Chapter 1
Queering Surveillance
āYou Blushedā: Queering Surveillance after 9/11 in the work of Jill Magid and Hasan Elahi
HARROD J SUAREZ
FIGURE 1.1
Hasan Elahi (American, b. 1972)
Tracking Transience
Screenshot from trackingtransience.net
Live website, launched 2003, ongoing
Courtesy of the artist
Hasan Elahiās Tracking Transience (plate 4, figure 1.1) is an ongoing project that appears online (trackingtransience.net). The site collects images of where Elahi is at any given moment, while also providing GPS coordinates for his recent whereabouts. The origins of the project shed light on what it might mean to surveil oneself. In a New York Times op-ed piece, he explains that he was unable to enter the United States through the Detroit Metropolitan Airport on June 19, 2002. A naturalized citizen born in Bangladesh who grew up in New York, he was interrogated about his whereabouts on the day after 9/11. Elahi writes, āFortunately, Iām neurotic about record keeping. I had my Palm P.D.A. with me; I looked up Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001 on my calendar. I read the contents [to the official]: āpay storage rent at 10; meeting with Judith at 10:30; intro class from 12 to 3; advanced class from 3 to 6.ā We read about six months of my calendar appointments. I donāt think he was expecting me to have such detailed records.ā1 After a series of inquiries into Elahiās background that continued for half a year, including polygraph tests, he was cleared of suspicion.
But in preparing to travel abroad after the background check, Elahi decided to contact the FBI, willingly offering the details of his trip. āI wanted to make sure that the bureau knew that I wasnāt making any sudden moves and that I wasnāt running off somewhere. I wanted them to know where I was and what I was doing at any given time,ā he writes. It is a counterintuitive move: shouldnāt one seek to challenge surveillance or, in the least, shield oneself from it? After 9/11, while some of those subjected to racial profiling sought to demonstrate their patriotism, others rejected such a mandate and challenged its racist assumptions. But it is here that the alternative offered by Tracking Transience begins. He continues:
Soon I began to e-mail the F.B.I. I started to send longer e-mails, with pictures, and then with links to Web sites I made. I wrote some clunky code for my phone back in 2003 and turned it into a tracking device.
My thinking was something like, āYou want to watch me? Fine. But I can watch myself better than you can, and I can get a level of detail that you will never have.ā
In the process of compiling data about myself and supplying it to the F.B.I., I started thinking about what intelligence agents might not know about me. I created a list of every flight Iāve ever been on, since birth. For the more recent flights, I noted the exact flight numbers, recorded in my frequent flier accounts, and also photographs of the meals that I ate on each flight, as well as photos of each knife provided by each airline on each flight.2
Grid upon grid, image after imageāit appears as if very little of Elahiās life in the last decade has not been subject to documentation, and he indicates that the server logs show visitors to the site include the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Executive Office of the President.3
It is important to recognize what Elahi accomplishes in using a tactic of exposure and revelation through self-surveillance. On one hand, the Transience website is a polyglot assortment of images that are hard to organize and seem to lack coherence. It is, as Elahi puts it, ādeliberately user-unfriendly. A lot of work is required to thread together the thousands of available points of information. By putting everything about me out there, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life. Despite the barrage of information about me that is publicly available, I live a surprisingly private and anonymous life.ā4 In doing so, he actually thwarts the objective of surveillance: to organize a profile of a subject/suspect. But he thwarts it not by running away, by seeking privacy from those who would surveil him, but by running toward the camera, arms wide open, offering himself and his whereabouts to whomever cares to inquire or log on. He shows the most intimate details of his lifeāthe toilets he uses, the meals he eats, the beds he sleeps ināsuch that we get lost in his life. We donāt obtain knowledge about him; instead, we very nearly come to live with him.
By staging what is in many ways an inappropriate survey of his life, Elahiās art sets up an alternative critical response to the conventional wisdom that privacy is the best way to resist surveillance. It is an alternative whose significance arrives through a queer reading, if we understand queer to refer to what Mel Chen calls āthe social and cultural formations of āimproper affiliation,ā so that queerness might well describe an array of subjectivities, intimacies, beings, and spaces located outside of the heteronormative.ā5 The discomfiting intimacy of Elahiās work precisely constitutes an āimproper affiliationā between the surveiller and the surveilled. In this essay, I argue that a queer reading of both Elahiās and Jill Magidās art charts forms of biopolitical intimacy that effectively seduce the surveiller such that his (the pronoun is used instructively) authority is compromised. By constructing an improper affiliation grounded in intimacy and desire rather than empirical data, these artists point to the limits of the purportedly objective comprehension of the surveilled subject/suspect.
Further raising the stakes of this argument, I suggest that Magid and Elahi enable a queer Asian Americanist critique of surveillance. Kandice Chuh argues for Asian American studies as a āsubjectless discourseā insofar as it does not have a normative or essential subject, given the heterogeneity inherent to the category.6 Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about Tracking Transience is that Elahiās body never appears in the surfeit of images. The images are literally subjectless and yet together compose something like a corpus, or body, of details orienting us toward Elahiās whereabouts and doings.
To draw attention to intimacy is already to disrupt the category of the subject/suspect. While surveillance may assume the subject to be a suspect, I contend that insofar as it is a category organized according to the protocols of a heteronormative biopolitics, the subject itself is suspect. Rather than reproduce the logic of subjectification that locates meaning in individuated subjects/suspects, the focus on intimacy calls for an intersubjective analysis. Thus, it hardly matters whether Elahi, Magid, I, or you identify as queer or Asian American. It is the intersubjective desireāthe desire that exceeds the subject of heteronormative biopolitics, the desire that draws me to Elahi and Magid just as they are drawn to systems of surveillanceāthat enacts the subjectlessness of queer Asian Americanist critique. It is the intimate and affective relations across bodies and texts that deliver a robust critique of surveillance.
While Steve Mannās āsousveillanceā projectāwhich attempts to surveil the surveiller, often literally using another camera to record the surveillance and closed circuit cameras in order āto empower individuals in ā¦ their encounters with organizationsā7āhas served as the āprevailing artistic response to surveillance,ā8 Magid and Elahi do not seek to take on such roles. Kirsty Robertson suggests that many of those working with sousveillance as a tactic have a ārelative privilegeā that potentially adheres to āan invisibly gendered virtualization of the omniscient male gaze.ā9 Mann himself has admitted that āuniversal surveillance/sousveillance may, in the end, only serve the ends of the existing dominant power structureāāand this is especially true if the response results in the construction of a resistant subject.10 To construct resistance along the terms of the subjectāagain, constituted through what I will claim has its foundations in heteronormative biopolitical surveillanceāis to remain within the logic of these dominant structures.
Rather than aspire to become surveillers of their own vis-Ć -vis Mann, Magid and Elahi inhabit the role of the surveilled, drawing attention to themselves as subjects of surveillance after 9/11. But in doing so, it is not as if they simply succumb to the demonstrably inescapable force of biopolitical surveillance. As Magid writes to a surveiller with whom she cultivates a romantic intimacy, āI did not critique your system; I made love to it. You blushed.ā11 If sousveillance functions as a critique that unwittingly reinforces the very terms of surveillance, its very power, then intimacy arrives as a queer relation to power. To be clear: the power is not so much in the surveillance itself, but in the form that enables the surv...