Citizenship and Identity in the Age of Surveillance
Pramod K. Nayar Cambridge House, 4381/4 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi 110002, India
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© Pramod K. Nayar 2015
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First published 2015
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Contents
Acknowledgements v
1. Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance 1–34 Constructing the vulnerable citizen 12 Constructing safety 25 Surveillance 28
2. Bodies and Biosurveillance 35–67 Surveillance and corporeality 36 Biosurveillance and biobanks 48 Surveillance, sorting and citizenship 51 Vulnerable bodies, consuming bodies and the rise of 62 the surveilled self
3. Data and Data Subjects 68–105 The data age 70 The personal information economy and the data subject 75 The vulnerable data subject 80 The responsible surveilled subject 101
4. Spaces of Surveillance 106–137 Splintering urbanisms and the spaces of surveillance 114 The rise of ‘defensible space’ 120
iii Contents
Cultural trauma, vulnerability, social splitting 123 Surveillance and the subject afraid of difference 135
5. Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject 138–171 Objectification, self-surveillance and the new regimes 140 of the self Performative surveillance 143 Witnessing and dissident surveillance 158 The rise of the witness-subject 169
6. Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship 172–200 Witnessing 174 Witnessing memory 180 Global witness citizenship 187 Surveillance, global witnessing and compassionate 194 cosmopolitanism
Bibliography 201 Index 215
iv Contents
Acknowledgements
This book owes its origins to informal exchanges with Debjani Mazumder. From preliminary back-and-forth over some months, we moved on to discussing the possibilities of a full-length book, disagreements about titles and scope, mode of writing, etc. Fortunately, these disagreements were productive, and the result is right here. Thank you, Debjani, my editor for many years, and now a friend and advisor on most matters in publishing. Anna Kurian expressed enormous enthusiasm for the project alongside concerns. With her characteristic passion for all – okay ‘most’ – of my projects, she read chapters, as we argued endlessly about loyalty cards, AADHAR, witnessing and compassionate cosmopolitanism. Once more, my gratitude to you, Anna: for shaping my thinking–writing (also my apologies for crenelated prose in parts!) I am indebted to V. Premlata for sending me vast amounts of material on surveillance (more than I could handle at times!). Thanks are due, as usual, to Saradindu Bhattacharya for sourcing essays and Neeraja S. for chipping in when necessary. Nandana Dutta objected, with her usual grace and charm, to several arguments in the chapter on witness citizenship, and the chapter is better for her interventions, and the book, overall, to her warm friendship. Thank you, ND. Sections of the chapter on participatory surveillance appeared as ‘Smile, You are On Camera: The Rise of Participatory Surveillance’, Rupkatha 3.3 (2011), while the Wikileaks sections of the same chapter had its origins in ‘WikiLeaks,
v Acknowledgements the New Information Cultures and Digital Parrhesia’ in Economic and Political Weekly xlv. 52 (25 December 2010): 27–30, and the longer essay Cabling India: Wikileaks and the Information Wars (DC Books, 2011). I am grateful to Tarun Tapas Mukherjee for inviting me to write the first, the referees and editors of EPW for the second, and to Saraswathy Rajagopalan of DC Books for her sustained interest in the third. Sections of the chapter on bodies appeared as essays or parts of books: ‘Cultures of Surveillance: Biological Citizenship and the Rise of the Surveilled Subject’ Literary Paritantra 3.1-2 (2013): 34–52 (Thank you, Premlata, for inviting me to write the essay for LP); ‘I Sing the Body Biometric: Identity, Identification, Surveillance and Biological Citizenship,’ Economic and Political Weekly XLVII.32 (2012): 17–22; ‘A Sting in the Tale’, Economic and Political Weekly XLIX.22 (2014), web exclusive http://www.epw.in/web-exclusives/ sting-tale.html; ‘A New Biological Citizenship: Octavia Butler’s Fledgling’, Modern Fiction Studies 58.4 (2012); Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013) and ‘From Bhopal to Biometrics: Biological Citizenship in the Age of Globalization’, in S. Swarnalatha, Scott Slovic, Vidya Sarweswaran (eds) Ecoambiguity, Community and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism. (Lanham: Lexington, 2014. 85–98). Thanks are due to the Swarnalatha for inviting me to write for the volume and the anonymous reviewers for suggestions. R. Radhakrishnan invited me to write on biological citizenship for the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, for which I am indebted, just as I am for the referee report from the journal. Posthumanism’s manuscript referees enabled me to sharpen my arguments, and rethink several. Sections of Chapter 5 were delivered as the Keynote address at the National Conference on Trauma, organized by St. Thomas College, Kozhencherry, Kerala, 5–6 September 2013. I am grateful to Febu George for inviting me to the conference and to my interlocutors there, specifically Meena Pillai and Josy Joseph. The arguments about the shift from surveillance to witness citizenship were first unleashed in the form of a keynote talk at the National Seminar on ‘The Practice of Everyday Life in the Northeast: An Interdisciplinary Approach’, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Tezpur University, March 2014. I am grateful to Prasanta Das for inviting me. Some parts of the main themes of surveillance constituted sections of my talk on 9/11 cultures at the Refresher Course in English, Calcutta University, January 2014. Thanks to Sinjini Bandopadhyay and Sanjukta Dasgupta for having me over.
vi Acknowledgements
I also record here my thanks to Ron, for lovely exchanges, punny and pithy, Molly, a.ka. ‘Chechu’, for being interested and for your constant goodwill; Soma Ghosh, Ajeet D, Saraswathy Rajagopalan, Vasudeva Rao, Bella Rao, Ibrahim Ali, Neelu (of the Famed Forwards), Niyati Dhuldhoya, Rita Kothari, inhabitants of my small social world; Narayana Chandran, for good humour, advice, astonishing bibliographic references flung out at random, subtly concealed approval, and for making the workplace interesting beyond measure; The staff of the American Library, Chennai, for their superefficient services that enable work to flow seamlessly. My support system that allows me the space, time and energy to work has withstood my projects (and me) for years now. To the loyal members of this system, my immeasurable gratitude – my parents and parents-in-law, Nandini and Pranav (and Pranav, this book is not on postcolonialism, so have addressed your complaint!). Finally, I would like to thank Ranjini Majumdar and Qudsiya Ahmed of Cambridge University Press for all that they did for this book.
vii
Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance
1 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance
wo days after the bomb explosions in Dilsukhnagar, Hyderabad (2013), a local newspaper reported ‘Rs 450 cr granted for 3,500 CCTV cameras’.T The state government also made surveillance cameras mandatory for all commercial buildings, malls and hotels (‘Rs 450 cr granted for 3,500 CCTV cameras’). The state proffers technological solutions to the general disquiet around lack of safe public areas. In June 2013 the Andhra Pradesh government’s AP Public Safety (measures) Enforcement Bill was passed in the Legislative Assembly that makes it mandatory for ‘private establishments that attract crowds of over 100 persons at a time … to have closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras and access control measures in place’ (‘CCTVs a Must in Private Establishments’, 2013). In Stephen King’s Under the Dome (2009) an entire community discovers that they are under observation by some alien intelligence. The town is placed under a dome, cut off from the rest of the world as though in a laboratory in which they are specimens. King’s otherwise not very riveting read ponders over the possibility of the entire human race being the subject of someone’s observational gaze, someone we cannot see or whose intentions in this experiment we cannot hope to understand. School buses, cabs and transport carriers in India now have a sticker on their rear window: ‘How Am I Driving? If You have Problems with My Driving call 123456789’. The sign tells us that the organization actively seeks our participation in monitoring 1 Citizenship and Identity the driving of that vehicle since the organization itself cannot do so. So much observation all round. What if our lives are being played out under somebody’s watchful gaze? What if the theological fetish of many cultures, that an omniscient eye of the Supreme Being watches our every move to reward or punish us, is merely a version of the observational mechanism of laboratories? In such idioms of the visual, we can discern a continuing obsession of the human race—watching. Or, more troublingly, surveillance. This book suggests that (i) surveillance is an organizing principle of our lives today, alongside other ‘grids’ like consumption or mobility and (ii) surveillance is also one of the elements that produces our subjectivity.1 It therefore accepts but moves beyond the now-classic formulation (Lyon 2001, 2003) of surveillance as monitoring for social sorting. Surveillance as the book sees it, is also a phenomenological element that informs, influences and inflects even our interiority. We are surveilled citizens. Our citizenship is produced within the crucible of surveillance, as is our sense of selves. We surveill ourselves because we are aware that our behaviour or body language, being documented by a camera somewhere, might produce consequences—such as being accosted by law enforcement authorities—should the ‘eyes’ watching the camera find this behaviour threatening, unusual or suspicious. If one could then redo the Decartes phrase to reflect the contemporary situation: I am surveilled therefore I am. This new form of subjectivity is not unique to India or the USA but is a global condition, albeit with variations in terms of density (of surveillance), resistance, state-role and privatization. It is therefore imperative, given the book’s progress from local ‘cultures of surveillance’ to this global condition of surveillance and witnessing, to state that while the focus is on India, developments in surveillance technologies and policies, like concerns over privacy, are global in scope and ambition. India’s privacy debate, as exemplified in Justice AP Shah’s Report on the ‘Group of Experts on Privacy’ instituted by the Government of India, relies heavily on global concerns about privacy and human dignity, privacy and human rights and privacy and state power. (Here it is essential to
1 I must add immediately that I am not speaking of the subjectivity that emerges from self-surveillance—for example, examining oneself for lumps, sugar levels, etc., or of one’s behaviour, all of which constitutes self-surveillance (more on this in the chapter on participation). 2 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance note, and I shall return to this point in the sections on exposure in Chapter 3, that the question of privacy is not addressed to say the urban poor, whose lives, including their intimate and personal moments are performed/played out in the full view of passers-by, on pavements and open spaces. The poor are not subject to the same kind of surveillance.) Further, with programmes like PRISM of the National Security Agency of (USA) monitoring Internet and telephone traffic across social media, geopolitical borders for surveillance cultures do not exist any longer. This book must therefore be seen as taking, as a point of departure, India’s surveillance cultures. However, it is also written with an incessant awareness of how global surveillance cultures impact upon India and how a shared, if uneven, culture of surveillance exists globally today.
* Surveillance is a system of social relations. Law enforcement and security agencies, CCTV managers in malls, apartments or public places, CCTV staff, residents/users of the space are all connected through the CCTV. Claims of activity (licit, illicit), counterclaims (loitering, suspicious behaviour), categorization of users (legitimate, illegitimate), assumptions (threat- assessment, risk regulation) and discourses (safety, private space) all revolve around technologies of seeing, monitoring and archiving via the CCTV. People are linked through these devices and discourses that the devices engender and are engendered by. Power relations are established between the watcher and the watched but also inverted and subverted by users, such as the Flash Mob or the performance of deliberate acts of mockery or critique, say by Surveillance Camera Players (New York City). The state’s power or that of the manufacturer and supplier over citizens, users and the masses is increasingly founded on the collation of vast amounts of information via devices and processes such as the CCTV or identity cards. That is, information gathering and interpretation (although gathering of information is itself founded on certain assumptions of what is acceptable behaviour and what is not, and who constitutes a threat or who is a legitimate user of that space being monitored) determines the extent of power a state or manufacturer has over the individual or a group in order to guard, incarcerate or furnish goods and services (targeted advertising is based on the monitoring of individual purchases, browsing and such). It is surveillance, therefore, that establishes the relations between social groups and the state, or between user and supplier. What we can therefore safely assume is that surveillance is a form of governance not only by the state but by non-state actors as well. 3 Citizenship and Identity
The camera and its monitoring of everyday life, space, purchases, surfing habits, expenses and behaviour affects the relationship between the governed and the governing (Backer 2008: 113), whether it is formal surveillance of public spaces by law enforcement cameras or the ranking of Indian universities and colleges that India Today carries out annually. (The latter marks a significant shift in the very nature of surveillance—away from public/state forms to privatized and corporate surveillance. We shall return to this aspect later.) What we see today is a convergence between the systematic use of surveillance by the state actors for monitoring citizens, the deployment of informal modes of surveillance (such as loyalty cards) by corporate bodies, the use of surveillance as a means of enforcing neighbourliness and community-feeling within a specific locality by the inhabitants/users of that locality to ensure a certain form of behaviour and the heightening of self-surveillance (especially medical). When the state gathers information about wealth and income, much of this information comes from the kinds of purchases—cars, holiday plans, luxury goods—an individual makes in the marketplace. Thus the state’s surveillance is facilitated by the information passed on by the non-state actor. When neighbourhood watch organizations collate information about users, residents, domestic workers and traffic to the local police station we see both a decentralization of surveillance as well as a convergence between official- formal and non-official forms, where the individual takes on the responsibility of surveilling the neighbour/neighbourhood. TV talk shows place celebrities, politicians, bureaucrats and the ‘common’ individual and their traumas, sufferings, successes under the spotlight, but very often (as we shall see in the case of the Indian talk show Satyamev Jayate) use individual stories to address or recognize a social condition. This convergence between forms of surveillance often invests the individual with the responsibility of surveilling, and of an appropriate response to what the surveillance reveals. This could be in the form of litigations, tightening visitor norms, expressions of empathy and solidarity or an active role in dissidence surveillance (such as India’s Right to Information Act that enables citizens to obtain information from the state or other organizations). ‘Convergence’ here is the merging of roles between actors and processes in the surveillance game, even when the aims of surveillance are different (monitoring populations or individuals in the case of the state, of the public space of the neighbourhood or the operations of the state in the case of the individual).
4 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance
Monitoring of people and places is in itself not new. Vagrants, spies, trouble- makers, unemployed individuals, enemies of the state (real and imagined), and nomadic tribes who were seen as possible disruptive forces in any society were placed under surveillance by states across human history. Surveillance might be a simple gathering of data – such as what happens in the case of online users. It could be positive surveillance, for instance, when law enforcement authorities keep an eye on criminals or public health matters, where to be excluded from surveillance might reduce the subject to neglect, lesser resources and safety. Predominantly, however, contemporary and commonplace notions of surveillance treat it as being overwhelmingly about power, domination and control of people and places by ‘authorities’.2 My sense of surveillance throughout this book partakes of all three senses of the term, although it is a bit more weighted towards the third. However I also propose towards the end of the book the rise of participatory surveillance processes and structures and their amplified role in the creation—still underway—of a global witness citizenship. Surveillance ‘involves assorted forms of monitoring, typically for the ultimate purpose of intervening in the world’ (Haggerty and Samatas 2010: 2). We need to start thinking of surveillance not simply as technological mechanisms of control or as instantiations of Orwellian state-power but as a cultural phenomenon. It is not the CCTV but the community’s cultural practice and belief system that empowers the CCTV qua surveillance to monitor people, places and events. It is a cultural belief and norm that calls for surveillance, just as surveillance produces certain cultural practices and norms of behaviour, facial expressions or even humorous and subversive gestures. We install CCTV and share product-purchase information with superstores not because a recording device exists: we accept those devices and questionnaires because we have come to believe in them. It is the culture of insecurity and its discourses of the vulnerable subject that produces and invents technology that is then taken as the solution to the insecurity and vulnerability. This also suggests that we cannot see surveillance as simply the deployment of CCTV or the documentation of irises through sophisticated technology. Surveillance must be seen as the effect of a series of interactions—between technology, human actors and nonhuman actors and space. CCTV whose images are sorted by computers is coded by
2 The etymology of the word favours this sense. ‘Surveillance’ comes from the French word surveiller, meaning to oversee and to watch over. This clearly implies a hierarchy of spatial arrangements and of power: of watcher and watched. 5 Citizenship and Identity humans. The TV observes humans, and should an alarm be sounded, the image interpreted by a computer (or human) would effect a human intervention in the space where unacceptable behaviour, as defined by the sorting code, has been underway. The space of the CCTV is itself transformed for us and modifies our experience of it through the presence of the surveillance device. When we as a public agree to place ourselves under the gaze, we have made surveillance a culturally accepted and culturally legible process. The principal difference between older forms of surveillance and the new ones is that they work by ‘transcending natural (distance, darkness, skin, time, and microscopic size) and constructed (walls, sealed envelopes) barriers that historically protected personal information’ (Marx 2004: 18–19). Surveillance is no more characterized by the watchtower: it is dispersed and diffused. Information about an individual is collated across domains, from recreation to employment records, DNA to medical history, by and at multiple sources (including supermarkets, neighbourhood watch communities, check-in cards at offices, CCTVs in parks, IP tracking for internet purchases), with no single, controlling viewing authority. We live in an everyday that is saturated with surveillance. It is a major shift from an earlier era where surveillance was something one experienced in specific places and under the gaze of one person or thing. In critical studies of surveillance the panopticon model has been dismantled in the last two decades. The Jeremy Bentham model, examined by Foucault, of the one-vantage-point view of the surveilled has been replaced by the rhizomatic model of surveillance. Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson propose instead of the panopticon a ‘surveillant assemblage’. In this assemblage, information is abstracted from human bodies in data flows and reassembled elsewhere in databases to produce ‘data doubles’ of the individuals (2000: 606). The assemblage is thus diffused, dispersed rather than centralized in the form of a watch-tower. Where earlier only suspects – that is, those whose identities where already known – were surveilled, today everybody and anybody, spaces and events, are surveilled (Marx 2004). Thus, surveillance which was once a narrower and specialized technology of state power has now become ubiquitous, including within its ambit everybody, and extending into domains as diverse as recreation, leisure, reading habits, consumerism in addition to retaining the older ones of law and order. The routinization of surveillance is what produces cultures of surveillance. Ubiquitous surveillance by ambient technologies has made surveillance more unobtrusive, and the physical intrusion into the body or
6 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance person is now no longer essential for any agency to collect data. Identification can occur from a distance, independent of the physical presence of the body in another spatial location. Neither does the surveilling agency need to rely on the perceptual capacities of a human person. Where earlier surveillance focused on individuals, contemporary surveillance observes entire populations (Finn 2009: 106). To reiterate, we are surveilled not in a centralized manner but in fragments—as a worker, as a consumer, as an internet user, as a resident in a neighbourhood, as an airline user, at the ATM—and the fragments now, in the age of the database, come together somewhere to produce my identity. What this also means is that surveillance has moved away from the punitive to the preventive: where once specific groups or individuals where placed under surveillance for having ‘committed’ an unacceptable action, the new surveillance monitors entire communities in order to ensure that nobody commits any crime. Correction programmes and Neighbourhood Watch programmes also signify a shift in surveillance, from the panopticon model to what Stan Cohen has called the ‘dispersal of social control’ (1985: 127). Having summarized the ‘traditional’, or commonsensical, role, purpose and process of surveillance, I now map a shift in how we can read surveillance.
* The obverse of the above scenarios of surveillance also exists. Increasingly authority and those in power become subjects of intense scrutiny and surveillance by the governed. If the governed are observed for their behaviour— whether it is in public spaces or in their acts of consumption—the governors are also observed. The governors, or governing bodies, are also sealed into networks of information-gathering (formal, such as the Right to Information Act, or informal, such as mobile witnessing by passers-by) and communication. It is increasingly the norm and sometimes the law that individuals in power, or governing bodies, open themselves up to such a scrutiny, that they furnish information about their processes and thoughts. Public trust in governing bodies is founded, in other words, on the extent of information furnished and the sustained surveillance of the bodies’ functioning. Governance is no more a condition of top-down surveillance but rather an effect of intricate and enmeshed flow of information gathered through multiple means (RTI, CCTV but also, in the case of the public observing the governing bodies, through sting operations). Acts of governing bodies seen as unacceptable through the information gathered therefore become modes of rejection and prosecution of the bodies by the governed. ‘Accountability’, the buzzword of contemporary
7 Citizenship and Identity democratic governance, is intimately connected to ocular metaphors drawn from surveillance cultures: visibility and transparency. If the governed are monitored for their behaviour, then the ‘fixing’ of responsibility or accountability upon the governing bodies is made possible through the techno-social processes of surveillance. The public offended by visual evidence of bribery, misbehaviour in houses of Parliament or Assembly, or the excessive use of force by security personnel fixes the responsibility for such behaviour and the resultant loss of trust in the governing body/bodies because the tape or video is deemed to ‘reveal’ the real workings, or interiority, of the systems of governance (I shall return to a more detailed examination of this theme of interiority and visibility in Chapter 5). We can also now postulate a surveillance citizenship. Elections and consumption are modes through which we define our belongingness—as political citizenship and consumer citizenship respectively—to the public. Surveillance citizenship is a form of belonging in neoliberal societies. In neoliberal economies with greater emphasis being placed on individual decision-making and participation, surveillance becomes a mode of establishing our participation in the processes of governance of the nation. It defines our relation with the public, and even the nation. Facebook confessions, disclosures on Reality TV, information sharing in social media are modes through which we perform a self-surveillance as spectacle as a means of socialization. Further, surveillance links, as we shall see in Chapter 6, various social actors into an organization, systematizing social relations, chain of command and functions, and built upon the ‘text’ of surveillance cameras. Sting operations and demands under RTI place authorities under the public eye and the institutional processes rendered transparent, thus also suggesting a connection between ocularity (seeing, seeing through), surveillance and power/knowledge. By participating in surveillance—sharing information about ourselves but also placing others under surveillance we acknowledge that we are all members of a public and this public needs to be defended. A key assumption of this book is, to summarize, that (i) we consider the public space or sphere as one that is recursively constructed through activities of surveillance and (ii) our participation in this public as responsible citizens is in the form of surveilled subjects. A recursive public is
a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of
8 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance
constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives. (Kelty 2008: 3).
The public sphere and the community is now defined and characterized by its forms, intensities and technologies of surveillance. Conscious citizenry – such as the ones we have seen assembling at various places in New Delhi even as I write these lines in December 2012–January 2013—demands surveillance as responsible citizens, and responsibility is now measured in the willingness to be part of the surveillance mechanism that protects the very idea of citizenship. US Attorney General Eric Holder is reported to have said in a Congressional hearing that the Department of Justice had ‘made tremendous progress in protecting the safety, and the sacred rights of the American people’. The news item which report Holder’s remarks also revealed that the Obama administration, armed with a judge-approved surveillance licence since 25 April 2013, had been snooping on telephone records of Verizon subscribers (‘US Agency Spying on Phone Records of Millions’). The implication is: if you are concerned about the ‘safety and sacred rights of the American people’ you would accept, even seek, such surveillance. A responsible citizen, in other words, is one who accepts, even seeks, mass/public surveillance in order to that public. This is the new subjectivity of the neoliberal state, under CCTV eyes, with AADHAR (India’s biometric identity card, titled ‘Unique Identification Number’, that was linked to social welfare schemes before a Supreme Court judgement in early 2014 ruled against it), consumer loyalty cards and neighbourhood watch. Thus we now see ourselves as a public that needs to use surveillance as a means of staying a public, where instead of, say, welfare measures for social security we now consider means of public safety (I shall return to this shift later in this chapter). We think in terms of ‘defensible spaces’—malls, gated communities, public spaces—where we will feel secure. I am a member of the public and therefore defend the right to be a person of this public in safety, in the face of threats. Participatory surveillance, as I shall argue, is the organization of the public into surveilling itself and its borders in order to ensure the smooth, legitimate functioning of the state, the safety of the public itself and to guard the erosion of freedoms and rights of that public. By participating in the surveillance mechanisms, whether in the form of neighbourhood watch or sting operations, one not only claims the right to be in that space but also performs essential services to keep that space public. However, such a participation might
9 Citizenship and Identity be taken a step further where the public turns the camera onto the structures of authority explicitly to monitor their functioning – a process we can think of as a subset of participatory surveillance that I call dissident surveillance (Chapter 5). (However to file a caveat right away and anticipating the arguments of Chapter 4, the very nature of this public or the modalities of participation in it are called into question when a homogenization is imposed, as consumer citizens in a mall or residents in a gated community, and heterogeneity – that characteristic chaos of the street – is posed as a threat in surveillance cultures.) Through a participation in the visibility regime we render the public more transparent and accountable. If, as Jürgen Habermas famously proposed (1962, English translation 1989), rational debate and conversations are crucial to the political project of democratic public spheres, then surveillance cultures of today see the increased securitization of the public space and its obverse, participatory surveillance, as central to democracy itself. Intervening in the public spaces of a democracy by examining the processes of power (as we shall see in later chapters) is, like rational debate, a means of participation in the public space. The crucial democratic challenge, writes Andrea Brighenti, is to ‘achieve a deployment of power that is ideally without secrets … the device of public representation is necessarily public’ (2010: 54). Visibility, writes Brighenti, ‘contributes crucially to the demarcation of the public domain’ (58). Sting operations, exposés, disclosures and such are surveillance modes through which the public turns watcher and the state, the watched. Rendering the government or authority visible in its processes is to render it accountable This, the present book suggests, is the politics of surveillance too where it is not the state’s hegemonic control over our lives and spaces but also the public’s surveillance of the state and corporate apparatuses with the possibility of counter-observation and resistance that makes for will be seen as a ‘witness politics’. Surveillance of this kind—by the public, whether in the form of Wikileaks or sting operations that makes information, say about government processes or even corruption or abuse of power, ‘common’—makes the public sphere open to all, as Habermas would want it. To phrase it differently, the public sphere is one made possible through acts of surveillance even as these acts are encouraged and enforced so that the public space is maintained in a particular way (with notions of safety, national security, satisfaction etc). Thus the public sphere is produced through and in
10 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance surveillance culture—the rituals, actors, processes and technologies that work in tandem to collect, collate and interpret information about individuals and groups. Categorization of ‘authorized users’ of spaces such as malls or movie houses is made possible by surveillance: the CCTV, the floor detective in the store, the bouncers and security guards. The pleasure of the mall as a public space is contingent upon the visible (visible to us just as we are visible on camera screens in the security rooms) and ambient forms of surveillance therein. We as pleasuring subjects exist within the space of this surveillance, and remain legitimate subjects as long as we fit into the patterns of behaviour for that space. Legitimacy and pleasure thus go together here. This surveillance culture produces particular kinds of subjects who in turn enable the making of the culture. Such a culture produces, and is produced by, particular kinds of subjects and subjectivity. However, as the latter chapters will demonstrate, this surveilled space can also generate a different order of space when, for example, the role of security guards, users or cameras itself comes under scrutiny by those who were assumed to be the passive surveilled. The role of mobile witnessing that I shall examine transforms the surveilled into surveillers of the very structures of power that are supposed to safeguard those surveilled. It is in this kind of reversal of the surveillance structure that new forms of public participation or ideas of democracy (as visibility, for instance) emerge. Surveillance, this book assumes, could also function as a safeguard for democratic processes. Moving beyond the pejorative sense of surveillance this book therefore examines and speculates upon other possibilities and potentialities in surveillance cultures. While conceding that these other possibilities—of the surveilled functioning as conscious witnesses to atrocity, documenting human rights violations or corruption in institutions, of developing a cultural literacy (which enables the spectator to become a witness) about rights or about the functioning of government through viewing the internal processes—are not yet fully amongst us, the book presents these as precisely that: potential.
* Surveillance cultures begin with the construction of vulnerability. We allow ourselves to be drawn into structures, perimeters and databases of surveillance, of ourselves and others, because we have agreed that we, our loved ones, neighbours, community and nation are vulnerable to different kinds and degrees of threat and danger. Co-opted into the ideology of vulnerability we then cast around for safety nets—both literal and metaphoric—as individuals,
11 Citizenship and Identity as a community and as a nation. Integral to the safety net are forms and modes of insurance and pre-emption—commercial products and services but also state-run mechanisms—of which surveillance, arguably, is the most significant. By endorsing and participating in surveillance culture we see ourselves as guarding us as a public. We watch ourselves watching others. And, as we shall see towards the end of the book, the responsible surveilled subject is slowly, since the last decades of the twentieth century, also transformed into a witness subject (as opposed to being simply the passive, surveilled subject of a former era), a member of an active global witness citizenship. This last demands a high level of cultural literacy, as noted above but is worth reiterating, about rights, legal process, violations—a literacy that comes, to make a circular argument, through heightened surveillance of structures of governance and power. Surveillance cultures therefore are double-edged, producing subjectivities of the passive-governed and of alert witness-citizens. But this is for later. In this Introduction I examine three interlinked and sequential discourses that constitute the principal ideological and ideational foundations of surveillance cultures: vulnerability, safety and surveillance. These discourses work in many domains such as data, bodies, entertainment, spaces and move us towards participation. In these domains a culture of surveillance is produced, as also a new kind of subjectivity.
Constructing the vulnerable citizen The transfat in biscuits and processed foods may result in cholesterol building up. The strange group of African college students assembling regularly at my neighbour’s house might indicate a drug cartel or a terrorist sleeper cell. The college kid sneaking around the aisles in the supermarket might be a shoplifter. That unaccompanied bag in the corner seat in the crowded airport lounge could be an explosive device. The downturn in market demand for engineers gestures at the imminent loss of value in engineering education which, if I were thinking of such a career now, relocates a discipline into the limbo of ‘unsafe’ or economically unviable subjects for study and employment. This anecdotal but not entirely speculative inventory of conditions that we encounter regularly, if not everyday, emerges out of our instant and immediate recognition of sources and situations of threat, danger and disaster. This recognition induces anxiety or panic, exacerbates social tensions and drives proactive measures by individuals and communities. It is this recognition that
12 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance constitutes the core of our sense of vulnerability. This sense of vulnerability has been built up assiduously through discourses circulating in our everyday life in the late twentieth century. We have become vulnerable or insecure citizens in the neoliberal state where the recognition of imminent danger or negative consequences is accompanied by the responsibility of a particular kind of response to these situations. Thus, it isn’t enough to be aware of one’s vulnerability. It is equally, if not more, important to take pre-emptive action against imminent disaster. This responsibility of securing one’s life, finances, family, neighbourhood and even to some extent the nation increasingly rests with the individual. One means of ensuring this security is through surveillance, as we shall see. Vulnerability discourses construct what Torin Monahan has called ‘insecurity subjects’. Monahan outlines the characteristics of this subject as follows:
This insecurity subject anticipates risks and minimizes them through consumption, regulates exposure to potentially threatening Others through systems of fortification, believes that economic inequalities are natural and social exclusion justified, voluntarily sacrifices privacy and civil liberties on the altar of national security, and fully supports punitive state policies, whether against immigrants, criminals, terrorists, or the poor. As an ideal type, the insecurity subject becomes the reference point against which individuals, and increasingly institutions and automated systems, evaluate behavior and make decisions. (2010: 2)
A few lines on the question of the discursive construction of vulnerability are in order now. The vulnerable, or insecurity, subject comes into being within a discourse addressed to her. This discourse often identifies a source of threat, and which I shall, for the sake of brevity merely designate as the Other. The Other, whether a faceless terrorist or the African student running a drug cartel in the neighbourhood, is made to address me in particular ways and makes it imperative that I respond in particular ways because it is the nature of the address that places the responsibility upon me to respond for the sake of ‘safety’ and ‘security’. The nature of the address therefore is all-important. It should be clear thus that I am surely responding not out of autonomy but because the nature of the address of this Other places upon me a moral obligation to do so. In other words, what I am proposing is that the vulnerable citizen is
13 Citizenship and Identity manipulated into a response due to the ‘source-of-threat’ Other addressing me in a certain way. (Vulnerability is also, therefore, a vulnerability to this discourse itself, of not being in a position of not responding.) Take for instance the discourse of danger to public places. Generic public interest or public safety announcements constantly address me, cautioning us as individuals to be alert to this unclaimed bag or that ‘suspicious’ movement in our immediate vicinity. Over time we become attuned to an imminent threat to any and all public spaces we navigate regularly. A faceless Other—a terrorist, a person with swine-flu symptoms, a chain-snatcher—is imprinted in an individual’s mind, an Other who poses a threat to this public space he/she is currently traversing even though we all know that more people die crossing the street in an Indian metropolis than in bomb explosions, swine-flu or terrorist attacks. Constructed as vulnerable to this nameless, faceless Other, we are called upon to respond essentially to an anonymous clear and present danger if we want to secure the public space. We are under a moral obligation to look for this faceless terrorist or suspicious passer-by (even though, for all we know, there really are no set criteria for identifying ‘suspicious activity’). Further, we expect, after years of cultural literacy through public announcements, that when such authoritative announcements are made by the police, the state and other such functionaries, they know what they are saying. In short we assume that the generic announcement comes from an authority that knows of the existence of danger. Authoritative addresses, as Judith Butler notes, are ‘binding’ upon the audience, and such public announcements function to bind me to an appropriate response (Butler 2004: 130). (That said, it is also obvious that in many cases an absolute, or resolute, indifference to risks and vulnerabilities is visible. The steadfast refusal to acknowledge unclaimed baggage or identify ‘suspicious’ activity in the neighbourhood is also now a part of our lives, and might be seen as a resistance to the security discourses that construct us as vulnerable and demand we act out of fear of the public space.) However, this vulnerability is not about any individual alone. Indeed in the world we inhabit—then and now—what characterizes our vulnerability is its borders with others. Once again I turn to Butler for her pithy summary of shared vulnerability:
each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies – as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to
14 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance
follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure. (20)
It is because as individuals we are connected to others that we share, partake of, are responsible for, others’ vulnerability. We are vulnerable with, even as we are vulnerable to. Vulnerability is therefore a form of subjectivity: what we can think of as ‘my sense of myself as being at risk’. This sense of insecurity, marketed by security agencies and the market, instils in individuals and groups a different view of the public space, of built environments and the city itself. Reports and media coverage of urban crime, terror attacks, vagrancy problems and the increasing numbers of the homeless on the city streets leads the individual citizen, over a period of time, to believe that public space is unsafe. The public space, the citizen believes, needs to be policed in order to render it safer, which translates into removal of the homeless, the poor or anybody who does not fit the definition of a respectable member of the community the individual belongs to. The right to the city, respectable members of the community have come to believe, cannot be a right for anyone and everyone. This sense of unsafe public spaces automatically becomes, therefore, at least in my mind, a discourse of policing, rights and zoning under the guise of ‘saving the public space’. The increased policing in zones such as malls, parks, financial districts, business centres and other spaces is a task, it must be emphasized, entrusted to private/corporate organizations with offices in that area (Hyderabad city’s Financial District and the ‘cyberabad’ zone with MNC software companies are examples) and thus marks the privatization of public space in the guise of enhanced security. (Extending this we see the mushrooming of gated communities and enclaves as modes of regulating space—more on this in the chapter on space.) The discourse of security does not ask whether the vagrants are homeless or jobless by choice or because the social mechanisms have failed. Portraying them as threats or risks to the public space eliminates the necessity of probing the reasons for people sleeping on pavements (Delhi’s homeless who die in the hundreds during its severe winters). That is, the condition of insecurity ‘erases’ the condition of social inequality with the former calling for tougher policing and privatisation of space and ignoring the necessity to address the social inequalities that produce vagrants in the first instance. As Don Mitchell demonstrates throughout his work The Right to the City (2003), it is the fear of ‘inappropriate users’ of public space that
15 Citizenship and Identity leads to increased policing—and concomitant diminishing freedom of—public space in the guise of keeping the public space public. To phrase it differently, the denial of access to public spaces to everyone (the ‘chartered streets’ from William Blake’s brilliant poem ‘London’) is presented in security discourses as the guarantor of public space for some. The discourse of vulnerability or risk, as I have argued before, is focused on the speculative and the chance of the ‘becoming-real’ (Nayar 2010). It calls upon us to imagine scenarios where the self is at risk in the world. The discourse is organized around four key components: exposure, foreseeable danger, the depoliticization of risk and paranoiac-suspicion discourse. To be surveilled is to be exposed to technologies of visibility, recording and databasing. It marks, Kirstie Ball argues (2009), the revelation of the interiority of the body to the world of the camera and the eye behind the camera.3 However, this is a rather limited sense of ‘exposure’. Instead, I propose that ‘exposure’ is two-fold: exposure to and exposed by. Both go together in the new media age. Criminals at large, terrorists, swine-flu, ‘Nigerian’ frauds are now exposed by procedures of surveillance, media coverage and warning notices.4 Sting operations expose corruption, corrupt officers and possible offenders. Wire- tapping and other forms of surveillance track down and expose terrorist sleeper cells but also (as seen in the Radia tapes scandal) conspiracies, political configurations and alliances.5 Exposure here is the revelation of conspiracies, threats, secrets and incipient dangers. Exposure here is not only the making visible of already committed crimes or frauds but also the anterior moment of a future event. Thus ‘exposure’ here is temporally a double-edged category because it looks at the past as well as the future.
