such that as
many as eighteen were launched in a few days after the failed Times Square bombing of May
2010. However, it was precisely such attacks that some consider to have motivated the attempt
to target New York in the first place, forming a familiar asymmetric feedback loop: increased
remote attacks of increased sophistication provoke increased attacks against U.S. civilians using
improvised and nonmilitary materials, like fireworks. Any such attack generates further reprisals
on both sides. Further, the chaos produced by post-panoptic visuality is its condition of
existence. Whereas Carlyle offered the Hero and his visualization as the only defense against
chaos, the counterinsurgent requires chaos, or at least its possibility, as the means of
authorization in all senses. Its gambit is simply that civilian governance lacks both the authority
and the imagination to resolve any of the crises that generate the need for counterinsurgency.
Increasingly, the result has been to create the seemingly contradictory practice of
counterinsurgent governance, the necropolitical regimes of separation.
It is at the borders of the United States and European Union that these asymmetric flows and
counterflows are worked out domestically. Other modes of separation and distinction, such as
the color line, are mobilized by this intensification because they are already there. For example,
the U.S.- Mexico border is a racialized distinction, just like that between “Europe” and “Africa”
on Spain's southern coasts and islands. Domestic segregation is complexly interactive with the
global counterinsurgency. It also visualizes its tasks as “to clear” and “to hold,” which is to say to
classify residents (as insurgent/illegal or “legitimate” resident) and separate them by physical
means. In the United States, the domestic use of counterinsurgency became apparent in the
response to Hurricane Katrina. In a (now deleted) article that appeared in the Army Times on 2
September 2005, Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard's Joint Task
Force, declared, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia.... We're going to go out and take
this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.” The journalist
understood this to mean that the National Guard would be combating “an insurgency in the
city.”6 In Spike Lee's powerful documentary of the events, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem
in Four Acts (2006), several sequences demonstrate the practical consequence of this division of
the sensible. We see then governor of Louisiana Kathleen Blanco histrionically announcing the
deployment of the National Guard into the city with the remark that they have just returned
from Iraq and will shoot to kill. We see a reporter for the BBC, usually the most decorous of
journalists, quivering with rage as law enforcement near the Superdome surrounded one man
accused of looting while dozens of others struggled through the by then polluted waters
unassisted. We see Lt. Gen. Russel Honore arriving in New Orleans on Friday, 2 September 2005,
telling the soldiers, “Put those damn weapons down”— and their palpable reluctance to do so
(see fig. 55). We realize that for the past four days U.S. troops have routinely been training their
weapons on their own citizens. Ironically, the historian Douglas Brinkley, featured in Lee's film,
reports that the terrorism security apparatus slowed the Department of Homeland Security's
response because of all the background checks.7 This adaptation of domestic politics to the
regime of counterinsurgency has since gone viral. Opponents of gay marriage in the United
States refer to such couples as “domestic terrorists.” High-school principals describe their work
in inner-city schools as “classic counterinsurgency.” Border patrols in Nogales, Arizona, follow
the counterinsurgency mantra “clear, hold, build” as the guiding light for their enforcement of
immigration law. In April 2010, a strikingly unconstitutional state law was passed in Arizona,
requiring police to pursue those who appeared to be illegal immigrants and criminalizing any
immigrant at large without documentation. While the law may well be invalidated, it was widely
agreed that it was passed for “domestic” political reasons within the state. The intent is to
intensify the racialized divide between the citizen and the undocumented migrant worker,
creating a nomadic border that can be instantiated whenever a “citizen” looks at a person
suspected of being a migrant. Indeed, the UAV is now widely used in cross-border surveillance,
flying first on the border and more recently in Mexico itself.8 British police have advanced plans
for the extensive use of drones as domestic surveillance tools.9 Test flights in Liverpool
produced a first arrest in February, 2010, only for the drones to be grounded by the Civil
Aviation Authority for lacking the requisite license.10
These imbrications of classic population-management discourses, from sexuality to education
and immigration, with low-intensity asymmetric urban warfare both produces, and is a product
of, the crisis in visuality. In 1990, Deleuze emphasized that Foucault had only been able to
perceive the constraints of the disciplinary society because they were coming undone as the
society of control took over. The coils of the serpent Leviathan, the state and its population
management, had so extensively succeeded in driving Marx's “old mole” of class struggle
