ABSTRACT
Is surveillance a weapon? Does it have a destructive dimension, destructive effects and consequences? Revisiting Foucault on the productive dimensions of power, this article attends to these questions by focusing on the question of subjectivity. It acknowledges the importance of reflections that take the target of surveillance as their primary concerns – Islamophobia – but proposes that vigilance and insomnia (notions that were conceptualized in Levinas’ early work) provide the premises of a different account of surveillance and the nature of its power.
Confronting the problem of surveillance and Islamophobia, the authors of a remarkable paper on the topic ask that we not surrender to the universalizing and levelling rhetoric, which seeks to convince us that we are all under surveillance. For
if the problem is mass surveillance, then what is at stake is not a violent geo-political agenda led by a few very powerful states or the deliberate targeting of communities within national contexts, but that now “everybody” is under surveillance. (Gürses, Kundnani, and Van Hoboken 2016, 582)
The crucial point is that, along with the “terrorist assemblages” scrutinized by Puar (2007), the “surveillance assemblages” (Hagerty and Ericson 2000), which we must now take for granted (whether to affirm or resist them), constitute, as David Lyon argued, unequal and divisive mechanisms of “social sorting” (2003). This means that we are hardly all equal in facing the surveillance apparatus, which is why it is crucial to examine the singularity of “thorough surveillance” (Sa’di 2014), to underscore as well “the surveillance of blackness” (Browne 2015), and – with regard to arguments about privacy, for instance – to recall that “workers, the under- and disemployed, the incarcerated, the homeless, and those dependent on welfare (most of whom are women) are the most exposed to surveillance and the least enfranchised of privacy rights” (Maxwell 2005, 13). Acknowledging the multiplicity (rather than the universality) of targets, and the way in which surveillance buttresses and deepens inequalities among them, the question that must be raised is how subjectivity – in the case at hand, “Muslim subjects” – and the problem of surveillance have been or should be understood or articulated together. Hagerty and Ericson phrase this matter in terms that are at once proximate and troubling to the concerns I will want to raise in what follows. “In the face of multiple connections across myriad technologies and practices”, they write,
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. (Hagerty and Ericson 2000, 609)w
Between general and collective subjects and privacy, between “every body” (and their “body cams”) and the terrifying specificities of targeted communities and individuals, surveillance – like prejudice, persecution and outright assault – insistently raises the question of subjectivity (name, label or “data double”) in the context of a struggle with and within power. Indeed, since Michel Foucault opposed the assujetissement, subjectivation, of the incarcerated to the invisible anonymity of the panoptic tower, subjectivity and subjectivation have been at the centre of surveillance concerns and objectives (Gilliom 2005, 72). And this obviously applies to the widespread monitoring of Muslims, and to Islamophobia, when “surveillance becomes intertwined with the fabric of human relationships and the threads of trust upon which they are built” (Kundnani 2014, 41). What I would like to isolate is of a different order than the production of new subjectivities, without, however, returning to a model of coercion where the power of surveillance is conceived as dominantly repressive or, as the language often goes, “chilling”. Such are, of course, urgently pertinent dimensions of the “surveillance society” in which we live, but as Puar has it, what emerges through the practices and technologies of surveillance is “not necessarily the crafting of the individual subject cohered through acquiescence to or internalization of norms but assemblages of ‘militarized bodies’” (Puar 2007, 156). My own narrow and specific focus will obliquely follow on Puar’s suggestion and seek to confront the destructive dimension of surveillance. At stake is something like “the mortification of the self” (Harcourt 2015, 217–233) or indeed, the dismantling, fragmenting or undoing, that is, the destruction of subjects. For, as Martin Harries rightly explains, “we may learn as much about how we imagine subjects from how we imagine their destruction as from how we imagine the ways in which they are made” (Harries 2007, 15). For my part, I shall here remain agnostic on the history of such famously made, constructed, or produced subjects, about which I have written elsewhere, or on the novelty of the instruments of their targeting (see Anidjar 2003, 2008, 2015). Mindful of “efforts to keep the ocean’s tide back with a broom”, I shall stubbornly treat surveillance as a weapon (political, military or other), at once a means of inscription and of destruction.