3 There is of course the willing exposure of this interiority in, for instance, reality TV, therapy cultures and game shows where participants reveal their character, personalities and anxieties to the audience. 4 Nigerian 419 scams refer to con jobs where somebody wishes to transfer huge amounts of money to your account, but requires an initial advance fee for the process. The 419 refers to the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code dealing with frauds. 5 The Radia tapes scandal was the exposure in the media of a telephonic conversations between Nira Radia, a lobbyist and the then telecom minister A Raja, other journalists and corporate heads like Ratan Tata. Radia was trying to influence decisions in the appointment of Raja as minister in the first instance and later the cellphone 2G spectrum allocation. Radia’s phones were tapped by the Income Tax Department. 16 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance
But exposure is also the continuous media coverage of possible risk scenarios signalling possible aetiologies of risk. Lonely roads are unsafe at nights, accepting foodstuffs from strangers on the train is risky, revealing your email/ bank account password to anybody opens up possibilities of hacking, shoulder surfing for passwords is common at ATMs and cybercafés—the list is endless. In this latter sense ‘exposure’ might be defined as the self’s encounter with the world of mistrust and suspicion. It is the exposure of our minds to the several possibilities of being defrauded, hacked, cheated, implicated and suspected. Kirstie Ball is right to claim that the surveilled subject is ‘exposed’. But this is a limited, if perspicacious, argument. It is not only the object of surveillance that is examined or ‘exposed’. Surveillance is also where our (subjective) awareness of the possible or necessary object of surveillance, whether the fraudster or the terrorist, is constructed when we are exposed to identikit pictures, aetiologies of fraud and the consequences of our carelessness. Exposure, thus, is a way of thinking about the construction of not only the surveilled subject or person but of our very own subjectivity as vulnerable individuals who agree to monitor others, to share data and to guard personal information. The surveilled citizen trained by the cultures of surveillance believes that a better life is possible within the framework of CCTVs, biometric identification and IP tracking. When we acknowledge that we are at risk from identity thieves, cons or terrorists after structures of surveillance have ‘exposed’ them to us, we are also being constructed within the binary of the threat: the individual is the one under threat or at risk from the Other. We therefore need to see exposure as a key element in the discourse of vulnerability because it positions the subject surveilled (threat) and the subject-at-risk (the individual as possible victim) within a dialectic. It is only when the individual accepts that she/he is at risk do they also accept that a surveillance strategy is essential. Once this strategy is accepted as essential it is possible to proceed further to construct one’s own vulnerability as well as the threatening Other. One of the key effects of ‘exposure’ is to bring to our attention the idea of foreseeable danger. Foreseeable danger is a discourse constituted by two components. The first locates drawbacks and limitations of a system, structure or design, arguing or suggesting that as a result of these limitations, danger is imminent, impending or inevitable. Second, it reduces the complexity of many processes that precede the disaster (such as a crime or a cardiac arrest) to a determinate set of conditions. That is, instead of exposing us to the many
17 Citizenship and Identity processes, several of which are indeterminate and uncertain, the discourse of foreseeable danger literally cuts to the quick and gives us an abbreviated aetiology of the event. It simplifies complex events into a straight-forward account. In the case of the first component, discourses of surveillance point to the bad lighting, transport conditions and inadequate back-up mechanisms that lead to crimes against women, kidnappings or just plain harassment. The second one is illustrated by warnings about unclaimed baggage. The aetiology here reduces the complicated nature of terror attacks to just one detail: a piece of unclaimed baggage and/or a person ‘moving under suspicious circumstances’. Whether this is the real sequence of events is immaterial to the discourse: what is important is that we recognize the ‘essence’ of the problem: unclaimed baggage. The latter, (‘moving under suspicious circumstances’) left undefined, simplifies the intricate nature of planning and surveillance or counter-terrorism measures that ‘produces’ the possibility of a crime. Or take health surveillance. Cholesterol-filled oils lead to cardiac problems. This simple aetiology of heart disease reduces the need of surveillance to one domain: watch what oils you consume. The discourse of cholesterol surveillance (by the self) omits other factors that might be equally if not more responsible for similar heart problems. Foreseeable danger is the discourse where individuals or groups are made to ‘see’ the limitations of their contexts and given a thumbnail sketch of all that could go wrong with these contexts. Thus in the immediate aftermath of the 16 December 2012 gang-rape and brutalization in New Delhi we had the discourse of foreseeable danger made visible in the statements by politicians and bureaucrats. Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee president, Botcha Satyanarayana, claimed such incidents occurred because women went out at night (‘Rape victim should have been careful: Andhra Pradesh Congress chief’). A politician claimed, on 29 December 2012, that sexual harassment of women was the result of women wearing skirts (‘Wearing skirts to school causes sexual harassment: BJP politician’). Eliding the complex nature of work today (call centre jobs that entail late-night shifts, post-work hour socializing mandatory to work cultures) or leisure, the changing nature of fashion, individual taste and temperament, and the nature of social relations across genders today, the discourse of foreseeable danger shifts blame to (i) ‘weak’ contexts of transport or social space and, most frighteningly, to (ii) the woman’s behaviour/clothing/ attitude. ‘You should have known this was coming’, sums up this discourse of foreseeable risk.
18 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance
Risk here must be seen as foreseeable within these contexts. Risk perceptions are often cast in simplistic binaries (victim/perpetrator, citizen/criminal). More importantly, sorting people into these binaries is now intrinsic to surveillance discourse. However, as Patrick Parnaby has noted, this sorting of people for surveillance is a depoliticization of risk because it reduces individuals or groups into particular categories by effacing the complicated socio-economic, caste, class and gender configurations and relying upon social stereotypes (2006: 11). While ‘depoliticizing’ perhaps is not the best word to describe this process of social sorting, the point Parnaby makes is well taken. Let me take an example here that illustrates Parnaby’s claims more or less accurately. I live in a city (Hyderabad) where Muslim youth—youth, not older men—are picked up at the first signs of communal tensions or for ‘questioning’. The branding of Muslim youth as troublemakers has now been effective for so long that it is now a stereotype. Thus, a day after the bomb blasts in Hyderabad (21 February 2013), a local newspaper carried a report about the anxiety of Muslim youth in the Old City. It cited a senior citizen of the area: ‘No one wants the police to knock on their doors. The Muslim youth are picked up from various parts of the city whenever such incidents take place’ (‘Old City Youth in a Grip of Fear’, 2013). Social sorting that has rendered Muslim youth vulnerable to such surveillance constructs them as ‘risk’. This risk-identity posed by the Muslim youth depoliticizes the socio-economic conditions of Muslim households and their access to education or employment (documented, as is now publicly known, by both the Sachar Committee and the Ranganath Misra Committee appointed by the Government of India to study the socio-economic conditions of Muslims).6 By reducing the Muslim youth to potential troublemaker or threat, risk has been embodied in him. Branding them as troublemakers elides the identity markers on which the sorting is actually being done: their religion. Depoliticizing also has another effect in terms of social sorting. Individuals with unique identities, features and attitudes—supposedly encoded in the ‘unique’ ID of the AADHAR card—are then sorted into types. This effectively
6 The Sachar Report is on the website of the Ministry of Minority Affairs, Government of India, http://www.minorityaffairs.gov.in/sites/upload_files/moma/files. The Ranganath Misra Commission Report, also known as the Report of the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities, 2009, is also on this website (http://www. minorityaffairs.gov.in/sites/upload_files/moma/files. Accessed 6 January 2013. 19 Citizenship and Identity merges their very individual personalities and features into attributes of a community already documented—and sought for—in the database. When Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) was detained at the John F Kennedy airport, New York, in 2009 and 2012, it was not as SRK the individual but as a man with a name ‘Khan’ that triggered alarms in the database programmed to pick out, again, not individuals but anybody with a Muslim-sounding name or Arab features.7 What we are looking at here is not the unicity of an individual but a social sorting and a typification using essentialisms. Similarly, neighbourhood watch suggestions include reporting any strangers in the vicinity. This entire discourse of neighbourhood watch thus relies upon two specific assumptions. First, we should be able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate users of the social space of the neighbourhood. Second, it also assumes that we ‘legitimate’ occupants have a natural or acquired (by virtue of living there in that space legitimately) capacity for identifying the illegitimate users (Parnaby 11–12). There is a further stage in the depoliticization of risk. When we sort people into legitimate and illegitimate users of our neighbourhood space we do so on the basis of fundamental assumptions: illegitimate users of the space are the ones with criminal or ‘anti-social’ intent. The ‘body’ of this user is not inscribed or ascribed with any other socio-economic factors (say their caste, class or religious identity). The body is reduced to only one identity: illegitimate user and possible/potential criminal. This is a depoliticization because we
7 The Director Kabir Khan, who was supposedly detained thrice, commenting on SRK’s ‘problems’ said in a comment to the Times of India: ‘That Shah Rukh’s name popped up in their system yet again is ridiculous. The last time this happened, the correction was made and his credentials established. It only shows that their security apparatus is faulty’ (Rajghatta 2012). What Kabir Khan is referring to is the typification and essentializing that underlies the US security systems that very often ignores the individuals and fastens on to the generic ‘attributes’ fed into the system. This algorithm or code that glows red whenever the name ‘Khan’ runs through the immigration check is not the effect of the software but reflects the human beliefs and prejudices that wrote the codes and the algorithms. Software sorting systems are attempts to sort individuals and groups minus the human element of guards. But this only means, David Murakami Wood and Stephen Graham note, the ‘potential for discrimination, and indeed for transgression, has effectively been given to the designers, builders and programmers of such systems, who are able to embody their prejudices and desires into the very functioning code and architecture of the systems themselves’ (2006: 186). 20 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance cannot sort people based on their religious identity. This would be socially unacceptable. Instead we sort them based on a supposed recognition of their illegitimacy in that space or their supposed criminal intent. By focusing the attention on their illegitimacy or criminal intent/potential we depoliticize what we are actually doing: sorting them based on their socio-economic factors and identities. It is, in other words, socially acceptable to sort people based on their criminal intent—which we as legitimate users of the social space supposedly recognize—but not on their socio-economic or religious identity although this latter is precisely what underlies the sorting. (Studies of CCTV surveillance show that ‘malign intent was equated with appearance, youth, clothing and posture’. Norris et al 1998; cited in Graham and Marvin 2001). Shifting the focus away from religious or caste identity towards the singular ‘criminal’ or ‘troublemaker’ identity is depoliticization. In Parnaby’s words, ‘the fact that members of a community may run the risk of excluding citizens on the basis of discriminatory criteria is not even acknowledged’ (12). It is a process of ascribing value, or rather values, to a particular kind of individuals. Regulating access to our neighbourhood or the mall based on unwritten and perhaps unacceptable assumptions (about certain groups of people, such as youth or vagrants) is a political act that furthers the vulnerability discourse because we are made aware through a process of accretion the kind of people we need to watch out for. ‘Security’, writes Mike Davis in his study of what he calls ‘Fortress L.A.’, ‘becomes a positional good defined by income access to private “protective service” and membership in some hardened residential enclave or restricted suburb’ (2006 [1990]: 224). As a result a typology of the ‘unacceptable’ or the ‘dangerous’ is increasingly wired into our unconscious, and the means to alleviate this anxiety of insecurity is now available for purchase. Surveillance cultures work around the condition of suspicion, even paranoia. David Harper’s work on paranoia (2008) proposes that surveillance induces anxiety in the constantly surveilled. But Harper ignores a related situation which is: doesn’t our participation in and acquiescence of surveillance of the Other entail a similar anxiety? For instance, a customer just might want to handle a few of the objects on the shelf in the supermarket. Does the presence of CCTV not make this individual worried that if he/she is seen/recorded doing so, would that not indicate criminal (shoplifter) intentions? Does the CCTV not engender the anxiety: ‘Am I behaving in a suspicious manner?’ Even with ubiquitous and near-unobtrusive surveillance in public spaces, are we not conditioned to ‘perform’ our identities differently—since, as Erving
21 Citizenship and Identity
Goffman (1959) so wonderfully argued, all identity is the presentation of the self in everyday life—because we are aware of our movements being recorded? Do we use our status messages, pictures and posts on Twitter, Flickr or Gmail aware of the self we are presenting for the world to observe (surveill?) and respond to? One of the assumptions I have outlined here is that surveillance culture is made possible because an individual acquiesces to it as a vulnerable citizen. This vulnerability borders, I now propose, on suspicion and even paranoia. Indeed, as David Harper notes, surveillance is ‘conceptually distinct from suspicion [but] is materially and discursively connected to it’ (4). Very often, it is a sense of powerlessness, the threat of victimization and exploitation that lead to the culture of paranoia. This sense of powerlessness is race, class and gender coded, as well as spatially demarcated. People in ghettoes, slums or specific zones who are economically disadvantaged, and are therefore prone to exploitation, are the ones who take readily to paranoia. Those belonging to disadvantaged sections of society who do recognize that other sections of society really have power over them are more easily conditioned into believing that some people are the source of threat (Mirowsky and Ross, 1983, cited in Harper 7). In such social contexts conspiratorial discourses work their best effects. However, upper classes and majoritarian communities are also conditioned into accepting such conspiratorial discourses. They are threatened with losing their privileges and social standing when, say, the poor or the minorities come to power. Implicit, for example in the discourse against the reservation policy (India’s affirmative action policy that ensures caste-based quotas in education and employment for communities identified as ‘backward’ castes) is the anxiety that, once the lower classes and castes become socially mobile the upper classes would not have drivers, servants and such ‘assistants’. But this anxiety is only implicitly expressed. The class boundary becomes, in this implicit discourse, impermeable till such time as an incident does penetrate and damage the boundary. The protest against the Delhi gang-rape of December 2012 might be read as an articulation of a cultural-social anxiety where the rape of a woman of a particular class demonstrated the permeability of the class boundary. Belonging to the socially mobile, educated and metropolitan classes was no immunity against gender-sexual cruelty, as this incident demonstrated. Conspiratorial discourses position some people or social groups in particular ways, and this positioning is done by particular groups as well. Blurring the lines between suspicion and paranoia, conspiratorial discourses urge us to be 22 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance mistrustful of the intentions of others. Or, the actions of others are interpreted to suggest ‘harmful intentions’.8 Intentionality is a key component of all conspiratorial discourse because it locates conscious agents within what could well be accidents or happenstance. Even without any evidence of deliberate plotting, the mere co-presence of, say politicians and businessmen at a party, makes it possible to forge a link between them, and propose a conspiracy. Another way in which conspiratorial discourse bordering on paranoia functions is by building connections between and across random objects and events (Harper 13). This involves developing stories and plot-lines around specific groups of people and events in history. As recently as 2012 a textbook from S Chand publishers carried a lesson in which it was claimed that meat- eating people are more likely to steal or be involved in acts of violence (see report in The Huffington Post 2012). Such a report indicts, with no proof, Muslims and Christians in India and attaches a particular tag to them. 9/11 has generated endless stories about conspiracies involving Jews, Muslims and even the US government. Conspiratorial discourse generates so-called knowledge about these events, people and objects, even proposing that this ‘knowledge’ is forbidden—and thus reinforces the very idea of conspiracy: ‘they do not want you to know’. In other words conspiratorial discourses work to propose access (of some people) to forbidden knowledge of secrets and plans (once again revolving around the theme of exposure). In such cases it is not paranoia any longer (paranoia is not being able to offer any proof for fears and anxieties), but ‘knowledge’ of/about something horrific. It reads beneath real power structures secret conclaves and intrigues. Conspiratorial discourses are also essentially modes of exposure: they expose the innards of a corporation, a political outfit or an historical event to us, unifying the disparate elements of these entities into a simple cause–effect or perpetrator narrative. Central also to the construction of paranoia is the discourse of intended threats. Think of two ‘facts’ that all of us now with access to newsprint and digital media are privy to. Terrorist emails and communications intercepted are regularly posted on our front pages or screens. Comments by leaders of such outfits where threats are crudely effectively worded are now commonplace. The second fact is our increased awareness that devices and mechanics of
8 Harper notes that one’s own suspicions are seen as normal whereas those of others would be treated as paranoia. 23 Citizenship and Identity destruction are now so widespread that any outfit in the world can use any of them against us. The intimacy of war and destruction, the intrusion of war into civic spaces of everyday life and the nondescript nature of terrorist targets has been made possible through the arrival of plastic bombs, remote control devices and, of course, aeroplanes. HV Savitch’s work on terrorism and the city notes:
cities provide the elements that make modern terrorism so combustible. Their large populations, high-value assets, capacity to connect the world, strategic location, and symbolic importance have changed the course of terrorism, giving it a new form. Hence urban terrorism is about how terrorists turn the strengths of the city against itself. (2008: 12)
In the aftermath of the brutal gang-rape (December 2012) India witnessed calls for greater policing of public places, GPS tracking of buses, monitoring of mass transport systems, even as the apex government for higher education, the University Grants Commission issued an order asking institutions to heighten security measures for women students (Kasturi 2013). It suddenly came home to many users of these facilities that the spaces are vulnerable spaces (or rather, they had always recognized public spaces as unfriendly to women, but the incident attenuated the risk factor). In other words, the world and space one occupies is not only vulnerable to attacks but facilitates the attacks by virtue of its very nature—the nature that facilitates our life in the city as well. Paranoia stems from the heightened awareness of the terrorist intentions to target places of worship, stock exchanges, shopping areas and mass transport systems that make life in the city easy, but also from the feasibility of these becoming targets to sophisticated destructive technology that we now know terrorist outfits possess. Paranoia kicks in when threats and disasters, their mechanics and perpetrators come to occupy the position of folk knowledge. Paranoia is of course manipulated by groups and individuals with specific interests. The US regime under Bush manipulated the population into paranoia about terror attacks and was able to, as a result, swing draconian policies regarding security checks, databasing, tapping and surveillance. For a very long time Indian politicians used the threat of the ‘foreign hand’— destabilizing influences such as the CIA, during Indira Gandhi’s regime—to keep the population in a state of anxiety. Right wing Hindutva outfits produce the discourse of terrorist Muslim groups and the Muslim minority itself to generate paranoia. 24 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance
This last has been particularly powerful and resulted in the BJP coming to power at the centre. The Hindutva discourse about the Muslim population has produced what Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘fear of small numbers’ (2007): the threat of the minorities in Hindu-majority India. Generating paranoia around Muslim population growth-rates, meat-eating, the Haj or the Islam- connection with the troubling neighbour Pakistan has enabled the Hindutva brigade to invest the Muslim with a potential terrorist tag (a theme examined in numerous texts to require reiteration here).9 Once the vulnerable citizen has been constructed the next stage in the move towards surveillance is the construction of safety.
Constructing safety ‘Safety’ in contemporary surveillance cultures is the avoidance of risk. Essentially risk-management in advance of possible risks, the discourses of safety invest proactive policy and actions in the individual. Safety discourses are discourses that institute risk management as a component of individual but also collective activity—of surveillance. A ‘good’ city or a ‘good’ life has, as Charles Raab points out, increasingly come to be associated with a secure and safe living conditions (cited in Lyon 2006: 405). The debate now in India is whether New Delhi, the National Capital Region, is a good city to live in. With 570 plus rapes reported (and surely many more not reported) to the police every year, the very idea of a good city becomes questionable when it is measured in terms of (gendered) safety.10 It is important and ironic that the term ‘security’ has now got attached to a variety of other terms: from national security we have now moved on to speaking of food security, energy security, water security etc. The state’s concern with national borders, neighbours and geopolitical borders has traditionally produced surveillance of these ‘domains’. But since the late 1990s the talk of security has been focused also on the essential services to be offered to the citizens. The monitoring of food supply, energy consumption (and production)
9 See also Varshney (1993), Bose (2009), among others on the Hindutva anxieties. 10 These stats were cited by BBC on 18 December 2012 (http://bbc.co.uk/news/world- asia-india-20765869. Accessed 6 January 2013). NDTV cited 400 plus figures on 27 October 2011. (http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/most-rapes-in-delhi-mumbai. Accessed 6 January 2013). 25 Citizenship and Identity and the quantum and quantity of water supply or life-saving drugs is now a part of the state’s general ‘security’ rhetoric. Securing the good life or survival structures (especially in the health and medical structures) is as important as the guarding of borders. National interests are no more simply the question of geopolitical borders but include now the lifeworlds of citizens. What has happened in the aftermath of 9/11, swine flu, bird flu, Mumbai 26/11, Parliament House, Somnath and Aksharadham, communal violence in various cities, kidnappings and rapes, is that questions of social security— employment, education, health – have modulated into questions of public safety. While progress in terms of facilities for the differently abled or the aged has remained stagnant the state is keener on instituting censorship of the electronic media to curb dissent, greater policing of public spaces and greater checks on leisure spaces (pubs, restaurants). Thus we see a greater investment in public safety rather than in social security measures, an investment founded on the assumption that, for example, greater policing will improve public safety but ignoring the fact that unemployment or economic insecurities of a large group of people might actually be a major factor in ‘insecure’ public spaces as well. The economically empowered are the only ones with social security and who also, therefore, are concerned about their safety in public spaces (this leads indirectly to ghettoization of spaces in the form of malls, private roads and heavily guarded enclaves and gated communities). This shift in emphasis from social security to public safety—whether the latter is about the nation or a public space within the city—is, I suggest, the marker of neoliberal economies. This shift is coterminous with another major shift—from the welfare state to what David Lyon calls the ‘safety state’ (2006). Well-being, previously defined in terms of the quality of life—education, health, food, employment—is increasingly defined in terms of safety. Privacy, for example, considered one of the essentials for the individual subject, comes increasingly under control and scrutiny in the interest of national security and public safety. Following Charles Raab, I propose that the state is less concerned with questions of the quality of life it guarantees or offers, the structural inequalities in society or the burgeoning dissatisfaction and unhappiness that are the result of these inequalities. Instead, the state spends more and more energies, monies and time on ensuring the fire safety of buildings, the securing of public property and the safety of people in mass transport systems. What is being addressed is, less and less the social inequalities and injustices rather than social ‘unsafeness’.
26 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance
Governments are not evaluated or reproached for the quality of their governance which would ensure social security, but for the public safety they offer. Thus after the 2012 gang-rape the commentators in newspapers sought to evaluate states more or less unsafe for women. Commentators noted that two states in India headed presently or formerly by women Chief Ministers (West Bengal under Mamta Banerjee and Uttar Pradesh under Mayawati formerly) reported an increase in rape cases. Surveillance is now the citizens’ surveilling of governance systems that have proved ineffective in ensuring the safety of lifeworlds, especially of women. The success or failure of governance measured in terms of the lifeworld of the women citizens demand close monitoring by citizens and activists of legal measures (against ‘eve teasing’ in India or sexual harassment at the workplace), law and order mechanisms (police patrolling, for example), the demographics of women in professions, etc, preliminary to applying pressure on the state to institute appropriate measures. Safety and security, of both oneself and the neighbourhood or society in general, is to be achieved as a collaborative project: between citizens in civil society and the law and order mechanisms. ‘Responsibilizing’ is Parnaby’s term (14) for civil society and the individual being made responsible for safety. Risk management is therefore a shared responsibility, and a response to imminent threats. Risk management processes that inspire or force you to monitor your neighbours or the space around you in public areas often function as a supplement to the actions of the state mechanism. I use the term ‘supplement’ here in a deconstructive sense to mean both ‘excess’ and ‘completion’ where what any citizen does is over and above what the law and order personnel do but is also essential to ensure the completion of the process of risk management. When city personnel and governance structures flatter us by saying ‘this is your city’, it co-opts you into such a supplementary role. Safety is materially and discursively linked now to intensities of surveillance. Surveillance of public spaces is interpreted to mean these spaces are safe. This means, just as all individuals have, theoretically, the right to public spaces, they are also now invested with a responsibility towards that public space: of making sure they participate in rendering the space safe by collaborating with mechanisms of surveillance. Responsibilizing therefore is an extension of the processes through which public spaces are constructed. Surveillance is what Henri Lefebvre (2000) calls a ‘real spatial practice’ where, as a responsible individual we watch the space
27 Citizenship and Identity for intrusions, invasions, illegitimate activity and irresponsible behaviour. Responsibilizing manifest in surveillance makes the public space recursive because, as a member of this public space, we as individuals watch it come into being, guard it with our actions so that we can better enjoy it. Surveillance becomes a technology through which a public space produces itself as being of, and possessing a particular quality: safety. It then becomes alert to variations and turbulence in this public space and zealously agrees to collaborate in bringing it back to a state of safety.
Surveillance Having constructed, first, the vulnerable citizen and then the safety society, discourses of threat and security now turn to practical measures to perform the risk management that is at the heart of all security and safety discourses. To supplement the city or nation’s processes of securing the space to produce the safety society responsible citizens are part of the process of securitization. Securitization is the mechanism of governance which ‘sets in motion a particular political dynamic, empowers particular political actors inside the state, and builds up technologies and instruments of security, most obviously (although not necessarily) the military and surveillance capacities of the state’ (Hansen 2006, cited in Brodie 2009: 691). This political dynamic is composed primarily of technologies of surveillance. I use David Lyon’s definition of surveillance here: ‘a routine and focused attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, care, and control’ (2006: 402). Surveillance is made up of several components: the collection of data, representing this data in particular ways, interpreting those data and producing social hierarchies. The collection of data about individuals and groups constitutes the foundation of all surveillance procedures. Whether through CCTV, ID cards or phone-taps, surveillance is about collecting information about material bodies, single or collective. The collected information is then interpreted in terms of some criteria evolved. This could be criteria such as behaviour, purchases, websites visited, tweets and emails sent, social events attended, credit card usage, etc. This meaning-making is the conversion of information into knowledge about particular people and groups.
28 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance
Surveillance is about social hierarchies because the information collected— whether in the form of consumer surveillance through loyalty cards or Frequent Flyer programmes or CCTV grabs of suspect shoplifters or ‘anti-social elements’—is used to sort people into various categories. Thus ‘Frequent Flyers’, ‘trouble-makers’, ‘loyal customer’, ‘returning customer’, ‘vagrant’, ‘below-poverty-line individual’ are social categories made possible through the collation and interpretation of information about them. It is the information environment (database) that produces and makes acceptable a social category or identity such as the ones listed above. Interpretation implies a priori assumptions and criteria for organizing and ‘reading’ the data and/or specific ideas of what is being searched for. This last is made possible through what Kirstie Ball calls ‘intermediation’ (2002). Intermediation is a socio-technical process that binds together individual actors, events, processes and objects (584). The media is a very powerful intermediation device because it brings together the information collected, the agencies that did the collection, the technologies of collection, the subjects surveilled and, most significantly, offers the frames of meaning in which the data might be interpreted. For instance, the media calls attention to the absence of safety in public spaces, the prevalence of corruption in the government, the presence of particular carcinogens in food products, the threat of disaster from a particular terror group, and so on. ‘National security’, ‘cross- border terrorism’, ‘unsafe-for-women’ are terms in media rhetoric that indicate the process of intermediation: these terms frame events, objects and people in terms of necessary surveillance. But these terms in and of themselves lack the power to organize perceptions (of threat or safety) and must be appropriated not just by the media but by an entire apparatus: individuals, organizations and technologies. Informal and official sources and domains—such as the neighbourhood watch programme or the local police station’s patrolling—collaborate and intersect to produce the surveillance domain of public safety in your neighbourhood. (I shall return to these informal modes of surveillance twthe end of this chapter.) The loyalty card and the ‘People who have bought this book also bought…’ from Amazon.com intersect to produce the domain of consumer satisfaction. At the time of the swine flu epidemic health advisories from state organizations (the Health Ministry of the central and state governments) and hospitals intersected with advertisements for consumer products like Brook Bond Red Label tea or Lifebouy soap where immunity-boosting and hygiene
29 Citizenship and Identity were emphasized to produce the discourse of individual and public health. Media coverage of terror attacks, government policies and interactions with the Interpol and other organizations (also reported in the media), warning notices about suspicious activities, debates over national identity card, discussions about citizenship or belonging intersect to produce discourses of identity, legitimate citizenship, nationalism and belonging. The intersections work across media, government agencies, corporate bodies, welfare organizations and groups, the intelligentsia and social commentators, service providers for CCTVs and burglar alarms, law and order agencies, etc. Within these intersections particular discourses emerge: of safety, responsibility, profit, satisfaction and national security. These intersections that link people, technologies and processes are the intermediations that produce the frames, or discourses, to interpret the data collected. Intermediation is what co-opts us into participatory surveillance. Intermediation constructs us as vulnerable, offers us the prospects of safety and then the technologies and mechanisms of surveillance that, we are assured, will guarantee safety. We agree to be surveilled and to surveil others because we agree that this ensures individual–personal and public safety.
* I wish to move in this book beyond David Lyon’s famous argument about surveillance as social sorting/control to examine the kind of subjectivity—of the responsible, ‘safety-first’ data- and witness-subject—that emerges in surveillance cultures. I look at surveillance not only as a ‘state matter’ but also as something we see in and participate everyday as benign, voluntary and beneficial, or as a condition wrought upon consumer society through corporate bodies, service providers and manufacturers. I want to also examine how such subjects and subjectivities become central to the very notion of the public or citizenry. Finally, I wish to examine a new form of global witness citizenship emerging through our mediated engagement(s) with the spectacle of distant suffering, whereby surveillance of the genocidal and suffering spots of the world carry within it the possibility of making compassionate cosmopolitans of us. We can thus think of global civil/civic societies built around surveillance of distant communities. Public space is now constituted in a major way through activities of surveillance by formal and informal, state and corporate, individual and collective entities and technologies all networked in the age of globalization. It is also constituted through the non-official forms of surveillance that 30 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance often subverts state information controls—exemplified in the media’s sting operations, for example. That is, we can now rethink the public space as the effect of ‘surveillance networks’ (Green 2010) one constituted by the very activity of surveillance, official and non-official, involving technologies, agents, organizations and frames of reading. Surveillance is itself now a social structure or mode of social interaction—‘surveillance culture’—that is produced due to the activities of vulnerable subjects. The subjects and activities are what the structure recursively organizes. Such a surveillance culture produces a particular kind of subject. However, we need to differentiate between those who are genuinely disempowered and placed under surveillance and those who opt for these via Facebook pages or consumer loyalty cards or Frequent Flyer miles. Compulsory sharing of data—insisted upon by the state in the form of, say, AADHAR— is radically different from voluntary disclosure of personal information in exchange for better service or discounts. The ontological category of the data subject in the former case is in sharp contrast with the second. In any case we can discern the following subject emerging in contemporary surveillance culture: the vulnerable citizen who, assured of safety, willingly participates as a responsible individual and member of a collective, in surveilling oneself and others. We perform the vulnerable self that then seeks satisfaction, safety and security and so participates in surveillance. The self is one that is performed within technologies and structures of surveillance. There is no self that is prior to surveillance: the self is produced at the intersection of devices, passwords, secret questions, CCTVs, key stroke monitoring, biometric scans and DNA fingerprinting. ‘I’ am an emergent condition made possible through such iterated performances of passwords, online activity and medical self-surveillance. Surveillance is another form of citizenship training today. In democracies and liberal governments like India’s (and the USA) citizens are called upon to understand the new needs of citizenship: surveillance (but with a veiled ‘freedom’ of choice to not accept data security, AADHAR or consumer loyalty cards). The immediate response to this comment would be that the Indian state is not directly involved in surveillance. True. But take a look at the example I began this chapter with: the state ordering private establishments to install CCTVs in their premises. Or the caution issued to the general public to watch out for suspicious activity in their neighbourhood. I propose that the state need not any more be directly placing us under surveillance. We can think
31 Citizenship and Identity now of what Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, when speaking of television and MakeOver TV, have described as ‘networks of government’ where ‘each one of us is subject to the rules and covenants of multiple private entities’ (2008: 172). We engage in self-disclosure on TV and establish norms of confession and behaviour, even as victims’ self-disclosures of abuse or injustice construct cultural scripts that shame a nation or society about its gendered or casteist attitudes. It is also through these private (non-state organized) entities like MTV or consumer loyalty cards issued by chain stores that surveillance is effected. ‘Informal surveillance’, as I think of neighbourhood watch and consumer databasing, is a mode of surveillance approved, allowed and sometimes insisted upon (like the CCTV ruling I began with) by the state. This too is surveillance at a distance where the state is not directly involved but might be. Surveillance cultures produce responsible citizens out of vulnerable citizens. They train us to be watchful, cooperative and performative, because the CCTV, the IP tracker, the face recognition technology (which may not work if you smile!) all induce us to act in certain ways. Our behaviour, attitudes and expressions now work hand-in-hand with our sense of vulnerability, the need for security and the burden of responsibility for data-security, data-sharing, voluntary surveillance, etc. We also engage in considerable ‘self-surveillance’, defined as ‘the attention one pays to one’s behaviour when facing the actuality or virtuality of an immediate or mediated observation by others whose opinion he or she deems as relevant – usually, observers of the same or superior social position’. More importantly, ‘self-surveillance is also based on the cultural postulation that certain thoughts and actions are dangerous or unwholesome to the constitution of the individual as a subject’ (Vaz and Bruno 2003: 273). The vulnerable citizen is one who masters the art of self-surveillance because the culture of surveillance has caused her/him to internalize codes of behaviour and the awareness that all or any of her/his actions are being monitored and recorded. We bear the burden of surveillance today, when we monitor monitoring mechanisms such as the CCTV in the apartment or in the neighbourhood, to report ‘untoward’ incidents or people, etc, as part of our ‘responsible citizen’ role. Cultures of surveillance, in other words, ensures that the surveillance processes are normalized and integrated into everyday lives and spaces by our consent and active endorsement of these processes. Rather than the top-down state-sponsored surveillance through video cameras that retains the power equation (governed/governing) what we now perceive is the
32 Vulnerability, Safety, Surveillance distribution of social control amongst the citizens that co-opts the individual into the process of governance. In Bilge Yesil’s words, contemporary processes of surveillance ‘control the population and train the soul of each individual’ (2006: 412). When we participate in surveillance in the form of neighbourhood or sharing data or accepting biometric identification we perform our duties as good consumers, members of a community (whether neighbourhood or frequent fliers or shoppers), and therefore as citizens. Civic interaction—the basis for liberal societies and democracies—is now premised (one might say, founded) on surveillance. We participate in civil society through our roles as the willingly surveilled and by being part of the surveillance mechanism ourselves. We become witness-subjects when we see and document atrocity, violations and deviance in authority or civil society, participate in sting operations and support the Right to Information process that forces the state or a corporate organization to make visible its mechanics. We thus take personal— individual—responsibility in surveilling others and ourselves as witness citizens to the state and as members of civil society. We fashion ourselves as surveilled citizens, and performing in particular ways in front of the camera, reporting on neighbourhood conditions or availing/installing data protection services may be considered as modes of self-making. Surveillance is the framework for better living—once we accept the necessity of being surveilled subjects. This framework is not always state-sponsored, but often private and informal. We do not see surveillance as governance or as the instrument of control when it is a non-state actor like your Internet service provider or the neighbourhood superstore that collects your data, but it remains, irreducibly, governance of a particular kind and it produces the responsible citizen. Yet, this surveillance, when ‘performed’ through Google Earth voluntarily by us of distant genocidal spots across the world, even when mediated by capitalist Google’s powerful technologies of surveying and cinematic capture, carries within it potentiality of a different kind, as I shall argue in my concluding chapter. The surveilled citizen can also become surveiller of a different kind. Such a responsible subject and the vulnerable citizen participating in surveillance emerges at the intersections of several discourses and in several domains, some of which this book examines. Although my examples are drawn mainly from the Indian context but it goes without saying that technologies and the politics of surveillance is hardly unique to this country, given the large-scale
33 Citizenship and Identity application of biometrics, consumer databasing, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices, CCTVs and other devices in airports, malls, entertainment places, public spaces, schools, homes, banks and homes across the world. The US, in particular, as several studies (many of which I cite in this book) show, seems to be overly preoccupied with surveillance and security—I revised this Introduction in the wake of the June 2013 revelations about the USA’s NSA surveillance systems—than others, but only marginally so. I however conclude the book on a very different note, refusing to simply stay within the notion of surveillance as a top-down process of discriminatory and oppressive social sorting but carrying within it the potential for a global witnessing that might well become the anterior moment of a compassionate cosmopolitanism. But that is a later stage: to begin with we have ‘surveillance citizenship’, whose contours and contents the next few chapters will examine.
34 Bodies and Biosurveillance
2 Bodies and Biosurveillance
urveillance is the monitoring of bodies, their behaviour, actions, choices, desires and even fears. Whether this involves the recording of individual Sbodies or groups of bodies in malls, airports or traffic islands, or the documentation of an individual’s browsing online (where, frequently, one has to demonstrate that queries, searches and downloads, are being performed by a human body) surveillance cultures focus on the body behind an action. In the late twentieth century biometric surveillance had become a routine state of affairs where specific features of bodies are recorded and documented for purposes of identification. Biometrics currently includes fingerprints, ultrasound, fingerprinting, iris scans, hand geometry, facial recognition, ear shape, signature dynamics, voice recognition, computer keystroke dynamics, skin patterns and foot dynamics. Future biometrics, or second generation biometrics as they are sometimes called, will include neural wave analysis, skin luminescence, remote iris scan, advanced facial recognition, body odour and others. Passport controls, banking, social welfare, criminal investigation, state controls all operate through biometric identification procedures. With AADHAR the Indian state has begun to organize welfare schemes and public distribution services around biometric identification. Biometrics marks the return of embodiment within surveillance cultures and the entrenchment of biological citizenship. Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas define biological citizenship as ‘citizenship projects that have linked
35 Citizenship and Identity their conceptions of citizens to beliefs about the biological existence of human beings, as individuals, as families and lineages, as communities, as population and races, and as species’ (Rose and Novas 2005. Citizens, Rose and Novas argue, increasingly understand themselves in biological terms, and see themselves as possessing a particular ‘biovalue’. Let me elaborate. The state and business houses evaluate the value of a body, its organs and tissues. Our membership in the state and civil society is constantly being linked to the value our bodies possess. This could be the economic value of a working body, the symbolic value of a beautiful body or the cultural value of a body that has decided to donate organs. Similarly the social concerns expressed over economically non-productive bodies capture the value we attach to a body’s contribution to society. Biometrics foregrounds this biovalue (for themselves, for the state and for private corporations) by constantly calling upon their bodies to identify, present, validate, show their ethnic membership, lineage and familial ties, all on one ID card. I shall return at the end of this chapter to this theme of biological citizenship but as a foretaste of the theme here is the Indian state’s document on biometrics and biological citizenship. The Strategy Overview document of the Unique Identification Number (UID) states:
For governments and individuals alike, strong identity for residents has real economic value. While weak identity systems cause the individual to miss out on benefits and services, it also makes it difficult for the government to account for money and resource flows across a country. In addition, it complicates government efforts to account for residents during emergencies and security threats. (Strategy Overview 6)
This is biological citizenship, where the genetic code, the iris, or even the way you move might enable or hinder your access to services and the state. Bodies in surveillance cultures initiated into the process of biological citizenship by way of biometrics might be read under three heads: corporeality and embodiment, biosurveillance and biobanks and, in conclusion, social sorting.