underground that population could now be managed, rather than disciplined. The corollary here
is that visuality itself has today become “visible” at a point of intensification in which it can no
longer fully contain that which it seeks to visualize. That is to say, chaos is now not the
alternative to visuality but its condition of necessity. The so-called visual turn in the humanities
since 1989 is, then, a symptomatic response to first the neovisuality of the RMA, which followed
the end of the Cold War, and now the intensified crisis of that visuality. Take the axiomatic
phrase “Move on, there's nothing to see here,” which I have borrowed from Ranciere. Under
conditions of (counter)insurgency, everyone knows that not to be the case. In Iraq and
Afghanistan, insurgents and suicide bombers have often dressed in military and police uniforms
to further confuse relations of visuality. Circulation itself becomes dangerous when roadside
explosive devices and marketplace suicide bombings are the tactics of choice. The Chinese artist
Cai Guo-Qiang visualized this contradiction in his spectacular sculpture Nothing to See Here
(2006). It consists of a sixteen-foot-long fiberglass crocodile, impaled with bamboo spears and
hundreds of “sharp objects” confiscated by Chinese transport police, such as forks, chopsticks,
and scissors. The confiscations allow the passenger to keep circulating, but perhaps we are all
missing the five-hundred-pound crocodile in the room With his trademark subtlety, Cai makes
us question whether the crocodile is the enemy insurgent or perhaps the body-politic of our
own society, so enmired in “security” as to have lost a sense of purpose. As the economic crisis
has shown, circulation is not always possible and is certainly not always an answer as to what to
do next. If that circulation is by car, as in the French circulation, meaning “traffic,” then it adds
to the disaster of climate change as well. Caught between the car crash, the car bomb, and the
fossil fuel-generated climate crisis, it seems impossible to know which way to turn.
Racism
The Alternative’s counter-visual understanding of history is necessary to
challenge slavery.
Mirzoeff 11. Nicholas, professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at
New York University, “The Right to Look”, Duke University Press 2011.
Visualized techniques were central to the operations of the Atlantic world formed by plantation
slavery and its ordering of reality. The plantation complex as a material system lasted from the
seventeenth century until the late nineteenth, and affected primarily those parts of the globe
known as the Atlantic triangle: the European slave-owning nations, Central and West Africa, the
Caribbean and the plantation colonies of the Americas. The plantation complex designates the
system of forced labor on cash-crop plantations, in which the role of authority was described by
historian Phillip Curtin: “The [slave] owner not only controlled his work force during working
hours, he also had, at least de facto, some form of legal jurisdiction. His agents acted informally
as policemen. They punished most minor criminals and settled most disputes without reference
to higher authority.”37 Sovereign authority was thus delegated to the plantation, where it was
managed in a system of visualized surveillance. While the overseer was always confronted with
revolt large and small, his authority was visualized as the surrogate of the monarch's and hence
Absolute. The overseer, who ran the colonial slave plantation, embodied the visualized
techniques of its authority, and so I call them collectively “oversight.” Oversight combined the
classifications of natural history, which defined the “slave” as a species, with the spatializing of
mapping that separated and defined slave space and “free” space. These separations and
distinctions were enabled by the force of law that allowed the overseer to enforce the slave
codes. This regime can be said to have been established between the passing of the Barbados
Slave Code, in 1661, and the promulgation of Louis XTVs Code Noir, in 1685. This ordering of
slavery was interactive with the “order of things” famously discerned as coming into being at
the same period in Europe by Foucault. A certain set of people were classified as commodifiable
and a resource for forced labor. By means of new legal and social codes, those so enslaved were
of course separated from the free not just in physical space, but in law and natural history. Once
assembled, the plantation complex came to be seen to be right. In his justifications for slavery,
the nineteenth-century Southern planter John Hammond turned such stratagems into axioms of
human existence: “You will say that man cannot hold property in man. The answer is that he can
and actually does all the world over, in a variety of forms, and has always done so.”38 Under the
plantation complex and in the long shadow of its memory, a moment that has yet to pass,
slavery is both literal and metaphorical: it is the very real trauma of chattel slavery and an
expression of a technically “free” social relation that is felt to be metaphorically equivalent to
slavery. So, too, is abolition literal and metaphorical. It expresses a moment of emancipation,
but also a condition in which slavery of all kinds would be impossible. As early as the mideighteenth century, the enslaved had devised counters to the key components of oversight.
Maroons, or runaway slaves, had established settlements in many plantation colonies,
sometimes signing formal treaties with colonial powers and thereby remapping the colony. The
enslaved had a superior understanding of tropical botany and were able to put this knowledge
to good effect in poisoning their masters, or so it was widely believed. Finally, the syncretic
religions of the plantation complex had produced a new embodied aesthetic represented in the
votive figures known as garde-corps, literally “body guard.” The revolt led, in 1757, by Francois
Makandal in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, united these different techniques into an effective
countervisuality that came close to overthrowing slavery. The plantocracy, as the ruling planter
class was known, responded by intensifying slavery. By the time of the revolution, in 1791, SaintDomingue was the single greatest producer of (colonial) wealth in the Western world. Huge
numbers of people were imported as forced labor as the planters sought both to achieve
autonomy for the island from the metropole and to automate the production process of the
cash crops, especially sugar. This intensification in turn produced the world-historical event of
the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the first successful act of decolonial liberation and the key
transformation in producing modern visuality. This intensification in the countervisuality of
antislavery produced the revolutionary hero as the embodied counter to the sovereign authority
represented by the overseer. The popular hero, such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, incarnated
democracy as the representative of the people, embodying a willed emancipation that was at
once education and, in his or her symbolic form, an aesthetic of transformation. Almost
immediately, the hero was subject to its own intensification within the new imaginary of the
“people.” This pressure produced a cleft within the revolution: was the priority now to be the
imagined community of the nation-state or the sustainable community at local level? In the
events covered by this book, this question has been persistently resolved by force in favor of the
nation-state from Toussaint's 1801 Constitution for Haiti, to the ending of Reconstruction in the
United States, in 1877, and the reconfiguration of the Algerian revolution, in 1965. The shared
subsistence economy claimed by subaltern actors in each case, most familiar now in the
Reconstruction slogan “forty acres and a mule,” was presented as naive, even reactionary, as it
still is today in the face of the disaster of climate change. The perceived necessity to restate
national authority opened the way for the imperial appropriation of the revolutionary hero in
the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, the archetype of the modern Hero for Carlyle.
The specter of Haiti haunted the long nineteenth century that ended with decolonization. The
images of Dessalines cutting the white section out of Haiti's flag, in 1804, even as he declared it
illegal for “whites” to own property on the island were, to use Michel-Rolph Trouillot's trenchant
term, “unthinkable.” The permanent alienation of “property” by the formerly enslaved in Haiti
claiming their own right to autonomy forced the remaking of visuality as a permanent war,
visualized as a battlefield map. These two-dimensional representations of the array of forces as
they confront each other became the visualization of history in Carlyle's imagination. Given this
separation, I will describe the forms of visuality and countervisuality separately from this point
forward. Visualizing was the hallmark of the modern general from the late eighteenth century
onward, as the battlefield became too extensive and complex for any one person to physically
see. The general in modern warfare as practiced and theorized by Karl von Clausewitz was
responsible for visualizing the battlefield. He worked on information supplied by subalterns—
the new lowest-ranked officer class created for this purpose—and by his own ideas, intuitions,
and images. Carlyle and other defenders of authority appropriated the hero from the Atlantic
revolutions and merged it with military visualization to create a new figure for modern
autocracy. Although Carlyle liked to assert that visuality was an attribute of the hero from time
immemorial, he was above all haunted by the abolition of slavery. In his monumental history of
The French Revolution (1837), all revolution from below is “black,” a blackness that pertained to
the popular forces in France, described as “black sans-culottes,” from the storming of the
Bastille, in 1789, but especially to Saint-Domingue, “shaking, writhing, in long horrid death
throes, it is Black without remedy; and remains, as African Haiti, a monition to the world.”39
This “blackness” was the very antithesis of heroism that Napoleon finally negated. For Carlyle, to
be Black was always to be on the side of Anarchy and disorder, beyond the possibility of Reality
and impossibly remote from heroism It is precisely, then, with “blackness” and slavery that a
counterhistory of visuality must be concerned. The function of the Hero for Carlyle and other
devotees, appropriated from those revolutions, was to lead and be worshipped and thereby to
shut down such uncertainties. His visuality was the intensification of the plantation comsplex
that culminated in the production of imperial visuality.
Slavery/Subject Formation
The destruction of the right to look is a foundational concept of slavery. The
subject is formed in relation to this lack – From the plantation complex to the
far more modern military-industrial complex the sustaining factor was control
over visuality. The operation of colonial law necessitates such a control of
desire.
