Someone out there is watching

A month after Sept. 11, a vast exhibition titled “CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance From Bentham to Big Brother” opened at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Its curator, Thomas Levin, a media theorist from New York, could hardly have foreseen the convergence of his survey of art and theory concerning surveillance with the “war on terrorism” launched by the Bush administration, including the home-front war of invasive checks, extensive arrests and indefinite detentions that has positioned thousands as “combatants” first and “citizens” second. This confluence makes the exhibition catalog an essential primer in “surveillant literacy,” ever more urgent as this awareness is essential not only for the protection of civil rights but also, more simply, for the practice of everyday life.

“Americans,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer remarked soon after the attacks, “ ... need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” His caution is fundamental to modern surveillance, which works mostly through our inhibition, through our internalization of its “gaze.” But, at least in some small measure, “we” might also reverse this threat and watch what “they” say and do as well. This is one persistent message of “CTRL [SPACE]”: that new techniques of surveillance also open up new possibilities for awareness and resistance.

“Our world has changed forever,” Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft proclaimed on Sept. 11. Quickly this remark (attributed to others as well) became a cliche, and this manipulated sense of epochal change permitted the precipitous passage of the Patriot Act. The new law, signed by President Bush on Oct. 26, 2001, allows for all telephone and e-mail activity by an individual to be tapped with a single warrant, for single warrants to be valid nationwide, for suspected foreigners to be held without charge for seven days and for other “enhanced surveillance procedures,” including “DNA identification” and “foreign student monitoring.” On May 30, 2002, Ashcroft announced further surveillance of religious and political organizations, libraries, Internet sites and other public spaces (many libraries now routinely dump records of use as a result). More recently, the tracking of Muslim men from 25 countries has become mandatory, and the tracking of countless others through data mining, biometric identification and many other means has become common.

Critics, both liberal and libertarian, have pointed to the paradox of an attorney general, the chief enforcer of the Constitution for the executive branch, who seems bent on eroding basic rights to privacy and due process (no less a Republican stalwart than Dick Armey has called Ashcroft’s Justice Department “out of control” for its federal activism).

Nonetheless, the march to a bigger kind of Big Brother continues apace. The Pentagon floated its own surveillance project with the Orwellian title “Total Information Awareness.” Designed, as William Safire wrote, to “scoop up your lifetime paper trail,” it was shelved only when word got out that Adm. John M. Poindexter, who was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, was slated to head it. And now there are congressmen who still wish to make the provisions of the Patriot Act permanent and to propose a Patriot Act II that would give the government access to computerized private information without a court order.

This background makes “CTRL [SPACE]” resonant reading. Its mix of critical texts and art projects traces a rich history of both modern “logics” of surveillance and recent attempts “to appropriate, refunction, expose and undermine these logics.” Contemporary reflections on surveillance are much indebted to Michel Foucault, who published his seminal study of the subject, “Discipline and Punish,” in 1975. Represented here by a subsequent interview, Foucault argued a decisive shift from the old spectacle of punishment -- with power inscribed on the very body of the criminal, whipped, racked or worse in public -- to the modern practice of discipline, with the prisoner controlled less violently, more privately, again in large part through a gaze that he is led to internalize.

For Foucault, the father of modern surveillance is the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who proposed his famous “panopticon” in 1787 as an initial reform of ancien regime punishments. A structure in the form of a ring, the panopticon has a tower at its center; there, inaccessible to the prisoners, one guard can look into all the cells arrayed in the ring and observe any cell at any time (“panopticon” means “all-seeing”).

Or so it is in principle: The threat of surveillance is supposed to render the prisoners docile. However oppressive to our eyes, the panopticon was born of the Age of Enlightenment and of revolution, out of “a fear that haunted the latter half of the eighteenth century: the fear of darkened spaces.” After the Bastille was torn down, there remained other obscure castles of arbitrary power to illuminate, and the panopticon served as a model for different institutions -- schools, hospitals, factories -- committed to new ideals of “social hygiene” and economic productivity. Power adapted and learned that it could work even better in the light.

The panoptical model developed in “Discipline and Punish” was much questioned. Surveillance is hardly objective, feminists argued; desire is at work in this gaze too, and it is inflected by differences in sexuality and gender -- and, others soon added, in race and class as well. This is a point that “CTRL [SPACE]” also makes indirectly. For example, the artist-critic Victor Burgin discusses the once-strange case of JenniCam, the Web site of onetime Dickinson College student Jennifer Ringley, who uploaded a video feed of the goings-on in her dormitory room to the Internet via camera and computer. In this banal theater, it is impossible to separate surveillance from voyeurism, interactivity from exhibitionism.

So, too, philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues that the surveillant gaze is not always feared today. “What we obtain here,” Zizek writes of the Big Brother versions of Reality TV, “is the tragic-comic reversal of the Bentham-Orwellian notion of the Panopticon-society in which we are (potentially) ‘observed always.’ ... [T]oday, anxiety seems to arise from the prospect of not being exposed to the Other’s gaze all the time, so that the subject needs the camera’s gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his/her being.”

Another challenge to Foucault’s model of power as surveillance came from a Marxist quarter. In “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967), Guy Debord described a postwar world in thrall to media “spectacle” and posited a new stage of capitalism in which commodities had become one with images. In “Discipline and Punish,” Foucault argued: “Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces.” For Foucault, power was less about controlling commodities than about compelling people.