Surveillance and corporeality Surveillance hinges upon the body of the observed. Traditionally it also involved the body of the observer, but this has undergone a major shift in the twentieth 36 Bodies and Biosurveillance century with ambient surveillance technologies like CCTVs connected to remote computer databases (although there is an observer body too, somewhere). We can think of this process as one where the body is first broken up into data (by computers) and then reassembled to proffer an ‘identity’ of the person. That is, the individual is first broken down and then put together again, where the body’s particular features are drawn on screen and assumed to ‘capture’ the full personality of the individual. The mere data are now deemed to be a person. We can call this a re-materialization of the body. Such re-materialization of the body, albeit within structures of surveillance, constitutes an interesting step in embodiment technologies. In an early book on surveillance David Lyon proposed that the body, once the site of surveillance is now the source of data for prediction (2001: 71–2). It is by observing bodies and their behaviour that law and order authorities come to particular conclusions, based of course, on particular assumptions (such as what constitutes ‘appropriate behaviour’) about the (i) the attitude of the individuals being observed and (ii) the intentions of the individuals being observed. Bodies become the source of anticipation, pre-emptive action and speculation. However, this also means that bodies in the surveillance cultures of today are not autonomous, coherent or sovereign entities. It is now possible to see them as not sites or sources but as nodes in a network that includes CCTVs, databases and observers. That is, a human body is not limited to or by the skin and flesh-and-blood structure. It is inserted into an entire chain of processes and structures that include cameras, people behind the cameras, the database into which the face, behaviour, purchases and action go, etc. These processes and structures are linked around and through the body: they are activated only when they ‘capture’ this body. Take a CCTV in a mall for example. This CCTV includes a camera, cabling and database which, one assumes, is periodically examined or regularly monitored by a human observer. What makes these structures and devices functional, purposeful and effective is not that they have a ‘source’ or site of investigation (say, the body of a shopper) but that they are activated only through this body entering their purview. Similarly the body is treated as customer-body, potential trouble-maker, big-spender, loiterer, within this surveillance circuit. It comes alive and performs a role within the network. Bodies are enmeshed into the surveillance circuit where, conscious of being observed (or even not), they behave in particular ways. In a sense, then, their subjective responses, identities and even subjectivities are forged through their
37 Citizenship and Identity bodies’ engagements with the electronic surveillance network. The bodies instantiate the network even as the network works because there are bodies to work on and with. While we cannot see free-moving bodies as seamlessly merged into the surveillance network, but neither is the so-called sovereign body fully sovereign either. In present day contexts, especially for individuals born into the surveillance society and constantly attuned to being observed, their selves evolve in conjunction with the surveillance network.1 Their selves are surveilled selves and their subjectivities, the effect of this performance of surveillance. Human embodied subjectivity now, in other words, is embedded at least partially in the technologies and networks of surveillance, whether the network is installed by the state or informally by Facebook and Amazon in their documentation of your internet searches and usage. (This last where the consumer/user produces data about her/himself and often allows the collection of such data has been termed ‘soft surveillance’, Marx 2006.)
Disappearance CCTVs, verification modes at passport controls, immigration records and usage records work with categorization (we shall return to social sorting towards the end of this chapter) and typologies of individuals rather than with individuals. Individuals are surveilled because of the ethnic, racial, age or class group they belong to. This means, the individual person is less important for particularities of features or behaviour than the class, race, ethnic group he/she belongs to. It is the group identity that takes precedence here. In one sense, therefore, the individual disappears. For instance, young black men dressed scruffily or in hooded jackets are surveilled more often than middle-aged or senior citizens (see Dubbeld 153). At passport controls and immigration checks after 9/11, studies show, Muslims, Arabs and others were subject to greater scrutiny (Lyon, Surveillance after 9/11, 2003). A famous story that illustrates this point of the disappearing body in contemporary surveillance culture is of India’s super star Shah Rukh Khan detained at New York airport in April 2012 (http://www.tribuneindia. com/2012/20120414/main6.htm. 16 Feb. 2013). Khan went on record to state
1 Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong have proposed that the observed are induced into conformity in surveillance cultures (cited in Dubbeld 2003).
38 Bodies and Biosurveillance that it had to do with his last name—Khan. The additional checks were not because he looked suspicious or behaved differently, but because surveillance mechanisms after 9/11 randomly picked up Muslim-sounding names for additional checks. SRK was picked up as a Muslim, not as SRK the individual. The detention was timely in one sense—since his just-released film, My Name is Khan, is one where SRK played an autistic Muslim in the USA whose refrain through the film is ‘My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist’. I propose that this shift of identity constitutes the disappearance of the individual and in her/his place the surveillance network sees a type. The individual’s actions are monitored because she/he belongs to a particular type. A set of features of say black young men or college students is first prepared—and this is where social prejudices influence the criteria—and these then become the foundation for surveilling the population. How an entire group is viewed determines how individual behaviour and actions are perceived. Surveillance is therefore about synecdoche, where the individual stands in for an entire group and vice versa. Next, an individual is the dataset inscribed into the UID or any card she/he might be asked by the state to carry. The body has been rendered into a set of numbers which must accompany the body at all times. All bodies are, in this account, mathematicized (by which is meant the conversion of humans into numbers and information that can then be stored or transmitted independent of the body). Lynsey Dubbeld argues that what is observed by the human observer is in fact mediated by the camera and the database into which the human individual has been rendered. The observed is here disembodied except as a profile, a mediated presence (Dubbeld 2003). That is, an individual’s entire personality, set of attributes, behaviour, prejudices and preferences are, to begin with, reduced to a set of statistical data. An individual possesses a ghost or a ‘data double’ (Lyon ‘Surveillance as Social Sorting’, 2003: 23)—in the dataflows as the individual disappears into this double. This informatization or mathematization is very much a part of our being and existence. That is, we cannot any more separate a pre-database body (which, once upon a time, was deemed ‘natural’) from the information about this body—information that the body produces every time the individual accesses an ATM, performs a search or walks through an identification scanner. Information-sharing, distribution and collation is now a part of one’s very ontology. As individuals we transmit this information: we inform banks, police, store-managers, online databases, airline officials, that we are at a particular place, seeking this or that product,
39 Citizenship and Identity performing a particular action. The surveilled body/subject could very welI thus say: ‘I inform, therefore I am’. Similarly, the data that is the subject can travel independent of her/his body. She/he need not be physically present for information, even highly personal information, to be gathered, transmitted and interpreted. This, in one sense, is true, but does not capture the entire complexity of the observation process for the body observed is also the body reappeared—we shall return to this in the next section. For now, it suffices to argue that, while the body remains the centrepiece, so to speak, of the processes of identity, it cannot any more be separated from the dataset this body has generated for a machine. Biometrics also means that one cannot ever be disassociated from the database of the body. This also means that identity of the ‘person’ resident in the body is revealed within the new regimes of surveillance—from ultrasonography to CAT scans and biometrics. An individual or subject is (only) the sum total of all the images produced within these technologies. Scanning and measuring technologies such as those in biometrics and other identification devices/techniques are ironically enough disembodied. One’s identification as X or Y is performed not through regimes of personalized and embodied surveillance (a watchman or policeman or any such human observer) but by a disembodied one. In other words, identity is observed, calibrated, verified by disembodied regimes of surveillance, but which, fed with a code that has a priori information about the behaviour of the group/race/class X or Y belongs to, and is able to predict what X or Y will do next. The body also disappears in another sense. An individual’s identity, if the state wants to confirm it, is now gathered from multiple sources and sites. We are surveilled as workers, consumers, as ATM users, as flyers, as Internet users, among others. When for example an individual ticks boxes that ask for preferences when booking air tickets, buying music online, or downloading scholarly essays the data are stored for future use. This set of data is then—as anybody who has been the victim of tele-callers will attest—often sent onward to companies, sellers and organizations that did not have any interaction with this individual in the first instance. Preferences for particular books, clothing, food, music or movies that an individual might reveal in one case seamlessly move into other databases. An entire biography is therefore available from these multiple sites and databases. Customer relations management services like salesforce.com and Radian 6 now use an ‘influence-metric’ called, appropriately,
40 Bodies and Biosurveillance
Klout, to measure the influence a customer can possess online. CoTweet and Seesmic display Klout scores next to contacts for the users to determine intensity of that individual contact’s influence. This influence in turn determines how quickly one needs to respond to customer requests—obviously individuals with higher Klout scores attract better service.2 An individual buyer’s social influence on fellow buyers is also monitored and her/his own requests as a customer will be determined by how much she/he can plug a product or service. An individual is, in other words, fragmented and sorted along and in several such databases, and a composite identity emerges through the collation of all these fragments. Surveillance then implies the fragmentation of an identity— and the dismemberment of a body, metaphorically—into multiple zones of use, action and behaviour. The ‘disappearance’ of the body can also be read in a different way. What digital cultures do is to produce simulations of our selves, called ‘dividuals’.3 ‘Dividuals’ are versions, or avatars, of the physical self that are then shared with others. What is important, Kirsty Best suggests, is that all actions—whether by the state or the manufacturer—are founded on projections themselves ‘grounded’ in these simulations: The process occurs continuously without need for any contact with or permission from the original (Wood and Graham 2003). In essence, the original self is superfluous to the processes which follow on from the gathering, sorting and sharing of information, processes which distribute impacts and effects based on these multiple simulated data-generated selves, without regard to the original referent. (Best 2010: 10) The original flesh-and-blood self with attitudes, biases and beliefs disappears into the data and the state or the company now deals almost exclusively with the composite dividual (composite because it is put together from multiple sources, such as credit card transactions, purchases, internet usage) in simulation. How the profile might behave is profiled in the computer’s database and consumer modelling is this fantasy, or speculation, entirely grounded in this profile. Amazon or Google’s database would therefore be made up of large numbers of dividuals, profiles and simulated avatars. These profiles are tracked and become the subject of prediction as to future taste, purchases or behaviour. These are not people or individuals per se but a set of profiles with predictable
2 For a short commentary on Klout see Lury (2012). 3 The term was used first, as far as I know, by Gilles Deleuze in his essay on surveillance (1992). 41 Citizenship and Identity actions and tastes. Google, for instance, keys advertisements to my search words. This not only builds a particular profile about me, it also makes use of my searches to further corporate interests.
Reappearance The disappeared body reappears, in several senses. First, it is reconstituted in a different form, as numbers and datasets. Thus the argument made above that the body disappears into the mediated and pixelated representations on screen or the numbers in the database is only one side of the story. The observer of course does see a mediated representation of a type of person, as noted above. But the task of the observer is to see through the mediated representation—whether it is on screen or profile sheets at immigration and airport checks or indeed any personal data—of a type and anticipate the behaviour of the individual behind the type. To phrase it differently, the task of the observer is to penetrate the mediated (onscreen, databased) representation of the individual and predict the actions of the person in that representation. The mediated representation on screen or data is a persona—to lapse into the argot of my discipline—a ‘face’. Surveillance is the penetration of this persona to discover the ‘true’ identity of the person who is believed to lurk inside. This is the reappearance of the body, and is an interpretive process where the person behind the mediated persona needs to be ‘decoded’. The observer who is following X’s movements on the security cameras moves behind/beyond the numbers and images and into X’s ‘self’. This movement inward/into the self and beyond the pixelated persona decodes X’s preferences and attitudes. Amazon, that epitome of consumer surveillance culture, is therefore able to tell X, based on its studies of customer purchases by other personae, that ‘people who bought this book also bought …’ To be able to interpret the personality and the intention behind the screen image—this is the next step in surveillance. Second, biometrics’ reign as the preeminent mode of identification and social sorting is a significant move in the return of the body. Biometrics becomes popular, ironically enough, at a time of increasing anxieties over the virtual. With more and more individuals in any population (primarily metropolitan- urban, but this is changing as well) spending a large part of their conscious lives in virtual environments, anxieties about the dematerialization of social interaction and personal relationships have been expressed. Yet this expanding virtual environment is also the space where bodily features, behaviours,
42 Bodies and Biosurveillance attitudes and actions are rematerialized. We now assume that status messages and updates, pokes and scraps are indicative of a real person behind the persona or on-screen image. For FaceBook fans the virtual is real enough, for these bodies, personalities and individuals interact in the guise of status messages, friending and pokes. Third, reappearance also involves the making of the ‘the somatically legible subject’ (Richard Nash’s phrase, 2011). What this means is that every body is at once treated as unique in terms of its biological data and yet fits into a larger dataset of what all bodies are. That is, biometrics is positioned at the intersection of the frailties, uniqueness and singularities of a specific body even as what is measured is common to all bodies. The ‘reappeared’ body is thus culled not only from her/his ‘persona’ but also from an abstract mass of generalized data: the type gives way to the individual and the mass to the atomic. The somatically legible subject is the shift from mass or congeries to the atomic. This somatically legible subject is one who acquires two key characteristics once the dataset has been prepared, cultural legitimacy and corporeal integrity. To begin with, the subject acquires a certain cultural legitimacy through the incorporation of that body’s socially, technologically and state-approved set of parameters—iris scans, for example—into the larger demographics. As the ‘Strategy Overview’ document of the Government of India’s UIDA states:
In India, an inability to prove identity is one of the biggest barriers preventing the poor from accessing benefits and subsidies … A clear identity number would also transform the delivery of social welfare programs by making them more inclusive of communities now cut off from such benefits due to their lack of identification. It would enable the government to shift from indirect to direct benefits, and help verify whether the intended beneficiaries actually receive funds/subsidies. A single, universal identity number will also be transformational in eliminating fraud and duplicate identities, since individuals will no longer be able to represent themselves differently to different agencies. This will result in significant savings to the state exchequer. (Strategy Overview, http://uidai.gov.in/UID_PDF/ Front_Page_Articles/Documents/Strategy_Overveiw-001.pdf, 1) Accessed on 4 June 2012
It is the body’s specific characteristics—its biologicals—that enable it to be fitted into a larger social domain as a vulnerable ‘poor body’. This is what I am referring to as cultural legitimacy where the biologicals determine, ascertain
43 Citizenship and Identity and validate the access to resources, and where the biologicals approved as determining factors alone can be counted. For a citizen to now access certain welfare measures or rights as citizen it requires that she/he acquire the cultural validation of biological traits supposedly unique to her/him. The somatically legible subject is one who fits the value ascribed to particular biological features—where these values are of course culturally instituted. An individual’s claim as a poor citizen, a senior citizen or as unemployed are linked to the database verifying not her/his social or economic condition but, primarily, her/his biological features. Surveillance legitimizes within the culture of state welfare or national security claims made by a body. Next, by positing that AADHAR’s biometrics can offer the security and safety to the vulnerable body of the below-poverty-line individual, the state makes surveillance integral to the very context of survival. It first constructs the vulnerable body, offers safety in terms of welfare and then makes this safety contingent upon the state’s ability to monitor the body. Biometrics thus clearly redraws the already constructed nature–culture boundary by making so-called natural features of the human body subject to cultural valuation as ‘authentic’ or ‘individual’. Thus a vulnerable, ‘poor’ body is one whose access to welfare schemes like dole or free medical care is contingent upon proving the link between its ‘innate’ self (‘this is me, as proven by the iris scan or DNA fingerprint’) and the exterior emaciated form (‘this is my weak, starving body’). Cultural legitimacy is particularly significant for the underprivileged and marginalized because they have to prove their legitimate marginality to the state in order to gain welfare (as seen in the document cited above). Cultural legitimacy is the politics of life itself where those who lead bare lives (zoē, as Giorgio Agamben terms it, 1998) must insert themselves into, and be subject to, the processes of biometric identification and databasing in order to become bíos.4 I think of this as ‘reappearance’ of the body because the weak, poor, unemployed and malnourished body reappears as the ‘deserving body’, which is a cultural category rather than just a biological one, through its insertion into the surveillance apparatus. The surveillance apparatus is the means through which a cultural legitimacy and subsequent
4 Giorgio Agamben (1998) refers to the animal-like life, minus rights and duties, as zoē, or bare life, exemplified by the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. Bíos is the political life, with rights and duties.
44 Bodies and Biosurveillance rights, if any, are ‘granted’ to the biological substrate.5 This is the making of the individual’s biological citizenship. (At the time of writing, in January 2013, the Indian government has linked domestic cooking gas supply to the biometric AADHAR [UID] card, thus demonstrating the link between biometric identification and state-run services. The scheme was eventually withdrawn on court orders)6 The second feature acquired by the somatically legible subject is corporeal integrity. This is achieved through the compilation of datasets, even if the body exhibits wear and tear, aging or injury. The parameters used in biometrics are the ones that supposedly, in biomedical terms, do not change with age. A certain corporeal integrity is ensured at least in the form of the consistent dataset that is prepared and which only uses those biologicals that do not alter, remain coherent and integrated even as the rest of the body alters with age and environment. Such a corporeal integrity is again linked to the cultural legitimacy outlined above. The unchanging status of particular biological features as indicative of the ‘core’ person or essential individual is premised upon a cultural assumption that these biologicals represent the true individual no matter how, or in what degree, her/his attitudes, behaviour, prejudices and responses to the world might have changed. This biometric identification process ignores environmental factors and rests all its processes of interpretation on biological features. It opts out of the nature/culture binary by ignoring changes instituted culturally through say education, religion or training, and focusing on unchanging biologicals. In effect, this privileges biology over culture, and is the cultural legitimization of biology. If your biological features remain unchanged across datasets—and of courses irises and DNA remain unchanged—then no matter what your social, psychological and cultural features are over the years, you are deemed to be the same ‘person’ inside. Surveillance establishes, in this fashion, that we
5 Although, as we know from materialist feminists like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, the very materiality of material substrates—biology—is performed through material-discursivity. 6 Studies of the Social Security database in the USA show how women expressed concern that every detail of their lives was documented and shared by people who did not always have their best interests at heart. Surveillance here works as ‘technologies of citizenship’ but also as modes of imparting political learning, ‘teaching lessons about their comparative social worth, competence, and opportunities’ (Eubanks 2006: 91).
45 Citizenship and Identity are our biology, above all else. AADHAR for example is not worried about how my training as a literature student and then as an academic might have wrought changes in me as a person. Environmental factors such as workplace, residential location, reading and thinking, socialization that contribute to the making of an individual as a person are consistently ignored in favour of the colour of her/his iris. To assume that the iris is the true, unchanging person is to carefully erase from the process of identity-formation all those factors that add to that individual’s prejudices, biases, preferences, efficiencies and inadequacies. You are not, , in other words, your iris alone. The politics of this cultural legitimacy must be addressed. Biometrics establishes the legitimacy of the deprived body to the state. So, from year to year, welfare schemes and support hinge upon consistently proving your biological core. This, however, does not address the unchanging social and cultural identity of the individual—who remains poor and in need of support year after year. Surveillance produces, in theory, access to resources for the underprivileged body, year after year. That the body remains both biologically as well as economically–socially unchanged is however surely problematic. The body reappears, every year, just the same! This does not account for changing socio-economic conditions and contexts of the body. Yet another way of thinking through the reappearance of the body is to consider its eversion in the context of the new surveillance technologies, where the body literally loses its privacy and integrity. It is fascinating to see that just when there are increased, and often acrimonious, debates about privacy invasions—the furore against Facebook’s face recognition software is a recent case (see Raphael 2011)—by media and others, the so-called technologies of surveillance invade the privacy of the body. This in a sense is a double paradox. It directly alters the notion of corporeal integrity outlined above through its invasive techniques, and it develops alongside the key concern with privacy. On the one hand there is more socializing, collaboration and exchange with perfect strangers—where one volunteers to part with information—that occurs due to the technology and yet the concern with privacy has never been as high as it is now. Relatedly, the private sphere of the body is no longer private (if, of course, there is any merit in this state of privacy). If the skin is the first home we occupy and which we constantly refurbish and regrow, then biometrics breaks down the borders of inside and outside. Indeed the outside world can now be negotiated safely only if one is willing to exhibit the inside of the body to these
46 Bodies and Biosurveillance machines and monitors. Our interface with the world is no longer defined by skin colour (alone). It is the revelation of the inside, letting the inside outside, so to speak, that allows us to interface with the world. The ‘revelation’ of the body through surveillance techniques such as DNA verification has generated debates that cohere around ideas of body integrity and body privacy. While frisking and searches ‘on’ the body have been around for some time now and more or less seamlessly woven into our everyday surveillance, DNA tests and such are believed to be more intrusive since they are ‘in’ the body (especially if these involve intrusion through, say the skin, although X-ray searches that do not ‘touch’ the skin are more difficult to classify as working ‘on’ or ‘in’ the body). As Irma Van Der Ploeg notes, this debate suggests that people have specific views of the boundary conditions of the body’s integrity (2003: 68).7 This matter of ‘revealing’ one’s identity has acquired another dimension. As debates and quarrels over the veil go on in Western society—with countries like France claiming that in a free and democratic society there cannot be veiling of the face—biometrics offers an entire new domain. The face, along with the fingerprint, has been one of the oldest of biometric measures (photography changed the way the face would be used, just as the impression of the monarch’s face on currency created the first culture of celebrity that relied on the transmission of the visual image). To cover the face has been seen, Lucas Introna and David Wood note, as a sign of implicit guilt in Western societies (2004: 178). With the new biometrics the face is not the key mode or site of revelation. The question of the veiled face does not arise because biometric identification procedures delve deeper into the body. With genetic testing kits now available for less than $120 DNA sampling is also slowly but steadily becoming a part of the biometric process. Thus what stands revealed, is exposed, is not the face alone but the very internal schema of the body. I propose, therefore, that biometrics is a process of eversion (a term from mathematics where something can be turned inside out without creasing, and
7 It might be useful here to think of self-surveillance for breast cancer, blood pressure, diabetes that are now part of everyday lives for many people. Many of these are intrusive and ‘in’ the body searches. It must also be noted that DNA samples are sometimes gathered in very strange ways. For instance, the USA’s FBI had tested the saliva on postage stamps to link a suspect to the World Trade Center bombing and to identify the Unabomber!
47 Citizenship and Identity from marine biology where some forms of animal life expel their entrails in defence) where the body is turned inside out.
Biosurveillance and biobanks Surveillance of bodies in the late twentieth century has gone deeper, and we now speak of biosurveillance. Biosurveillance includes not only DNA fingerprinting of criminals and suspected terrorists but also the databasing of entire populations (the Human Genome Project is an example of this kind of surveillance) as well as biobanks of stem cells, serums and tissues. The term ‘surveillance’ here therefore acquires new semantic scope and begins to refer to the collection of data not merely for the purpose of monitoring criminal activity but also for processes like research or biodiversity initiatives. Further, in the age of globalization and new forms of capitalism the materiality of the body gets enmeshed in circuits of exchange—and this enmeshing demands the databasing of bodies and their evaluation—often referred to as ‘tissue economies’ (Waldby and Mitchell 2006). Capitalism in the age of globalization has invested heavily in biologicals—genes, tissues and organs. This very often takes the form of bioprospecting (literally the prospecting, or mining, of biological matter) especially in the global black market for organs and tissues. In cases such as India bioprospecting and its correlate, biosurveillance, clearly facilitate exploitative relationships of First World buyers and Third World bodies. The BBC reported that every year an estimated 100,000 Indians die waiting for organs, with only 3,500 reported transplant operations (https://www. britishcouncil.org.in/debatingmattersindia/sites/default/files/topics/2013/ Organ_Donation_DMITopicGuide2012.doc). Accessed on: 9 June 2013 India’s organs are surveilled, prospected and globalized. Take the case of Amit Kumar, a.k.a Kidney King. Kumar and his associates removed kidneys from poor patients and sold them to paying customers. After he was arrested in 2008 it was established that he was part of a network that supplied kidneys to First World buyers. India is at the centre of a massive global bioprospecting movement, where the Indian poor are located in a tissue economy that respects no national sovereignty. But this organ trade, international in scope, and which reinscribes the poor Indian body into a global marketplace of organs, dovetails into something totally distinct: the biodiversity and the biomedical commons movement that
48 Bodies and Biosurveillance also seeks to globalize bodies. I use the term ‘inscribe’ to gesture at the value coding of corporeality and its constituents—blood, tissue, organs—and even functions (surrogate wombs, for example, which I have not addressed here). Hyderabad city held the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), in October 2012. The UN Charter on Biodiversity’s Article 15 on the access to genetic resources states:
Recognizing the sovereign rights of States over their natural resources, the authority to determine access to genetic resources rests with the national governments and is subject to national legislation. 2. Each Contracting Party shall endeavour to create conditions to facilitate access to genetic resources for environmentally sound uses by other Contracting Parties and not to impose restrictions that run counter to the objectives of this Convention.
It concludes with:
Each Contracting Party shall take legislative, administrative or policy measures, as appropriate, and in accordance with Articles 16 and 19 and, where necessary, through the financial mechanism established by Articles 20 and 21 with the aim of sharing in a fair and equitable way the results of research and development and the benefits arising from the commercial and other utilization of genetic resources with the Contracting Party providing such resources. Such sharing shall be upon mutually agreed terms. (http://www. cbd.int/kb/record/article/6897?FreeText=genetic) Accessed on: 9 June 2013
This biodiversity initiative is the making of biomedical commons. The ostensible aim is to resist the commodification of biological material like tissue and oppose patents on genes and gene sequences that are seen as leading to the enslavement of human bodies (Waldby and Mitchell 2006).The aim of open source biomedical database is ostensibly also to resist the incorporation of biovalue into globalized and standardized production, distribution and consumption patterns (145. Also see Malm 2009 on the moral duty to share genetic information). Open source initiatives, pioneered by organizations like Open Bioinformatic Foundation, the Bioinformatics Organization and the SNP Consortium, allow free web access to DNA, RNA, protein sequences and provide software (like BioPerl) for ‘reading’ genetic material. The Tropical Diseases Initiative is also open source, driven by the idea that to share research is to ensure some measure of therapeutic discoveries, embodied in the 2000 joint statement on 49 Citizenship and Identity human genome research by President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair where they claimed that ‘unencumbered access to this information [human genomic databases] will promote discoveries that will reduce the burden of disease, improve health around the world, and enhance the quality of life for all mankind’ (cited in Waldby and Mitchell 2006). Such biobanks and biomedical commons constitute a transnationalization of life itself. Biobanks are not merely the objects of governance, they are something through which the governance of life is effected (Gottweis 2008), but a governance that operates across species and also, crucially for my argument, across national borders. Worldwide diversity biobanks such as those proposed by CBD are not about genomic medicine alone. They institute a new order of biosurveillance where data about individuals, ethnic groups and communities are collected—often without informed consent as we now know—and rendered into disseminable or saleable data. As such, biopolitics has now gone deeper into bodies, to the level of molecular structure and information. (I shall return to questions of informational privacy and genetic data in the chapter on data.) The monitoring of genetic materials and their eventual organization into databanks, even in the guise of medical benefit for all, constitutes a new biological citizenship as well where particular groups have their data ordered and analysed outside the nation-state’s purview the moment the state signs the biodiversity agreement. It entails the management of serum, genes, proteins, blood and other bodily data by institutes and corporations outside the nation- state. This means, essentially, the body has been dematerialized into numbers for absorption into a global matrix of such bio-data. I therefore forward the argument that the decorporealization of bodies into data constitutes the politics of the dispersed body whose data lies somewhere in the vaults outside the nation state under the guise of human diversity. Bioprospecting for organs and for genetic medicine and research are both therefore perceivable as modes of biosurveillance. The consequences of local bodies enmeshed in global tissue economies as a result of this surveillance and prospecting are alterations of the very nature of citizenship. Yet another form of biosurveillance is visible since at least the 1980s, and this is the documentation of bodies affected by disaster, violence and oppression. The global campaigns for the Bhopal victims, for the refugees from genocide in Rwanda, for the victims of civil war in Somalia, Congo, Sudan and of natural disasters like the Haitian earthquake or the tsunami suggests a global surveillance mechanism driven by humanitarian concerns. The role
50 Bodies and Biosurveillance of institutions like Amnesty, the Red Cross, or the various NGOs in setting up documentation—visual and other—of such stories and bodies is a form of biosurveillance as well, and a surveillance that has resulted in transnational engagements. Thus the Bhopal victims have seen global action on their behalf where campaigners like Diane Wilson in the USA have been seeking proper trial and indictment of people (Warren Anderson) responsible for the disaster. Here we can think of biosurveillance as instituting a global citizenship of suffering, where various victim bodies are inserted into databases, legal processes and state/non-state aid. The careful documentation of their injuries and impairments indicates the intensity of the biosurveillance mechanism.
Surveillance, sorting and citizenship Surveillance, as commentators from David Lyon downward have argued, is essentially about social sorting, social ordering and therefore about citizenship. It ‘sorts people into categories, assigning worth or risk, in ways that have real effects on their life-chances’ (Lyon ‘Introduction’, 2003: 1). The body is the biometric border, a ‘portable border par excellence, carried by mobile bodies at the very same time as it is deployed to divide bodies at international boundaries, airports, railway stations, on subways or city streets, in the office or the neighbourhood’ (Amoore 2006: 338). Databases sort people into risk categories and ‘low risk’ individuals who are fast-tracked while ‘high risk’ ones are searched and even detained. This is where the power relations between observed and observer, and the question of social sorting through surveillance become visible. The turn to social sorting in studies of surveillance is necessitated by the recognition that power is an administrative function of/using the information gathered. Larry Backer summarizes it thus:
While virtually everything can be monitored, power (and the limits of power) is a function of control over the way power is understood, gathered, and used. Moreover, the power to decide what parts of monitored activity may be revealed, extracted, analysed, judged, and relied on has important consequences, consequences that themselves are the subject of further surveillance. (2008: 103)
Decisions about whom to monitor and what to do with data collected about the monitored subjects are political decisions, and therefore about power relations. 51 Citizenship and Identity
Social sorting The National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) of the Government of India acquires and collates statistical data in numerous domains in the country. As an organization whose data is demanded and utilized by government agencies, the NSSO are a preeminent instance of surveillance for public good. It hands the government the empirical data it needs to draft policies. Thus, if we were to browse data in the National Family Health Survey 3 (data updated till 2008) we can discover the age-specific fertility rates, numbers of children treated for malaria, diarrhoea and enteric fevers, women in the age group 15–49 years who have experienced violence, among others. These statistics are organized state-wise too (http://www.indiastat.com/health/16/ nationalfamilyhealthsurvey3/411384/stats.aspx. 16 January 2013). All this clearly points to social sorting. Next, let us return to post 9/11 scenario and social sorting. Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (effective from 2002, in a direct response to 9/11), commercial airlines are required to provide Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) with passenger and crew information before take-off. This information must include the passenger’s complete legal name, gender, date of birth, nationality and travel document number. What this means should be obvious: immigration officials are armed with information about any potential high-risk travellers even before the carrier takes off for a Canadian destination. It enables, in other words, immigration and airport personnel to sort arriving passengers into potential ‘risky’ individuals and non- or low-risk individuals. Within the USA, a news report as late as 2012, noted that funding for a programme, High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) was also used to pay for New York Police Department’s monitoring of Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods (‘White House Pays for NYPD Muslim Surveillance’). The first—NSSO and its health monitoring surveys, or the Indian Government’s collaborative effort with the World Health Organization, the National Polio Surveillance Project—form of social sorting is considered more acceptable although in many cases the data-collection clearly disturbs socially approved norms of privacy.8 This form of social sorting is deemed essential
8 The history of global health surveillance dates back, according to one commentator, to 1851 and its International Sanitary Conference. We now have an epidemiological cartography, or disease map, of the world that in the age of globalization also entails, indeed makes imperative, global health surveillance (Ostherr 2005). 52 Bodies and Biosurveillance and acceptable because (i) the observer and collector of data is the state which is (ii) tasked with effecting policies based on the data and (iii) public welfare (especially in the matter of contagious diseases) is deemed to override concerns over individual privacy (for debates see Fairchild et al 2008, Rubel 2012). However, the second example demonstrates something substantively and qualitatively different. The data collected enables the state and its law enforcement agencies to separate arriving passengers into desirable, risky, non-risky and ‘undesirable’ categories. In this instance, social sorting leads directly from data collection to, often, sustained interrogation, deportation or enhanced surveillance. These examples evidence the key role of the observer behind the camera, and the fact that there is no objective monitoring of data: all data can effect social sorting of some kind or the other. If the NSSO and the Indian government appropriate the health survey data for instituting policies for neo- and ante-natal care or immunization programmes the public health surveillance has enabled welfare. This state action is based on a particular set of interpretive frames regarding the data. In the second case, again, interpretive frames conclude that certain people—with perhaps names like ‘Khan’ or a flight itinerary out of Iraq – are ‘high risk’ and results in greater surveillance, interrogation or incarceration. Thus even though the CCTV or the biometric reader serves as a neutral and ‘objective’ observer, the processing of the information recorded by the CCTV— the interpretation of the mediated images/representations that stand for the person ‘behind’ the persona—is performed by a human observer. Surveillance is not, as Larry Backer reminds us, only about the gaze, it ‘serves as well as the reification of the borders of assertions of power over what can be seen/recorded/ reduced to symbolic significance’ (2008). The ‘symbolic significance’ of what is observed and the decision to observe particular people, groups and events is not about the technology but the social, economic, political and cultural myths, norms, prejudices, biases, preferences and material realities behind the technologies. Backer writes of this power relation:
Surveillance is the application of norms both in the construction of the gaze (how are objects observed/recorded) and in the focus of the observation (what is observed/recorded). It is at this level that modern surveillance and the social order in which it is embedded most intimately interact. (Backer 2008)
53 Citizenship and Identity
This normative foundation of surveillance is played out in image interpretation (of what is recorded in visual surveillance). Image interpretation, surveillance experts and engineers tell us, includes ‘motion detection, object recognition, tracking, and behavior understanding’ (Kim et al 2010: 926). It also involves ‘human activity recognition’ which uses ‘prior knowledge’ of human behaviour (Kim et al 2010). This means, simply, prior knowledge that enables the operator to interpret images of surveilled subjects is embedded in social prejudices and biases regarding particular races, ethnicities and genders. The actions of the black teen in the mall is read through a prior knowledge of how young black men behave—knowledge that might or might not encode prejudices about the race. It is therefore inadequate to simply state that humans are rendered more transparent, visible and typified in surveillance technologies. This begs the question: who is watching whom and how is visibility being appropriated into a large structure of control or governance. In the above examples therefore we need to examine the categorical imperatives behind making black, men, Muslims, gypsies or teens more visible. Further, the code governing the CCTV and the computer alert mechanisms are written by humans and therefore subject to all those prejudices—about race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity—that the code-writer carries (Bowker and Star 2000). This means, some subjects of surveillance will be looked at differently, or trigger off alarms, because the code governing the cameras and the devices was written by somebody who primed the mechanism to look for individuals of particular types. This leads to interesting consequences. Surveillance and social ordering lead to what Kevin Macnish terms ‘self- fulfilling prophecies’ about particular social groups. Surveillance cameras in supermarkets, malls and stores watch more teenagers for they are believed to constitute the majority of shoplifters. But, when more teenagers are watched, more teenagers will be caught stealing. As more teenagers are sentenced for stealing, the statistics will show that a majority of shoplifters are teenagers. This will justify further monitoring of teenagers. Other non-teenage shoplifters, who do not get the same attention from the surveillance mechanism which increasingly ignores them (in order to focus on teenagers), escape (Macnish 2012: 154). Social sorting is not the characteristic or even defining function or service, of the state alone, but is something produced by the intersection of multiple actors. The state’s law and order machinery, for example, encourages Neighbourhood Watch projects. Privatized spaces such as malls are allowed
54 Bodies and Biosurveillance to—encouraged?—to put in place their own surveillance devices and security measures. Communities take up formal and informal policing of their areas with the active encouragement of the local police station which in fact makes use of feedback and information furnished by these communities in order to fulfil its communitarian function. In other words rather than a centralized control centre managed by the state law enforcement agencies we see increasingly local initiatives and strategies that then feed into a larger mechanism of surveillance. This also means that there arises a local shared-by-the-community definition of appropriate or suspicious behaviour or crime that may or may not have official approval. The local definition and ideas about criminal behaviour or deviance therefore is a part of the informal governance structure. Prohibition on the movement of street vendors or salesmen, CCTVs in communities, neighbourhood cautions about criminal gangs or unruly youth constitute an apparatus of surveillance that polices bodies, but remain informally and problematically connected to ‘official’ structures of surveillance. Social order therefore becomes everybody’s concern where, although citizen arrests are truly speaking illegal, decisions regarding people’s movements are set in place by communities through internal agreement and tacit approval of the state agencies. Take Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Cities like Bengaluru, Chennai, New Delhi and others are experimenting with new forms of traffic regulation and the Association of ITS now has an Indian presence. ITS includes the wireless provision of traffic information to drivers (especially congestion and alternate routes), information about public transport to commuters, law enforcement, the management of commercial vehicle fleets, environmental regulation, providing route and location information to the vehicle/traveller and electronic toll collection.9 It also helps monitor vehicle breakdown, intersection traffic signal management, vehicle identification, pollution and road quality monitoring, among others. The commuter’s smart phone can now be used to collaborate with the ITS. The phone sends out information such as the
9 The Government of India, according to one report, has committed Rs.234, 000 crores in the urban infrastructure sector. Various organizations such as the Centre for Excellence in Urban Transport (COEUT) at the IIT Madras are working towards these smart solutions to India’s urban transport problems. With radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and traffic analyzers developed by private organizations like Kritikal, road users can be monitored every step of their route.