--- Evidentiary support of your reading of history: Greece, Abu Ghraib, Jim Crow
--- Psychoanalysis/Slavery Impact, you can read any of the death drive cards as an impact
module if you so desire
Mirzoeff 11. Nicholas, professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at
New York University, “The Right to Look”, Duke University Press 2011.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus tells us that the Scythians of antiquity blinded their
slaves. As the Scythians were horse-riding nomads, modern historians have concluded that this
practice was designed to prevent the slaves from escaping.27 It cannot but also suggest that
slavery is the removal of the right to look. The blinding makes a person a slave and removes the
possibility of regaining the status of a free person. While chattel slavery did not physically blind
the enslaved, its legal authority now policed even their imagination, knowing that their labor
required looking. For example, in the British colony of Jamaica the enslaved were forbidden
even to “imagine the death of any white Person.”28 By contrast, in the metropole it became a
capital offence for subjects to imagine the death of a king only during the revolutionary crisis of
the 1790s.29 The difference in these laws suggest that any white person in the plantation colony
was the equivalent of the sovereign in the “home” nation. Such laws became necessary when
authority feared that the enslaved or feudal subject might act on such imaginings, the always
possible revolutionizing of the plantation complex. This anxiety moved from plantation to
metropole. In the North American context, “reckless eyeballing,” a simple looking at a white
person, especially a white woman or person in authority, was forbidden those classified as
“colored” under Jim Crow. Such looking was held to be both violent and sexualized in and of
itself, a further intensification of the policing of visuality. As late as 1951, a farmer named Matt
Ingram was convicted of the assault of a white woman in North Carolina because she had not
liked the way he looked at her from a distance of sixty-five feet.30 This monitoring of the look
has been retained in the U.S. prison system so that, for example, detainees in the Abu Ghraib
phase of the war in Iraq (2003¬4) were forcefully told, “Don't eyeball me!”31
In short, complexes are complex. They are divided against themselves first as configurations of
visuality against countervisuality and then as material systems of administering authority
interfaced with mental means of authorizing. In tracing a decolonial genealogy of visuality, I
have identified three primary complexes of visuality and countervisuality in this book, from the
“plantation complex” that sustained Atlantic slavery, via what was known to certain apologists
for the British empire as the “imperialist complex,” to President Dwight Eisenhower's “militaryindustrial complex,” which is still very much with us. Each responded to and generated forms of
countervisuality. The clash of visuality and countervisuality produced not just imagined relations
but materialized visualizations as images of all kinds, as natural history, law, politics, and so on.
The extended encounter between the right to look and visuality created a “world-generating
optic” on modernity, such that “modernity is produced as the West.”32 What was at stake was
the form of the real, the realistic, and realism in all senses. From the decolonial perspective used
here, it is the way that modernity looks when seen from the places of visuality's application—
the plantation, the colony, the counterinsurgency—back toward the metropole. That look is not
a copy, or even a reverse shot, but is equally constitutive by means of its own reality effect of
the classified, spatialized, aestheticized, and militarized transnational culture that in its presentday form has come to be called “globalization.” Indeed, the contradiction that has generated
change within the complexes of visuality has been that while authority claims to remain
unchanged in the face of modernity, eternally deriving authority from its ability to interpret
messages, it has been driven to radical transformation by the resistance it has itself produced.
This force has applied to visuality and countervisuality alike as what Michel Foucault called
“intensity,” rendering them “more economic and more effective.”33 Under the pressure of
intensification, each form of visuality becomes more specific and technical, so that within each
complex there is, as it were, both a standard and an intensified form. That is the paradox
glimpsed by Carlyle, in which history and visualization have become mutually constitutive as the
reality of modernity, while failing to account entirely for each other.34 It is that space between
intention and accomplishment that allows for the possibility of a countervisuality that is more
than simply the opposition predicated by visuality as its necessary price of becoming.
In significant part, therefore, these modes of visuality are psychic events that nonetheless have
material effects. In this sense, the visualized complex produced a set of psychic relations
described by Sigmund Freud as “a group of interdependent ideational elements cathected with
affect.”35 For Freud, the complex, above all the famous Oedipus complex, was at first the name
of the process by which the internal “pleasure principle” became reconciled with the “reality
principle” of the exterior world. Following the experience of shell shock in the First World War,
Freud revised his opinion to see the psychic economy as a conflict between the pleasure drive
and the death drive, leading to a doubled set of disruptions. For Jacques Lacan, as Slavoj Zizek
has described, the subject was constituted by the inevitable failure to overcome this lack: “The
place of ‘reality’ within the psychic economy is that of an ‘excess,’ of a surplus which disturbs
and blocks from within the autarky of the self-contained balance of the psychic apparatus—
‘reality’ as the external necessity which forces the psychic apparatus to renounce the exclusive
rule of the ‘pleasure principle’ is correlative to this inner stumbling block.”36 The diagram that
visualizes this process is an arrow that travels around a circle until it is blocked at the last
minute. The pleasure principle cannot quite fulfill its wish because something from outside its
domain intrudes and prevents it from doing so. For Lacan that “thing” was epitomized by the
Oedipus complex in which the law of the father prevented the infant from achieving its desire to
possess the mother. Authority thus counters desire and produces a self-conscious subject who
experiences both internal desire and external constraint as “reality.” In this book, I take the
existence of this doubled complex to be the product of history, as opposed to a transhistorical
human condition, specifically that of the violence with which colonial authority enforced its
claims. From the dream-world of the Haitian and French Revolutions and their imaginaries to
the imperial investigation of the “primitive” mind and Fanon's deconstruction of colonial
psychology, producing and exploring psychic complexes and complexity was central to the labor
of visualization. Needless to say, visualization has in turn now become part of the labor of being
analyzed.