There are two words – words rather than concepts – that have failed to receive the attention they seem to deserve in the work of Michel Foucault, “the grandfather of contemporary surveillance studies” (Marx 2015, 734). I am referring to French words that, though articulated in opposition to each other by Foucault himself, nonetheless partake of a joined supplementarity, an elevated or heightened dimension, perhaps an extended and hyperbolic measure. These are not particularly strange words, except for the fact that they share a prefix, the prefix “sur”, which has been rendered into English as “over”, “above”, or even “super” or “hyper”. And yet, the first of the two words, surpouvoir, seems striking enough, over-powering enough. It was translated by Alan Sheridan as “super-power”, which in the context of the Cold War is both odd and potentially misleading. In Discipline and Punish, at any rate, once and once only in the book, Foucault deploys that word as a name or an attribute of sovereign power, the hyper-demonstrative form of power “which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations, … a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as ‘super-power’” (Foucault 1975, 61, 1977, 57). The scare quotes, by the way, have also been added, supplemented to the French original, which testifies, I think, to the discomfort of the translator, who otherwise conveys quite accurately the seminal idea of a significant and historical distinction between sovereign and disciplinary power. But what I mostly wish to call attention to here is the way Foucault himself renders this distinction in a peculiar lexical fashion; the way he distinguishes between “continual supervision” – notable at this stage by its absence – and surpouvoir.
By now, it will have been easy to surmise that the English word “supervision” is (and translates) the second sur-mot or super-word, which really interests me here, namely, the word surveillance. It is, first of all, the apposition, and the opposition, of surpouvoir and surveillance that should have attracted, I think, a more scrupulous philological attention for it underscores the composite nature of both words as well as the etymological and semantic peculiarities of their constitutive elements. I do speak of a philological or literary attention which, considering the significance of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the representation and conceptualization of hyperbolic surveillance, is surprisingly lacking in surveillance studies (see e.g. Lyon 1994, 11; Kammerer 2012; Berlatsky 2014; Harcourt 2015, 26–27, 31–53). Now, “supervision” is not a bad translation for this difficult and quite successful “multidimensional concept” (Marx 2015, 736) even if it did give some trouble to the translator from the book title onward. Indeed, it is well known that “Discipline and Punish” remains a poor or inaccurate translation of Foucault’s original title. As Sheridan puts it:
Any closer translation of the French title of this book, Surveiller et punir, has proved unsatisfactory on various counts. To begin with, Foucault uses the infinitive, which, as here, may have the effect of an “impersonal imperative”. Such a nuance is denied us in English. More seriously, the verb “surveiller” has no adequate English equivalent. Our noun “surveillance” has an altogether too restricted and technical use. Jeremy Bentham used the term “inspect” – which Foucault translates as “surveiller” – but the range of connotations does not correspond. “Supervise” is perhaps closest of all, but again, the word has different associations. “Observe” is rather too neutral, though Foucault is aware of the aggression involved in any one-sided observation. In the end, Foucault himself suggested Discipline and Punish, which relates closely to the book’s structure. (1977, ix)
Sheridan is correct, of course, though it is notable that the Oxford English Dictionary does have an entry for the verb “surveil” (“to exercise surveillance over (someone), subject (someone) to surveillance. Also with a place or area as obj[ect]. … ”), the first listed use of which, in Federal court documents, is dated 1960 (OED Online 2015). According to the same OED entry, by 1966, Harper’s Magazine was wryly referring to the CIA as both subject and (evasive) object of surveillance (“If the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is as adroit in surveilling others as it is in escaping surveillance of itself, the Republic can relax”). What we are confronted with, in any case, are two words that, among other things, strikingly summarize and illustrate the famous Foucauldian transition, which moves us from sovereignty to discipline; two hyperbolic markers that seem to take us from the spectacular mode of sovereign super power, that must be seen by all, to the ubiquity of supervision, which observes and oversees all: from surpouvoir to surveillance.
There are a few rare occasions when Foucault referred again to surpouvoir (mostly in the context of psychiatric power and in his lecture of 29 January 1975 on Sade in Abnormal); yet, the discursive potential of that word does not appear to have sufficed for an uptake, for the word to morph into a full-blown concept, and certainly not one of the magnitude of surveillance. My own wish here is to capture and mobilize the parallel and supplemental potential of these two über-words, to awaken, as it were, the augmented, elevated, and hyperbolic dimensions that operate in and through both of them. It is perhaps easy to understand (or to misunderstand) what the “sur” of “surpouvoir” refers to or modifies, even if it is by no means identical to what used to be called superpowers (in French, superpuissances, back in the good old days when there were more than one of those), and what we may think of today in the power and superpower-saturated atmosphere we live and breathe – or merely watch, perhaps. But pouvoir and surpouvoir aside, what is it exactly that the “sur” of “surveillance” signifies or modifies? (Szendy 2007). What is it that it comes to affect or fashion?