55 Citizenship and Identity frequency of braking and honking (indicating congestion), acceleration and therefore allows the organization to computer vehicle speed and approximate arrival time (Rohatgi 2011 ). Electronic toll payments (made possible through the Smart Tag system developed and enforced in parts of the world such as Virginia, USA) enable the tracking of users whereas old-fashioned cash payments are less effective in the same domain. What is important to recognize is that at any point in the process the monitoring can shift from the vehicle (through say number plate recording) to the interior of the vehicle, and therefore to the passengers. From transport mechanics and processes the ITS seamlessly, where required, shift to personal and human body monitoring. (It must be noted that many of the ITS services are built with public–private collaboration and therefore the issues regarding privacy are of a different order, Bennett et al 2003.) ITS also, evidently, constitutes one more step in social sorting. Social order and surveillance constitute the domain of ‘public interest’ which is integral to the idea of the recursive public sphere. The community keen on preserving itself as a space of freedom, leisure, security and pleasure needs to guard the practices that are allowed within that space. Conscious citizenry works to preserve this space in public interest—and this manifests as surveillance. I am proposing here a vernacular, non-official surveillance culture where the community polices itself and its spaces and thereby participates in the larger function of governance without active intervention by the state machinery. By getting its members and families to conform to notions and practices of ‘good behaviour’ (which might include participation in festivals, celebrations, social gatherings and leisure activities), the community surveills itself and therefore governs itself. A subtle but effective mode of social ordering is put in place as a result. This is not a centralized, authoritarian mode of social sorting and governance but a localized, informal and vernacular one.10 Policing involves social sorting founded on data gathering. In Hyderabad city whenever any controversial political decision or crisis is imminent the
10 Commentators argue that the ‘security network is not simply to be understood as a mechanism of crime prevention technology but as an important alliance of interests that have emerged in the gaps left by a series of legitimation deficits around policing and in urban governance’ (Coleman and Sim 2000: 636). The ‘trust deficit’ in the state’s function therefore means that both the state and civil society agree to this form of vernacular policing. 56 Bodies and Biosurveillance
‘Old City’ (essentially the Charminar area) witnesses massive police presence. Termed ‘sensitive areas’ in newspaper and police rhetoric these parts of the city come under intensified surveillance. CCTVs were installed near the Mecca Masjid in 2007–8 and there is heavy cop presence during the Friday prayers so that certain potential trouble makers are under the scanner, as are the premises themselves. This is an attempt at pre-empting particular kinds of behaviour based on information infrastructures already with the police (the history of violence in those regions of the city). These localities are mapped socially, a mapping founded on stereotypes of Hindu–Muslim behaviour. Ericson and Haggerty writing about policing and surveillance note that all such acts of surveillance are constructed by institutions that place particular values on categories such as youth, race, age, employment, gender etc (Ericson and Haggerty 1997: 256). In the case of Hyderabad where young males of a particular community get picked up for ‘questioning’ at an alarming rate during any such crisis, we see social sorting in practice. Particular ‘bodies’ possess a particular value—‘trouble-makers’—during these crises, and the police action is (i) drawn from a priori stereotypes about these bodies and (ii) is pre-emptive with regard to the possible behaviour of these bodies. Another form of social sorting emerges in consumer surveillance. Databases of customer purchases and requirements, loyalty cards, frequent flier privileges are means of surveillance as well. The Reliance Membership Card that we are asked for every time we shop at the Reliance supermarket functions as a system of monitoring but also as a means through which we can acquire a consumer citizenship. Every time X buys something and has it recorded in the final bill and the loyalty card, X links a local act with the global movement. X hereafter is a ‘body’ that purchased this item like several others around the country. In this way—and I shall be discussing the domain of data in a later chapter—X is inserted into the global data flows around that item. It is a body’s consumption patterns that give it a particular social identity: as membership within a community whose members use this hair oil, that toothbrush and this other oatmeal. More importantly, as Nils Zurawski argues in a study of consumer surveillance, a consumer willingly offer this information through Membership or Loyalty cards, and thus enacts a social self-fashioning (2011: 511). The consumer volunteers information about preferences in soaps, clothing and books when the consumer agrees that the data may be collected by the store where, by sharing information—photographs, autobiographical information— on portals and other places, she/he is engaged in a cultural practice. What we
57 Citizenship and Identity consider to be our individual shopping experience and behaviour is quickly integrated into a larger pattern of similar experiences and behaviour globally (i.e., a culture of consumption). When online sellers persuade us that ‘those who bought this book also bought …’ we are being drawn into a community of similar readers/users (and hence a social self-fashioning, even as the consumer fashions a social body for herself or himself: as one who uses these unguents, reads these books and watches those kinds of films). When we recommend preferences, we are actively participating in our own surveillance even as we further the culture of consumption. There is then a link between consumer and surveillance cultures. Consumers, however, do not perceive this as surveillance at all, and the process of data collection is conducted frictionlessly and with active participation by the customer in the store. (It is also important to note that consumers unwilling to part with this information, whether in offline or online transactions—where, for example, the website asks to be allowed to install cookies—lose out on benefits and special services. The full extent of the service from the company or manufacturers is contingent upon our willingness to offer personal information about our shopping or consumption.) Store owners are interested in you as this body that moves from the local to the global by your act of consumption. Customer Relations Management (CRM) is the ‘capturing and managing data generated by consumers as they select, attract, and use products’ (Ball, Daniel, Dibb and Meadows 2010: 113). Used by stores to profile their high-paying customers and to retain them, tracking repeat orders, frequency of visits and search queries constitute CRM profiling. Customer relationships are essentially a manifestation of interpretive mechanisms where the store has ‘read’ your purchases and categorized you as a ‘valuable customer’, with the value very specifically recorded in the database. As Ball et al (2010) note, this form of surveillance moves from database to niche marketing to relations management (114). In the public sector this ‘relations management’ might make for greater political effects where access to and utilization of state resources by individuals and communities becomes (as noted above in the case of the UID).
Biological citizenship In the late twentieth century, bioprospecting has enabled new forms of biological citizenship for Third World bodies. I have argued above that the Third World
58 Bodies and Biosurveillance body is now a site and source of genetic material and is therefore subject to biosurveillance. I now propose that, in the case of bodies, biosurveillance in the global tissue economy produces new forms of biological citizenship. Discussions on citizenship are invariably centred around its national form and location. Citizenship relies on specific ‘biological presuppositions, [that] explicitly or implicitly, have underlain many citizenship projects, shaped conceptions of what it means to be a citizen, and underpinned distinctions between actual, potential, troublesome and impossible citizens’ (Rose and Novas 2005) . Contemporary biological citizenship does not take a racialized and nationalized form alone. As bio-prospecting and bio-piracy show, not all have equal citizenship in this new biological age. Anthropologist Adriana Petryna’s work among Chernobyl victims demonstrated how biological citizenship embodies a demand for particular protections, for the enactment, cessation or modification of particular policies or actions such as insurance and compensation ‘based on medical, scientific, and legal criteria that both acknowledge biological injury and compensate for it’ (2002:4). The cell line, the genetic code and the tissue signature are only deeper extensions of the global emphasis on biosurveillance that originates in fingerprinting and has now reached the stage of iris prints, voice signatures and other biometric methods of monitoring and surveillance. DNA collection is now a common practice in several countries. Biometrics with the databasing of DNA fingerprinting or iris prints is linked less to the larger debate on individual corporeal privacy than to the global interest in borders of nations, bodies and institutions. An individual’s biometric data at the US Consulate is now linked to a global database that the immigration official at a US port of entry can access at a click to validate a traveller-arrival’s claim about who they say they are. All bodies are now part of a transnational and transmissible biological citizenship with biometrics. Biometric identification is often taken as unique to individuals alone—iris and voice scans, DNA fingerprinting etc. More importantly these are mobile features that we cannot ever, try as we might, leave behind, forget or erase. Thus we carry our unique identities with us, willingly or unwillingly, wherever we go. Biometrics, I have argued (Nayar 2012), can be seen as a response to the increased ‘dematerialization’ of the human in the age of the virtual: the body returns as the foundation of the human. Corporeal integrity is ensured at least in the form of the consistent dataset that is prepared and which only uses those biologicals that do not alter, remains coherent and integrated even as
59 Citizenship and Identity the rest of the body alters with age and environment. Thus, on the one hand, face-to-face interactions and socialization shift to the virtual, with avatars and profile-management online, biometrics reinstates the material body within these same electronic networks in the form of corporeal data. Mobilities are now linked to the body’s data, and this primarily affects migrant workers and potential immigrants. Foreign nationals in the UK are subject to a separate biometric identity card scheme named ‘Biometric Residence Permits’ (BRPs) including international students, visiting scholars, entrepreneurs, investors and domestic workers. Migrants, as studies show, saw the BRPs as a constant reminder of their difference, and this significantly affected their everyday lives in the receiving society, and this affected their sense of belonging in the global age because their bodies are documented as different (Warren & Mavroudi 2011).11 This implies that the organization of welfare and social benefits hinge upon the ‘voluntary’ sharing of corporeal and other data with the state or any agency empowered by the state. In the globalized world so much continues to hinge not on mobilities but on monitored, regulated and ‘databased’ corporeal mobilities. This means, the technique of biosurveillance is a mode of governance itself, and is therefore treated by some commentators as a new form of lawmaking where national/international and private/public distinctions are rendered irrelevant in reconstituting the power relations between individuals, individuals and organizations and amongst organizations (Backer 2008). The state asks private agencies to share data (the frequent requests to Google to share its data is a case in point), thus blurring the state/market boundaries. The Indian government uses these data, acquired by private agencies, to consider new regulatory laws. Without a formal lawmaking process the state is able to engineer regulation, and even overcome the limits of public lawmaking.12
11 In 1989, Thatcherite Britain instituted a policy for the use of DNA fingerprint tests on immigrant applicants seeking to prove that they have relatives in Britain. 12 This kind of transnational surveillance has another component to it. The behaviour of states and MNCs has also been subject to scrutiny through information-gathering. Take the non-governmental organization, Transparency International (TI), for example. It describes itself as ‘a global network including more than 90 locally established national chapters and chapters . . . Politically non-partisan, TI does not undertake investigations of alleged corruption or expose individual cases, but at times will work in coalition with organisations that do’ (Transparency International, About Us, http://www.transparency. org/about_us). Accessed on: 9 June 2013 60 Bodies and Biosurveillance
What is important is to note how biological citizenship is the consequence not of a centralized artefact that records our faces/irises/thumbprints but the dispersal of surveillance into our everyday lives. Ambient intelligence and surveillance technologies ensure that we now live in the age of distributed surveillance. ATMs, locks, cameras, keyboards add to the biometric state and the surveillance society where your identity is distributed and validated an infinite number of times every hour. It is the convergence of multiple databases— from the online shopping you do to the iris scan, from Consulate offices to Google—that constitutes an individual’s identity disseminated across borders today. Biological citizenship thus is not simply an iris scan and your face, it is the sum total of several such bits of data that comprise you. Data collected by one source is often compared and collated with other sources in order to build a larger, clearer picture of what you are and what you do. Informal and local surveillance are increasingly embedded in surveillance networks that are global and not always under the control of the state or local actors. When such metadata about an individual goes into massive databases such as Google’s, then we have a biological citizenship far beyond national borders. Google, for example, makes its money by using our profiles—which includes personal details, the shopping choices we make, dating, medical searches, travel plans—to present us with advertisements keyed to the words we search and therefore supposedly keyed to our personalities, desires and requirements. As Siva Vaidhyanathan summarizes it:
[Google] collects information from us when we use its services; it copies and makes available trivial or harmful information about us that lies in disparate corners of the Internet; and it actively captures images of public spaces around the world, opening potentially embarrassing or private scenes to scrutiny by strangers—or, sometimes worse, by loved ones. (2011)
Our choices and curiosities that make us what we are, are now in databases somewhere, to be retrieved at will by people with access to the database. Data converges upon matter, the body, even as the body is disseminated as zeroes and ones into the database. Biosurveillance also produces odd connections, lineages and biological citizenships that also redefine racial, ethnic and current geopolitical–national boundaries. For example a recent report states that the Aboriginals in Australia share common origins with the original inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent—and these are results from DNA studies of fossil records
61 Citizenship and Identity
(‘Indians broke Australian isolation 4,000 years ago’ ) (Cosmos 15 January 2013). Markedly different results can also be found. An Israeli researcher using DNA techniques on the Cohanim Jews (Orthodox Jews who trace their lineage 3,300 years back to the first high priest) found a genetic pattern on the Y-chromosome that is shared by the descendants of the Cohanim. These descendants are therefore accorded higher status and are the only rabbis to perform certain religious duties (cited in Nelkin and Andrews 2003: 105). In the USA, television shows like African American Lives—hosted by African American literary theorist Henri Louis Gates, Jr.—Who Do You Think You Are? Faces of America, etc., have been hugely successful. Tracing ancestry and family history of the African Americans has mushroomed into a very profitable business as well. One can acquire an ancestry kit, use some saliva and discover one’s genetic roots. African Ancestry offers an ‘Ancestry Certificate’ at the end of the check. The new genetic determinism that this suggests also ends up reiterating the older biological determinisms that governed racial profiling and stereotyping, but occasionally also throws up surprises (as it happened when quite a few of the Company’s African American clients discovered that there was some white ancestor in their blood as well). More importantly, those who discovered their roots broadcast their racial selves in what has come to be known as the ‘roots and revelations’ culture (Nelson and Hwang 2012).
Vulnerable bodies, consuming bodies and the rise of the surveilled self The electronic age in the era of globalization has produced particular kinds of vulnerability and vulnerable bodies. Of all the threats—terrorism, epidemics, being two significant ones—the most common, or visible, one today is identity theft. The vulnerability discourse of the late twentieth century and its concomitant discourse of safety and surveillance has several interesting features. First, identity theft—phishing, skimming (of credit cards through the use of magnetic strip readers, shoulder-surfing for PIN numbers at ATMs or at public computers), key-stroke recording programmes—produce a moral panic around the vulnerability of our identity. Treated frequently as being at par with violations (physical—of bodies and homes) and violence, identity theft constructs the vulnerable citizen as the electronic-age citizen with a special notion of identity. Our identity is increasingly found in bits and bytes across multiple spaces. Identity theft has become the preeminent form of moral panic
62 Bodies and Biosurveillance in the age of network lives because, as Mark Poster notes, identity is scattered: it is not only within our body, signature, or face but in the keyboarding, online purchases, biometrics, financial transactions through credit cards, etc. What Poster terms the ‘suturing or coupling of pieces of information in disjunctive time and scattered spaces’ (2006: 114) is the new ontology of bodies and identities. It is precisely this nature of identity that also lends it its so-called vulnerability. Second, the constant warnings issued by banks and financial institutions constitute a discourse of self-surveillance that builds on the discourse of vulnerability. Think of the messages that bombard us on a regular basis today: ‘Do not reveal your physical location’; ‘Do not share your credit card details’; ‘Do not share your password with ANYONE’; ‘Do not be taken in by promises of great profits in transfer-of-funds schemes’. It calls for greater monitoring and policing of our private actions and the ways in which we reveal our identity across the spectrum of social, financial, leisure and work practices. There are, it is suggested, simply too many ways in which one may ‘lose’ one’s identity today. Third, there is an intrinsic link forged between vulnerability, self- surveillance and consumption. The vulnerable subject, convinced of risk, threat and identity-theft, can ensure greater safety through consumption of surveillance techniques and devices. The vulnerable subject has to surveill herself/himself through the purchase and consumption of products: anti-virus programs, paper-shredders, credit-watch services, alarm systems, among others. In other words, the vulnerable subject is also simultaneously a consuming subject, ensuring the use of multiple surveillance devices so that she/he can consume more in peace. Fourth, what is interesting about this surveillance-consumption link is that it becomes the individual’s responsibility to keep abreast of the newest anti-virus software, of new modes of fraud and of measures to be instituted in the neighbourhood to ensure safety. It results in what Bilge Yesil calls ‘self-responsibilization’ (2000).13 Indeed, it is very often, as Torin Monahan has noted, an individual’s duty to gather information to live safely (2010: 54).
13 Reality TV has also been seen as a medium/mode through which such a self- responsibilization works, so that a new form of neoliberal governance has begun to emerge. See Ouelette (2004). 63 Citizenship and Identity
It should also be noted that the vulnerable citizen subject not only enacts a considerable amount of surveillance she/he also turns to private resources— whether security guards or anti-virus software—in order to protect against the crime of identity theft. Identity theft is itself a crime that law enforcement agencies see as the effect of poor self-surveillance, i.e., private practices, and it therefore seems logical to leave the task of protecting oneself from it to private security measures and devices.14 In effect, these four elements in the electronic age become modes of governance. Children starting out on computers now require an early awareness of identity theft as well, where the dangers of being too friendly on Facebook now accompany more traditional warnings of being friendly to strangers. The state and the media issue warnings and narrate salutary stories of identity theft so that the citizens learn better ways of policing—governing—themselves. Vulnerable citizens consent therefore to govern themselves better, to procure specific technologies of self-and Other-surveillance, and to ‘cooperate’ when required by sharing data or experiences so that the public good or national security might be strengthened (I shall return to participatory surveillance in greater detail in a later chapter). This means, also, that our bodies now are conditioned right from an early age to live with technologies and devices of surveillance and control, whether it is the security software for internet regulation on PCs or the GPS on their mobiles. Mun-Cho Kim describes this ‘preference for symbiotic cohabitation with empowering surveillance technologies’ as ‘co-active’ (2004: 210). Early in this chapter I had proposed that our selves now evolve in conjunction with the surveillance network, and Kim’s ‘co-active’ self seems to tie-in with the proposition. What is to be underlined in both Kim’s formulation and my proposition is that we now consent to and indeed actively seek to, live with ambient surveillance technologies. As responsible subjects trained through the presence of CCTVs and participation in neighbourhood watch and AADHAR and benefitting from consumer database tracking of our purchases, we are surveilled citizens whose civic interactions are founded on this surveillance as a framework. We come to
14 Kirsty Best’s 2010 study however points in an entirely different direction, where ‘although several recent academic reports of public opinion surveys argue that people are bothered by infringements on privacy … people’s actual practices appear to belie this worry’. Best notes that most users had very little concern about what happened to their data that they had voluntarily shared (7). 64 Bodies and Biosurveillance believe in the increased security of our lives, data, families and spaces because we voluntarily accept surveillance as the framework of our lives. Further, bodies and selves become, contemporary commentators have argued persuasively, posthuman because they evolve in conjunction with other life forms and technologies. Human identity in this view is no more a sovereign, autonomous and coherently bounded subject but one that shares space and consciousness with an environment that contains organic and inorganic, human and machine ‘bodies’.15 And one such environment in which our bodies and consciousness grow and evolve is surveillance. It should be clear that I am treating surveillance not merely as a technology of disciplining or governance—although it is a form of governance, with or without state role and increasingly privatized—but as a cultural practice that we have all since the late twentieth century internalized, grown with and more or less accepted. What we need to ask is: why do we, in this time and context, believe the CCTV or AADHAR ensures greater security? How does sharing of data produce greater benefit or danger? That is, surveillance is a cultural technology, primarily, that produces a certain kind of subject with a set of beliefs and who will act in particular ways due to the awareness of Facebook’s face recognition software, the CCTV and the loyalty card. Surveillance is not only about an individual’s identity but also about her or his citizenship and membership in civil society with which she/he shares space. It is because surveillance is cultural and not just technological that Torin Monahan, one of the most prescient commentators on surveillance along with David Lyon, writes: ‘surveillance systems attain presence as negotiated components of culture and accrete meaning by tapping a culture’s immense symbolic reservoirs, which can include narrative, media, and art, among other things’ (2011). The making of the self, as is now established, occurs in its interactions with the world. Surveillance, it can be said, is one mode of engaging with the world: watching others, watching oneself in public and in private, watching oneself being watched, and watching oneself watching. Symbols, iconographies and narratives of being watched or watching—the eye on the screen, the camera at the store corner, the thumb print, the IDs we carry, etc—are now ubiquitous and a part of who we see ourselves as, define ourselves as. When X says ‘this is me’ to the world X includes in the narrative these symbols and iconography of X’s self. This includes obvious icons and narratives such as my photo ID but also contemporary coded symbols and
15 For a summary of this position, see Nayar, Posthumanism (2013). 65 Citizenship and Identity narratives of the self such as store loyalty cards, library records, airline frequent flier miles card, privilege cards, fingerprints, Amazon.com or Flipkart searches, purchase records at the store, among others. Putting up posts, scraps, friend requests, ‘like’ icons, status messages on online sites/portals also constitute the individual’s public face or narrative to the world, for the world to see, report, forward, link to, comment and engage with. Sharing voluntarily information about preferences, recommending books or films, is participation in a cultural practice that, as noted earlier in the section on consumer surveillance, enables a social self-fashioning, inserted into a community of similar users. We perform the self within these cultural practices that involve cameras, fingerprinting, status messages, posts and records. The self now is that which is performed within surveillance.16 We behave in certain ways in the presence of the camera, we are watchful of our (and others’) actions online, we guard our passwords and we subject our bodies to examination for lumps, sugar content and blood pressure levels. Our identities and subjectivities emerge, so to speak, within this performance. We no longer see most of these checks and password queries as interruptive, but as facilitating safety for oneself, our loved ones and our actions. This is an important component of our narrative self where we do not perceive intrusive questions about our pet cat, our first kiss, or a parent’s profession as unwarranted invasion of our privacy but as enabling our comfortable and secure actions in the world. Indeed, we even recommend such measures to those around us so that we can all be part of an inclusive system. Rather than treat these measures as exclusionary we begin to see them as inclusive, facilitating the creation of my ‘own’ social circle or spaces. Where access to clubs, gaming zones, chat rooms or stores is monitored–controlled by biometric, CCTV, face recognition software we see our selves with others who are entitled—verified by surveillance—to be there. Our performance of our selves is thus within a social order comprised of similar performances facilitated and legitimized by surveillance, where equally entitled individuals and groups come together. This argument thus proposes that the individual and the social self are both emergent properties enabled by surveillance.
16 I am of course adopting here the theoretical positions forwarded by critics like Judith Butler who propose that rather than an immanent Self, we need to think of the Self as performance, where identity emerges in the repeated iterations of performances— clothing, fashion, etiquette, taste and speech patterns. 66 Bodies and Biosurveillance
The self is therefore always already the surveilled self that includes within it layers of the vulnerable self and the secure self. We sustain our identity, and even our idea of our selves, in terms of passwords, status messages, frequent flyer miles, loyalty cards, carefully monitored blood sugar, credit rating and ATM PIN numbers (all, as we have seen, modes of surveillance). Although we understand that these are ‘features’ stored across databases and therefore fragmented we perceive our selves as ‘essentially’ encoded within these data where we can say: ‘I am me + my dataset’. The ‘I’ is an emergent condition made possible through repeated performances of passwords, online activity and medical self-surveillance. Subjecting ourselves, voluntarily, to checks and questions by humans and nonhuman observers, we produce a narrative of the self that is the sum total of our answers to these queries, whether passwords or verification questions (‘secret question: what was your mother’s maiden name?’). Surveillance, to state it differently, is integral to the narrative self because an individual’s answers are part of her or his self’s narrative to herself/himself and to the world. When as responsible citizens we watch (out for) others the world, the online system validates our passwords, our individual narrative self has acquired social- machine validation so that we can say to our selves: I am finally me.
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3 Data and Data Subjects
e are the Populus Scrutatus, ‘the People of Search’, say some commentators (Hillis et al 2013: 8), but who are also the searched and the databased. AnW individual’s online biography is built up not (only) through people’s and institutions’ searches for that individual, but through what she/he searches for. There is a data double of each individual, a virtual Mr Hyde (although hopefully without the propensity for violence in Stevenson’s horrific tale) , a doppelganger, built up through the preferred search engine’s collation of that individual’s image/music/news/book searches, alerts, groups, talk, Scholar, Froogle, maps, Notebook, blogging and the search queries in the toolbar. A ‘database of intentions’ (Battelle 2003), representing an individual’s desires, wants, prejudices, likes and dislikes has been created by Flipkart, Amazon, Google, library catalogues, book repositories, Radio Mirchi, Instagram, Facebook, Google Maps, Reliance Retail, Yatra that then situates that individual in a particular relationship with other consumers (similar to or different from that individual), a product, a destination, reading habits and even the nation itself (depending on whether that individual is willing to be part of the national AADHAR scheme, which all of us should volunteer for, as ‘good citizens’). It is not possible, commentators tell us, to be ‘unGoogleable’ and therefore the newest chic going is ‘anonymity chic’ (Jeffries 2013). Our citizenship in the social order, consumers, cultural practices and in entities like the nation is predicated upon data shared, willingly or unwillingly. Threats, desires, possibilities and anxieties are all projected in the form of 68 Data and Data Subjects information on to a million screens with suitable/useable organization and ranking. I propose that we live in the age of the data-gaze and information citizenship.1 The data-gaze is the organizing principle of everyday life, although, ironically, it is based on a hierarchization and standardization—sorting—of data into expert, most-used, visible, user-generated, reliable, official, private and public. The data-gaze unifies us into a cohesive identification that fits a certain symbolic order of abstract processes like Customer Relations Management (CRM) or the nation. In order to fit into the nation, the category of a particular consumer, income tax bracket, user of a device, travelling class, etc, or to be risk-free, identifiable and privileged we subject ourselves to the data-gaze. I am therefore positing the data-gaze as not just a condition of our everyday life-world but also as a precondition for identity, subjectivity, rights (of various kinds), security, and privacy. Data links us to the world, brings the world to us, shapes our subjectivity, relationships and now, with predictive Google (Google Instant), the way we seek information. It also unifies various diverse components of my life into numbers somewhere. In the age of Google and the search engine, where the Internet is the first stop for many of us, it seems essential to think in terms of how data is served up to us when we type in a query. Numerous studies of search engines—initiated by Introna and Nissenbaum in their field-defining piece, ‘Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters’ (2000)—have demonstrated the dynamics of search engines that determine what we read or see. The algorithms that index and rank online information are not always (or should that be ‘never’?) transparent to the user (Introna and Nissenbaum noted that Google’s criteria for ranking a source is one of the most heavily guarded secrets in the world—on par with Coca Cola’s ingredients, 2000: 8). There is a heavy reliance on searcher behaviour that helps the search engine know what results were most helpful and this information in turn is used by the engine to alter the algorithm for the ranking. Databasing searcher behaviour, as Google does, constitutes a form of surveillance conducted by a private corporation (Hillis et al 2013: 17):
[the] results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result … Taken together, this information represents a real-time history of post-Web culture — a massive clickstream database of
1 The idea of the data-gaze is a nod towards Alan Feldman’s idea of the ‘actuarial gaze’ (2005). 69 Citizenship and Identity
desires, needs, wants, and preferences that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited for all sorts of ends. (Battelle 2005, cited in Hillis et al 14)
When searching for data we do not observe as to what kinds of sources are given higher ranking in Google: commercial, educational, governmental, nonprofit sites (Granka 2010: 371). A site that has more links from it acquires, in Google, a higher PageRank, producing what some commentators have called a ‘Googlearchy’ (Hindman et al 2003, cited in Asal and Harwood 2008: 646). It ‘mirrors’, writes Alejandro Diaz, ‘the “common” wishes of the users’ rather than reflect the page’s ‘ “importance” or “authoritativeness” on a given subject’ (2008: 17). Researchers investigating the link between terrorist attack fatalities and search engines found that ‘more fatalities a group inflicts offline, the more pages about that group Google returns’ (Asal and Harwood 2008) . The profit- making dimension of search engines like Google has made commentators wary of projects such as Google Books (the effort to digitize the world’s books). Siva Vaidhyanathan after examining the copyright controversies, rulings and settlements with the project concludes: ‘Google Books is a revenue-generating project for the company. It is not a public service’ (2011: 157). Google’s control over the world’s information economy, in terms of both data search/supply and knowledge (in terms of books) is a matter of some concern, as studies such as Vaidyanathan’s emphasize. I do not focus on the politics of search engines per se, nor do I examine the modes of data-gathering specific to say workplaces, online SNSes or public health, or the legal ramifications of data gathering, or what is now called ‘dataveillance’ (the term was coined by Roger Clarke 1988, cited in Bennett 2008: 15). The chapter studies the data-gaze and the ‘culture of data’, by which I mean the many cultural effects and manifestations of dataveillance, specifically questions of subjectivity with its contributing attendant characteristics such as privacy, autonomy and interiority, that arise when we speak of certain kinds of data-sourcing and data-sharing.
The data age Let me begin with an inventory of data-gazing. In the first paragraph of its Introduction, the Unique Identification Authority of India’s document, Biometrics Design Standards, for UID Applications (2009) states:
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The UID Authority of India (UIDAI) has been setup by the Govt. of India with a mandate to issue a unique identification number to every resident in the country. The UIDAI proposes that it create a platform to first collect the identity details of residents, and subsequently perform identity authentication services that can be used by government and commercial service providers. (7)
The document, in short, tells me that the biometric data collected, integrated with other bits of information about me—such as bank accounts, mobile phone number, residential address, telephone-gas-electricity and such essential utility services—might one day be ‘used’ by commercial services, although the exact nature of the ‘use’ is left unspecified. At Rs. 1990/- I can acquire, says an SMS I received, ironically when worrying about my data being supplied to all and sundry as I wrote this chapter, a ‘SPY Hidden Camera in key Chain with USB. SPY Video and audio recording. Click Photo 3.2 MP [sic], expands upto 8 GB’. That is, I can also embark on collecting—and eventually circulating, if I should want to do so—data about persons unknown or known, intimate or distant, friends or colleagues: photographs, conversations, habits, facial expressions, etc. Just as this chapter was being finalized news broke that the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) had been spying on people having acquired direct access to Google, Facebook and Apple through a new programme called PRISM. Costing $ 20,000,000 annually, the programme collects data on email, file transfer, chat, VoIP, videos, photos, OSNs (Online Social Networking), logins. In an expose by The Guardian during the week 3–9 June 2013, it was revealed that while domestic snooping has been going on since 9/11 PRISM and this new expansion of surveillance began around 2009 (Greenwald and MacAskill 2013, MacAskill, Borger and Greenwald, 2013. See The Guardian’s The NSA Files at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the- nsa-f i les/. Accessed on: 9 June 2013), Britain too has been using the USA’s PRISM (Suroor 2013). In a clarification, James Clapper, popularly known as the USA’s spy chief, claimed the surveillance policy only targets ‘non- US persons’ (Lakshman 2013). This comes close on the heels of the Indian government’s own Central Monitoring System (CMS), initiated in April 2013, that would allow it to snoop on all internet and phone conversations. (The CMS was created without parliamentary approval according to one report, Balaji 2013).
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Those who know these things advise me that it is better to install ‘Net Nannies’ on to the PCs and laptops so that ‘inappropriate’ content—data of a particular kind—does not enter the system, and therefore the home and the family. These same people tell me that one should monitor children’s use of the internet so that information about the physical location of residence, bank accounts or salaries does not leave the home. The security of or threat to the space of the home or family, it seems, is determined by the nature of information entering or leaving it. Relationships among life forms have always been based on information- exchange: the nature of the relationship determining the quantity and quality of information exchanged. Our bodies—matter—are constituted through a constant exchange with the environment. The temperature of human bodies, for example, is regulated when information about temperature of the environment is received by the body. Feedback loops connect the environment and the body as we exchange faeces, blood, sweat, DNA, skin, sperm—all of which contains information of one kind or another—across the borders of the bodies and settings. We integrate ourselves into the environment through this process of information exchange. The passage of data across borders—whether of skin or houses—and then interpreted in various ways helps constitute identities in relationships. Then why is it that information, which I shall hereafter refer to as ‘data’, has become the buzzword and fetish of contemporary life?2 And why do we have information cultures of the kind we see and experience today? The reason is fairly simple: technologies of data collection, processing, dissemination and invasion have never expanded in this fashion before. From data about the geology of distant planets to the movements of neurochemicals in our bodies, technologies have expanded both outward and inward. In an earlier era surveillance and its component, data collection, was always about particular types of people (vagrants, celebrities, political figures, suspected terrorists), restricted to particular areas (banks, defence installations, the geopolitical national border) or around certain events (large festive gatherings, sports tournaments, events with celebrities in attendance). This expansion
2 ‘Information’ is a larger, and more composite, concept than ‘data’, and might be described as the consequence of applying particular interpretive frameworks to ‘read’ the data. This distinction is usually missed when we use the ‘data’ and ‘information’ interchangeably. In surveillance culture the framework for collecting data—what has to be collected—is crucial, just as subsequent interpretation of it to yield information. 72 Data and Data Subjects of the scope of surveillance is what is new (Marx 2004). What characterizes surveillance today is its ubiquity, its often unobtrusive technological presence and the monitoring of the masses and the everyday. Data are now routinely collected at ATMs, airlines, hospitals, internet traffic and searches, stores, traffic signals, banks, public offices, malls, cinema houses and gated residential communities in the form of photographs, purchase records, frequent flier miles, iris scans, thumbprints, etc. From the earlier circumscribed nature of surveillance, restricted to suspects and people with criminal records, it has now expanded. What was previously considered mundane, or private, is now part of the data being collected and stored. Ubiquitous computing with the RFIDs, PDAs, cookies in the PC and such devices of the data-gaze determine our interface with the world and place considerable strains on our sense of individuality and informational autonomy (Michelfelder 2010). This ubiquity and ever-widening scope of data collection as part of mass surveillance is what has aroused concern and consternation about and commercial interest in data flows. Thus debates about privacy that we now meet almost routinely in the pages of newspapers and on TV, are essentially debates about the data- gaze to which we are subject today: the flows of information, whether these are authorized, unauthorized, invasive, useless or inappropriate. The flow of information determines boundaries of inside and outside. It determines identity itself, and this explains our obsession with the nature of this flow of information. As citizens we are less worried about (politicized) surveillance for potential terrorists than about our everyday life being monitored—that is, personal surveillance—and how we organize our behaviour and daily activities in response to this surveillance. Thus the questions that come to us when we log on, validate passwords, or being photographed are: Who authorized it? What comes into the home? Who is reading personal emails? Are websearches revealing something about our individual personalities? Are the data on the biometric (AADHAR) card to be released to commercial service providers? Is the individual’s taste in soap or shampoo being registered in the servers of the Reliance store chain each time a purchase is clocked up on the ‘membership card’? Facebook collects, as a matter of routine, personal likes and dislikes of users to be passed on to manufacturers and vendors for targeted advertising. One volunteers information into this social network which then is appropriated by the firms to sell products suiting our likes and dislikes to create a condition of ‘personalized mass surveillance’ where user-generated content empowers the corporate body through the social network’s processes (Fuchs 2011: 138).
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It is this all-pervasive nature of the data-gaze and the recognition that our identities are increasingly constructed and/or compromised within information flows over which we have absolutely no control that calls for an examination of data cultures of surveillance. This chapter proposes several related theses about information exchange. First, with the new technologies of surveillance we can discern the rise of a data-subject whose material (corporeal) and virtual biographies (essentially, the collection of data) are both a part of her subjectivity and personhood. Second, our fears about the loss of privacy emanate now from the prospect of our anxieties, desires, tastes and prejudices being revealed. (It should be emphasized that I am using privacy as one of the key organizing principles to ask certain questions of dataveillance.) Hitherto these were narratives of our private self to our private self (that is, we knew about our anxieties and desires), but now with browsing or visits to certain kinds of URLs, these narratives as data are stored somewhere, and this could expose our interiority to the world which could produce negative judgements about us from people, even cause more serious repercussions. Third, armed with information about our tastes and desires, we are delivered unsolicited and directed information about products and services that then cater to our minds and eventually, like all good advertising always has, manipulates and transforms our decisions and preferences. That is, in the age of the data-gaze, the information coming in invades the interior by affecting thought processes and therefore an individual’s autonomous subjectivity itself. Fourth, whatever impression management and presentation of the self we do in the material-corporeal dimension, the data of the virtual self, whether in the form of purchases or browsing, is out there as our data-double. This offers, perhaps, a different biography from the one we voluntarily, with autonomy and agency, present to the world. Thus the unconscious presentations of the self—exemplified by web-searches, for instance, for violent online games—constitute a virtual biography that might be completely at odds with our usual self-presentation. In other words, the personal data gathered is the source of the reconstruction of a person elsewhere, when the database is made into a narrative. The boundaries of my self and the state of my subjectivity—interiority—are now defined by the flows of data each time we fly, browse, shop, walk, vote, talk, Whatsapp or email because these flows constitute the feedback loop with the environment, being recorded somewhere and which can come back to manipulate our subjectivity through an entirely new set of data that appeals
74 Data and Data Subjects to us (simply because it is data founded on the data we have released into the world, knowingly and unknowingly). To live is to be immersed in the data-gaze that then positions us in particular ways with the settings and processes of our lives, showing us risks and potentialities, alleviating or heightening our sense of these, and thereby inserting us into the social order as surveilled ‘data subjects’.