Alternative
Countervisuality
The alt is a call for a Countervisuality, the AFF alone is not transformative because
it remains tethered to singular visions of power, however starting with the
demand of the “right to look” is a performance of a counter-history that more
effectively challenges sovereign power.
--- AFF is not transformative
--- A2 Agamben ‘rights bad’ args, maybe defense to their biopolitcs args
Mirzoeff 11. Nicholas, professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at
New York University, “The Right to Look”, Duke University Press 2011.
CONCEPTUALIZING COUNTERVISUALITY
Carlyle presented visuality as naturally authoritative while being aware not only of opposition,
but of foundational defeat during the Atlantic revolutions. However, not all opposition to
visuality can be considered countervisuality, a point which will help us to understand the
difficulties involved. Considering the development of globalization around the end of the
twentieth century, Arjun Appadurai noted the “split character” of the globalized work of
imagination: “On the one hand it is in and through the imagination that modern citizens are
disciplined and controlled—by states, markets, and other powerful interests. But it is also the
faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life
emerge.”57 In the case of visuality, we need to introduce a similar distinction. As a discursive
organization of history, visuality was never able to achieve its goal of representing totality,
because “history” itself as a form of the historicopolitical was not monolithic, but structured as
conflict. In his study of Marx's theory of capital, Dipesh Chakrabarty has described two modes of
history as it was formed under capitalism History 1 is that history predicated by capital for itself
“as a precondition” to its own existence, whereas History 2 is that which cannot be written into
the history of capital even as prefiguration and so has to be excluded.58 Chakrabarty has sought
to recover that History 2 without privileging it either as the new dominant mode of History, or
as the dialectical other to History 1. Rather, he suggests, “History 2 is better thought of as a
category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1.”
This doubled interaction offers a model for thinking about visuality that incorporates its
embodied dimension at an individual and collective level, together with visuality as cultural and
political representation.
In these terms, Visuality 1 would be that narrative that concentrates on the formation of a
coherent and intelligible picture of modernity that allowed for centralized and/or autocratic
leadership. It creates a picture of order that sustained the industrial division of labor as its
enactment of the “division of the sensible.” In this sense, photography, for example, contributed
to Visuality 1 in the manner famously critiqued by Baudelaire as the tool of commerce, science,
and industry.59 This form of visuality, one proper to the docile bodies demanded by capital,
developed new means of disciplining, normalizing, and ordering vision, ranging from the colorblindness tests that were introduced for industrial workers in the 1840s, to state-funded
compulsory literacy and the public museum. Consequently, the modern production process that
culminated in Taylor's and Ford's systems came to rely on a normative hand-eye coordination,
trained in sport, managed by the distribution of corrective lenses, and controlled with sight
tests.60 In visual representation, its dominant apparatus would become the cinema, understood
in the sense of Jonathan L. Beller's “cinematic mode of production,” which creates value by
attracting attention.61 Its logical endpoint was what Guy Debord famously called the
“spectacle,” that is to say, “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image.”62 In
this sense, then, a certain history of visuality—or at least Visuality 1—has already been written
and is not unfamiliar. This book does not revisit that story for several reasons. The History that
Chakrabarty describes as being the precondition for capital is not exactly the same as the
History visualized by visuality (and this is, of course, no criticism of Chakrabarty—quite the
contrary). Whereas it may be said that capital will do anything to preserve and extend its
circulation, so that even carbon emissions are now being formulated into a market, visuality was
concerned above all to safeguard the authority of leadership. So whereas Chakrabarty
established a diachronic binary distinction between the two modes of History under capitalism, I
have tried to define a successive set of synchronic complexes for visuality and countervisuality
from slavery to imperialism and global counterinsurgency.