The etymology of the English word “surveillance” is, interestingly enough, French, though the word evidently finds its origins in the Latin vigilo, vigilare, which also gives us the word vigilance, common to English and French. In French, at any rate, the word surveillance comes from “veiller”, meaning to guard or to watch, to watch over and watch out; to exercise one’s attention or one’s caution or indeed, to watch over someone else’s behaviour, to keep an eye on them; to oversee and supervise. Primarily though, and just like its Latin antecedent, veiller refers to being or staying awake and aware, to keep vigil in the sense of postponing sleep, refraining or altogether abstaining from sleep. One engages in this kind of practice, this kind of veille or wake, or indeed, vigil, in relation to the sick or, obviously, to the dead. One keeps watch, one wakes, over them. Generally, the word has something to do with an extension of wakefulness (éveil or réveil), an extension and an intensification of awareness or watchfulness, of vigilance. Not unlike surpouvoir, then, with its augmenting and elevating prefix, the word surveillance would thus suggest a kind of hyperbolic attention or wakefulness (one that is hardly dented by the increasingly popular “sousveillance”). More than a negation of sleep, it would designate its extreme and heightened opposite, a state where sleep becomes close to impossible or even implausible, a state, if you will, of insomnia. The society of surveillance, to which Foucault awoke us (or awoke us again) and in which we live, may or may not stand in (historical) opposition to a sovereign, and hyperbolic, surpouvoir, but it has everything to do with our current understanding (or is it over-standing?), with the state of our extended awareness, and with our sleeplessness. And if Marshall McLuhan was correct in understanding media (and among them, weapons) as “extensions of man”, then surveillance, the vigilant ubiquity of supervision, must surely be conceived as a medium, an extension, and it is one to be reckoned with. Indeed, Gary Marx ascribes to “the new surveillance” precisely such an extended character. The new surveillance, he writes, “tends to be more intensive, [it] is extensive, extends the senses … and cognitive abilities” (2015, 735). Surveillance thus would signal the extension (and, as we shall also see, the extinction) of our most prized possession – our consciousness, our conscious awareness. It constitutes, by Marshall McLuhan’s account at least, a kind of ultimate weapon (2013).
Yet, if it has been broadly recognized that surveillance is a weapon – a hunting, warring or ruling weapon – that it is structured like a weapon (“the biometric system is the absolute political weapon of our era”, insists Nitzan Lebovic), it remains unclear what consequences such recognition might bring, what reflections might ensue (2015, 853). There is here, to a surprising extent, a largely uncharted territory. For surveillance, scholars have largely neglected the military dimension of their subject, despite their recognition of its foundational importance (Wilson 2012, 269, but see Dandeker 1990 and Graham 2010). By the same token, “little discussion has connected surveillance, intelligence and military security”, and security studies at large (Bigo 2012, 281; and see Bigo and Tsoukala 2008). For my part, by underscoring, in a military or, more broadly, hoplological context, the link between sleep (or sleeplessness), wakefulness and surveillance, and by considering surveillance, after McLuhan, as the hyperbolic and weaponized extension of our conscious awareness, I mean first of all to echo Jonathan Crary’s study of “late capitalism and the ends of sleep”, which opens by looking at military and scientific efforts “to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep and to function productively and efficiently” (2013, 2). Crary also explains that sleeplessness and surveillance, the extension of wakeful awareness, is not something that is targeting the individual alone, or even primarily. In fact, the incessant surveillance of the individual belongs to the macro structure of state terror and “the military-police paradigm of full-spectrum dominance” (32). Along this political line, Crary mentions the US Air Force aptly coded “Operation Gorgon State”, which is “a collection of surveillance and data-analysis resources that ‘sees’ unblinkingly 24/7, indifferent to day, night, or weather, and that is lethally oblivious to the specificity of the living being it targets” (32). One of the names ...