Today, 30 years later, whatever contradiction existed between these forms of power in theory seems overcome in practice. In “CTRL [SPACE],” media theorist Paul Virilio uses the term “tele-surveillance” to evoke a general condition of global TV, 24-hour news coverage and live cameras on the Internet in which “spectacle” and “surveillance” appear to be combined. In a trenchant piece, Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College, asks at what price this “eternal vigilance” has come and answers “indifference.” We might think that “tele-surveillance” of world events produces public knowledge and prompts government action, but “after a decade of genocide, famine, and concentration camps” this is hardly certain, and in the case of Bosnia alone -- where the images of atrocity produced so little effect -- “the surveillance was as complete as the abandonment What if the belief in this public was part of the failure,” Keenan asks, “if the faith in the obviousness, the evidence or self-evidence of the pictures and the automatic chain of reasoning they inspire, was not what failed but the very failure itself?”

For the most part, “CTRL [SPACE]” concentrates on technological extensions of panoptical power, and telling contributions are made by such critics and theorists as Beatriz Colomina, McKenzie Wark, Timothy Druckrey and Lev Manovich, as well as by artists and architects such as Harun Farocki, Diller + Scofido, Laura Kurgan and Denis Beaubois. Crucial to this further investigation of “panopticism” is a brilliant essay by Gilles Deleuze titled “Postscript on Control Societies” (1990). Deleuze carries on where his old friend Foucault left off: After societies of punishment and discipline, Deleuze argues, come societies of control. As the factory is displaced in importance by the corporation, “perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination.” If the surveillant gaze is focused on both the individual and the masses, “the numerical language of control” breaks down each term in this pair: “individuals have become ‘dividuals’ [that is, statistical trajectories], and masses [have become] samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’ ” Here surveillance becomes mostly a matter of the electronic tracking, with our every use of an ATM or EZ Pass, a credit card or a cell phone, a library card or a Web site, potentially registered in a continuous profiling that is at once cultural, political, medical, legal and, most of all, financial. “Man is no longer man enclosed,” Deleuze comments, “but man in debt.”

Both critically and artistically, “CTRL [SPACE]” traces this shift in “panopticism,” which Levin describes as one “from the paradigmatic notion of controlled space articulated in the architectural model of the panopticon to the new episteme of control in state-of-the-art ‘dataveillance’ invoked by the reference to ‘ctrl’ and space-bar keys of the computer interface.”

“What happens,” Levin asks, “when one recognizes the panopticon in terms of a new infrared, thermal, or satellite imaging practices? Indeed, what are the sociological and political consequences of a surveillant culture based increasingly on entirely non-phenomenal logics of data gathering and aggregation?”

One great merit of “CTRL [SPACE]” is its weaving together of artistic projects and critical texts. The coverage begins with early video installations by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham that explore the now common experience of seeing in a space where one is also seen on a monitor and extends to recent projects that are explicitly counter-surveillant, such as “City TV” (1997-99) by Frank Thiel, an array of 101 photos that document surveillance cameras in Berlin. In a related project, volunteers from the New York Civil Liberties Union mapped such cameras in Manhattan; with this information a group called the Surveillance Camera Players now presents walking tours of this tracking, and another collective called the Institute for Applied Autonomy offers an online service that calculates “routes of least surveillance” on request.

Sometimes in these projects “art” serves as an alibi for the staging of exposes. Especially provocative in this regard is “New York, September 11, 2001, Four Days Later ... “ by architect Laura Kurgan, a massive digital print of a commercial satellite mapping of a devastated Lower Manhattan set on the floor. Although the imaging power of the satellite (fittingly named Ikonos) reaches to 1-meter resolution, Kurgan concludes that the resultant “evidence reveals little, and is forensically of little use”: “[W]hat is missing are the missing.”

If there is a genre of “surveillance art,” an early masterpiece is “The Giant” (1982-83), an 82-minute orchestration of video footage culled by the Czech-born artist Michael Klier from surveillance cameras in several German cities. In the words of film critic J. Hoberman, these mechanical images of autobahns and subways, office buildings and shopping malls, private homes and public demonstrations convey “the rampant power and exquisite boredom of surveillance.” “The Giant” recalls cinematic odes to modern life, such as Walter Ruttmann’s “Berlin, Symphony of a Great City” (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s “The Man With a Movie Camera” (1929). Yet these modernist essays exult in the new filmic extension of the human sensorium, while “The Giant” attests to the triumph of “machine vision” alone. Rather than a “man with a movie camera,” we watch a mindless Giant watching us, a contemporary Cyclops patrolling everything as so much property. “Blandly and brilliantly totalitarian, ‘The Giant’ announces a routine fact of postmodern times, hailing the video-camera uber alles.”

If the camera as Cyclops is one figure of surveillance, another is the eye of God. In fact, the first text in “CTRL [SPACE]” argues that this eye is the prototype of surveillance in the Christian West: an omniscient gaze that is also internalized as conscience in our everyday struggle between “good and evil.”

As I read this text, I happened on a personal-greetings portrait of John Ashcroft, which shows the attorney general with a line from Psalm 32 inscribed below his kindly face: “I will guide thee with mine eye.” Whose voice is this, and whose eye? For all its futuristic advances, contemporary surveillance sometimes invokes a primordial authority as well.