How should we conceptualize, theorize, and understand countervisuality in relation to this
divided visuality? It is not simply Visuality 2. If Visuality 1 is the domain of authority, Visuality 2
would be that picturing of the self or collective that exceeds or precedes that subjugation to
centralized authority. Visuality 2 was not invisible to authority and has been figured as the
barbaric, the uncivilized, or, in the modern period, the “primitive.” In the imperial complex, an
army of self-styled “hero” missionaries generated an epistemic apparatus to discipline and order
it, whereas the “primitives” in the metropole were to be controlled by the new imperial Caesar
and his command of imagery. The leading taxonomies of such “primitive” visuality were idolatry,
fetishism, and totemism, in order of seniority.63 This definition of Visuality 2 was enacted in the
colonial and imperial domains that Conrad called the “blank spaces of the map,” the blind spots
of visuality. Within the metropole, an artistic version of Visuality 2 was that “irrational
modernism.... that escapes... appropriative logic,” such as Dada and Surrealism, often of course
using the forms and ideas of indigenous art and culture from colonized domains.64 By now,
surrealism in particular has nonetheless been thoroughly appropriated, especially by advertising
and music videos. For Visuality 2 is not necessarily politically radical or progressive; it is only not
part of authority's “life process.” There are multiple forms of Visuality 2, because that difference
“lives in intimate and plural relationships to [authority], ranging from opposition to
neutrality.”65 The two modes of visuality are not opposed in a binary system, but operate as a
relation of difference that is always deferred. So not all forms of Visuality 2 are what I am calling
countervisuality, the attempt to reconfigure visuality as a whole. For example, many forms of
religion might deploy some mode of Visuality 2 without seeking to change the perceived real in
which that religion is practiced.
Countervisuality proper is the claim for the right to look. It is the dissensus with visuality,
meaning “a dispute over what is visible as an element of a situation, over which visible elements
belong to what is common, over the capacity of subjects to designate this common and argue
for it.”66 The performative claim of a right to look where none exists puts a countervisuality into
play. Like visuality, it interfaces “formal” and “historical” aspects. The “right” in the right to look
contests first the “right” to property in another person by insisting on the irreducible autonomy
of all citizens. Autonomy implies a working through of Enlightenment claims to rights in the
context of coloniality, with an emphasis on the right to subjectivity and the contestation of
poverty.67 By engaging in such a discussion, I am implicitly rejecting the dismissal of rights as a
biopolitical ruse presented by Agamben.— There is no “bare life” entirely beyond the remit of
rights. Hardt and Negri powerfully cite Spinoza to this effect: “Nobody can so completely
transfer to another all his right, and consequently his power, as to cease to be a human being,
nor will there ever be a sovereign power that can do all it pleases.”69 Ariella Azoulay has
expressed the legacy of revolutionary discourses of rights as precisely “struggles pos[ing] a
demand that bare life be recognized as life worth living.”70 Azoulay rightly sees these demands
being enacted in feminism from Olympe de Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman and
the Citizen (1791) on. As Ranciere points out, de Gouges's insistence that if women have the
“right” to be executed, they are foundationally equal, also shows that “bare life itself is
political.”71 Precisely the same argument can be made with regard to the enslaved, who were
subject to legal codes specifying punishments. In following what you might call “Carlyle-ism” (a
pattern of discourse concerning the visualization of imperial autocracy) to shape this book, I was
at first concerned that his emphasis on heroic masculinity would engender a similarly
masculinist project. However, I came to notice that all the efforts at countervisuality I describe
here centered on women and children both as individual actors and as collective entities. The
actions and even names of individual women and children (especially of the enslaved) have to
be reclaimed from historical archives that are not designed to preserve them and have not
always done so.
Aff Answers
Panopticon Good
Their criticism of the panoptic model is essentialist – only the AFF explains
modern power relations effectively
Wood 7 [David Murakami Wood,” Beyond the Panopticon? Foucault and Surveillance Studies”,
Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography]
There are also many arguments about how much real prisons resemble the Panopticon. Ignatieff
(1989), Lyon (1993) and Boyne (2000) all note that Bentham’s original plans for the Panopticon
were not implemented. Alford (2000) goes further, arguing that Foucault’s theory is invalidated
because nothing panoptic can be seen in contemporary US prisons, where only the entrances
and exits are controlled and prisoners merely counted because ‘one inmate is exactly like
another’ (129). He argues that ‘If you have to look, you have already ceded a measure of power,
the power not to look and not to care’ (2000, 127). But this criticism is flawed for two related
reasons. First, once again, it assumes that Foucault was writing a conventional history of prisons,
rather than a genealogy of modem punishment. Second, Foucault had described exactly this
type of power earlier in the book: the ‘heavy’ power of the monarch’s dungeon. The fact that
societies contain mixtures of modes of ordering, that modernism remains an incomplete or
failed project (c.f.: Bauman 1991a; Latour 1993), or that the death penalty still exists, does not
invalidate a genealogy of the modem subject. Alford (2000) later notes that prisoners live in a
pre-modern style, so why criticize Foucault’s model of modern subjectivity for being
inadequate? McCorkhill (2003) claims that there are examples of panoptic prisons: women’s
prisons, which tend to emphasize moral reform. However she overestimates the degree to
which their psychological approaches contradict Foucault: where she is correct in arguing, after
Bartky (1988) that Foucault neglected gender (see also: Koskela 2000; 2003), her evidence
seems to support the post-carceral model that emerges at the end of the book.