The personal information economy and the data subject That we live today in an information economy is a truism, since personal information gathering is a default condition of browsing, travelling, credit card transactions, ATM usage, and all the other small and big deeds we perform in the course of everyday lives. But we also live in a personal information economy where, thanks to OSNs and search engines, loyalty cards and status updating, the amount of personal information we voluntarily and involuntarily disclose and share is phenomenal. Starting with an individual’s name, age (through birthday posts), and profession, she/he shares information including social class, financial status, locations (physical address as well as cell numbers, e-mail accounts), ethnicity, gender, type of car, number of children or childlessness, pets, taste in music, clothing, sport and film, political views, sexual orientations, habits (smoking, drinking, shopping) and hobbies. Surveillance culture, whether in the form of the state’s interest in your political affiliations or the merchandizers’ interest in your taste in fashion accessories, has come to, more and more, rely on the personal information economy for economic activities (Perri 6, 2005). Thus policies, product design (and alteration/modification), outlet location, advertising campaigns of a Tata or a Reliance now rely heavily on consumer profiling—profiles that have been founded on personal information consumers voluntarily and involuntarily disclose when they provide feedback on products or when they buy the same product repeatedly and this information gets stored on their ‘loyalty cards’. Over a period of time the company knows exactly how many consumers frequently buy or ask for a particular product. Extending this, the company also acquires data that tells them about the consumer habits of a community in a particular area and whether, therefore, it would be profitable (or not) to open an outlet in that area. The personal information economy is the merger of the information economy with a widening of the scope of data gathering, processing and integration. The individual’s tastes and preferences are now part of a larger database which
75 Citizenship and Identity provides the necessary fuel to economic policies. I propose here that the personal information economy is an instantiation of the data-gaze where new forms of associations, and therefore memberships into mystical, abstract and affective ‘belonging’ that make up my social and personal identity, are instituted through the sharing of this data. The individual who has shared her/his data does not quite know exactly what profile is generated, or with which group she/he is aligned. The larger pattern is visible only to the company that is collating multiple bits of data. The personal information economy generates a new form of community, but one with which the individual may or may not have any flesh-and-blood or territorial connections. Thus all users of Tata Tea or Ford car owners in Hyderabad city’s metropolitan area constitute a community and potential customer database for the companies. Any individual has enabled the formation of this community that exists primarily as a database community of users, citizens and consumers. The individual’s location in this database community is through a form of affiliation and identification rather than filiation and identity. Filiation implies a genealogical, familial and intimate relationship. Affiliation is the association through the recognition of shared characteristics, behaviours and tastes. Identity implies a particular set of narratives of the self that is then validated by the world. In the case of the personal information economy the individual possesses a certain identification as a user of Tata Tea, but the other aspects of her identity are irrelevant except in so far as it affects the consumption of this product. Thus it is not identity but identification through the search (by the database) for and preparation of patterns of usage—what we can think of as narrative. I am working here with Lev Manovich’s useful distinction between database and narrative (2001). A database is simply a large set of data. When one follows a trajectory through that data, seeking some, rejecting others, we generate a narrative out of that data. Meaning-making is the process of data mining where profiles are built up through a careful sifting of the data. Organizations that collect data build narratives out of the database. These narratives are forms of identification and affiliation that are then affixed on to the individuals in the community by the organizations and merchandizers. We are looking at the merger of identities (in the form of personal data) into identifications (into generic consumer or user profiles). Shah Rukh Khan’s (SRK’s) extended detention at John F Kennedy (JFK) in 2012 was not the result of suspicious behaviour on his part as an individual but because his name (and not his actions) fitted a social type—Asian, Muslim—that pre-exists his arrival. He had been, 76 Data and Data Subjects in short, sorted into a certain category that called for extra attentions. Social sorting, we can now see, is the construction of identifications through the aggregation—what we can think of as narrativization—of personal information in multiple databases. What the data-gaze does, with or without our active participation, is perform a segmentation of consumers and users (McStay 2010: 94). The personal information economy affects the lifeworlds of individuals with the surveillance procedures and the processes of identification. The purchase- and product-browsing history available as data on Flipkart or Marks and Spencer or Domino’s, if it indicates a certain minimum amount spent weekly or monthly, immediately provides an identification of the individual as a type of consumer, with a certain level of income. The services that therefore are offered in terms of targeted advertising and promotional campaigns—President Obama’s election campaign carefully ‘combined dozens of pieces of information on each registered US voter to discover patterns that let them target fundraising appeals and ads’ (Greenwald 2013)—are substantially different from what that individual would otherwise command. Our life chances here are qualitatively different, therefore, due to the personal information that has been built up into a narrative/identification of a ‘big spender’. As Perri 6 points out, these new markers of social mobility emerge from surveillance (2005: 30). An individual subject’s access to welfare, state schemes, health, insurance, banking, credit, loans, privileged offers, discounts are increasingly linked to an identification by the manufacturer or marketing organization as a valued, reliable, honest consumer/customer. So, the cab company I patronize for airport trips sends me this mail on 18 June 2013:
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I could become their privileged customer, as soon as I share some information, preferences, likes and dislikes, that will then be collated with ‘usage pattern’ and my ‘loyalty’. The customer (me) has been sorted into a social category through dataveillance and this narrative is what stands between his claims, rights and responsibilities and the world of goods, services and duties. What, in short, the personal information economy is the foundation for living in the world and the quality of life. As we shall see in the case of the vulnerable data subject, this databased foundation also opens up risks. The personal information economy produces the data subject. The data subject is the sum total of data collated across services, products and activities an individual has engaged in, and which is then interpreted (sorted) by organizations—the state, manufacturers, service providers—to produce an identification. The data subject is at once the individual and a type that emerges through not just in the collation but in conjunction with other such data from other individuals. The personal information economy in the age of surveillance is a process through which new meanings are conferred upon real people, actions and behaviour. Thus the purchase of a particular low-priced brand of watch typifies an individual as a middle-class, low-spending consumer, and the bank/Visa will issue a credit card therefore with a lower spending limit. The more this subject buys of expensive brands the higher the rating goes and the bank raises the spending limit. The ‘new’ meaning that emerges in the real action of my expenditure is that of a ‘high’ or ‘low’ spender. This enables a certain level of predictability for suppliers, manufacturers and service providers and is an extension of the process of rationalization that reduces individuals into numbers plottable on graphs (McStay 2010: 93, 103). True, this process of counting consumers is not new and statistical measurements of people are as old as the hills. But what is new about the data-gaze today is the impersonal nature of such rationalization, sorting and identification so that other processes such as targeted advertising and personalized production (‘Customer Relations Management’, in a word!) are possible. This impersonal nature of the data-gaze that absorbs us into cohesive, identifiable and predictable ‘units’ is achieved by machines (Gandy 2003: 28). With minimal human intervention (except at the level of creating the algorithm) and the delinking of ‘suspicion’ from ‘subjectivity’ by making it mechanical (Jobard and Linhardt 2008: 84), it is
78 Data and Data Subjects the inexorability of the data-gaze and the inevitability of being ‘processed’, so to speak, that characterizes the surveillance culture of today. The data subject in the consumer-information economy—surveillance cultures and technologies bridge the consumer and the information economies—is of course a version of the consumer citizen. Flying in the face of traditional definitions of the subject in human rights discourses, the individual is increasingly mathematized: the sum total of measurable taste, quantifiable preferences and indexed likes and dislikes. Such a mathematization enables the dispersal of this individual along numerous pathways as well, automatically, and every pathway and its ‘core’ processor generates its own meaning of the individual. Thus, a frequent flier whose data flows across many different service provider databases, is at once a frequent flier, of a certain income tax bracket, a user of certain kinds of hotels and restaurants, a shopper for particular products, and so on. The individual comes to mean different things because every database ‘interprets’ the flow of data about this individual based on its requirements. This individual also has little decision-making powers over the meaning(s) being generated elsewhere because s/he does not any more control the self-image being presented to the world (Michelfelder 67). There is another side to the rise-of-the-data-subject argument. Think for a minute of status messages, FB updates, profile and impression management online. One would not immediately characterize this as surveillance since information—from preferences in pizza toppings to photographs—is volunteered and voluntarily shared. We project ourselves onto and into the data- gaze because we wish to insert ourselves into the symbolic order (although not necessarily the actual group) of consumers or privileged individuals and thereby acquire a certain cultural citizenship because we all participate in the project of demonstrating the same tastes, approving the same tastes and preferences. Non-commercial, voluntary and supposedly ‘fun’, we are speaking of data subjects who make themselves the objects of surveillance through say webcams. Hille Koskela analysing the role of home webcams in contemporary societies argues that such a voluntary participation in the cultures of surveillance gives individuals a sense of agency in the making of their own subjectivity. It is a ‘political act [that] reject[s] the traditional understanding of objectification’ (2006: 175). While Koskela believes that this self-presentation constitutes them as subjects of surveillance, I would propose that they are at once subjects and objects. They present themselves (hence indicating a certain subject-agency position) in order to be the object of the world’s gaze. Surveillance then might
79 Citizenship and Identity be seen as the volunteering by data subjects as objects for scrutiny where the increased and shared visibility is a part of the very subjectivity of the individual. That is, we cannot here see the data subject as produced in the crucible of surreptitious and invisible surveillance but co-produced within the creation of data (my photographs), dissemination of the data (uploaded on to Flickr) and consumption (either by the world at large, or selectively depending on viewer controls I have installed).
The vulnerable data subject Since our lifeworlds, life choices and life chances are contingent upon the world out there, any assessment of our personal information in the interlinked databases that produces a narrative of incompetence, for instance, means that we run the risk of not receiving certain kinds of life chances. Suppose a data subject has overdrawn bank accounts or has a history of non-payment/delayed payment of credit card bills, but is also a compulsive shopper for luxury goods (which is why the bank account was overdrawn and the bills unpaid in the first instance). These three bits of information are stored in different databases, although they pertain to the same individual. In the personal information economy with appropriate surveillance mechanisms, the data from these three different sources, the bank, Visa and the luxury store, get merged to produce an identification of an unreliable and financially incompetent individual – a type rather than a person. If at some point the individual needs a bank loan, or even a different job, this identification would impede her/his chances of ever acquiring the loan or the job. In the USA, credit history being a crucial part of every individual’s life, the database built into a narrative tells the story of an individual who is financially incompetent, and many life chances are therefore closed to her/him because the personal information has been shared among organizations. How car dealers, jewellery stores, credit card dealers and banks treat her/him now, with this identification, will be very different from an age when such data were not always merged into a narrative. In similar fashion access to health services, state facilities and such are also adversely affected due to the pooling together of the data. Membership in a political party or union of any sort, when revealed to say a future employer, might produce a negative appraisal of candidature for the job, and thus affects the life chances of that individual. The personal information economy is the context in which the vulnerable data subject emerges, as we can see here.
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Perri 6 points out that ultimately the personal information economy is, like any other economy, concerned with the maximizing of profit through the minimizing of risk (2005: 31–2). The narrative identification of an individual, in the form of a coherent biography built up through multiple databases, as a low-spending-consumer or a financially incompetent customer translates into a certain degree—high—of risk around/about that individual. Consequently services offered by organizations will be suitably altered so that she/he does not represent too much of risk to their investment. In terms of what it means to that subject as an individual is that her/his incompetence in one domain impacts her/his life chances in several others. Individuals from marginalized and underprivileged groups therefore are clearly at a disadvantage in this new meritocracy because their loans, access to health services and such are all likely to be in jeopardy because their credit history with one bank is part of a larger narrative of their lives: in the social sorting they have been rendered ‘high risk’. Thus the sharing of personal data gathered through surveillance directly and over time affects my life chances and life worlds so that I am a vulnerable data subject: vulnerable to the risk of denial of services and social advantages. However, there is also a particular kind of voluntary data subject that we see in contemporary culture. The confessional mode, where the subject publicizes the condition of vulnerability in the past, that we see in Oprah or any of the Reality TV today might be interpreted as the data subject who emerges through a willing submission to the norms of surveillance, public disclosure and data-sharing. The conversion of personal information into a means of the public fashioning of identity constitutes a form of participatory surveillance—something to which I shall turn in the fifth chapter. I want to first address a more widespread consequence of surveillance that affects a large number of data subjects. Surveys conducted by merchandizers, chain stores and service providers categorize communities and neighbourhoods for their income, expenditure, product preferences, leisure spending and others. The community is the data source that then is directly affected by what patterns the organization reads into the data. Thus local data feed into a global network and this in turn shapes the network (Zurawski 2011). But the network then impinges upon the local data in a feedback mechanism. Communities with higher spending patterns will attract more services and stores. Others will not. Thus a community can move from being a data source to becoming utility deserts based on dataveillance. The refusal of stores to open or service certain segments of a city results in fewer life chances and choices for the people in
81 Citizenship and Identity that area and produces a utility desert. The people in that section of the city become, in short, vulnerable data subjects. The community, one could say, has unthinkingly fashioned itself every time it consumed less: its insertion into the symbolic order of consumption has effectively projected its behaviour as ‘low-potential/high-risk’. This is what is often referred to as the ‘social costs’ of surveillance (Andrew von Hirsch, cited in Welsh and Farrington 2009: 25) In order to understand the making of the vulnerable data subject we need to examine the numerous layers of data, and subjectivity, that surveillance culture creates.
Interiority and privacy ‘The perfect search engine … [that] understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want’. Larry Page, co-founder of Google (https://google.co.in/intl/en/about/compamy/products/ 18 June 2013)
India suffers from what is now commonly called ‘privacy lacunae’ in its legal system (Greenleaf 2010: 483). Debates about the gathering and dissemination of information in the form of the AADHAR card or DNA fingerprinting have suddenly brought to the forefront the issue of privacy. There have been discussions on ‘genetic privacy’ and DNA collection (Hickok 2012) and a general controversy around the AADHAR card, especially after those who read the document from the UIDA that I began this chapter with (Nayar 2012). The Group of Experts on Privacy, headed by Justice AP Shah submitted its report in October 2012. While acknowledging that the right to privacy was a fundamental right, the Group went by earlier Court judgements that it was not an ‘iron clad’ right (2012: 6) . The Report collated definitions and views on privacy from the European Union, Canada, Australia, OECD, APEC Privacy Framework, and noted that ‘principles of Notice, Consent, Collection Limitation, Use Limitation, Access and Corrections, Security/Safeguards, and Openness cut across these frameworks’ (10).3 The document then goes
3 India’s National Privacy Principles, said the Report ‘can be enumerated as the distillation of global best practices which can be effectively implemented in Indian conditions’ (21), once again indicating that it becomes increasingly difficult to see surveillance or the controversies and concerns around it as restricted to any one geopolitical entity. 82 Data and Data Subjects on to list basic principles for a National Privacy Policy: notice of information policy to be notified by all data controllers, consent, collection limitation, purpose limitation, access and correction, disclosure, security, openness and accountability (21–7). What is evident from the Report is that privacy is now almost entirely to do with data flows. But why is the ‘wrongful’ or ‘illegitimate’ flow of data in terms of collection, disclosure or application/use deemed to be a loss or invasion of an individual’s privacy?4 How does it matter that an individual’s DNA details are stored in the national and/or regional data bank (as has been proposed in a Bill with the Parliament as of 2013)? How does the flow of data become the boundary condition of an individual’s identity and subjectivity? If, as Julie Cohen comments, ‘informational privacy is an essential building block for the kind of individuality, and the kind of society, that we say we value’ (2000: 1435), then we need to examine (i) the kind of individual subject that emerges in the information economy of surveillance culture, (ii) the risks to this subject’s subjectivity, autonomy and interiority from surveillance and dataveillance, (iii) the responsibilization of the data subject in the age of surveillance. Debates over the nature of privacy and the forms of privacy have been in the legal dominant least in the USA since the end of the nineteenth century when Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis defined it as ‘the right to be let alone’ (1890, cited in Bennett 2008: 3). I would for purposes of this chapter, say that privacy ‘is (at least in part) about regulating transactions between persons (including information flows)’, as Mark Taylor defines it (2012: 19). In Graeme Laurie’s terms, it is first,
a state of non-access to the individual’s physical or psychological self – what can be called spatial privacy. Second, privacy can be seen as a state in which personal information about an individual is in a state of non-access from others – informational privacy. One unifying definition can be deduced from these two concepts: privacy is a state of separatedness from others … privacy should be taken to refer to a state in which an individual is apart from others, either in a bodily or psychological sense or by reference to the inaccessibility of certain intimate adjuncts to their individuality, such as personal information. (2002: 6)
4 As should be clear I am not studying corporate data flows and data rights here. For a quick summary of the issues in data protection and policies in India see Bajaj (2012), among others. 83 Citizenship and Identity
One of the leading thinkers on surveillance and privacy, Colin Bennett, summarizes the informational approach to privacy: the ‘point is not that certain information is perennially and inherently sensitive and therefore private, but that the individual should have a right to control its circulation’ (2008: 4). Informational privacy is defined by ‘how much personal information is available from sources other than the individual to whom it pertains. The less opportunity individuals have to limit access by others to their personal information or to limit the amount of personal information they must give up to others (either voluntarily or by coercion, the less informational privacy they have’ (Alpert 2003: 302-03). All relationships are mediated by the exchange of information but we like to be in control over the information about us available to others. Privacy, in humanistic terms, is necessary ‘to protect the dignity, individuality, integrity, or private personality of each and every one of us, regardless of wider implications or consequences’ (Bennett 2008: 4). In the instrumental view of privacy, it is argued that ‘if you can protect the information on which decisions are made about individuals, you can also protect the fairness, integrity, and effectiveness of that decision-making process’ (5). Scoglio Stefano examining the four areas of privacy (physical, decisional, informational and formational) argues that privacy is ‘the place to cultivate and experience … the sense of our inner universality and wholeness’ , a form of existential privacy (1998: 42). It is the ‘protection of an essentially and thus potentially spiritual and ethical interiority’ (29). Decision-making performed by this interiority deserves to be left alone to make those decisions (formational privacy, without the invasion of unwanted information (10). Daniel Solove argues a case for privacy as personhood. Privacy, he proposes, is about the protection of the integrity of personality (cited in Yesil 2009: 22). Simson Garfinkel in Database Nation argues that privacy is about self-possession, autonomy and integrity of a person (2000). Adam Moore proposes that
controlling access to ourselves affords individuals the space to develop themselves as they see fit. Such control yields room to grow personally while maintaining autonomy over the course and direction of one’s life. (2003: 216)
Privacy is necessary for the ‘proper functioning of human beings’ (223), and the ‘ability to regulate access to our bodies, capacities and powers, and to sensitive personal information is an essential part of human flourishing or well-being’ (223).
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What I wish to do is to examine how privacy, with a particular and singular set of data unique to that individual, has been seen as a core of human dignity and autonomy, and therefore any data that enters or leaves the individual without her consent might be deemed to be a loss or invasion of privacy. There is of course in such arguments about the misappropriation of data the conceptualization of personal data as property (since the individual is believed to be the creator of the data). Such an argument about data privacy that focuses on the consent of an individual implicitly suggests that ‘a successful data privacy regime is precisely one that guarantees individuals the right to trade their personal information for perceived benefits, and that places the lowest transaction cost barriers in the way of consensual trades’ (Julie Cohen 2000: 1391). I shall return to questions of data theft and data invasion in the making of the vulnerable data subject in a later section. The causes behind my decisions, whether of browsing, shopping, relationships, are my deepest desires, fears, hates that are often unconscious. Privacy is the space for reflecting on decisions. It is only with reflection that the human being flourishes and grows, according to the privacy philosophers. This means the individual subject needs to be autonomous within himself or herself in the sense that the interiority of the individual needs to be ‘let alone’ to confront, negotiate and engage with fears and desires in order to come to an understanding of the self or to a decision. To deny a person this space of reflection is to then deny interiority itself. What Larry Page is telling us users—in his well-known description of Google—is that the search engine knows exactly what we want, even though we may not be very sure ourselves. An individual’s reflections on what she/he want ends the minute she/he starts keying in a search query because Google Instant finishes this query for the individual and directs her/him to the ‘best’ answer that Google’s PageRank has determined based on what other users have found useful. In other words, the individual’s mental processes have been shut down, interfered with and directed along particular routes because of a Google search and Google decided that it knew better. This, it could be argued, following the privacy philosophers, is an invasion of interiority. Viewed as a sum of data that can be aggregated to offer the state and the market indices of consumption, tastes and political beliefs, the individual- as-data-subject is an exemplification and embodiment of surveillance culture. The data subject’s autonomy of interiority is what is at stake in such a culture. Decision-making, self-fashioning and critical acuity that demand a certain 85 Citizenship and Identity isolation from the environment—from where, of course we receive the information on which our decisions are to be based—are vulnerable in a society where surveillance is constant and irreducibly intrusive. Julie Cohen writes: the ‘pervasive monitoring of every first move or false start will, at the margin, incline choices towards the bland and the mainstream’ (2000: 1425–6). For true self-governance, informational privacy, Cohen argues, is indispensable. It is from this position of privacy-as-interiority and the guarantor of growth that subsequent debates about data flows and data invasion that subvert the autonomy of the individual can proceed. Individuals often alter their behaviour in the presence of an eavesdropper or a camera. In a sense one dramatizes—by toning down or amplifying—certain kinds of behaviour and responses when conscious of being photographed or recorded in any way. Thus it could be argued that the presence of surveillance devices—more and more incorporated into the immediate settings in unobtrusive ways—causes us to be inhibited in our behaviour. Surveillance introduces a ‘subtle yet fundamental shift in the content of our character, a blunting and blurring of rough edges and sharp lines’ (Cohen 2000) because we become conscious of what is acceptable or unacceptable behaviour. In a sense we become conformists—this indeed we could argue is exactly what surveillance cultures seek to instil in the masses.5 Such notions of privacy hinge on assumptions of interiority and the exterior. However, this is a problematic assumption in itself, especially in a country like India where, in cities like Mumbai, thousands of people live in very public spaces. In addition there is also the common feature of public performance of private acts—such as defecation—that India is notorious for. The very concept of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ that determines accompanying notions of personal/ private and therefore of privacy, is something that applies to particular classes of people, evidently. The poor, living in the open or in extremely crowded conditions clearly do not merit the same kinds of discussions about privacy.
5 In this connection it might be interesting to see the work of the New York Surveillance Camera Players (http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html Last accessed: 26 June 2014 and http://www.artelectronicmedia.com/artwork/new-york-surveillance-camera- players.Last accessed: 26 June 2014). Also see the work of Denis Beaubois, In The Event of Amnesia the City will Recall… (http://www.denisbeaubois.com/Amnesia/In%20 the%20event%20of%20Amnesia%20copy%202.html). Last accessed: 26 June 2014 with his unmoving ‘penance’ in front of the surveillance camera, or of Nancy Nisbet who, with RFID chips in her hands, uses them to ‘enact’ surveillance (Nisbet 2004). 86 Data and Data Subjects
Data doubles The collation of information from the bank, PC, grocery shopping, travel bookings website, online shopping and other such everyday actions produces a particular identification or simulation of an individual in some database. ‘Data doubles’, as these avatars or simulations are called, are the virtual doubles of real people. These data doubles are to stand in for the real flesh-and-blood person in terms of their habits, behaviour, attitudes and actions. The data double is a reconstruction of the self elsewhere and over whose interpretation the individual has little or no control because (i) we will not be sure where, in which database or organization, this avatar exists, (ii) the criteria of interpretation and meaning-making in which we emerge as particular kinds of persons (what I have called identification), (iii) we did not, on many occasions know what kind of data was being gathered each time we logged on, nor was our consent asked, (iv) we do not know whether the retail chain will alone use the data about our shopping trends or will pass it on to other service providers in an exercise of function creep. Data doubling becomes a troubling feature of lives—when we are conscious of it—because these reveal patterns of behaviour that then drive responses by service providers, the state or organizations, across domains. Data gathered about my banking and investment policies, for example, when integrated into a database offers the insurance companies information about my income and expenditure. Our medical purchases when integrated into the insurance company’s database could, if they so choose, identify every individual as prone to specific kinds of ailments and the insurance provider therefore could take decisions about future policies. At once specific and generic, the data double functions as a virtual persona. It takes data about one’s interiority—whether it is the chocolate bar we might buy impulsively at the counter in the grocery store or the fetishistic surfing for poverty porn scenes from, say, Sudan—and constructs a type of person who fits into categories already in place by the data miner. The data double is what the service provider or the government first encounters. This means, surveillance must be seen as the process through which the surveiller moves beyond the avatar or data double in order to make judgements about the real person who has generated the data. The data double therefore has a certain materiality to it. This is where the question of data theft begins to make its anxious appearance. 87 Citizenship and Identity
Data theft When a service provider or neighbour gains access to these data about us, she/ he develops a judgment about us that could then impinge our social relations in the community. Given the fact that in India there really is no data protection law the chances that somebody somewhere could come into possession of data that might then be a source of threat to us, our friends, family and social relations. Several types of data theft and their cultural implications have been identified by Daniel Solove (2006). Every form produces vulnerability in the data subject. If, as I have proposed, the sense of the self and the self-in-the world is marked by the boundary condition of data flows then data theft radically alters the boundary condition calling into crisis the sense of the self.
Disclosure Think of the revelations of UK’s Prince Harry’s or Bill Clinton’s marijuana use during their college days.6 Or the Angelina Jolie mastectomy.7 Or, closer home, the disclosure of Lisa Ray’s cancer. Or novelist Sohaila Abdulali’s disclosure, in the light of the December 2012 New Delhi rape, about her own gang-rape years ago.8 Disclosure is the circulation of true information about individuals in the world. Data, especially of the medical variety, or of alcohol and/or drug use, can influence people’s judgements of and interactions with the individual concerned. The disclosure of my neighbour’s alcoholism or gambling habit would prejudice me against him. The disclosure of a politician or scientist or administrator’s college day revelries prejudices a citizen’s judgement in the
6 http://www.foxnews.com/story/2002/01/13/prince-harry-spent-day-in-rehab- after-admitting-smoking-pot/. 19 June 2013. For Clinton see http://www.nytimes. com/1992/03/30/news/30iht-bill_1.html. 19 June 2013. 7 http://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/celebrity/celebrity-news/2013/05/14/angelina- jolie-has-double-mastectomy-due-to-high-risk-of-breast-cancer. Last accessed 19 June 2013. 8 Lisa Ray on her cancer at http://lisaraniray.com/about/lisa-ray/. Abdulali had written about her rape three years after it occurred (http://www.manushi-india.org/pdfs_issues/ articles/I%20Fought%20for%20My%20Life.pdf) Last accessed: 26 June 2014. Interest in her autobiographical account was revived as a result of the December 2012 Delhi rape, she noted in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/opinion/ after-being-raped-i-was-wounded-my-honor-wasnt.html?_r=2&). Last accessed: 26 June 2014 88 Data and Data Subjects present, and thus, in a sense, negates all that the individual has acquired or become since those youthful days. The disclosure of an individual’s political beliefs might be detrimental to her or his social life, because these are likely to evoke strong responses from those antagonistic to those views. In the contemporary era, the constant attention on celebrities by the paparazzi often reveals details of their personal lives that influence our evaluation of them. Princess Diana, Bill Clinton, Salman Khan and several others have had their popularity ratings nosedive because of disclosures about their private lives. We read of stalkers tracking down the physical addresses and family members via email communications or Facebook. This form of disclosure threatens the security of the data subject in very real terms, and not just in terms of negative judgments. In other cases, such as the Valerie Palme case (where the undercover CIA agent, Palme, had her real identity disclosed to the world, perhaps wilfully, by people in the US government because of her husband’s outspoken criticism of the ‘war on terror’) there is the risk of death because of disclosure of identity of the individual working with sensitive assignments such as the defence or intelligence agencies. To move the debate out of the domain of individual disclosure, I turn to public disclosure of institutions and processes. India as a land of scams has had a history of embarrassing disclosure. Sting operations—about which I will have more to say in a later chapter—are aimed at disclosing true information about individuals, organizations and events. Take the case of disclosure in one of contemporary India’s largest scams: the 2G spectrum allocation (2010) . What the disclosure of the (disputed) Radia tapes revealed was an alleged nexus between journalists (Nira Radia, Vir Sanghvi, Barkha Dutt), political parties (the Congress/UPA, in power at the Centre) and politicians (A Raja, Telecom minister during the allocation of the spectrum). Another example of disclosure would be the more recent Walmart lobbying case. First appearing as reports in US newspapers, the company had spend $ 25 million on lobbying for gaining an entry into India (‘Walmart Lobby Bill hits $ 25 m on India entry, other cases’, 2012). In January 2013, the Government of India appointed a one-man commission to conduct and inquiry into the allegations of Walmart’s lobbying, which submitted its Report towards the end of May 2013, stating that there was no evidence of such lobbying, and the case had to be closed. The first disclosure (commonly referred to as ‘Radiagate’ in the Indian media) attracted widespread attention because it suggested (widely denied by Barkha Dutt and Co., who claimed that the authenticity of the tapes was
89 Citizenship and Identity questionable) a certain unreliability about so-called hard-hitting journalism and reliable media. It called into question the process of ministerial selection, the making of policy and the actual nature of the interventionary role of journalists.9 The second disclosure likewise exposed the problems of policy- making in India and the questionable role of lobby and pressure groups. Whistleblowing here works because the whistleblower should possess a belief that the disclosure reveals wrong-doing in terms of the law, and that the disclosure is essential for the survival of the civic/public sphere.
Exposure A related mode of data flow that is perceived as a violation of privacy is exposure, although, very often, the two (disclosure and exposure) are taken as interchangeable. Solove contends that exposure is the making public of intimate moments, functions and emotions. He writes: ‘exposure creates injury because we have developed social practices to conceal aspects of life that we find animal-like or disgusting. Further, in certain activities, we are vulnerable and weak, such as when we are nude or going to the bathroom’ (2000) . Unlike disclosure of an individual’s financial incompetence, health conditions or sexual escapades, the ‘information [in exposure] is not revealing of anything we typically use to judge people’s character’ (2006). That is, prevalent social norms and prejudices might find extramarital affairs or bigamy or live-in relationships inappropriate (it must be underscored that this is not about moral rightness or wrongness of any of these acts, but about social norms that classify these as immoral or unacceptable, where norms are of course culturally dependent). Exposure is the flow of data that results not necessarily in physical or other harm, but produces embarrassment and humiliation, and consequently damages the dignity of the individual. This isn’t about data that reveals wrong-doing (which is how, public disclosure often works). Exposure of intimate moments is treated as embarrassing because social norms dictate that these are not to be revealed to public gaze. Media coverage of wardrobe malfunction—so frequent in Indian magazines and TV coverage today—is an instance of a data flow that presents an
9 However, lobbying is not restricted to US companies. India, according to an Economic Times report, Rs. 1.8 crores is being spent for a six-month hire of the lobbying firm Podesta Group, believed to be close to the Obama administration (‘India Retains Podesta Group for Lobbying in US’, 2013). 90 Data and Data Subjects individual’s body in a particular way to the public eye. Inherently it does not condemn the individual to social opprobrium for baseness of character or poor moral rectitude. What it does do is to subject the individual to ridicule and insult. In and of itself the exposure reveals nothing that we do not already know of the individual—one assumes we are all aware of the human body— but it offers up the individual body in vulnerable, careless or socially inept ways. Details that are common knowledge but not common spectacle emerge in exposure, and produce social/cultural embarrassment. Disclosure might damage the reputation of an individual, especially if that individual is a public functionary (Clinton’s escapades would be a case in point) but exposure damages an individual’s personal dignity. To return to a point I made in the Introduction and earlier in this chapter, the questions to be asked of these theories of privacy as human dignity are: can the poor possess dignity when they are in a state of constant exposure, when their intimate moments and functions are visible and audible to neighbours, family and passers-by? Can we think of these conditions as that of unrelenting surveillance of individuals? Or is there something we need to say to qualify the context of ‘surveillance’ itself? ‘Privacy’, it appears, is not a condition of poor lives: it is a defensible and defended condition of people with houses, windows and curtains. Surveillance, like privacy, is hardly the condition of lives that are lived in full public view, except in terms of the local police station monitoring them. Threats of exposure do not possess any relevance to such lives. If surveillance is about the gaze, about being seen, then it is necessary to recognize that we as gazers do not ‘see’ people performing certain functions in public. The poor are part of the ‘natural’ settings, as it were, and so they do not suffer from ‘exposure’. In a sense there is an invisibilizing of natural functions in their case. The sight of a nude but poor body on the street is neither surveillance nor titillating because of a mediated gaze that we use upon them. This mediation has to do with the cultural script of avoiding looking at what we think are embarrassing human functions. Alongside the culture of surveillance, then, is a culture of invisibilizing.
Appropriation and function creep When an individual’s identity is used, without consent, by another individual or organization for their profit or advantage, it is deemed appropriation.
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The use of an academic A’s name, for example, by a fellow academic, B, in order to get a hearing from publishers would be an instance of appropriation. It makes use of a certain kind of data—a formal relationship between A and B as colleagues, the reputation of A in the field, the relationship between publishers and A – in order to further this B’s aims and ambitions. Commonly aligned with the word ‘exploitation’, ‘appropriation’ does carry connotations of ‘property’ along with ‘propriety’. Nobody is entitled to use A’s name (or face or other characteristics)—that might or might not be in the public domain— without A’s consent for their purposes. If, to use another example, X consents to any form of medical treatment does it imply X’s consent to her/his blood or tissue being used for research purposes by the hospital, or by the pharmaceutical industry (often called ‘permissible secondary use’)? Would X gain financially if, using X’s blood or tissue the company develops patented drugs? Cases have been recorded where hospitals have appropriated patient data for their own research work, without the knowledge of the patients. The famous instance of John Moore’s cell line and the University of California is an instance of this form of data production and dissemination. (In June 2013 the US Supreme Court ruled that genes cannot be patented.) Moore being treated at UCLA found that the Regents of the University of California had patented his cell line. Moore lost his case (where he claimed his DNA or cell line was his property) when the Court ruled that he had no property rights on his discarded cells. The larger non-legal dimensions of the issue stirred up numerous debates. That Moore’s DNA was under ‘surveillance’ and the data were gathered for one purpose—his cancer treatment—and was eventually used for other purposes suggests a data flow that is unsanctioned by the individual. ‘Function creep’ is the appropriation of data ostensibly gathered for one purpose but employed for entirely different purposes. If data gathered with my consent by the state is sold to an agency that then uses this data to sell me products, offer services or damage my reputation in anyway, then we have an example of function creep.
Distortion Rumours about celebrity pregnancies, divorces and infidelity, about association of politicians and criminals, gossip about an individual’s health or financial solvency are instances of the spread of data altered to elicit a particular response towards the individual concerned: a negative one. Distortion is the toning 92 Data and Data Subjects down, amplifying, adding, misrepresenting of data around an individual. Defamation and slander are commonly associated with this form of data flow, where the individual concerned is aggrieved that she/he has suffered financial, psychological and reputational harm as a result of people’s misperceptions about her/him. A visit to a doctor—a documented fact—by an individual being represented by neighbours or acquaintances as a visit to a psychiatrist could result in the public perception of the individual as suffering from any version of nervous instability, or worse. In terms of social reputation and social identity, the individual suffers extensive damages, especially because this quickly escalates into distorted data about professional competence, earning capacity, family life, etc. Individuals in the public eye often file for defamation when media reports, distorting particular facts, that they have suspicious habits, connections or attitudes. Such people, the victims of data distortion, claim their public reputation and sense of self have both been damaged. Since public perceptions, reputation and character are integral aspects of my identity, any alteration in these domains deeply affects the sense of self as well.
Data invasion and decisional interference In what we have examined above we looked at the exit and dissemination of data about individuals beyond their control, which produces the vulnerable data subject as a consequence. But a vulnerable data subject is also produced due to certain kinds of data entering the domain of her/his mind, self, home and family. Surveillance itself is a form of intrusion for it is about a gaze or ear that extends into the space of the home, the individual’s most intimate moments and the privacy of relationships. In the age of email and telephones, junk, spam and telemarketing constitute some of the most recurrent forms of data intrusion. The intrusion of such data is an index of random surveillance of IP addresses or web browsing, credit card spending and shopping where the data we generate in our routine, mundane and ‘legitimate’ operations bring as feedback the unwanted information of products and services. Surveillance first places us under the scanner to see how our minds work, what it stimulates, and what it seeks. It then offers suggestions for us to indulge ourselves in. Advertising is a common form of data intrusion that, unobtrusive or obtrusive, distracts me from our focus but also caters to a need, desire or 93 Citizenship and Identity fear within me—needs, fears and desires that have already been mapped by the dataveillance structure that collated information about my browsing, shopping and consumption patterns. As Scoglio Stefano points out these forms of informational intrusions are strategies of mind-transformation where we are tempted into taking certain kinds of decision that fit us into the consumer pattern (1998). The stimulation of our minds through advertisements is a form, therefore, of decisional interference that, by informing us of our possible options, tempting us with others or warning us against some others, could directly affect our decisions about lifestyle choices. The state, public or organization’s intrusion with particular kinds of legislation, questions and inquiries (i.e., narratives or data) might have a significant effect upon the decisions made by the individual in her or his private lives. The predictive nature of Google’s search functions that tells us what we could possibly be seeking by finishing our query for us, and this might also be considered a form of decisional interference because it determines our choices. The data-gaze here is the projection of wants and desires that we didn’t know we wanted and desired until we were offered them as choices. By finishing and finalizing our search queries it also inserts us into a symbolic order—where other people had by looking for a certain answer chose this one and caused Google to rank it higher. In a sense we are drafted into a users’ choice of answers and/or information even before we knew this is what we wanted. It is not, let us understand this clearly, the best, most authoritative or reliable answer/info: it is what most users have browsed, selected, scanned. Our membership in a social order is now assured because we too, like these several others, have chosen that bit of info, since our plodding search was (i) curtailed when Google supplied the keywords and (ii) taken along a direction that I might not have chosen if given time to reflect.10 Further by clicking on the top ranked links we have added ‘value’ to it so that the next (unsuspecting) searcher will also surely find it, and the next searcher, and the next. Communiques and advertisements that are to do with health, for example, warning us of particular forms of infection, the side effects of certain drugs
10 Hillis et al. write: Genericism is the underlying logic of PageRank, which draws on the so-called wisdom of crowds. Its model of relevance values and hierarchizes information as “relevant” in terms of its measurable appreciation by a mass of users, including those institutionalized experts whose valuations receive higher weightings. (2013, emphasis added) 94 Data and Data Subjects or the necessity of certain kinds of precautions are also forms of decisional interference through the intrusion of data into private areas of family, health and the body. Such data intrusions are usually treated as positive intrusions, but they do construct a condition of vulnerability in the data subject by inventorying risks in domains where one thought one was free to take any kind of decision. India’s family planning campaigns are an instance of this kind of data intrusion that directly intervenes in decision-making in an area traditionally regarded as outside the purview of the state. By offering information about contraception and precautions the state hopes to influence lifestyle habits in the domain of sexuality and the family. Likewise, public health campaigns are decisional interference intrusions as well where the medical information about say AIDS (often cast, fortunately or unfortunately, in moral terms in India)—one can see these posted inside ATM facilities across Hyderabad city—serve the purpose of educating individuals about the risks involved and the modes of caution that may be exercised, if one chooses to. I conclude this section on the vulnerable data subject by turning to one instance of such a subjectification in the age of new surveillance: genetic privacy.
Genetic privacy and the vulnerable data subject Of the newest forms of surveillance, DNA fingerprinting and DNA databasing constitutes the most extensive intrusion into the content of the human corporeal self. It is perhaps the most personal information anybody has within herself or himself. ‘Genetic data’ is an umbrella term for ‘any data prepared in a way that it might yield genetic information if subject to genetic interpretation’ (Taylor 2012: 43–4).11 Genetic data reveal traits, behaviour, susceptibility to diseases not only about an individual but also about blood relations and even the community to which the individual belongs. Today genetic tests can detect an individual’s predisposition to a particular genetic disorder, or her/ his status as a carrier (which means the disorder/disease might be passed on to the next generation).12
11 As Mark Taylor notes, genetic material is believed, first, to have the potential for yielding genetic information and, second, this is therefore prepared and analysed in a way as to yield this information (44). 12 The Human Genome Project, the mapping of the human genome, started in 1990 and the finished version of the euchromatic human genome was published in 2004. See http://www.genome.gov/10001772. Last accessed 9 December 2013. 95 Citizenship and Identity
Used initially to enable the conviction of criminals with DNA gathered from the crime scene, DNA databasing is here to stay in most countries in the world. In a recent and much criticized ruling seen as a blow to civil liberties activists seeking a ban on DNA profiling, the US Supreme Court ruled (5 to 4, with Justice Scalia writing a scathing dissent) in May 2013 that DNA tests are similar to DNA fingerprinting methods.13 But why is genetic data at the forefront of the privacy and surveillance debate? An answer was provided by George Annas of the Boston University School of Public Health’s Health Law Department as early as 1995, and continues, I think, to offer a cautionary note for us in the age of personal information economy. Genetic data are even more personal, says Annas, because they can predict an individual’s likely medical future, it divulges information about one’s parents, siblings and children, and it has a history of being used to stigmatize and victimize individuals (1995: 1196). Such testing and databasing is a frightening version of the politics of life itself. Nikolas Rose sums up the ‘politics of life’ this way:
When an illness or a pathology is thought of as genetic, it is no longer an individual matter. It has become familial, a matter both of family histories and potential family futures. In this way genetic thought induces “genetic responsibility”: it reshapes prudence and obligation, in relation to marriage, having children, pursuing a career, and organizing ones financial affairs. (2007: 108)
Information unique to an individual is personal information, whether genetic or not. Graeme Laurie’s interpretation of genetic information and the appropriate responses to it is a useful way to consider the new domains of datasourcing:
If we recognise an inherent connection between information and the person to whom it relates, an obligation of respect in relation to the information remains. This goes beyond the mere avoidance of harm, and encompasses other obligations of respect, such as ensuring that the information is obtained in an appropriate manner with valid and informed consent from the subject, and warranting that the uses to which the information is to be put are legitimate. (89)
India accepted DNA fingerprinting in its legal and law enforcement domains in 1985. (The United Kingdom was the first country to establish a national DNA database, in 1994, for law enforcement purposes.)
