[Hamsini - Core Post 2] Resisting Surveillance

 

Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen (2013)

Is surveillance ever actually total? Many of the readings this week, even as they lay out the systems of surveillance—by states, companies, each other, ourselves—that mark a shift from panoptic modes to Deleuzian “societies of control,” offer figures of possibility: for resistance, for escape, for, at any rate, rendering surveillance incomplete.

Browne gives us “dark sousveillance”: “an imaginative place from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance, a critique that takes form in antisurveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices. Dark sousveillance, then, plots imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being” (p. 21). It is a form of watching from the position of the slave, observing authority and the strictures of plantation life in order to mount resistance and craft escape. Even as racializing surveillance—operating through the record-keeping, legal, and policing mechanisms of slavery through to today’s high-tech facial recognition and predictive policing systems—enacts violence on Black people, there is still the possibility of otherwise. The sousveillant position opens up the possibility for physical fugitivity, but also for creative, artistic, spiritual critique and escape as well.

Meanwhile, Gaboury operates from the perspective of queer theory to examine possibilities for refusal of totalizing computational systems. To Gaboury, there is no outside; queerness offers the possibility not of escaping surveillance but of becoming illegible within its confines. This a story of refusal, opacity, indeterminacy in face of surveillance, which he renders concrete through a discussion of NULL values in SQL, arguing that NULL-ness “corresponds with the epistemological condition of queerness as an excessive illegibility collapsed into an unwieldy frame, an aberrant third-ness within an otherwise normative system of relations.” As Rohan points out in his post, NULL does not escape the database; nor does it destroy it. But it exists within the system as a negation of value (an absent presence, perhaps, vs. the present absence of the Black feminist perspective Browne centers). To Gaboury, in this context, escape is a utopian imaginary that contrasts with the real possibility of defying the logics of categorization.

Vaidhyanathan, meanwhile, is concerned with pushing back on the individualizing (dividualizing?) logics of Google by pointing to the ways in which it is collectivity, our social relations, that constitute desirable data—and it is through collective mechanisms of protest and rebellion (as well as law) that people can push back. To Vaidhyanathan, it is important for people to understand the ways in which Google and other tech companies control the terms of how information is managed through “infrastructural imperialism” rather than defining particular categories of information (such as race, gender, etc.)—but local, culturally specific ways of seeing can challenge such universalizing terms. Of course, his chapter also documents the ways in which such resistance is co-opted: how groups protesting Google Street View, for example, come to be accommodated, and the controversy itself draws attention to and markets the tool.

Andrejevic does not explicitly discuss resistance, focusing on describing the shift from disciplinary power and panopticon to environmental surveillance that escapes citizen awareness and indeed forecloses politics. However, the tension between surveillance and resistance to surveillance is still visible here: the figure of the terrorist and the criminal, for instance, defies disciplinary power in surveillance by being “inexplicable,” “intransigent,” “nonnarrativizable,”—in a word, an irrational rather than rational subject. To try to catch these thieves necessitates preemption rather than deterrence, the development of new, actuarial mechanisms of surveillance (though Browne’s history of surveillance, perhaps, challenges how “new” such modes are). However, I would suggest it is possible that even totalizing systems of preemption can and do fail, and perhaps there is possibility in that failure: Andrejevic references Minority Report in his discussion of predictive policing (a novella and film of the same genre as Handmaid’s Tale: what if modes of oppression historically applied to Black and other marginalized peoples were applied to white people?). But, of course, the predictive policing of Minority Report is stymied by the actual minority report—the errors in prediction that suggest the possibility of alternative futures.

I’ll wrap up by pointing to two pieces that kept coming to mind on modalities of resisting surveillance as I read this week: Lauren Bridges’ article on “Digital failure: Unbecoming the “good” data subject through entropic, fugitive, and queer data,” and Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen.