Not yet Postsubjective (Tania, Core post #3)

 

Simone Brown’s Dark Matters offers an absolutely necessary complement to Mark Andrejevic’s To Preempt a Thief—filling in a register that lies suppressed in the latter. This despite the many reasons to appreciate To Preempt a Thief and find value, as I did, in its delineation of some of the ways in which predictive policing works. Panoptic vs. environmental surveillance; predictive policing’s reformulation of the relationship between citizens and state; preemption vs. deterrence; the percolation of drone logics throughout the social (“the droning of politics”); these are valuable interventions in the discourse of surveillance. And yet, Andrejevic’s argument seems to fail quite seriously in his attempt to argue, throughout this essay and in ways that are central to the overall architecture of his position, that with preemption we have entered a “postsubjective” era, or that disciplinarity has been thoroughly left behind.

Andrejevic makes this claim in the service of marking a break between panoptic and environmental surveillance, or between deterrence and preemption i.e. the disappearance of a science of the subject is part of what Andrejevic identifies as central to what is truly different about this moment. To follow his argument for a bit: disciplinary systems activate subjectivizing processes by virtue of the fact that their targets “internalize the imperatives of the monitoring system” (880); the subject of a disciplinary surveillance is understood as basically rational and capable of modulating their behavior as a result of the knowledge of surveillance (i.e. the subject is narrativized within a chain of cause and effect); they come by this knowledge through the visible signs of panoptic surveillance, the excessively visible “cue or clue that one is being watched” (885). Per Andrejevic, in environmental surveillance all three elements are done away with. No longer seen as inhabiting a rational calculus, the target of environmental surveillance is unmoored from causal logics, understood as “nonnarrativizable” (the emblem of such a figure is, of course, the terrorist); with the dispersal into ubiquity of surveillance technologies, targets are left without visible icons through which they might understand that they are being surveilled and, thus, no longer internalize the fact of surveillance with the aim of ‘becoming docile.’

The acknowledgement that Andrejevic provides, in passing, of disciplinary effects is totally meager: “This is not to say that postdisciplinary surveillance does not have disciplinary effects (surely, awareness of comprehensive monitoring could lead to the internalization of a monitoring gaze in some quarters), but rather to note that these effects are not its defining purpose. Such forms of monitoring are targeted precisely on those who are assumed to be impervious to disciplinary norms (terrorists and implacable, irrational criminality),” (890) [emphasis added]. Before moving on to the terms in which Andrejevic’s notion of a postsubjective surveillance is misguided, I’d like mark that this isn’t merely a matter of redistributing emphasis. The problem isn’t that the presence of disciplinary effects “in some quarters” is for Andrejevic something essentially dismissible, or something we should take seriously. The problem is rather that his model elides the way that difference enters the picture within this caveat, or how policing—even in its environmental and preemptive avatar—operates along differential axes. Put another way: to take seriously the differential operation of environmental surveillance is to return to the realm of the subject, of the disciplinary processes within with subjectivization plays out.

To concretize this (and to note, in passing, that part of what’s missing in Andrejevic’s position is ethnographic considerations, or a sense of how the abstractions of preemptive surveillance look in the world), consider this July 2022 episode of Intercepted (a podcast by The Intercept). Titled The Cost of Saying No to the FBI, the episode narrates the case of Aswad Khan, a 26-year-old student from Pakistan at a college in Boston who crossed paths with the FBI in what can only be one of many such uncounted encounters. The FBI agent ‘asks’ him to turn informant for them—to spy on Muslims in mosques—in exchange for “U.S. citizenship, money, and other perks.” Khan declines. The agent turns up the heat a bit but lets him go eventually, to what Khan naively assumes will be normalcy. Then things go dark. From the podcast: “Soon after he returned to Pakistan his friends started having problems at the U.S. border and Khan’s name kept coming up…One of Khan’s childhood friends, Y., has been detained at the U.S. border and questioned about Khan on multiple occasions…[after a few more such instances] acquaintances quietly severed ties, phone calls and messages were left unreturned, and even parents of friends told their children it was too much trouble to associate with him.” By ostracizing Khan in order to secure their own safety, Khan’s friends were operating not under the logic of moral contagion (distancing oneself from a known criminal) but, rather, were deploying the careful tactics of social modulation that are now the norm for subjects who know themselves to be under the gaze of a pervasive, inescapable, environmental, and total surveillance–who know themselves, furthermore, as being under “categorical suspicion” (Browne, 15).  Hard to square this with Andrejevic’s assertion that environmental surveillance no longer cares about individuals, only about populations; or that subjectivity is no longer the grounds on which surveillance, disciplinary or otherwise, plays out. In the interest of keeping this post at a reasonable length, I’ll note only that Browne’s mapping of the specificity of environmental surveillance, her Fanon-inflected accent on the embodied effects of the awareness of a powerful gaze, is a deeply useful corrective to abstracted theorizations of what, exactly, environmental surveillance is doing to our sense of self and other i.e. to subjectivity.