13 See ‘US Supreme Court Rules in Favour of Routine DNA Swabs After Arrest’ (2013). 96 Data and Data Subjects
But the proposal now pending (at the time of writing) in the form of the Draft DNA Profiling Bill in the Parliament of India (Draft DNA Profiling Bill). The DNA data will be cross referenced, according to this Draft Bill, with ‘crime scene indexes, suspects index, offender’s index, missing persons index, unknown deceased persons’ index, volunteers’ index, and such other DNA indices as may be specified by regulations made by the Board’. The larger aim for law enforcement, according to the Bill, is the ‘to enhance protection of people in the society and administration of justice [through the] analysis of DNA found at the scene of crime, of the victim or offender … to establish identity’ (2012: 3). It lists various offences—from criminal offences like murder and sexual offences—to personal identification whose purposes will be served by the use of DNA fingerprinting and databasing technologies (Several problems with the Draft Bill have been raised by Elonnai Hickok 2012.) My interest is not in the legal aspects of the DNA policy that Hickok focuses on, but rather in the form of biopolitical surveillance culture embodied in the DNA fingerprinting technologies. In the preceding chapter I spoke of biometric surveillance and biobanks. I return to the subject of bio-privacy here primarily because one of the most controversial dimensions of contemporary bioscience has been DNA testing/ profiling and the debate over genetic privacy.14 One of the first problems of DNA profiling is the assumption that it is the databasing of an individual and is unique to that individual. But as Sheri Alpert points out genetic information of an individual is also an ‘intrusion on group or collectivity privacy interests’ (2003: 303) because my genes link me to particular ethnic groups. Demographic profiles can also be built up from a person’s so-called unique gene data. In
14 Genetic testing includes, according to the US Task Force on Genetic Testing: The analysis of human DNA, RNA, chromosomes, proteins, and certain metabolites in order to detect heritable disease-related genotypes, mutations, phenotypes, or karyotypes for clinical purposes. Such purposes include predicting risk of disease, identifying carriers, establishing prenatal and clinical diagnosis or prognosis. Prenatal, newborn, and carrier screening, as well as testing in high risk families, are included. Tests for metabolites are covered only when they are undertaken with high probability that an excess or deficiency of the metabolite indicates the presence of heritable mutations in single genes. Tests conducted purely for research are excluded from the definition, as are tests for somatic (as opposed to heritable) mutations, and testing for forensic purposes. Thus tests that do not involve the direct analysis of the DNA are not deemed to be genetic tests. 97 Citizenship and Identity other words, because data such as DNA profiles is based on ‘biological or ethnic lineage and not on voluntary connections’ (ibid), the appropriation of an individual’s data is also an intrusion into that of a ‘bio-ethno group’ (ibid). The question is therefore not of an individual’s right to genetic and bio-data privacy but that of a group’s right to its intergenerational genetic data. In India, tribal, community and caste identities are genetically structured not in terms of individuals alone. The Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, one of the premier institutions for DNA work, lists as one of its objectives the creation of ‘DNA marker databases of different caste populations in India’ (Annual Report 2011–12: 23). Elonnai Hickok writes about this objective:
This objective is based on the assumption that caste is an immutable genetic trait and seems to ignore the fact that individuals change their caste and that caste is not uniformly passed on in marriage. Furthermore, using caste for forensic purposes and to develop DNA databases could far too easily be abused and result in the profiling of individuals, and identification errors. (2012, unpaginated)
Does genetic data add one more ‘quantifiable’ factor to the possibilities of caste-based identification? Since, as noted above, an individual’s genetic data cannot be said to be entirely her/his property or her/his making, then the extrapolation of inferences from an individual’s data to that of a particular ethnic or caste group seems to offer a whole new set of possibilities for misuse. With memories of Nazi Germany’s racial profiling based on genetic data not too far in the past, Hickok’s point is well taken about the necessity of stringent regulations governing the use of this kind of caste-based genetic data.15 Information, in the form of collection and dissemination, is contextual since information is the interpretation of data. Genetic data when disclosed affect our relationships, change our behaviour and alter reproductive choices, in addition, of course to changes in public legal policies and health and medicare decisions, insurance, the law, etc. Since genetic tests can be predictive – about susceptibility to particular disorders – these can influence judgements detrimental to the individuals, what is now commonly referred to as ‘geneticism’. That is, employers, insurers, health authorities, law enforcement
15 On genetic discrimination see Allen and Ostrer (1993), Nayar (2006), Taylor (2012, chapter 8). 98 Data and Data Subjects authorities among others, when armed with the genetic data of an individual or community might develop prejudices against them. In such circumstances the individual should be empowered by law to not have to share the information. If dataveillance does not grant this right to the individual (to determine what happens to genetic information that can affect their life chances, life choices and life worlds) it becomes potentially threatening. This is where the flow of information really alters the boundaries of the self and the world, intruding into the person of the individual, taking the data, disseminating it and then delivering feedback detrimental to the individual. Genetic information offers singular problems in terms of its contexts, as feminist philosopher Elisabeth Boetzkes has thoughtfully spelt out (2001). The burden of childbearing and nurturing, she notes, is disproportionately high on women. The disclosure of genetic information through, say, pre-natal testing about children (‘predictive medicine’), especially to women living below the poverty line (and India would be a test case for such contexts of genetic data gathering) would have a bearing on economic decisions about child- and mother-care.16 Surveillance here with the concomitant collection of data that enables medical predictions not only intrudes on the private space of the individual and a relationship (mother-child) but readily transforms certain kinds of individuals and relationships—contextualized in terms of say lower class, unemployed, immigrant—into vulnerable data subjects to whom welfare or medical facilities might be denied for economic, social or administrative reasons. If monitoring for genetic susceptibility to disease or disability within medical conditions such as those that prevail in India were to release data about the susceptibility then we have to plan for prohibitions and restrictions
16 Monogenic diseases occur because of particular mutations in the genome. These are of two types. Recessive diseases (cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anaemia) occur when an individual inherits two copies of a defective gene, one from each parent. No disease occurs if only one copy is inherited but the individual then becomes a carrier of the disease. Dominant disorders are inherited even when only one copy of a defective gene is inherited. However, it is by no means certain that a defective gene will manifest in a disease. Recent research shows that while 50 per cent of cases of late-onset Alzheimer’s disease have ApoE 4 allele, it is believed that the variant is only responsible for around 15 per cent of susceptibility to the disease. Numerous other factors such as environment, chemical/drug intake and diet play significant roles in the occurrence of any genetically transmitted disease. 99 Citizenship and Identity being placed on the woman. Boetzkes notes that in such circumstances a woman’s reproductive autonomy (and therefore, one might add, privacy) might be threatened (305) but the contexts of such a data-gathering and disclosure cannot be denied either. Boetzkes then turns to another kind of domestic pressure (on women) and the role of genetic data (306). If, during the course of pre-natal tests (sex- determination is banned in India as a result of a continuous high rate of female foeticide), the genetic susceptibility to disease is one linked to the X (female) chromosome and she has daughters then it is more than likely that the woman will be accused of bearing carrier-daughters, doubling disempowering both mother and daughter/s. If she has sons with manifestations of the X-linked disease then she would be accused of passing on the disease to the son of the family. The family’s perception of their daughter-in-law/wife, if they have been made aware of the genetic data about susceptibility to X-linked disease, is, in the Indian context, unlikely to remain benevolent and caring. (This is tantamount to genetic discrimination based on interpreted data, whether the interpretation is accurate or not, and preferences for certain traits and characteristics—height, weight, complexion, etc—and genetic variations that are associated with such traits, see Taylor 2012: 185–8.) Would women have decision-making autonomy if they and their families have been given genetic data about genetic susceptibility to diseases? How do economic, cultural and social factors of households and communities affect the interpretation of such data? If genetic information from the domains of reproductive health affects the autonomy and privacy of the woman within specific contexts—family, community, economy, culture, religion—then what measures need to be in place to prevent the making of a gendered vulnerable data subject? If the tests are for linkages (that is, for markers that accompany genes) rather than only for genetic defects then these tests require sampling of DNA from the whole blood-family—including affected and non-affected—would such tests be permitted and the data forthcoming?17 Questions like these are crucial, for they demonstrate clearly the links between scientific knowledge, biomedical and health surveillance, procedures of data-dissemination, the ethics of care and the privacy-autonomy of individuals and families.
17 Testing is of various kinds and for different purposes: (i) pre-implantation diagnosis; (ii) prenatal diagnosis; (iii) new-born screening; (iv) carrier testing; (v) diagnostic analysis; (vi) confirmatory analysis; (vii) predictive testing; and (viii) susceptibility testing. 100 Data and Data Subjects
Continuing the focus on contexts in which vulnerable data subjects are constructed, especially subjects in terms of genetic data, the contexts for genetic data gathering and dissemination, therefore, the family as a cultural and social unit (although, it must be underscored, configurations of family with adoption, surrogacy and such are also to be brought into the ambit) is a crucial player in the genetic privacy debate. The vulnerability of the child as a data subject cannot be guarded against, Claudia Wiesemann has eloquently argued (2010), by appealing to individual privacy rights alone. Since the child is born into a world over which it has absolutely no influence or choice—and where the family is the social space in which the child first finds meaning and relationships—the privacy rights of the family, where decisions are made about children also need to be taken into account.18
The responsible surveilled subject The data subject has been responsibilized within the personal information economy. But before we speak of the responsible data-subject we need to clarify the qualitative difference among data-subjects. As proposed in the
18 Related issues have been raised in terms of disability information and health privacy. Thus NN Mishra et al (2012) speak of the issuance of disability certificates in India. They point out that while certain benefits accrue from the disclosure of a condition of disability, very often contexts of disclosure can be very stigmatizing. Their summary of a hypothetical instance where the cancer-patient avails the Indian Railways’ discount but has to face a peculiar situation in the course of the journey summarizes the crisis of health privacy: the price to be paid for this otherwise valuable and well-intentioned benefit is exposure of her cancer condition, something that could otherwise be kept largely private beyond her immediate family and healthcare settings. In some cases, even the train ticket itself will state the cancer diagnosis. While cancer may now be less stigmatising than mental illness or leprosy, some people still retain erroneous beliefs that cancer is contagious or that having cancer is a reflection of a person’s character. Thus revelation of one’s cancer diagnosis to a ticket checker or fellow passenger can be stigmatising and lead to social shunning as well as more official forms of discrimination. (44) Health privacy is a whole new domain of debate, but one which this chapter does not address except in terms of genetic privacy. On health/disease surveillance see, among others, Fairchild et al (2008), Youde (2010) and Beddoe (2010). 101 Citizenship and Identity
Introduction, surveillance is another form of citizenship training today. It is the data-gaze that incorporates individuals as responsible members of the civil society when they subject themselves to governance by the state and private entities. Surveillance is a personal responsibility as citizens to the state and as members of civil society. A caveat about this structure of surveillance and responsibility needs to be filed before we speak of the new subjectivity. It is important to distinguish between those who are genuinely disempowered and placed under surveillance and those who opt for these via Facebook pages and consumer loyalty cards. To be responsible data subjects in the face of the government’s insistence that subsidized cooking gas will only be available to those with AADHAR is to ‘possess’ and experience a very different form of subjectivity. On the other hand, the conscious and careful use of data by answering surveys or contributing personal information on preferences to Reliance, Marks and Spencers or Tata marks one out to be a data subject with a considerable amount of agency. ‘Informed consent’ and control over one’s personal information are different ontological conditions. The responsible data-subject fashions her/himself in conjunction with the technologies and processes of surveillance and the data-gaze. In a democratic set-up such as India’s there is no overt state surveillance. On the other hand, we see all around us ‘informal surveillance’ by private organizations and spaces, many of which I have documented here—from loyalty cards to reporting errant driving—that is now part of the very fabric of civil society. In order to be a responsible member of this civil society, every individual needs to fashion her/himself as a surveilled citizen with technologies of observation and data-gathering. The CCTV is one of those technologies of surveillance that (i) brings home the (harsh) realities of city life, with its stalking and other insecurities and thus evokes the sense of vulnerability in certain contexts such as dark streets or ATM machines in isolated buildings or at late hours of the night (ii) but also enables a sense of trust. Daniel Neyland’s work demonstrates how CCTV is considered as a potential site for forming relations of trust and a focus for constituting the repair of breached, normal and ordinary social relations or such social relations perceived to be at risk of breach. (2006: 91) More importantly, Neyland notes, ‘trustworthiness is constituted and assessed in the building of potential connectivity between individuals and CCTV’ (91).
102 Data and Data Subjects
Now, trust is one of the foundations of social order. Certain forms of surveillance become nodal points for negotiating trust within a social order, and therefore contribute to my subjectivity, under the gaze of the CCTV, so to speak. As a responsible data-subject I forge a subjectivity that enables the making of a trust-relationship with surveillance technologies and the fellow- surveilled. First, the responsible and vulnerable data subject here forges a connection between the CCTV in the building or public space so as to continue with her or his social relations with a measure of equanimity because s/he, like every user of that space, is accountable for actions in that space. Actions that are deemed to be threatening are being monitored and collated at some distant centre, perhaps by the law enforcement authorities. Neyland does not quite push the argument far enough, but what is implied in this ‘connection’ that he sees as a feature of CCTV and public trust is the pooling of data. Data sourcing, sorting and interpreting in the form of connected flows of information constitute a parasocial relationship. Trust emerges when we assume that like us, everybody else will respond to the obvious monitoring with a degree of accountability and not indulge in threatening behaviour. This parasocial relationship does not undermine the ‘normal’ one but supplements it. It adds a certain amount of trust in the vulnerable data subject’s negotiations with the environment. I am proposing that trust is the effect of the recognition of interconnected and convergent data flows enabled by the new technologies. A responsible data subject therefore posits this connection between surveillance, security, connections and data and thereby facilitates trust. Second, a different kind of responsibilizing also begins to take shape in the surveilled data subject. The surveilled data subject, participating in the data- gaze of projecting desires, anxieties or threats and inserting herself/ himself into the symbolic order of ‘safe resident’, consumer or citizen, fashions herself/ himself, as already noted but is worth reiterating, in and through a particular connection with the surveillance technologies and processes around her/him. The data-gaze is an orientation towards the world around us now, and my attitude towards ‘my’ data dovetails into my sense of responsibility towards individual and shared conditions of security, privacy and social ordering. It is possible to see the world as something that every individual interfaces with through data. As a responsible data-subject the individuaI should monitor this interface with care and caution where possible even though—and this is crucial—she/ he accepts the fact that very often data is collected each time she/he enters a
103 Citizenship and Identity supermarket. How we choose to regulate this data-gaze, this interface, is our self-fashioning as responsible data-subjects. Third, as a responsible data-subject every individual regularly updates anti-spyware, concede the use of CCTV, purchase data-protection services, etc. As a responsible data-subject aware of, say, public health surveillance or bank frauds or Nigerian 419 scams, we begin to take passwords, logging out, encryption and such everyday activities of online lives very seriously. Data shared unthinkingly, we have been made aware, leaves us vulnerable. He who steals my purse, in the current scenario, steals ID cards and some currency. But he who steals our password consigns us to perdition. More than anything else we are now aware of the significance of data to our identity, survival, social and familial relations, financial stability, leisure—in short, life itself. Building and securing trust in data transactions and guarding data in multiple domains, careful extraction and ranking of data from sources are now built into the everyday life of the data subject. Fourth, being made aware of the benefits of sharing data—discounts, special offers—we volunteer information to the organization (it takes up only 10 minutes of our time!). Implicit in the volunteering for such a consumer surveillance system is the sense of a barter: our individual data for your services. It implies a market value placed on that individual’s data and the choice to share it (or not). Data is the currency we now use for such a trade. (Of course it also assumes that taste or choice is a measurable attribute where the algorithms in the data mining company presents a certain number as an index to an individual subject’s taste in clothes or ice cream, thus carrying the rationalization process of modernity to its logical next level.) The subject’s future consumption that might be cheaper or better because of the discounts or personalized marketing that the company offers is now something she/he can choose, opt for and be responsible for, if she/he does not insist on information privacy about her/ his tastes and product choice. In other words, the choice of sharing data is a personal responsibility where we can choose to gain from sharing or give up certain advantages the market offers.19 This is one more element in our self-
19 We do not of course know the exact criteria for the calculation of patterns by data mining corporations. But as Julie Cohen has pointed out, if we are to be rewarded or punished for our choices because the organization might take decisions affecting our future life chances, then should we not be interested in knowing how the categorization of consumers has been arrived at? (Cohen 2000: 1406–7). 104 Data and Data Subjects fashioning where we begin to develop a new sense of value for our data, and see its convertibility into something valuable. This is the ‘self-fashioning’ of a responsible data-subject where a subject’s very orientation towards the world and presentation of the self to this world is woven around the question of the individual’s data-in-the-world. Individuals fashion secure data-lines and monitor data-sharing, thus demonstrating that data is the boundary condition of their existence. We are responsible data- subjects now where our participation in the life of the community is founded on our willingness to share and receive data.
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4 Spaces of Surveillance
uring the run-up to the UN Conference on biodiversity in Hyderabad city in October 2012, I was fascinated by the quantum of security being Dput in place enroute to my place of work. The security was meant to ensure the smooth flow of traffic—without vehicles lingering by the roadside for people to take/make phone calls—since the delegates for the Conference were traversing the same sector of roads. Roadside vendors were removed, massive (ill-designed) flower pots hurriedly placed on the median and cops dotted the route. Activists, politicians, scientists and others who were the guests of the Indian government were to be seamlessly transferred from one place to another through public space without experiencing the necessary chaos of that space which, ironically, would have shown them the diversity on Indian roads as well. The security arrangements once again made visible the increased militarization of public spaces, a militarization that ensured the smooth, unhindered movement between home/hotel and high-profile conference venues for select people. What emerged clearly in the heightened arrangements was the privileging of mobility of some people across public roads which, theoretically, are democratic spaces for all road-users. Although mobility has always been differentiated (Sheller and Urry 2006: 2)—the clearing of public roads for ministerial travel is a common experience of the tax-paying Indian road user (and a ban on such privileged movement was a key demand of the Aam Aadmi Party in the 2013–14 elections in New Delhi)—globalization has brought
106 Spaces of Surveillance about an intensification and automation of this differentiation in the use of space under the gaze of guards and cameras. Although this chapter, like this book itself, does acknowledge the role surveillance plays in crime reduction, it is tilted in favour of the interpretation of surveillance as a negative act, producing vulnerable subjects and cartographies, landscapes of fear, enforcing conformism and homogeneity and resulting in controlled spaces, everyday life and subjectivity, in addition to, of course, resulting in participatory surveillance (on which more in the next chapter). The shift within surveillance towards witnessing, where I abandon the largely pejorative connotations of the term, will follow in Chapter 6. While community parks in Hyderabad city, supposedly under the management of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, fall into disuse, landscaped gardens, topiary and manicured hedges, walkways and lush green lawns may be found within barricaded, patrolled and surveilled gated communities. Indeed the only safe-to-use green zones are not in the public space any longer. The advert for Safeway Symphony gated community speaks of ‘acres of green belt’ (The Hindu 1 June 2013, ‘Habitat’, 1). Rainbow Vistas not only advertises its Green Building Certification but also its ‘7-acre Central Park’ and ‘2 natural lakes’ (The Hindu, Hyderabad edition, 1 June 2013, 1). The landscaping and monitored use of the open spaces in such complexes extends surveillance into newer domains: the aesthetic management of land. During the numerous agitations for the separate Telangana state, 2010–12, the MNCs and their representatives appealed to the government of Andhra Pradesh to ensure heightened security for their buildings, and to ensure that the movement of their employees from various parts of the city towards Cyberabad would not be affected by bandhs (civic shutdown) and ‘road rokos’ (road blockades). Media hype around the impact of the agitations focused, very often, on the IT hub. A significant sidelight was the discovery of a massive surveillance project that created a city-within-a-city space. The Society for Cyberabad’s Security Council (88 of the 130 companies in the Cyberabad region are members of the Council) unveiled an ambitious plan to implement its own ‘IT Corridor Surveillance Project’. This involved deployment of devices for ‘a real-time information alerts [sic] based on multiple applications such as motion tracking, object classification, people/vehicle counting, virtual fencing, missing/foreign objects, auto PTZ tracking etc’. The stated aim was: ‘covering all sensitive & critical areas for public safety & security, acts as deterrence, rapid
107 Citizenship and Identity action in case of any incidents etc’. This was not all. The state actively endorses and facilitates the intensification of surveillance of this ‘crucial’ infrastructural space. The Society’s write-up states that the Council has:
-> Provided 3 patrolling vehicles to Police Department where Special Force Commandos with Arms to guard the sensitive areas in Cyberabad IT corridor on a 24x7 basis. Their attendance & the duties are monitored on a daily basis. -> Engaged Traffic Marshals for 8 months in addition to Marshals provided by Infosys & ADP to assist the Cyberabad Traffic Police to streamline the traffic congestions. (http://cyberabadsecuritycouncil.org/eventspage.html. Accessed on 3 July 2013)
One news report from October 2011 spells out the intensification of surveillance in this ‘IT corridor’:
Surveillance cameras, check posts, exclusive patrolling vans, Quick Response Teams (QRT), bomb squads and police cooperation form a part of an elaborate security mechanism, by the Cyberabad Security Council (CSC), to shield the IT workforce in the region… The entire region also has a ‘unified fibre network’, currently with 17 CCTV cameras installed in critical locations… “We plan to install over 200 cameras, one for every 500 m[etres], to create a surveillance system that will protect all IT installations, citizens and help in quick detection of crime”… (‘IT workforce in Cyberabad unscathed by Telangana stir’ 2011)1
The developments being documented here are important for our purposes. The city’s reimaging of itself—Bangalore, Hyderabad are particular examples here—as techno-hubs for global industries often has two discourses.
1 Despite these so-called ‘security measures’ kidnaps and molestations do occur, within the camera-secured zone as well. A ‘techie’ was kidnapped and gangraped in a car in Hyderabad city in October 2013. She got into the car at InOrbit Mall at 7.30 PM – at perhaps one of the busiest times and locations in the city (http://www.deccanchronicle. com/131023/news-crime/article/hyderabad-techie-was-gang-raped-cabbies-arrested. Last accessed 26 June 2014). The city has seen other such incidents (http://www. thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/techie-kidnap-mystery-cracked/ article4436267.ece). Last accessed: 26 June 2014. 108 Spaces of Surveillance
One, that it is globally connected (with modern airports, hotels with WiFi etc), networked, FDI-friendly SEZs, with governments offering prime land and investment opportunities.2 Two, considerable attention is also paid to crime rate, quality of life and such social anxieties. The first, one could speculate, is linked to the second, and surveillance and surveilled spaces are the consequence of this reimaging. The state by allowing MNCs and corporations to operate their own security systems or controlling road (i.e., public) space and even going so far as to intensify surveillance and law enforcement mechanisms in these areas (as seen in the above extracts from the Society for Cyberabad’s Security Council is a case in point) links the securitization of public space to the reimaging of the city as a global city.3 Hence during the agitations, said a commentator, the measures ‘ensured that the Telangana supporters who staged an agitation at Cyber Towers on Wednesday, did not proceed any further into the corridor’. (‘IT workforce in Cyberabad unscathed by Telangana stir’ 2011). The greater the connectivity to the global flows of information and capital the greater the need for surveillance and control of the local space, it would seem. Managing and administering these local spaces, in other words, is what fits the city into the global marketplace. Increased securitization and surveillance is a consequence of this reimaging. In these examples what strikes the eye is the organization of space. This organization of space under the CCTV and within controlled barriers is the subject of the present chapter. In the Introduction I proposed that in the neoliberal age we define ourselves as a public by defending the right to be a public in safety in the face of (real or imagined) threats. Thus, to be a responsible citizen in this public is, first, to accept and be responsible for the defence of this public by actively participating in surveillance, as observer and observed, surveiller and surveilled. I also anticipated a key theme of this chapter when I argued that the nature of this public, and of public spaces, is called into question due to the responsible citizen’s demand for and participation in surveillance because surveillance segments, isolates, distances and selects modalities of publicness. Second, a citizen’s identity and subjectivity emerge in her/his ability to integrate with the surveilled environment, whether it is the smooth passage through automated tollbooths or the use of smart cards to access neighbourhood services.
2 See Heitzman on Bangalore (2004). 3 Also see ‘No Impact of Telangana Agitation on Hyderabad’s IT Industry’ (2011). 109 Citizenship and Identity
Surveillance, this chapter argues, is the organization of space and the activities of/in that space. Within such a surveilled space emerges subjectivity and identity for those able to negotiate this space. Surveillance devices and processes are constituents of the ‘vulnerability cartography’ that is now emerging in visual and other representations of town planning, residential areas and neighbourhoods. By vulnerability cartography I mean the mapping of spaces in terms of flows of threats, strangers, troublemakers, vagrants and the deterrent mechanisms needed and deployed to restrict or prevent these flows. Vulnerability cartography is the mapping of neighbourhhods or spaces with imagined boundaries that then mutate into real barriers and the material- infrastructural-processual reorganization of that space. The vulnerability cartography of an area is determined, usually, by the local residents/ landowners association, just as the Cyberabad Security Council determined the vulnerability map of the network city within the city (cited above). Writing about security cultures and spaces, Torin Monahan (2010) , one of the world’s leading commentators on surveillance, writes:
Security cultures … emerge from the selective blurring or fixing of spaces and identities in political discourses and media representations. One underlying logic is that borders should be porous for capital and preferred travelers, but sealed for people who are perceived as threatening or in need. (8)
This means, simply, ‘securing’ a public space might render it ‘safe’ for some people who are seen as acceptable or legitimate users of that space. However, the corollary is that this same space excludes others as ‘undesirable’. This latter group will be observed even more closely and almost certainly harassed and made to ‘feel’ unwanted in that space. In other words, CCTV or patrolling security guards determine the subjective experience of that space as confident, legitimate consumer-user or unwanted, loitering onlooker.4 A secure space is ‘produced’ through (i) a vulnerability cartography and (ii) interdictory spaces. The second, to which I shall turn in a while, ensures that certain types of
4 Loitering is gendered, as the very figure of the flaneur has stereotyped. Shilpa Phadke and others working with the gendered spaces of the city argue that the woman loitering without purpose is unacceptable. See Phadke et al’s Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets). It is with the rise of mall culture that loitering became possible, one could argue, for bourgeois women, also constructed as consumer citizens. 110 Spaces of Surveillance people feel out-of-place so that selected others, deemed more ‘legitimate’, might experience freer mobility in that same space. Hille Koskela puts it this way: ‘video-surveillance changes the ways in which power is exercised, modifies emotional experiences in urban space and affects the ways in which “reality” is conceptualized and understood’ (2000: 243). In other words, surveillance structures and our awareness of them alters the very nature of that space for us. Surveillance produces a certain kind of space. Critical work on urbanisms has drawn attention to the increasing segmentation of communities with their greater emphasis on privatized security measures, community responsibility over its spaces and delinking of ‘their’ specific zones from the rest of the city. Mike Davis’ work on what he calls ‘fortress LA’ inventories ‘bumproof benches’, sprinkler systems that come on randomly, and other mechanisms that prevent lingering and ‘hanging out’ by people who are deemed to be inessential to the mall-space (2006 [1990]: 233). Steven Flusty notes how ‘prickly spaces’ in cities discourage loitering and the homeless (2004: 72- 92). Aravind Rajagopal speaks of the tensions of public spaces in Bombay/ Mumbai arising from the presence of hawkers that disturbs the ‘new regimes of consumption’ embodied in malls (2001). If these are modes of deterrence for people from the ‘outside’, gated communities and new residential zones are also spaces of heightened privatized governance and control.5 Evan McKenzie speaks of ‘privatopias’ where ‘privatised services and infrastructure are thus placed outside the realm of larges cale democratic control and civil liberties’ (2006: 10). Gated communities across India now announce ‘24-hour security’ for its residents, with several points of identity verification. Christiane Brosius’ study of gated communities in her book on the Indian middle class notes how spatial distancing, away from the chaos and crowds of the city, is projected as one of the most desirable qualities of gated community lives (2010: 94).6 This means, of course, that the residents are also monitored. Malini Ranganathan writing about Bangalore city’s Resident Welfare Associations
5 In an early, and still relevant, definition, gated communities were described by Blakely and Snyder as residential areas with restricted access in which public space is privatized (1997). 6 Numerous local studies of gated communities exist today. See, in particular, influential work by Setha Low (2003, 2006), Teresa Caldiera (1996), and others. For a representative collection see Georg Glasze et al (2006) and Bagaeen and Uduku (2010). 111 Citizenship and Identity notes how neoliberal development policies—and therefore governance policies as well—are constituted and occasionally contested through neighbourhood- level policies, thus delegating the work to communities (2011). Klaus Frantz discerns a ‘landscaping of fear’ in gated communities through the installation of deterrence and security devices (2006: 62). Zygmunt Bauman writing about contemporary configurations of community suggests that safety is now individualized where local communities need to offer and find safety, resulting in gated communities and ghettoes that work on the binary of familiar/alien (2001: 112–13). In a furious critique about the privatization of the ‘right to the city’, Don Mitchell (2003) writes of the anti-homeless campaigns in which there is a recurrent demonization of the vagrant population:
The demonization of homelessness that makes their ongoing murder, death by exposure or lack of medical care appear to be the result of their homelessness rather than the result of faulty housing, mental health, drug and employment policies. (197)
One recalls, when reading Mitchell’s comment, how every January New Delhi and other northern Indian cities pile up the homeless dead in the bitter winter: death by exposure. Dedicated roads, high-speed connectivity, specialized services (from ‘under hire’, commissioned transport to home- delivered groceries) increasingly separate, physically and socially, classes of people in the same city in demarcated spaces such as SEZs and gated communities. Cross-subsidies—people who patronize one brand get discounts at another store or brand—are increasingly available only to those who have virtual identities and use virtual cash. The poor who use old-fashioned currency are therefore not entitled to discounts, even if these are the people who need it the most. The Sub-Inspector from the local police station makes occasional visits to residential colonies’ Welfare Associations to speak of the necessity of monitoring strangers, servants and tenants in a version of the American (and New Delhi’s) Neighbourhood Watch. Automated gates and privileged access for certain classes of people at airports (web check-ins, fast-track check-ins) ensure that these do not encounter long queues. Border controls, from passports to frisking, are subtly (or not so subtly) intensified for certain categories of people who are made nervous through the questions, questioning looks and reiterated inquiries. Loitering is discouraged in malls, and public spaces such as parks are increasingly under surveillance cameras.
112 Spaces of Surveillance
All these are examples of how our experience of, behaviour in and social interactions within that space are not only subject to the ever- and all-seeing eye but mediated by our consciousness of being monitored. Surveillance is one more mechanism of the ‘splintering urbanism’ we see all around us today. It is a process through which interdictory spaces (I take the concept from Steven Flusty, 2004) are constructed. Interdictory spaces would be spaces where mobilities of people are controlled—‘interdiction’ is prohibition by ecclesiastical or legal sanction, so Flusty’s notion of interdictory space resonates with the legal, state or corporate—provisions that determine use of space—so that their arrival at particular destinations are deferred or even sabotaged (this would be the explicitly military meaning of ‘interdiction’). An example of such an interdictory space would be zones like malls or leisure arcades where people who do not appear to be consumer citizens—more on this later in the chapter—are actively discouraged from entering or are made to feel nervous and ‘out of place’ by security mechanisms under the guise of surveillance. But I also see interdictory spaces as spaces produced by surveillance in which an individual’s arrival at the destination of a particular subjectivity or identity is mediated through multiple processes of monitoring and identification. In order to demonstrate her or his identity as a consumer—which really is the only legitimate identity in a mall—and to validate her or his sense of the self as a consumer citizen, she/he needs to traverse the space of the mall with a particular confidence and attitude: the easy-going walk of a person who is used to the (surveilled) space of the mall. Anything less than this confident, ‘been-there, done-that’ poise attracts attention, and makes the subject feel, experientially, out-of-place. I am of course making a shift here to a subjective condition of the experience of space, but CCTVs, security guards, shop assistants and the organized space of the mall are all factors in the way one feels and interacts in that space. What I am proposing, therefore, is a two-fold notion of surveilled interdictory spaces. One, interdictory spaces are spaces of deterrence. Two, these spaces with barriers, obstructions and CCTVs are (to be) experienced and negotiated in particular, legitimate ways in order to establish an identity and for the individual to acquire a subjectivity in that space. Interdictory spaces are modes of securing spaces for some, select groups or types of people—in other words, these spaces are modes of social sorting. Surveillance functions to make a space interdictory so that unless one has learnt to deal with the interdictions of escalators, elevators, barriers and
113 Citizenship and Identity obstructions and seating arrangements one cannot experience it fully, and might feel unwanted or even harassed. Interdictory spaces are sites of emergent subjectivity in the new urbanisms. One’s subjectivity as a surveilled citizen, is contingent upon a practised or naïve, seamless or bumbling, navigation of a host of devices, paths and processes in that space.
Splintering urbanisms and the spaces of surveillance Interdictory spaces are the effect of the ‘vulnerability cartography’. Warning announcements at airports, signage warning us ‘this … is under surveillance’, the announcement of barriers and checking (‘toll booth ahead’, ‘check post ahead’, ‘you are entering …’) or even the local police station’s pasting of photographs of ‘wanted’ criminals at public spaces function as signifiers of spatial vulnerability. The signage transforms that space into one where the subject’s safety is under threat. The signage becomes emblematic of vulnerable spaces and, in consequence, spaces of intensified surveillance. Spatial segregation and organization is achieved in terms of surveillance: those rendered safe and visible by cameras and those that are not. Surveillance is a constitutive element of vulnerability cartography and infrastructural segmentation of splintering urbanisms.
Infrastructural segmentation and privatized governance Every morning in Hyderabad city one can see specialized transport services for Thomson Reuters, Franklin Templeton, WIPRO, Infosys, Amazon and other companies with global connections whizz past crowds of people waiting for state-run public transport buses. These are well-maintained, air-conditioned and one can actually get seats to sit through the journey, all in sharp contrast to the public transport system. The same public road seems now all the more segmented—although the companies have not yet asked for dedicated lanes on the roads—between users. (It was not, ever, unified or homogeneous, but what we now see is a heightening of the segmentation.) These vehicles transport workers to edifices and buildings that, as James Heitzman (2004) has shown in the case of Bangalore’s IT hub, sit awkwardly surrounded by slums, middle class colonies and tea-shanties. New consumption zones, service segments, development projects that are created to cater to a global system of trade, commerce and employment in the form of contemporary India’s SEZs, cybercities, techno-parks and financial
114 Spaces of Surveillance districts constitute what Graham and Marvin (2001) identify as ‘splintering urbanism’. The ‘unbundling’, as they term it, of infrastructure so that the larger public is now increasingly marginalized in favour of specialized packages for the IT or business sector, marks the ‘fragmentation of the social and material fabric of cities’ (ibid). This unbundling is accompanied, I propose, by intensified surveillance of the specialized infrastructure. Surveillance is what makes this specialized infrastructure specialized, privileged and sought-after. The special zones within the city’s public areas, from malls to workplaces, demonstrate a privatisation of governance as well. Public space, as Graham and Marvin put it, is increasingly under corporate control (ibid). The campuses for these offices in the city I work in, Hyderabad, begin right from the road, and the borders of these campuses are interdictory spaces. Gates and security booths are located right at the perimeter, practically abutting on to the road. Barriers and cameras immediately suggest spaces that are marked off and separated from the public space of the road. Access to the inner spaces is obviously a multi-stage process where one has to prove identity, get photographed and documented first. Only the serious visitor, in other words, is allowed access. One does not see vagrants, beggars or loiterers anywhere in the vicinity, which seems at least to me, a scene so unlike any Indian city. The space’s governance has very little to do with public law enforcement agencies. Every corporate body commands its own formidable security apparatus. This last with its accessories (cameras, scanners, metal detector frames, human guards) constitute a parallel governmental apparatus that does not, except minimally, intersect with the governance mechanisms of public spaces (which is essentially the state’s responsibility). Interdictory spaces here and the route maps or floor plans of buildings in these spaces, I propose, form the vulnerability cartography of the new urbanism. The spaces are populated by signifiers indexing security and cleanliness measures that therefore implicitly mark off these spaces as safer and cleaner from the setting. These spaces which exist in sharp contrast to the chaotic, randomly organized, often filthy environment of the Indian city set up their cordon sanitaire that separate them from the rest of the city. Controlled environments such as these are niche spaces whose signifiers call attention to a very old binary: inside/outside and its concomitant, familiar/ strange or safe/unsafe. The corporatization of Indian cities that has been the characteristic of post-1990s India results in such a vulnerability cartography that, by signposting safe zones, leisure areas and the inside/outside boundaries
115 Citizenship and Identity constantly tell the inhabitants that surveillance is what renders these areas safe for the full experience of the space. The cordon sanitaire that identifies vulnerable spaces is also inclusive of objects. Surveillance, as we now see, includes non-human actors as well. Bags and other objects at airports and public places, for instance, are subject to scrutiny like people’s movements and behaviour. Cameras trained on doors and gates automatically make these objects in space crucial for the functioning of that space, and therefore vulnerable. Peter Adey (2004) calls for attention to the ways in which objects such as luggage are placed under surveillance in airports. Hand luggage is subject to screening, as is the checked-in one. Certain kinds of objects—inflammables or sharp ones—are immediately suspect. Adey notes that the intention of the troublemaker or terrorist is transferred to the object in surveillance (509). Thus, a sharp object in your carry-on makes you the subject of further scrutiny. Adey is undoubtedly right to suggest that we include the surveillance of objects when examining cultures of surveillance. Contemporary India’s numerous terrorist attacks have energized surveillance measures, and these now include objects in addition to people. What we watch out for, as responsible, surveilled and surveilling subjects, is the ‘suspicious’ object. Warnings at airports and public places caution us against abandoned bags, suitcases, vehicles. The object here is seen as an intrusion but one that is a concealment device for a nefarious plan. After 9/11 and the anthrax scare objects like postal envelops and courier packages became suspicious objects in the USA and Europe. Publishers’ websites since 2001 ask for detailed information about sender to be pasted/written clearly on any package sent them. If, as Adey says, the intention of the terrorist has been deemed transferred to the object, then as a surveillance culture, we have now grown to see isolated objects in public spaces as threats to that space. This becomes a veritable conundrum: a vehicle is a legitimate object on the road. But at what point does it move into the category of ‘suspicious object’? After the Hyderabad blasts of 2013, which were triggered by bombs placed in boxes on bicycles, bicycles with tiffin carriers (lunch boxes) were viewed with suspicion (‘Bloodshed and Futility’ 2013). This is where the surveillance of space and its objects becomes predicated upon the culture of fear and the psychosis of the vulnerable citizen. Do we normally see the vehicle on the road as a suspicious object, or is it in the aftermath of blasts that we come to do so? This depends on how we have grown as a surveillance culture and into vulnerable subjects. Our personal vulnerability converts the public
116 Spaces of Surveillance space’s roads, shops, objects into a vulnerability cartography that we have to traverse safely. Our experience of the objects in that space is contingent upon our suspicion of these objects, and is ultimately an experience of the space itself. The objects, in other words, become interdictions (‘that bicycle has been standing outside that shop for over two hours …’) in our movement through or experience of that space, given every subjectivity is that of a vulnerable citizen. Strangely, in order to navigate the interdictory space, what we need is not pure intentions or impeccable behaviour alone (though these help), but another set of objects: identity cards, passports or a ticket. If stopped at any point, we cannot validate our claim about who our individual identities are unless we can produce a document that states we are who we claim we are. David Lyon points out that ID cards are not about identity (which is self-identity, what I think of myself) but about identification by others: they validate your claim about who you are (2009: 8-16). In other words, it is the object (passport, ID card) that testifies to an individual’s identity. This is where surveillance culture’s networked nature emerges most clearly. The passport or ID card (object 1) through the scanner (object 2) declares my identity to the computer-database (object 3) and thence to the human observer or operator of the machine. Without the perfect coordination of these objects one cannot hope to be validated. Let me illustrate. An academic friend of mine had to spend some additional hours at the JFK immigration office. His thumb had had an injury and the scanner could not confirm his identity because the print would not match the print in the database. The object’s inability to establish equivalence or correspondence ensured that surveillance was intensified for a few hours at least. It is the object that allows an individual to pass through the space, just as a sharp object in my hand baggage would prevent me from passing through. What I am proposing here is that our experience of surveilled spaces is contingent upon an equal amount of surveillance distributed across human and nonhuman objects, and very often the validation, or culpability or suspect-nature, of the former is dependent upon the latter. Surveillance clearly links objects with humans in a network, and we are therefore what we wear, carry or present. More than in any other time in human history identity is contingent upon a human-object relation, a techno-sociality of sorts. As a surveilled subject, in other words, we are alerted to the significance of nonhuman objects in our experience of space, just as we acknowledge that a space is rendered safe/unsafe, negotiable/non-negotiable based on the objects present. Objects facilitate in the safe and speedy movement through space.
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Surveilled subjectivity in secure spaces But infrastructure and vulnerable cartography is only one part of the new surveilled spaces of our lives. Also common to the neoliberal state is an increased cyborgization of individuals who coexist in assemblages with machines and whose everyday life is led in connection with multiple time zones and socio-technological processes (Graham and Marvin 2001). WJ Mitchell in Me ++ (2003) has pointed out that for the affluent everyday life and the access to infrastructure and services of the city are made possible through a cyborgization—whether this is the smart card or the GPS. The permeability of borders and barriers—interdictions—in these spaces is automated. We might, after Nigel Thrift and Shaun French (2002) think of the ‘automatic production of space’. The spaces are controlled not by human elements but by code, software that recognizes faces, hand prints, irises or voices,and either allows or bars access to that space. Mobility, in short, into or through the space is automatically regulated. In order for a person to experience this mobility through the space, she/he must become a cyborg, and slot into the automatic software program that opens doors and access points. Not relying on human barriers, this form of interdiction relies almost entirely on the coding of humans with the space. I think of this arrangement of cyborgization as embodying a form of interdiction because it finally is about power and the social sorting of people, and process-pathways in space: it allows ‘legitimate’ users and bars ‘illegitimate’ ones. The new spaces of urbanism are hybrid spaces founded on a technocratic rationality. The differential permeability of the border or passage—who is allowed, and who is not—is founded upon not human but a software’s interpretation of the individual seeking admittance. It is not who you know but whether the scanner knows your barcode that allows passage and admittance. This form of cyborged connections with city (and global) spaces is therefore constitutive of a surveillance culture. With every keystroke, log in, download, access or purchase monitored, entry and exits from buildings databased by cameras and on swipe-card records, the global–local subject working or relaxing in such an environment develops a subjectivity that is embedded in surveillance systems and which transcends the environment of the city, given that long hours are spent in an environment entirely disconnected from the chaotic streets and heterogeneous populace of the city. An individual in such environments—from gated communities through dedicated transport systems and finally to spaces
118 Spaces of Surveillance of work and leisure—works in integrated fashion with numerous systems and service providers that enable the everyday to run without a hitch. (It is interesting to note that most adverts for gated communities in my city seem to assume that their residents will be working in the IT sector, commuting to Hyderabad’s Hi-tech city. Thus Rainbow Vista’s advert refers to the ‘quick commute to office’, specifically the ‘5 kms to HITEC City’ (The Hindu, Hyderabad, 1 June 2013, 1). Jains Carlton Creek advertises that its gated community is ‘4.5 kms from HITEC City, 4 kms from ISB & Inorbit Mall, 3 kms from WIPRO junction’ (The Hindu, Hyderabad, 8 June 2013, ‘Habitat’, J1). Rajapushpa, the advert claims, is located within five minutes drive from WIPRO X Roads and has ‘proximity to Financial District, IT hubs of Gachibowli & HITEC City’ (The Hindu, Hyderabad, 15 June 2013, J1). We are seeing a segmentation of the city here.) The GPS on cell phones, traffic data transmitted to my car, CCTV at traffic junctions, swipe cards that enable the entries and exits, credit card use at the petrol pump, the trip meter inside the vehicle, wi-fi on campus, SMSes and calls, log-ins are all part of the cyborged and surveilled self that ‘fits’ the subject into the processes of the city, but also monitors every moment of the subject’s day in and across multiple spaces. The ‘automatic production of space’ within which these lives are led is the intensification of both surveillance in the form of technocratic rationality (of the CCTV or the software regulating door access) and of a particular form of subjectivity. David Murakami Wood and Stephen Graham, building on the work of Michael Lianos mark this as a shift from collective sociality (guards that once used to make up interdictions) to institutional sociality, ‘governed by inhuman rules of automated flow which are orchestrated and enacted through enormous systems of interlinked and computerized elements using code’ (2006: 182). In a sense, such a citizen- user is under perpetual surveillance because she/he is never off the grid of information network of some kind or the other. The smoothness of transit, services, functions and usage depends on how embedded one is into this grid. That is to say, to be a secure, productive, on-time subject one has to, increasingly, become cyborged and therefore surveilled. This cyborg subjectivity, I propose, is now a marker of particular sections of the population whose surveilled identity is voluntarily embraced (or as voluntary as it can be when it ‘comes with the job’) as opposed to the involuntarily surveilled (that is, surveilled by force) masses. Second, the cyborged, surveilled subjectivity of the new elite of hi-tech and business cities emerges in interdictory
119 Citizenship and Identity spaces, in the vulnerable cartography of the cordon sanitaire. Third, it is a subjectivity that emerges with a minimising of social conflict because their transport, work and leisure environments are within ‘secure’ spaces with very little to do with the seething heterogeneity of the city. The cordon sanitaire that marks the boundaries in the vulnerability cartography represents the regulated space of commodification (property relations and the circulation of capital) and bureaucratization (surveillance, regulation, hygiene and maintenance) which together contribute to the social experience of that space. The environment’s ‘architectural policing of social boundaries’ (Davis 223) ensures that these surveilled subjects mostly meet and interact with other similar surveilled subjects, all within the cordon sanitaire.
The rise of ‘defensible space’ Aparna Constructions, which has built a chain of gated communities in Hyderabad city, has this to say about its work:
Refined Lifestyle Apartments that blend together the best of all worlds. The beauty of the site itself, next to a huge perennial lake and its close proximity to the fast emerging IT Hub / Financial District at Gachibowli and a host of internationally reputed educational institutions. The convenience of its prime location, with its 100’ link road connecting BHEL and the surrounding townships. And of course the safety, security and comfort of being gated communities. Go ahead. You’ll choose well. (http://www.aparnaconstructions.com/index.php/aparna/project_ intro?pname=aparna_sarovar&id=intro. Last accessed: 30 June 2013)
It has its own ‘Underground electrical cabling - Water softening plant and sewage treatment plant’. Further, ‘ample care taken in designing the structures to withstand wind and seismic loads (Zone-II)’. (http://www.aparnaconstructions.com/index.php/aparna/project_ plan?pname=aparna_sarovar&id=floorplan. 30 June 2013). What we are looking at here is an instance of a self-contained complex whose inhabitants need not rely on public amenities or state-controlled services. Within the space of the city, we see more and more such enclaves emerging in the metropolises across India marking a gigantic shift towards gated communities, even as malls and business districts represent a shift towards the privatization of public space with dedicated roads and corporate 120 Spaces of Surveillance controlled parking zones and amenities. We are looking in India at the explosion of ‘defensible space’, an idea first propounded by American architect Oscar Newman in his 1972 book, Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space. Newman was speaking of residential areas which develop their own security arrangements as a way of combating the crime-ridden world outside. Most importantly, Newman argued that the residents of such a space must willingly accept that the space had to be defended and that all of them must contribute to the defence. One of the necessary elements in the construction of such a defensible space was surveillance, where residents needed to see and recognize events happening in their streets. The design of such spaces, he argued, was central to the defence of such spaces. The Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) programme in the USA and other countries was a result of this theory of defensible spaces.
The ‘landscaping of fear’ In ‘An Idiot’s Guide to Gated Communities’ published in The Outlook, 18 August 2008, the very first description under the heading ‘what’ reads: ‘walled residential complexes with high security’. Security is the single largest service sought after, one would think from the rhetoric in this and other representations of gated communities, among the upwardly mobile population of Indian cities. Klaus Frantz’s descriptor (2006), the ‘landscaping of fear’, adequately captures the spatialization of anxiety, and reflects almost exactly what I termed the vulnerability cartography of contemporary urbanism. The landscaping of fear is achieved through devices of surveillance and the concomitant construction of interdictory spaces. Gated communities offer privatized spaces distanced from the city’s chaos. Distancing is indeed one of the hyped up elements in the advertisement rhetoric for such communities. The write-up on PNR’s High Nest gated community calls upon buyers to ‘imagine communing with the clouds, the stars the winds’, implying a spatial distancing from terra firma and the worlds below going on to add that ‘from [sic] the top of the world is a close-knit family’. Implied here is also the securitization of the family as something achieved through a literal and metaphoric retreat/ascent away from the rest of the world (The Hindu 1 June 2013, ‘Habitat’, 1). What needs to be understood is that the distancing is also the construction of surveilled, interdictory spaces. One cannot go right up to the buildings
121 Citizenship and Identity inside any such community. The approaches to the community are carefully monitored and deterrents such as barriers, gates and security booths work at a clear differentiation of inside (safe, ordered) and outside (unsafe, chaotic). Surveillance-as-social-sorting is most explicitly visible in the gated community’s institutional spatialization of difference through the making of interdictory spaces. Differential mobilities that such communities engender—the right of way or rest for some people and the restriction of movement for others—are modes of social sorting as well. The vulnerability cartography of gated communities is usually made of three clear, visible signifiers: entry controls, hardened perimeters and internal surveillance (McKenzie 2006: 17). As Evan McKenzie points out, such architectural structures and measures have a tremendous visual impact (17), but what needs to be added to this suggestion is that these become signposts in the landscaping of fear. On the one hand these very possibly instil a sense of security, but on the other hand they very clearly reinforce the necessity of keeping a watch on the interactions with the outside world: Who comes in? Who leaves? etc. I am proposing that these symbols of security also double up as symbols of uncertainty in the landscaping of fear. Central to this social sorting as a response to the sense of insecure ‘outside’ is the emphasis on homogenization. Gated communities are homogenized in terms of architecture and even lifestyles. Surveillance plays a crucial role here in monitoring the residents as well. Informal networks that all communities possess (Sujata Patel 2013, personal communication), place all inhabitants under surveillance to ensure that the homogenous identity of that community is maintained. This need not necessarily take the form of surveillance technologies. Networks and channels of communication, common rituals of gathering and even gossip become modes of surveillance. Another aspect of surveillance within such communities is that the public space within the community is also under constant surveillance. The chaos and disorder of the public space outside the gates is not replicated.
Public life in this sprawling urban club is well controlled, however, distinguishing it from equivalent spaces outside. Surveillance cameras monitor the use of public space and the unusual has a strong chance of being detected. (Janoschka and Borsdorf 2006: 90).
That is, the ‘public’ of the community within the gates is a surveilled, homogenized space with norms of behaviour that makes it distinct from 122 Spaces of Surveillance the heterogeneous ‘disorder’ of the public space outside. Residents willingly give up their individual privacy—by agreeing to be surveilled constantly—in favour of safeguarding the privacy of the entire community. That is, within these communities one sees a wholly new order of privacy under surveillance. And because within this community the surveillance is more or less permanent—as opposed to the public space outside where surveillance is often random and selective—one lives under the shadow of the CCTV. This is what I refer to as the vulnerability cartography of the surveilled community. The landscaping of fear and the attendant sense of vulnerability and threat occasionally might also result in a lessening of civic concern, as some studies have shown (Bayne and Freeman 1995)—something I shall return to in a later section of this chapter. Surveilled existence need not necessarily result in a confident lifestyle since, to live inside enclaves and monitored social interaction means that one does not frequently encounter conflicts and social tensions that would teach individuals to deal with unregulated and unsupervised difference. The landscaping of fear embodied in the interdictory spaces is founded, I suggest, in a culture of avoidance. Social conflicts and misunderstandings that are the staple of the heterogeneous street or public space is a part and parcel of our social development. The alien or culturally different person comes to occupy the position of a threat primarily due to our ignorance about them. What surveillance culture does when it creates interdictions is to ensure that one would not have to meet a diverse set of people—these will be first ‘checked out’ and profiled before we embark on any sort of social interaction. A person who lives in a gated community, takes dedicated transport (or private vehicle) to work, shops at malls or has stuff delivered, socializes with colleagues from work or within the community, is a subject forged in a culture of avoidance where meeting people from very diverse backgrounds is a relatively rare phenomenon. Surveillance is built into this culture of avoidance because it initiates the interaction from a distance: through cameras and security guards. Interdictory spaces might then be seen as embodying the culture of avoidance because the immediacy and therefore shock of contact is avoided through layers of screening and checks.
Cultural trauma, vulnerability, social splitting With gated communities, special business districts, shopping malls and the increased privatization of space in urban centres social sorting through
123 Citizenship and Identity surveillance and the construction of interdictory spaces is now more a norm than an exception. While gated communities and enclaves of work and leisure do offer a sense of security to the citizen-subject the vulnerability cartography of barriers, grids, designated pathways and 24x7 surveillance also induces a sense of insecurity with regard to the big bad world outside. Cultures of surveillance emerge from and are intimately connected with cultural trauma.
Cultural trauma and the culture of surveillance The influential theorist of cultural trauma, Jeffrey Alexander, argues that the ‘cultural construction of collective trauma’ focuses on ‘wounds to social identity’ (2012: 2). ‘Lives lost and pains experienced are individual facts; shared trauma,’ writes Alexander, ‘depends on collective processes of cultural interpretation’ (3). Even national histories, he argues, ‘are constructed around injuries that cry out for revenge’ (13). It is the ‘symbolic power and enactment’ (4) and the ‘claims’ (14) of who did what to whom that constitutes cultural trauma. Alexander’s argument invites us to see how the media’s and other representations of crimes against old people, children, minorities or specific ethnic and caste groups might be productively read as the enactment of claims, blame and guilt involving large segments of the social order. That is, the coverage of targets/victims and their social identity (‘Muslim man attacked’, ‘school-girl raped’) rather than just their individual pain and suffering shifts (or perhaps merges) the individual with the collective, leading to the ‘awareness’ that specific groups and identities are under threat. These media portals and reports function as the ‘intermediaries’ (Ball 2002) that draw attention to (i) the sources and modes of insecurities and (ii) the necessity of surveillance of particular places, people, ethnic groups. As a result of these intermediaries, several specific communities might begin to see themselves as besieged, unsafe, unwanted or deprived. To return to Alexander once again, the truth of the ‘cultural script [of injury and loss] depends not on its empirical accuracy, but on its symbolic power and enactment’ (4). Alexander lists ‘speeches, rituals, marches, meetings, plays, movies, and storytelling of all kinds as the ‘carrier groups’ that undertake the symbolic construction of collective trauma (3–4).7
7 I have myself argued elsewhere argued that Human Rights in India are also culturally constructed around such stories, eyewitness accounts and testimonios (Nayar 2012). 124 Spaces of Surveillance
We have seen each one of these ‘carrier groups’ in action in contemporary India, whether the Shiv Sena or the MNS’s surveillance of Biharis arriving to write government exams in Maharashtra state or the iteration of Godhra and the Gujarat riots of 2002. I propose that these symbolic enactments of injury that merge (some might say, subsume) the individual with/in the collective produce the culture of surveillance. Vulnerability is built into these enactments and the aspiration for safety and security—the USA after 9/11 is an excellent example of a national history and surveillance culture built around a wound—results in surveillance and what Setha Low in her study of gated communities calls ‘social splitting’. Low sees social splitting as a strategy that is reinforced by cultural stereotypes and media distortions, allowing people to psychologically separate themselves from people who they perceive as threatening their tranquillity and neighborhood stability. The walls and gates of the community reflect this splitting physically as well as metaphorically, with “good” people (the good part of us) inside, and the “bad” remaining outside. (2003: 137) Surveillance then becomes both the cause and effect of this social splitting. In order to ensure the autonomy and spatial purity of ‘our kind’, which has been the victim (real or imagined) of attacks and threats, we participate in a community project to raise high walls and place the region and people outside (the ‘not-our-kind’) under surveillance. In the era of neoliberal social order, economics and urbanisms with rapid changes in demographics, floating populations and increased social flux, social splitting becomes a means of avoiding the stresses of diversity and complex social groups, and constructing the social and physical barriers in the face of perceived trauma. Cultural trauma that is recollected about communal riots in cities like Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and other cities serve as originary moments of the ‘siege mentality’. But these are also the originary moments of the ghetto and the sealed-community, of social splitting, of the established and reinforcement of binaries like ‘us and them’. The necessity of monitoring the demographic, economic and social developments of the Other—witness the BJP’s constant surveillance of Muslim population growth rates in India—is born out of the cultural trauma conveniently remembered, whether of the Partition or of communal violence in post-1947 India. Flux needs to be monitored and change documented because these might result in modifications of the social order, the demographic profiles and therefore the quality and nature of social interaction. In the most recent
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(January 2014) instance of this monitoring the Aam Aadmi’s controversial suggestion that African women in the New Delhi region need to be surveilled because they are at the centre of a prostitution racket brought to the surface not only the issue of neighbourhood security but also incipient racism that informs our sense of the ‘threat’.8 The insistence of neighbourhood watch on observing newcomers and tenants is not simply the fear of terrorists and drug pushers but an anxiety about the diversity that might creep into a homogenous community and demanding a readjustment of social interaction and our responses to the culturally alien other. The social splitting avoids this anxiety, even as social anxieties are themselves plotted along spatial lines. (One only has to look at the geography of riots—whether Sikh-dominated localities in New Delhi 1984, Gulbarg Society Ahmedabad 2002, the Old City in Hyderabad. Anees Salim’s award-winning Vanity Bagh (2013) focuses on such a geography of anxiety and rioting in urban India.)9
Vulnerable citizen, neighbourhood watch and citizenship The state warns us of increase in child abuse, kidnapping and the general vulnerability of children. Given these alarming statistics and accounts we might choose to withdraw into a fortress, buying at high price space in an area with surveillance cameras, security guards and high walls. The making of the vulnerable subject, I have emphasized throughout this book, is what enables, enforces and reinforces surveillance as a cultural phenomenon, at the same time training the vulnerable subject to become a citizen. Surveillance takes the vulnerable citizen and upgrades her/him into an observant citizen, conscious
8 http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/they-held-us-in-taxi-for-3-hrs- took-urine-samples-said-black-people-break-laws/. Accessed 5 February 2014. 9 I am grateful to my ever-vigilant First Reader Anna Kurian for drawing my attention to the geography of social anxiety and rioting in contemporary India. She also pointed out that much contemporary dystopian fiction, most notably by African American speculative writer Octavia Butler—the Parables series and Clay’s Ark—is about ghettos, gated communities and the resultant spatial organization of social anxieties, whether of race or class. In these texts, the anxiety within the gates results in the arming of the community in order to keep the anarchy presumed to exist outside, outside. However, what Butler shows is the excessive repression and violence inside the ghettos as well. For a study of the Muslim ghettos and spatial anxiety in India see Seabrook and Siddiqui (2011). 126 Spaces of Surveillance of neighbourhood, aware of property rights, locality borders, stranger-presence and the necessity of maintaining social homogeneity and order. An individual becomes, within the culture of surveillance, the vulnerable citizen+. By drawing attention to the several versions of insecurity around the self, the family, friends and property, the state generates a moral panic about ‘unprotected’ spaces. The state’s emphasis on neighbourhood watch and community policing also makes it clear to me that ‘public space’ is not safe any longer since the state has left the responsibility of securing it for me to the community. Logically this means, unless we participate in the community’s policing of its boundaries we cannot feel safe in a public space. Gated communities, as noted above, thrive on the security-imperative, and are driven, I propose, by the aspiration for safety in an insecure world, an insecurity that is constantly brought home to me by the moral panics of newspaper coverage of increasing crime rates. Neighbourhood watch which necessitates the participation of all members of the community as, at once, vulnerable citizens and responsible citizens, polarizes, notes Eve Darian-Smith, social conflicts even further: pitting ‘property owners against the propertyless; employed against unemployed; family, home, and community against the individual outsider; law abider against lawbreaker; morally strong against the sinfully weak’ (1993: 83). Following Darian-Smith, I propose that ‘neighbourhood’ or ‘community’ might now be defined not necessarily in terms of cultural sharing, intimate relationships or friendships but in terms of shared surveillance, guardians and vulnerable citizens in the same space. Symbolic codes govern the social space and its relationships where signs of being propertied or ‘belonging’ such as participation in cultural practices, festivals, local activities and especially neighbourhood watch become modes of demarcating the spaces of the community. The New Delhi police’s Neighbourhood Watch Scheme (NWS) declares its aims: (a) to reduce property crime; (b) to foster police-community relations; (c) to increase community spirit; (d) to reduce juvenile crime by getting the youths also involved in the Scheme. (http://www.delhipolice.nic.in/home/watch.htm. 5 July 2013) The community spirit, it seems to me, manifests, in the police’s write-up, as a surveillance spirit shared by all people who reside in the neighbourhood.
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It is of course possible, in the same breath (an academic’s breath, really), to wonder if there is a dubious conjunction among (i) the state’s emphasis on community policing, (ii) the media coverage of increased crime in public space and (iii) developers offering high security residential areas. Are the discourses from these parties contributing to the privatization of public space and safety? Are moral panics engineered by (i) and (ii) working in tandem with (iii) to drive me towards purchasing a space in a gated community? Why is it that we do not have statistics about lowering of crime rates in fortress areas in comparison with rising crime rates in the rest of the city? What is the crime rate within gated communities? The rise in sales of surveillance equipment and home-protection devices seems to suggest that at least some industries benefit from the moral panics. Moral panics about increased crime has geographical consequences, both in terms of the rise and spread of gated communities and increased community surveillance in the face of the state’s withdrawal from effective law enforcement in public spaces. The moral panics that add to the vulnerability of the citizen produces the observant citizen—what I have termed the vulnerable citizen+— who participates in neighbourhood watch and community policing. To return once more to New Delhi police’s plans for community policing, the rhetoric underscores the need to produce observant citizens by demonstrating the necessity for personal commitment to the project. For this, says the police write-up, ‘as personal invitations are generally hard to decline, local police officers and SPOs will individually contact the residents in order to motivate them to attend the meeting’ (http://www.delhipolice.nic.in/home/watch.htm. 5 July 2013). Such exercises have been launched in Kerala (the Janamaithri Suraksha programme), Odisha and other states (see www.keralapolicehistory. com/jmait.html, Last accessed: 26 June 2014; Mohapatra 2013, respectively) and the Central government, according to one report, was considering adopting the Kerala model (Mohan 2013). A good neighbour is an observant neighbour, a vulnerable citizen+, who surveills the neighbourhood, especially in the absence of adequate law enforcement machinery.
Valorizing the consumer citizen in space One of the most surveilled spaces we see today is the mall and leisure/ entertainment zones of the city. The Indian bazaar with its chaos, hawkers,
128 Spaces of Surveillance animals and beggars jostling customers is very different from the sanitized super-organized mall. The politics of demolitions in the bazaar, as Aravind Rajagopal (2001) has noted, is the reordering of such spaces for greater privatization and, by extension, increased surveillance. The mall, as numerous critics have noted (Zukin 1998), is the street taken in. But there is more to the sanitized space of the mall. It constructs the subject within it in particular ways. CCTVs are supposed to instil a sense of security among the people who walk into the mall. This ‘feel-good’ factor is integral to the shopping/ leisure experience itself (Fyfe and Banister 1998: 255). The surveillance here recognizes certain kinds of users and walkers as consumer citizens. Therefore, those perceived as not belonging to the category of consumer citizen (vagrants, beggars or even those who look poorly dressed) are excluded through the interdictions—usually in the form of security guards—that prevent them from reaching the spaces of leisure. What defines the vulnerable citizen of the surveilled mall is the insecurity that might possibly attend to the consumer’s shopping (i.e., money-spending) experience in the presence of vagrants, the homeless or beggars. Homogenizing consumers qua consumers ensures a certain ordering of the space of the mall. It is this group’s vulnerability that needs to be addressed resulting, therefore, in the interdictory spaces for the rest. Surveillance produces spaces that are at once secure for some and interdictory for others. As Nicholas Fyfe and Jon Bannister (1998) note, commercial imperatives drive what counts as acceptable behaviour in surveilled environs such as the mall. That is, surveillance of the non-spender is markedly different in motives but not in effects from surveillance to safeguard citizen safety, public property or life in general. This is not surveillance that is generic and concerned with the safety of the public space as we know it. Rather it is the making of interdictory spaces in order to guard the commercial viability of privatized public spaces and make the place safer for the class of people who will spend money. Surveillance here has achieved a tremendous measure of social sorting by identifying and securing the attention but also the ‘I-am-safe-here’ sense of the consumer subject. The subject within this structure of surveillance is the consumer subject and no other. Surveillance and interdictory spaces produce, therefore, homogenized subjects and homogenized spaces. In order to understand this shift in the nature of spaces due to surveillance one needs to turn to the ‘standard’ Indian street. The disorder of the Indian street with its multi-use systems, co-existence of several geographies (including
129 Citizenship and Identity the haptic) ensures, Tim Edensor points out, that an uninterrupted and straight movement is practically impossible. Edensor also makes a significant point about surveillance:
The bazaar and street are subject to regulation but this is contingent, contextual and local. Rather than security guards, video surveillance and policing … local power holders exercise policies of exclusion and control. Overall, however, surveillance is rather low-level. (1998: 206)
While there is considerable variety in terms of social interactions, caste and other factors function as informal systems of surveillance and determinants of interaction.10
Surveillance, governance and cultural autonomy What we have seen so far might very well be treated as a critique of gated communities, malls and their excessive surveillance over their spaces. However, this is only one side of the picture. Keeping in mind the fact that surveillance does instil a ‘feel-good factor’ among even the critics of surveillance we might now turn to other cultural functions of the surveillance of spaces. Within spaces such as neighbourhoods or gated communities, as noted above, individuals give up their privacy and autonomy for preservation of the privacy and autonomy of the community within the enclave. Surveillance here is integral to the system of self-governance and internal autonomy that elite spaces now demonstrate. Resident associations are the localized equivalent of formal systems of state control and governance. Thus communities that draw up rules and norms of behaviour and impose systems for mobility, services and such serve as decentralized and localized versions of the state. As Eve Darian-Smith (1993) points out, programmes like neighbourhood watch, simply follow and replicate values at local levels associated with the state: governance, legality, property rights (84). Community policing, for instance, is seen as a mode of discipline among students and youth. As one report puts it, community policing, ‘trains high school students by inculcating in them respect for the law, discipline, civic
10 Thus, while recognizing the intensification of surveillance one must also acknowledge that informal systems of surveillance—determined by caste, gender, ethnicity and class—have always influenced spaces and mobilities. 130 Spaces of Surveillance sense, empathy for vulnerable sections of society and resistance to social evils’ (Mohan 2013). In other words, training youth to surveill their neighbourhoods becomes a form of citizenship training, making responsible and good citizens with the same values of law and order, respect for property and such. What families and education sought to do surveillance culture seeks to perform now: citizenship training. In the neoliberal age with the withdrawing of the state from everyday functions—law and order, garbage clearance, road maintenance—the community assumes even more responsibility for itself. As we have seen in the case of an entire region of Hyderabad city, Cyberabad, the state colludes with the MNC in the privatization of space under the guise of extending greater security cover to significant companies and activities. The collusion of state and corporate that creates both the vulnerability cartography and heightened surveillance leading to private governance is best exemplified in the words of Srinivasa Prasad, Secretary of Cyberabad Security Council:
“We plan on introducing a Government order (GO) to make it mandatory for all companies within the Cyberabad jurisdiction to be a part of the council and access the security mechanisms,” informed Prasad. (‘IT workforce in Cyberabad unscathed by Telangana stir’ )
A consortium of companies, if Prasad is to be believed, can ‘introduce’ a Government order enforcing security and surveillance measure. Surveillance is part of the new world order, of gated communities, Financial Districts, SEZs and Cyberabads, where the community falls back on itself. Neighbourhood watch is an excellent example of semi-autonomous communities producing surveilling subjects who, having conceded their responsibility to be surveilled, also accept the responsibility for surveilling. In other words, the autonomy and privacy of the community becomes the responsibility of the resident and this drives surveillance culture of the participatory kind (I return to this in the last chapter). Autonomy, then, is the freedom of the community to initiate surveillance methods in order to safeguard its autonomy. Surveillance, I argue, is a cultural practice now that determines, in lieu of any clear directions or intervention by the state, forms of spatial belonging, the use of spaces, mobilities and behaviour of its residents in far more formal fashion than ever before (communities have always regulated their membership) with rules and contracts. With the state’s
131 Citizenship and Identity withdrawal from the public spaces of the city—the disappearing parks and water bodies in Hyderabad city are frequently the subject of debate by the voluntary organizations, who point to state officials’ greed and corruption in selling off these open spaces to developers—the only ‘open’ spaces are under the control of gated communities. This is perhaps the reason why most developers of such communities, from DLF to Aparna, hype their open spaces and park areas. This too is an instance of the privatization of open spaces where, since the state does not take responsibility for the preservation of open spaces, those who can pay for it retreat into surveilled spaces of community parks. Free to decide the design and usage of the open spaces within its walls the community functions as the state once did. The result is the only green spaces left are behind walls! There is one more element to this participatory surveillance of space. Residents now can actually contribute to the community’s democratic processes in far more incisive and impact-producing ways than before where their opinion on roads, parks or street usage were hardly solicited by the state. The paying resident can now determine to some extent the practices of the community in what might be thought of as a descaling of the democratic project. Civic concerns, which critics claim (Bayne and Freeman 1995) is the price one pays for creating gated communities, do not entirely disappear. Indeed, it might be argued, civic concerns narrow in scope to the boundaries of the gated community. Surveillance functions in ways to enforce civic concerns—whether it is about the safety of children playing in the grounds of the community or the frequency of garbage collection. The paying resident of such a community who surrenders certain rights of privacy in order to gain the right to observe and intervene is the surveilled subject. The self-fashioning of the resident as a responsible resident demands that she/he subscribe to the community’s faith in surveillance, despite the resultant loss of her/his privacy and the construction of the vulnerability cartography of her/his environs because surveillance is central to the autonomy and integrity of the community and the cultural rights to the lifestyle of the individual. A community’s vulnerability cartography is also a map of its predetermined, administered and ordered cultural homogeneity—which it tries to defend in the face of increasing cultural diversity and therefore frightening strangeness. What the gated community seeks is homogeneity, individuals prefer to live in an area with shared lifestyles, and this simply extends the earlier notions of ‘middle class locality’ or ‘posh areas’ of the 1970s and 1980s. Basak Tanulku,
132 Spaces of Surveillance following Glasze and Alkhayyal (2002), describes these as ‘cultural enclaves’ (2012: 518). In a world in incredible flux (of jobs, migrant populations, lifestyles), the gated community delivers a comforting predictability, restrains cultural diversity (which might not be a comforting thing for some people) in favour of cultural homogeneity. In such cases surveillance therefore is less a coercive than a consensual cultural practice of people who share lifestyles and tastes and therefore live as a community. What is being monitored is the commonality of cultural tastes, whether for golf or swimming, within the enclave. We might therefore see surveillance here not only in terms of physical safety and property-financial security of the vulnerable subject but also in terms of a community’s cultural autonomy and an individual’s cultural relationships. Surveillance in such contexts is predicated upon the believed-in legitimacy of a community’s cultural autonomy from the rest of the world outside. I am not, let me hasten to add, merely aestheticizing surveillance in the guise of cultural autonomy. What I am proposing is that surveillance becomes a way of defending cultural beliefs and practices. If we assume that cultural rights are as integral to the growth and development of an individual then the freedom to practice these rights is as significant as property rights or safety rights. The gated community’s surveillance is therefore focused on not simply property and physical safety but also on lifestyles and practices. One pays for the right to engage in one’s cultural and lifestyle preferences within secure environs. Lifestyle preferences and cultural autonomy often involves ‘aesthetic management’ (Low’s term, 2003: 165) and surveillance of the landscape. Every single advert for gated communities that I have come across advertises its safe and green area, all within high walls and under CCTV surveillance. This aesthetic management of the landscape contrasts the public-yet-private land—limited to residents’ use, but also to be used within the parameters laid down by the association, thus dovetailing aesthetic management into surveillance and civic ordering—with the mismanaged and usually filthy but truly public spaces of parks elsewhere in the city. The ‘regimenting of the environment’ (Low 2003) is also the regimenting of the population, in the guise of safety and aesthetics. That is, the existence of a green zone within these communities is coterminous with the loss of truly public green areas in the city. Aesthetic management of the landscape is a part of the functional and cultural autonomy of the gated community and simply extends into yet another domain technologies of surveillance, albeit for an entirely different purpose: land use, greening and ecological ‘connectivity’ of man and nature.
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When we speak of surveillance as an assertion of autonomy by a community we also, implicitly, see the community’s ‘face’—the residents’ association, neighbourhood watch, etc.—as standing in for the state as its organizational or institutional equivalent at the local level. In the neoliberal age as the state withdraws from healthcare, law and order and civic maintenance the responsibility devolves upon communities, as noted earlier. The state’s failure to upgrade, maintain or even barely just run services such as transport or road-maintenance in the public domain means that only those who pay— and pay communities to do this for them—have access to these goods and services. Privatization of road use, water, electricity, sewage treatment is clearly underwritten into adverts for these communities when they mention their ‘independent’ water-treatment plants, sewage lines, electricity generation and roads. This privatization also means that the community needs to take upon itself, in the absence of state support, the task of securitization of its environs and inhabitants—of what we can think of as the privatization of government. Surveillance, as I have emphasized throughout this book, is not a state process any longer. Like consumer surveillance which is attended to by the corporate body or merchandiser, local processes of surveillance are agential acts of a community that takes upon itself the policing and civic securitization. The autonomy of a community is also, therefore, the agency to surveill its citizenry, to develop and run a private government in order to (i) delineate, maintain and guard the vulnerability cartography of its-self and (ii) protect its paying, registered residents. Gated communities and enclaves must therefore be seen as systems of privatized governance in the neoliberal era, and surveillance is the necessary apparatus of this governance. This also means that social conflicts and potential sources of conflicts—whether moral (about behaviour), aesthetic (décor or gardening), infrastructural (modifications to one’s flat), functional (parking, use of common spaces)—within the community are also carefully monitored by the community itself. The aim of such a community that seeks autonomy is to reduce the sources of such conflicts. The close surveillance of strangers and borders is only one component of this quest for a well-governed space: much effort is also expended on homogenization and community- building exercises, both of which are also modes of surveillance and governance. Autonomy here is one more instance of the culture of avoidance. The community’s surveillance mechanisms vet the visitors, janitorial staff and
134 Spaces of Surveillance other people. The mall excludes the non-paying consumer. The street and neighbourhood watch vacates vagrants and the radically different and the stranger is viewed multiple times (often with suspicion). Surveillance, as noted above, creates an interdictory space for the social interaction where the heterogeneous masses are avoided where possible and scrutinized and documented before the interaction, should interaction be necessary. This attempted homogenization of social interaction that strives to ensure, through surveillance and interdictory spaces, one only meets people of ‘our’ kind, and avoids the tensions, thrills, surprises and conflicts of the heterogeneous street contact, is what I think of as the culture of avoidance. Exclusivity, which is what surveillance and gated communities construct, is the opposite of social integration because each class, group and community hardens its borders against diversity.11
Surveillance and the subject afraid of difference Having argued a case for the privatization of governance in the form of surveilled residential spaces, I now conclude by turning to the slow homogenization of the social fields of everyday life. Ian Burkitt (2004), following Henri Lefebvre, argues that everyday life is multidimensional and consists of a mixture of official (rule-bound, institutional) and unofficial (intimate, emotional, randomized) social fields. ‘Play’ and the informal spaces of bars, club houses and playgrounds are spaces in which rules are subordinated to randomness and heterogeneity, intimacy and accident. This latter—play and its attendant intimacies and emotional components—are central, Burkitt notes, to the self-development of individuals (212). It is the unregulated consumption of such moments and spaces, relationships and dynamics that contributes to our social skills but also our subjectivity. With surveilled residential spaces even this component of play becomes standardized. As noted above (and evidence is cited for this homogenization
11 Setha Low writes: ‘those precautions lead to greater social isolation, which in turn produces greater perceived vulnerability and more fear—which residents deal with by taking even greater precautions and thus becoming even more isolated socially’ (2003: 121). And later adds: ‘Gates, in fact, may contribute to placing residents at increased risk by marking the community as a wealthy enclave where burglary is lucrative…’ (2006).