Many question Foucault’s interpretation of Bentham’s Panopticon (1791), for example, Lyon
(1993), Hannah (1997) and Boyne (2000), and there are other non-Foucauldian readings (see:
Himmelfarb 1965; Jacobs 1977; Ignatieff 1989; Markus 1993; Kaschadt 2002). However, it is
quite common now to see Bentham entirely through Foucault or through surveillance studies’
reading of Foucault, for example, Dubbeld (2003) implies almost in passing that Bentham
himself proposed the idea of the disciplinary gaze, and that Foucault merely documented the
generalization of such surveillance, thus rereading Foucault back onto Bentham.
Concerning the reduction of my analyses to the simple figure which is the metaphor of the
panopticon, I believe that here one can respond on two levels. One can say: compare what they
attribute to me to what I have said; and here, it is easy to show that the analyses of power that
1 have carried out cannot be reduced to this figure alone, not even in the book in which they
have gone to look, that is to say, Surveille et Punish. In fact, if I show that the panopticon was a
utopia, a type of pure form elaborated at the end of the Eighteenth Century to furnish the most
convenient formulation of a constant exercise of instant and total power, if then I had shown
the birth, the formulation of this utopia, its raison d’etre, it is also true that I had directly shown
that it concerned precisely a utopia which never functioned as it was described and that all the
history of the prison - its reality - consisted precisely of always having passed this model by.
(Foucault 1994c, 628)
Even if there are problems with a panoptic understanding of surveillance its use
as a theoretical tool is valuable.
Lyon 6 [David Lyon, Queen's Research Chair in the Sociology Department and Director of the
Surveillance Project at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, “Theorizing surveillance”,
Pg. 1-2]
The field of 'surveillance studies' has grown rapidly over the past two decades, spurred by both
rapid developments in governance and new technologies on the one hand, and fresh initiatives
in theoretical explanation on the other. While surveillance practices are as old as human history,
they took some rather specific forms in the modern world, becoming routine and systematic,
based especially on individuation and on bureaucratic organization (Dandeker 1990). From the
last part of the twentieth century onwards, it became clear that new technologies would be
implicated decisively in surveillance processes, as computer-based systems augmented older
paper file and face-to-face modes (Marx 1988; Rule 1974). At the same time, the work of Michel
Foucault stimulated new approaches to understanding surveillance. His book, Discipline and
Punish (1979), was central to the new debates, even though surveillance appeared as a theme in
several of Foucault's works.
The panopticon concept has caught the imagination of many researchers, for better or worse.
The prison architecture invented by the Bentham brothers but elaborated by Jeremy Bentham
became the crucial 'diagram' for Foucault's work on surveillance. Interestingly, it encapsulated
both an emphasis on self-discipline as the archetypical modern mode, supplanting previous
coercive and brutal methods, and a focus on the classificatory schemes by which sovereign
power would locate and differentiate treatment of the variety of prisoners. Whether these two
approaches are ever brought together in Foucault's work is unclear; the more recent work of
Agamben suggests not (Agamben 1998). However, while Foucault prompted a new
'panopticism' in theorizing surveillance, others quickly claimed that his work was flawed (e.g.
Ignatieff 1977) or that one had to go beyond Foucault to understand contemporary electronic
technology-dependent surveillance (Webster and Robins 1986; Zuboff 1988).
I commence with a conundrum: the more stringent and rigorous the panoptic regime, the more
it generates active resistance, whereas the more soft and subtle the panoptic strategies, the
more it produces the desired docile bodies. But that is only a starting point, still within the
panoptic frame. My comments move, secondly, to the range of theories available, whether
inside the panoptic frame or not, and the possibilities for dialogue and mutual learning
presented if we bring together the classical and the cultural, the critical and the poststructuralist. The even larger frame behind these is the realm of metatheory. Surveillance
theories are also situated within these debates and are inevitably informed by them. They relate
to history, humanity and, yes, to life itself. All these comments serve as entry points into a lively
debate about 'theorizing surveillance' represented by the authors of this book, to whose ideas I
offer trailers or previews in the final part.
Permutation
The ALT alone fails and devolves into a Bethamite perspective which doesn’t
solve the case – the permutations combination of Deluezian and Foucaultian
thought is necessary theoretical tool to reread history in new ways.
Elmer 12 [Greg, (PhD at University of Massachusetts Amherst) is Hell Globemedia Research
Chair and Director of the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media at Ryerson University
Canad, “Panopticon—discipline—control”, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies,Pg. 2728]
It seems that Haggerty assumes a Benthamite perspective, defining panoptic surveillance as a
human act of watching (or as being individually identified, as privacy scholars typically do), not
the assumption of always being watched. Such a distinction has important political implications,
one that speaks from the Foulcaultian-Deleuzian trajectory as critiquing non-sovereign, or
better, unquestioned, forms of social and political power—a quiet conformity that is only
intensified by its automation, embeddedness and modulation that informs the near-future.
Automation is the key concept. Only through the subsumption of power, the internalization of a
probable gaze, can the panopticon transform into a disciplinary society that displaces and elides
the face of power.
Scholars who begin their analysis of surveillance from a panoptic gaze risk disarticulating the
subject from social forms of power, leaving only individuals and their transgressed liberties.
Mathiesen’s (1997) inversion of such a gaze into a synopticon—from Bemham's one (tower)
watching the many (cells), to the many watching the few (eg. contemporary media culture)—
similarly displaces Foucault's central thesis on disciplinary power and his important critiques of
liberalism. 1 how might the synopticon shift the nature of contemporary governmentality?
Taking us back to Foucault’s thesis on subjectivity, Mark Andrejevic (2004) argues that such
synoptic relationships—for instance on reality television—are not simply questions of personal
privacy, information to be collected by surveillant gazes. Rather, focusing again on the panoptic
subject, or in this case the synoptic subject (reality program contestant), Andrejevic argues that
to be under the media gaze is to perform work, “the work of being watched.”
More importantly, such work does not simply put one’s private property at risk, but rather—
predating the emergence of social networking platforms like Facebook—Andrejevic’s synoptic
example highlights the Foucaultian concern with self-governance, not a loss of privacy, but in
this instance the management of one's personal publicity. Such a political economy of
surveillance, linking the downloading of work, and the management of individual networkedidentity. serves us an important update to Foucaultian-inspired critiques of contemporary forms
of liberalism (or neo-liberalism), particularly in the context of a governmental regime and set of
policies that have sought to “liberalize” markets, societies and individuals in an effort to increase
efficiencies.
Bentham’s net of watching—commonly adopted in surveillance studies—assumes a surveillant
object, one that can be viewed, tracked, or monitored. The meaningful surveillant object, in
other words, is perhaps one of the very fundamental assumptions made by surveillance
scholars. This starting point however simplifies or altogether displaces typically conflictual social
relationships—closely-knit communities and largely homogenous police forces, or first world
nations and closed totalitarian ones such as North Korea. Such spaces and sites, however,
challenge surveillance studies to integrate such panoptic-vacuums into a diagram of probability,
one that increasingly monetizes or financializes “risky*’ social, economic and political
relationships that are immune to surveillant mechanism. As I have argued elsewhere, however
(Elmer and Opel 2008), such intelligence gathering is often an oxymoron, not only because it
leads to uninformed actions (e.g. the preemptive invasion of Iraq, mass arrests of peaceful
protestors, etc.), but moreover, because it a priori rejects instances where panoptic surveillance
cannot be established—typically in particularly demographically tight-knit isolated communities
(locally or globally).
Through the work of Deleuze, and the rejection of Bentham. conversely, surveillance studies can
begin to question the economic rationalities of diagrammatic systems, the assigning of value to
objects that may or may not be subject to a successful form of monitoring. The meaningfulness
of networked objects of surveillance are never preconstituted, universal or equivalent, rather, as
seen in the example of phone hacking by journalists in the UK in 2011. the surveillance and
monitoring of individuals is subject to a broader financial and libidinal economy, one that targets
valuable objects, information that can be resold and capitalized upon. Surveillance in this sense
is subject to an economy that constantly seeks to rationalize relationships among people and
things to better manage the future.