135 Citizenship and Identity in every single study of gated communities I have come across)12, the homogenization of architecture, income, class-identity and lifestyle in these surveilled spaces constitutes what Lefebvre termed as the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ (cited in Burkitt 2004). The creation of community celebrations, rituals of play and organized behaviour—even things as ordinary as redoing the façade of one’s home in that community – becomes regulated, at least in terms of norms if not actually residency rules. While this in and of itself is not new—all communities impose norms—with surveillance we reach a level of intensification and expansion as never before. Thus play, which was meant to be random and heterogeneous—of the street, for example, in India, where most children play and discover social conflict and learn to deal with difference—is minimized. The erasure of difference, which is the main effect of surveilled communities, means that self-development does not include the possibility of meeting a different social field. Indeed I would go so far as to propose that in surveilled communities ‘there is an aim to create the perfect closed system of controlled consumption that encapsulates everyday life, systematizing thought and structuring action’ (Burkitt 219). When open spaces are placed under surveillance the chances of engaging with heterogeneity or completely radical behaviour are reduced. To return to a point I made via Julie Cohen in the preceding chapter, surveillance introduces a ‘subtle yet fundamental shift in the content of our character, a blunting and blurring of rough edges and sharp lines’ (Cohen 2000) because we become conscious of what is acceptable or unacceptable behaviour. The surveilled subject that emerges within this crucible of vulnerability cartography, bureaucratized and controlled consumption and homogeneity believes that the homogenization is the bulwark against the world which is full of contradictions, difference and conflict. The minimizing of conflict that surveilled residential areas seek, as noted by numerous commentators, is therefore a particular kind absence in the self-development of the individual. Workplaces have been secured—as employees of Cyberabad declared during the Telangana agitation, Hyderabad, see ‘IT workforce in Cyberabad unscathed by
12 Sardar (2010) says the ‘the gated community emphasizes if not perfect homogeneity, then certainly a social monolith of conformity’ (10). Also see studies of gated communities in China (Tomba 2010: 31), Latin America (Roitman and Giglio 2010: 64) and other essays in the same volume. Further: Bayne and Freeman (1995), T. Duncan on California’s private cities cited in McKenzie (16), Low (2006), and others. 136 Spaces of Surveillance
Telangana stir’—and social and political conflicts do not hamper their work or leisure. How does such a worker integrate into a social order marked by tensions and conflicts arising from ‘normal’ human differences? This question leads us to add to what critics of surveillance society say of the dehumanization of individuals under the CCTV, and propose that the vulnerable subject in sanitized spaces very possibly begins to be afraid of unorganized spaces, of difference and heterogeneity. While more psychological studies are needed to demonstrate the validity of this claim, the writings of people like Cohen, Lyon and others suggest that surveillance itself causes people to become ‘conformist’. If we extend this to include everyday lives and its multiple social fields, especially the unofficial, playful and heterogeneous ones of friendships and socialization, then we can surely consider the emergence of a vulnerable subject afraid of difference. The vulnerable subject, already acclimatized to self-surveillance through living under the gaze of the camera, also begins to be increasingly a participant in the surveillance of anything/anyone different. And all, of course, in the eye of the camera and across interdictory spaces.
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5 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject
t might seem quite odd to list ‘participation’ as a topic in a study of surveillance, the general view of surveillance being a top-down, panoptical Isystem of data-gathering of individuals and populations for social sorting, governance and control. However, this older notion of surveillance is no longer valid in the age of status messages, TV confessionals, neighbourhood watch, sting operations, consumer loyalty cards and multiveillance. Interactivity and consensual surveillance that makes a spectacle out of our deeds, likes, dislikes as noted above also has a different dimension in the age of the digital. Online socializing shifts the domain of social interaction with its cues and codes of accounting, risk management, verification and mediation away from the physical into the virtual domain. Online dating services that offer background checks on potential partners (Check-mate.com, Abika.com, True.com) become mediators in social interaction to produce a culture of multiveillance. Multiveillance is the condition of surveillance where we are all part of the network of mutual monitoring, information sharing, confessionals and, instead of the panopticon model of top-down surveillance we have a rhizomatic one. In multiveillance ‘every actor places somebody else under surveillance … everybody reports on everybody/anybody else’ (Nayar 2011) . ‘Participatory surveillance’ is the condition wherein, according to Mark Poster, we consent to being surveilled 138 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject
(1991). I take it to mean more than just a consent to being surveilled, but to be actually involved in processes of surveillance, whether of the self or the other.1 The availability of services like the above-mentioned online ones creates not only a culture of multiveillance it also produces a culture of do-it-yourself surveillance. As I have argued throughout, it becomes the individual’s responsibility to assess risk and put in place measures to alleviate and address this risk. Technologies and services of multiveillance convert all and each of us into watchers. But—and this is crucial—it also produces a seismic shift in that surveillance becomes an individual’s responsibility and guarantor of risk- minimization, social success and financial security. To initiate the process of dating and social relations through Check-mate.com is of course simply an amplification of earlier processes of verification and accounting (by ‘asking around’), but it is indisputable that these technological advances transform social and intimate relations into fields of inquiry, our friends and family into objects of inquiry and investigation and the entire process of socialization a techno-mediated one. Studies remain to be done whether multiveillance makes us inherently sceptical or paranoid. Commentators like Laurie Ouellette (2004: 246) and Mark Andrejevic (2007: 240) note that such a culture of surveillance and suspicion means that what was previously the goal of the state and authorities (the police) now becomes the choice and responsibility of the individual. Multiveillance is clearly decentralized, rhizomatic and far more insidious than the panopticon. It also initiates a culture of mutually assured surveillance (and suspicion, perhaps). It alters the way we perceive others and ourselves because, increasingly, we expect to be monitored even as we monitor the others. The overarching thesis of this book is that we live in an age of surveillance citizenship. Surveillance now approximates to a technology of belonging and a mode of establishing our participation in the processes of governance of the nation. Democracy is the participation in the processes of governance that makes us a public. Elections are one means of doing this. Surveillance is now the defence we mount of the publicness that we all, by definition, as citizens, belong to. We define ourselves as a public and defend ourselves as a public that values its publicness and the right to its publicness. Surveillance, shifted
1 Many reasons have been offered through empirical studies as to why people consent to surveillance: the access to care, facilities and discounts. See Elmer (2003), Best (2010). 139 Citizenship and Identity to the community and individuals away from law enforcement agencies and the state in neoliberal times, is a form of dissidence where we demonstrate the value we place on the public. If the public doesn’t exist then one cannot fulfil one’s fullest potential as a citizen any more: hence one defends this space, and hence one’s participation in surveillance. Through a participation in the visibility regime—of watchers and watched—we render the public more transparent and accountable. If democracy, as Craig Calhoun (2005) argues, requires both inclusion and connection among its citizens, then the sharing of relevant information among the citizens through surveillance is an essential part of the process of democracy (cited in Brighenti 2010: 55). The crucial democratic challenge, writes Andrea Brighenti, is to ‘achieve a deployment of power that is ideally without secrets … the device of public representation is necessarily public’ (2010: 54). Visibility, writes Brighenti, ‘contributes crucially to the demarcation of the public domain’ (58). As I shall argue in the case of sting operations, it is our participation in visibility regimes by recourse to the RTI Act for obtaining information from the government that renders the processes and mechanisms of governance visible, and keeps the public, public. I turn first to performances of self-surveillance, then self-disclosure as a surveillance-spectacle that generates a cultural script and finally to the public’s participation in surveillance projects to defend themselves as a public. Cultural artefacts produced by the surveillance process engaged in by the public, by amateurs, call into question the traditional model of top-down surveillance or surveillance as the instrument of (only) governments. This chapter will track a major shift when it focuses on dissident surveillance that transforms the public into witnesses and the state/structures of authority into objects to be observed and documented. It also maps a shift from the neoliberal subject who is passively surveilled into a more active subject who contributes to the very nature (‘open’, ‘democratic’) of the public space by engaging in dissident surveillance. In this shift the chapter sees the emergence of the witness-subject that is central to the preservation of the sense of the public itself. It is the potential of surveillance mechanisms to also serve the needs and aspirations of the public rather than just that of governing bodies that this chapter hopes to bring to the surface.
Objectification, self-surveillance and the new regimes of the self The object we monitor most closely now is our selves, both body and ‘soul’. Previously acceptable sources of pleasure or comfort—such as eating fried 140 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject things!—are now high-risk products. Further, the taste for such foods in the age of discourses of ‘lifestyle diseases’ itself is deemed to indicate an absence of self-control. To watch what we eat, how we sit/stand/walk, our investments, our bodies is a matter of individual responsibility. We have to observe and plan what we can/cannot eat, view, buy, invest in, indulge in. We have to observe our own behaviour and conduct in various social contexts. Thus a moral responsibility regarding the pleasurable practices of eating, drinking, sex and smoking and their potential risks, is inculcated through the cultural technologies of Reality TV, advice columns, health advisories and talk shows. Self-surveillance is the process of constructing the body as a site for observation and careful documentation. Weight-watching, checking for lumps, the monitoring of blood pressure and glucose levels have become commonplace features in the medicalized everyday of our lives. ‘Body surveillance’ is the condition where we observe our-selves, monitor body parameters and measure these against easily available norms. Body surveillance or self-surveillance is an exercise where a curious view of the self is in operation, partly due to the enormous quantum of objectification of the body that we see in mass media representations today. The good citizen’s self/body surveillance approximates to what Mark Andrejevic (2004: 18) calls ‘market based monitoring’ which leads to the scientific management of consumption. Nutritional advice, fitness regimens, health advisories that now bombard us are also core components of this medical objectification. Medical objectification leads to self/body surveillance through a series of processes. Medical objectification is linked to the mass media and the constant barrage of information about bodily conditions, causes and cures in which we live today. Knowledge about etiologies, palliative and therapeutic options are commonplace as we now speak the language of health risk: from cholesterol to sugar and salt. Medical objectification renders the body a particular kind of object to the individual: the material body that can possibly suffer from assorted ailments and decay. By medical objectification I am referring to one of the largest discourses we see on an everyday basis on TV and in other mass media: the medicalized body with adverts for assorted products to sort out problems of our teeth, skin, hair, etc. Closely aligned with medical objectification of the body are the cosmetic and insurance modes. There is also, as even a cursory glance through the Sunday supplement of The Hindu would reveal, far more medical information about geriatric problems, Alzheimer’s, stress, back pain, eating disorders and such, than was ever available before.
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Together these discourses bring home to me the object-that-is-my- vulnerable-body. If, as I have argued throughout the book, security discourses construct vulnerable subjects the medical objectification of such adverts/ health columns render our bodies vulnerable objects to our consciousness. Medical objectification causes the assimilation of the language of risk into everyday lives. We come to accept the risk from cholesterol, sedentary lifestyles, junk food, carbonated drinks, pesticides, the acquisition of fitness machines, altered tastes, lifestyle changes, relaxation techniques, cosmetic products, cooking oils among others. Next, the individual, having recognized the risks of particular foods, lifestyles, medical conditions, begins to reinvent her/his life. Once we accept this risk to our bodies—the vulnerable object as I called it above—then we are morally obligated to put in a new regime of safety, which would include shifting to exercise, fat-free oils, green tea, bran and oats, particular cosmetics and toothpastes, aloe vera and so on.2 Popular norms of health, fitness, looks, shape and health circulate through medical, cosmetic and insurance discourses that then serve as models for the ‘good’ citizen. That is, models of regulating one’s lifestyle, fashion, eating habits, finances and recreation are available for us to emulate. From self- surveillance to the adoption of new regimes of the self, might thus be read as a technology of governance in the service of the ‘therapeutics of the self’ (Dubrofsky 2007). It suggests a condition that approximates to Stan Cohen’s much-cited thesis about the ‘dispersal of social control’ (1985: 127) where the intersection of manufacturer, medical advisory, popular media and publicity systems produce discourses that call upon us, persuade us, even shame us into first observing, then documenting and finally changing/regulating ourselves. Internalizing these norms and then acting upon them through changes in consumption and lifestyle then becomes a logical (consumption-oriented) extension of self/body surveillance. Surveillance here is therefore treated not only as a form of governance but as self-empowerment. What emerges here is an intrinsic link between discourses of medical objectification, self/body surveillance and consumption. If, as I have emphasized throughout, surveillance is an organizing principle of our lives today, alongside other ‘grids’ like consumption or mobility and surveillance is also one of the elements that produces our subjectivity, self/body surveillance contributes in no mean measure to this organizing principle and enables us to
2 Studies show that such body surveillance leads, in many cases but especially among women, to greater body dissatisfaction (see Mercurio and Rima 2011). 142 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject produce a certain model of the self and subjectivity—whether this is the ‘fit’ subject or the ‘healthy’ body.
Performative surveillance TV talk shows bring together couples and friends, individuals and families to speak to the world at large, of details traditionally restricted to closed circles. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and online social networking sites enable an individual to post personal details for the community to read and respond to. Impression management through such posts, scraps, tweets and status messages announce one’s self to the world, calling upon the community one has built online to ‘come and watch’. We also share personal preferences with service providers and manufacturers when we participate in their surveys. Thus, just when democracies and liberal societies scream themselves hoarse over NSA and surveillance by the state, there is a massive willing participation in the project of surveillance which however is not regarded as surveillance since we ‘willingly’ release this information. The TV screen is a space of participation (Nayar, Digital Cool 2013) where one can phone-in with views and opinions or even appear to be the subject of a makeover. This, as has been noted by commentators on reality TV (Ouellette and Hay 2008: 210–11), is a mode of surveillance to which the subject willingly subjects herself/himself. Talk shows and emotional dramas like Emotional Atyachar or Axe your Ex are instances where individuals are willing to let their personal relations, preferences and opinions be placed on camera for scrutiny. ‘Performative surveillance’ is EJ Westlake’s term (2008) for the ways in which online social networking sites encourage users to perform their selves for public and private consumption. This performance cannot, Westlake cautions us, be simply dismissed as either passive or deviant. Rather, ‘they are energetic engagements with the panoptic gaze: as people offer themselves up for surveillance, they establish and reinforce social norms, but also resist being fixed as rigid, unchanging subjects’ (23). Performative surveillance therefore is not simply about being camera-conscious or exhibitionist, as traditionalists might think. It is a form of engagement with a community of viewers (‘friending’), seeking validation (‘like’) and a form of communication (‘pokes’, posts, scraps) that is as material and real as offline ones today. If in face-to-face communications one created impressions (as Erving Goffman demonstrated, 1959) of one’s self, information-sharing through these modes
143 Citizenship and Identity constitute impression-management, profile-building and the articulation of the self in online worlds. We need to think of performative surveillance as a mix of role-playing, truth-telling, self-policing, idealization and normativization. There are various modes of performative surveillance today.
Reality TV and surveillance drama Watching the confessionals in MTV Roadies or Bigg Boss one is struck by a particular feature. Every contestant, in the ‘privacy’ of the confessional—which is of course recorded on camera and broadcast—happily admits to being catty, jealous, angry, unhappy with the events unfolding around them. They confess their attitudes, affections, dislike towards other contestants as well. The assumption here is that what is being presented to the world (and the camera) is the authentic and real self of the individual. The entire premise of Reality TV is of course that the contestants do not play at roles; they play at themselves, authentic and real. Reality TV programming like Bigg Boss is ostensibly about real people in real situations with other real people, hence it is unscripted and true-to-life and true-to-themselves.3 This premise leads Rachel Dubrofsky to suggest that Reality TV is the context for people to articulate ‘the process of affirming a consistent (unchanged) self across disparate social spaces, verified by surveillance’ (2007: 266). The affirmation of the self— which, supposedly, is not being reinvented just because it is on camera—is what produces the authenticity quotient of Reality TV for Dubrofsky, which she claims is therapeutic because it suggests ‘the idea of being content with the self – not changing the self’ (268). Mark Andrejevic (2004), on whose work Dubrofsky builds, has already argued that the self being under constant surveillance ‘intensifies’ one’s experience of the self, and this leads to self- knowledge (97). ‘This is me’, ‘this is what I am’ are frequent comments one hears from contestant-participants on Bigg Boss and MTV Roadies. It seems as though, in Andrejevic’s words, ‘this authenticity becomes a process of self- expression, self-realization, and self-validation’ (108). What both Andrejevic and Dubrofsky point to is the playing out of the self under the surveillance gaze, where the camera is the context for the self
3 This ignores the editing and narrativization of the events recorded by editorial teams and TV workers. 144 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject to (i) express itself, (ii) know itself and finally (iii) reaffirm itself. The camera is the context, in other words, for the construction of the self which is then taken to be authentic. Reality TV naturalizes the camera as one more context in which one is just ‘oneself’. By showing individuals ‘being themselves’ in the Bigg Boss household or Survivor Reality TV introduces the camera as an ubiquitous but invisible part of one’s life. It effaces the camera as a surveillance device altogether, instead treating it as just a setting in which an individual can be true to him/her self. There is another dimension to Reality TV’s surveillance programming, and one that we do not often recognize as surveillance. First, there is the active soliciting of individuals to participate in the auditioning process to become members of the Roadies or Bigg Boss. The thousands lining up for auditioning during Indian Idol season suggests that the masses finally find a means of moving from spectators to spectacle. That there are many who wish to be surveilled, to have their lives and selves put up on screens for the world to watch, suggests that Reality TV has transformed surveillance into a means of participatory entertainment: when a subject X is in Bigg Boss, X invites you to watch her/him. Not seen as surveillance any longer, Reality TV’s programming makes ordinary lives under the camera a source of entertainment. Submission to the ubiquitous camera, as Andrejevic puts it, is an attractive proposition now (2004: 2–3). But one need not turn to commercial TV channel programming to see this shift in our understanding of surveillance, as we shall see soon, for Facebook posts, Flickr Whatsapp and other apps invite us to participate in sharing our lives on camera for the world to consume and comment on. Second, Reality TV’s ubiquitous surveillance programming suggests that it is quite alright to be ordinary: you can still provide the source of entertainment to the world. This is precisely why Andrejevic sees Reality TV as democratic and as work (6–7). Putting oneself ‘on camera’ does not require special skills or talents, and anyone can become the protagonist of what one might think of as ‘surveillance drama’. Surveillance drama is the plotting of one’s life, and everyday life at that, on camera. It takes the most quotidian of functions, everyday emotions and upheavals and puts them on screen to be labelled entertainment. Reality TV commodifies the emotional everyday of the ‘ordinary’—that is non-professional actors—protagonists and makes it to do the work of entertainment. It makes surveillance fun, entertaining and productive. If Reality TV’s surveillance drama is the acquiescence of people to be surveilled in their everyday life for consumption, it merely naturalizes and
145 Citizenship and Identity extends the surveillance drama of our shopping, walking, driving and leisure in supermarkets, roads, malls and other public spaces. I therefore propose that we see Reality TV and life under CCTV as versions of the surveillance drama of which we are all at once spectators and participants. When we look up at the camera in a market or, in some cases where it is possible at the screens to see ourselves, we have emplotted our routine act of shopping into surveillance drama in which we are both spectacle and spectator: we watch ourselves watching ourselves. It demonstrates our active role in group participation— voters, viewers, fans—even as it instructs us in the norms of such a participation. I propose that Reality TV becomes a mode of popularizing and naturalizing life under the camera and thus prepares us for life under CCTV and surveillance in general (just as CCTVs everywhere might prepare us for experiencing Reality TV). When Bigg Boss or MTV Roadies places people under 24x7 camera surveillance, and shows them being at ease and authentic under the camera gaze, it naturalizes the process of self-representation and monitoring. Further by showing these individuals as engaged in a process of self-discovery (‘I didn’t know I had these traits till my fellow housemates pointed it out’), Reality TV offers surveillance as a means of self-discovery, and therefore an important process in the construction and affirmation of the self within surveillance drama. Surveillance drama also includes one more element, something that is rarely taken as surveillance at all. Programme producers invite feedback, start fanzines, online responses and discussion groups for viewers to write about their programme, both constructive as well as critical comments. When we participate in an online forum’s discussion on the newest episode of the programme, dissecting the actions of our preferred contestants, voting for or against them, offering suggestions about their behaviour, we of course contribute to the production component of the programme (feedback loops take our comments and responses to the producers). But in the process we are also placing for public consumption our tastes, attitudes, preferences and biases. That is, when we declare our reasons for liking or disliking an episode or a contestant what we are subtly doing is revealing our own hopes, aspirations, desires, prejudices, and therefore our selves, to the others on the group. The producer gathering information from us in this fashion is actually monitoring us (Andrejevic 2004: 14) but more importantly we willingly share this information because we are a part of the surveillance drama unfolding both on screen and off it (in the form of the discussion or fan group).
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Interactivity and surveillance Online is where much life is lived now. For some commentators we are now part of a ‘digital enclosure, a ‘process whereby places and activities become encompassed by the monitoring embrace of an interactive (virtual) space’ and where ‘every action and transaction generates information about itself’ (Andrejevic 2007: 2). Online purchases, opinions, discounts, voting accompanied by cell phone and browsing histories, public record searches all mean that we can monitor and record information about one another in ways that are unprecedented. Sites like CheckMyMate.com (self-explanatory as a name), Teen Arrive Alive (a service that uses cell phone networks to produce information about the movements of children so that their parents can be constantly monitoring them) encourage monitoring. Others like Facebook confessions pages or PostSecret (a weblog) allows individuals to confess to things for public monitoring. I see these as instances of interactivity because these are modes of sharing. Moving away from the top-down surveillance model of Big Brother, we now have an active, participatory exchange of information with systems and networks, an exchange that leads to further exchange. Information-gathering is interactive, in short. Take a simple example of shopping online. Advice and suggestions from other earlier (and supposedly satisfied) consumers about products are placed on Jabong, Flipkart and Amazon. These consumers have shared information about their purchases (either voluntarily or involuntarily because the Company might have drawn patterns of purchase behaviour) or advice about using a product. Marketing strategies—targeted advertising— from these manufacturers and distributors display these comments and advice when you are browsing for a product. The preceding consumers have in a sense determined what you will see when you browse for a product, signalling useful items for you to buy. In other words when they interacted with the online store (what Andrejevic has called the ‘digital enclosure’ when the mere act of purchase means you have been documented by the system) they also shifted away from being mere consumers to producers and marketers. Their advice, recommendations and opinions enabled the companies to persuade you to buy the product or service. Interactivity with the online store thus transforms the consumer into a producer for the next potential consumer. Another form of interactivity that relies on monitoring of information flows is the digital culture of Facebook, Flickr, Whatsapp, MySpace and such. Members reveal enormous amounts of personal information—food, 147 Citizenship and Identity music, movies, sports, clothes, education and relationship histories, friends, etc. More importantly with news feeds—FB’s controversial move4—it enables individuals to have almost real-time following and follow people. Often equated with stalking, such tracks of information sharing and gathering constitute an interactive, voluntary form of surveillance as well. Posting links to friends’ websites and videos, posting likes and links to profiles, even purchases and current reading constitutes an interactive process of placing somebody else, alongside oneself, under the public gaze. Such information also constitutes, as Nicole Cohen notes, a form of advertising, where, Cohen writes ‘Facebook taps into members’ productivity through the act of surveillance’ (2008). With such a culture of sharing we create not a ‘digital enclosure’ as Andrejevic seems to think (because, according to him, we are locked into the circuit of information) but a digital agora. The digital agora is the strangely public space of interactivity and connections, but also of surveillance. I use the term ‘strangely’ because the publicness of the agora, of the commons, emerges only when we agree to share information, to allow ourselves to be tracked, coded, databased and are willing to do the same to others. The digital agora is a series of linkages produced as a result of these processes of sharing, tracking, coding and circulating. Contra Andrejevic I see the making of a public—asymmetrical, exploitative—space as the making of an information environment. Interactivity is now one of the most important means of public-making. ‘Surveill at leisure’ and ‘surveill for pleasure’, both of which describe the condition of ‘likes’, ‘newsfeeds’, ‘scraps’, ‘links’ that produce the network of shared information in the virtual world, are modes of public-making in the information environment of everyday lives. This consensual surveillance effaces the otherwise pejorative connotations of surveillance because it is not perceived as surveillance at all when one updates a friend’s relationship status or a new purchase. The digital agora built on consensual surveillance and informal networks of information sharing alters the very notions of public and private. Where, as danah boyd notes, architectural and structural conditions (walls, limits on vision and hearing) defined the public/private boundary, the virtual world makes private actions public beyond the walls (2008: 14). An individual’s purchase of the new Stephen King novel if shared as an odd bite of information on Facebook can produce a newsfeed, a whole debate around
4 For the controversy around FB’s News feed feature see Romano (2006). 148 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject horror and thriller fiction that then circulates more or less in the public domain. What the digital agora, especially services and apps like News Feed do, is to build communities around what were previously isolated bits of information that now are coalesced into a labelled stream. This is the new form of surveillance produced around consensual sharing of private information. What one might have shared with just a few select friends is now brought to the attention of a larger community of Facebookers. The new surveillance in the digital agora generates a ‘social convergence’ (boyd 2008) where otherwise easy-to-miss information becomes collated and organized, categorized and channelled, for people to actively take notice of. Interactivity— which is the forwarding and putting up of links, updates and so on—is what produces this social convergence through consensual and participatory surveillance. Social convergence collapses otherwise disparate and discrete social contexts (boyd 18) simply because information from one domain—the family, consumption, reading habits, relationships, employment—spills over into another domain. Norms of consumption for this information, forwarded and updated, ‘fed’ and posted, are radically different in the digital agora and thus irreducibly alters the sense of private and public. We have no expectation of privacy any longer when we post a news item, but we also do not know with any degree of certainty who is the audience that is watching and monitoring us. What is also important is that such a process and condition of participatory surveillance not only places us in the position of watcher, we also consent to being watched. I am not here speaking of Reality TV alone.
Loyalty cards, information-sharing and cultural membership When shopping at particular stores customers display and make use of loyalty cards. As noted in the preceding chapters this is a form of consumer surveillance for the manufacturer–marketer because the data regarding nature, frequency and quantum of purchases gets recorded through the membership-loyalty card (Zurawski 2011). However, consumer surveillance is far more complicated than this. I propose that consumer surveillance appears as a far more benign form of monitoring because the data collected is supposed to lead to deals, bonuses, gifts, better services and extras. It also constitutes a form of voluntary information sharing that then leads to a set of social relations, as members of a particular store, patron of a particular brand and consumer of a particular 149 Citizenship and Identity product. Just as News Feed and Flickr enabled the making of a public around consensual surveillance’s information sharing, loyalty and membership cards might be read as technological artefacts that produce a cultural system of membership, endorse trust (in a brand/store) and establish social relations. I see membership and loyalty cards as instances of the surveillance drama that we participate in. First, the role-playing of an ‘exclusive’ or special consumer within this drama establishes identity—a Reliance consumer, an Indigo frequent flyer, a Country Club member, a Hilton privileged customer, etc—of the consumer through repeated use. Second, the plot of this drama helps the consumer position himself/herself as a subject within a larger group and cultural membership—those who use a certain product, who like certain kinds of films, who frequent certain events, etc. Together these two operations succeed in the construction of a particular subjectivity of/for the consumer. The more I fly on an airline or the more I shop at Body Shop or Croma, the more entrenched the subjectivity as a consumer (of that brand or store or service) becomes. It is in exchange for this sense of belonging and cultural citizenship that I yield information with every online and card transaction. This belonging promised to me as a frequent and loyal consumer is also a form of social ordering because my membership into a particular class of consumers enables the manufacturers and marketers to predict my shopping behaviour, taste and preference and organize their sales and product pitch to fit in with my requirements. To phrase it in more political terms, the loyalty card must be seen as a text or artefact which by recording and transmitting personal information shapes and reproduces certain social relations of the consumer with other consumers even as it influences the producer–consumer relations of the individual with the manufacturer and service provider. The card is therefore not a neutral piece of plastic, rather it is an active mediating device that negotiates the relation between the consumer and the world and activates the dynamics of consumption and channelizes it along certain lines. It is a text whose meaning we decode in order to develop a sense of belonging but which also, in the very act of decoding, places an obligation upon us to use and reuse it in order to share information about our consumption. Plotting purchases to reach a certain point average for ‘redeeming’ or for discounts, and the careful choreographing of trust and loyalty—between brand/ shop and consumer, is now a part of the mundane activity of shopping. That is, in addition to the calculation of material gains to be had from using such cards the phenomenon also constructs a social edifice—of trust (in a brand),
150 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject obligation (to a store) and loyalty (to a brand). If, as noted earlier, makeovers are modes of self-governance disguised as self-empowerment (Ouellette and Hay 2008) then loyalty cards establish affective systems of affiliation, lineage and sociality between consumer and store/manufacturer even as they establish patterns of behaviour. I see this last also as a mode of governance where we agree to be surveilled for our purchases in order to gain materially but also to socialize into ways of thinking about the material gains to be had through the cultural practice of using cards. To use such cards becomes intrinsic to the very culture and habit of shopping, and thus might be read as a mode of governance through the establishment of norms and rituals of behaviour. A full-fledged and ‘good’ consumer citizen, in other words, would be a person who calculates benefits from loyalty cards, has consistent shopping patterns and displays loyalty to the store/brand. Engineering the consistency of purchases is a mode of socializing the consumer, and this is precisely what the ‘benign’ surveillance of loyalty cards achieves. For the manufacturer this benign and consensual surveillance establishes patterns of shopping behaviour, enabling predictive functions of shoppers, and thereby of course determines manufacture, marketing and release of product information—all of which together constitute consumer governance. Techniques of participation such as loyalty, privilege and membership cards are models of governmental rationality—I should reiterate here that surveillance is not a state project any longer, with corporate bodies, organizations, local communities all being engaged in forms of surveillance—but about consumer citizenship. Thus far we have seen neoliberal forms of surveillance as continuing the older forms of monitoring, albeit in unobtrusive and informal ways. But in neoliberal contexts today the surveillance of subjects also produces unexpected and even shocking cultural scripts that exceed the individual story revealed before the camera.
Talk shows, self-disclosure and cultural scripts for change Admitting to being beaten/abused, unfaithful, sick, ‘deviant’ or ‘bad’ husband/ father/son, declaring dreams, personality traits, aspirations, preferences, likes and dislikes on television—whether celebrities or more ordinary people—is now the staple ingredient of television and shows its presence in YouTube’s home videos, Flickr’s photographs and online archivization of the everyday by everybody.
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Oprah Winfrey (arguably the most famous of America’s, and perhaps the world’s, talk show hosts), Karan Johar (Bollywood film director), Phil Donahue, Aamir Khan (Bollywood actor, often considered a superstar), Farah Khan (Bollywood director) and numerous others in the West and in India have popularized the confessional TV format. Talk shows constitute a participatory surveillance culture because they work on the principle of self-disclosure. Take the example of Oprah who revealed that she was a victim of child-abuse and her battle against obesity. Oprah uses this information effectively to establish a one-among-you relationship with the guests on her show but also with the anonymous audience watching her show. Self-disclosure is a form of sharing information that establishes a social relation, and might be read as a communicative act. But it does not end with Oprah’s self-disclosure. Oprah’s willing sharing of information encourages others to do the same, thus building an affective affinity and a community of sufferers across audiences.5 Self-disclosure and the participatory spectacle of confessions and personal drama on screens is not simply entertainment for commercial purposes. These confessions create cultural scripts that then convey, in the guise of entertainment or commentary, normative values of family, sexuality, education, manners, etc. Thus, as Leigh Gilmore has argued in the case of Oprah, redemption narratives (of, say, addicts who have recovered and documented their life in a memoir) and their:
reproduction of redemption creates a preference for certain kinds of narratives that seem to substantiate through repetition the impossible access to mobility promised by the American dream. Indeed, narratives that succeed in this market point away from a critique of the systemic nature of inequalities, and promote an increasingly non-specific and generic self. (2010: 659)
That is, the neoconfessional and the redemption narrative produces a cultural script of an American dream that shifts the focus away from structural inequalities but retains the essential argument about ‘pulling oneself up by the bootstraps’. These must be, therefore, seen as spectacles where the individuals’ admission to/of certain experiences and/or behaviour generates a more generalized
5 Laurie Haag argues that a certain measure of intimacy is forged through such acts of self-disclosure (1993: 117). 152 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject discourse around ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, or about the resurgent self. Where I depart from Gilmore is in her argument that the self-disclosure/redemption narrative is about generic selves. It is not. The spectacle of abuse victims spread across screens addresses more than an individual problem or trauma. Such shows and reality TV is believed to offer a taste of the authentic, in the words of Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray, it ‘promises its audience revelatory insights into the lives of others’ (2004: 6). Through this ‘discovery’ of the lives of others a certain social project is initiated. If, as commentators like Ouellette and Hay (2008), following the work of Nikolas Rose, note that the domain of ‘governance’ has shifted out of the government to other professionals, the medical professional, the social worker, the educationist, and via cultural technologies like television, then programmes of the confessional talk show variety call upon the public to respond to social issues having been educated on the issues through a personal confession. In Ouellette and Hay’s account, this is a form of governance which involves ‘not just the reinventing government but reinventing citizens’ relation to a security society through new plans, experiments, and demonstrations of risk assessment and management’ (138, emphasis in original). The show’s self-disclosure thus becomes a means of energizing the society’s task of examining, and even perhaps regulating, itself. Take the case of India’s phenomenally successful Satyamev Jayate (13 episodes on Star TV, sponsored by Airtel, 2012, second edition in 2014). The dramatic—detractors would say melodramatic or even ‘filmi’—talk show fits right into the arguments I have made around participatory self-surveillance and the structure of self-disclosure as spectacle. On the official website (http:// www.satyamevjayate.in/) and as advertised on TV after the programme, are links to ‘NGOs and Donations’, ‘Learn More’, ‘India Says’, Impact’. For Episode 2, on child abuse, the first link has this to say:
The sexual abuse of children is a horrible reality, and many are unaware of its extent. Research has shown that as many as 53 per cent, or one in every two children, are victims of child sexual abuse. Contrary to belief, the home is not the safest place for a child, as many abusers are trusted by the family. In addition to educating children and encouraging them to be brave enough to say No to abuse, parents themselves need to be sensitive to their children’s signals. Moreover, a robust and specific law against child sexual abuse must be put in place to protect the child and vigorously punish the abuser.
The source of the statistics is not immediately clear but is available under the link ‘Learn More’. The write up calls for: examining the structure of the 153 Citizenship and Identity family, a sensitized pedagogy and parental behaviour and finally, legislation and punitive measures. The ‘Learn More’ link gives definitions of child sexual abuse, organizations and modes of dealing with the disclosure. The most crucial link—and one that illustrates the validity of Laurie Haag’s observation about self-disclosure leading to more self-disclosure cited above, and my own point about the making of a community of sufferers—is ‘India Says’. Under this link one finds additional stories and admissions of similar experiences. The link invites self-disclosure warning individuals that ‘Please note, all messages here will be public and may be featured online and on air. Please do not put in the personal details that should remain private’ (http://www. satyamevjayate.in/issue02/indiasays/). Under ‘Impact’ it gives us statistics about donations, connections, responses. What we see here is the shift of focus from the individual instances of self- disclosure that constituted the programme’s episode to the larger social order it seems to have generated. The community-of-sufferers argument made above is instantiated here, in addition to the larger thematic of governance. While legal measures, the programme claims, were initiated because of the programme, the more significant point is the sense of social outrage, need for redressal mechanism and support that emerges out of the individuals’ self-disclosure. So the line ‘speak up, the world is listening’ in the rhetoric of the programme demonstrates the organization of social opinion, support and eventually governance based on the acts of self-disclosure, placing the responsibility for addressing the problem on the civic-social rather than the state side of things. This, I argue, is an example of the new organization of governance where self-disclosure becomes the starting point for the mobilization of affect but also social action by civil society. It is in the staging and spectacle of suffering, invited by the very structure of the talk show and eventually the website that a social initiative towards better life for children, girls (the first episode of the programme was on female foeticide), the disabled (episode 6), caste conflict (episode 10), among others.6 Self-disclosure here, as in Oprah or Donahue,
6 The episode on Untouchability provoked a strong response from S Anand, publisher, Navayana, in Outlook, where Anand took Aamir Khan to task for not mentioning Ambedkar even once in the show, for editing out, supposedly, Dalit speakers who had been interviewed (see ‘Silence Eva Jayate’, 23 July 2012, archived at http://www. outlookindia.com/article.aspx?281646, accessed 13 October 2013). It is also important to look at the corporate sponsors of such shows, where neat capitalism reveals its social causes, but that is not the point I am addressing here. 154 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject
Source: http://www.satyamevjayate.in/issue02/impact/#conn creates a cultural script where norms of family life, sexuality, parenting, gender and caste roles might be debated and contested. It thus moves beyond the individual story to a social condition. I now turn to the centrality of self- 155 Citizenship and Identity disclosure that generates a cultural script in the making of a larger national identity, keeping in mind the emphasis throughout this discussion of the role of such a mediated spectacle in producing a discourse of governance. Self-disclosure that initiates a cultural script around thus-far silenced topics and social conditions might then be thought of as a form of surveillance that generates public opinion and symbolic responsibility to the state of the community. While many commentators see these shows as exemplifying a ‘therapy culture’ (Illouz 2008, Dubrofsky 2007), they also publicize private problems and privatize social concerns. Any and all public displays of vulnerability are now acceptable (Furedi 2004), and indeed TRPs for programmes like MTV’s Webbed thrive on people confessing to mistakes. Webbed is a programme about identity theft, stalking and web-based exploitation. Jai Mishra, we are shown, is lured into an online ‘friendship’ with NRI Surabhi. Surabhi herself comes to India, having made arrangements for her stay through an online service network, and whose local host, Vinay Mittal has other plans for her. Dramatizing the possible dangers of being misled by internet-based fraudsters, Webbed (http://mtv.in.com/webbed/confessions.php ) also showcases confessions by those who admit to have been exploited and misled. The self-disclosure of vulnerability, mistakes and misplaced trust on Webbed serves as a form of a form of pedagogy—warning us viewers of the dangers of the virtual world. In the case of socially oriented shows like Satyamev Jayate merging the private with the public these personal, real-life stories take the conditions of discrimination or abuse out of the domain of the family or home or personal relationships and make them a social condition and call for social activism. These shows also showcase the victim and ask for a different judgemental order where the audience is drawn into an affective relationship with the individual witness/confessor and which in turn invites further confessions and admissions. The audience too is called upon to understand and evaluate itself through these narratives unravelling: this is what we are. To phrase it differently, an individual’s story being narrated on screen to an audience of strangers not only calls for the comfort of strangers but also entails a moral responsibility on the audience to respond in particular ways. Further, it produces a narrative society that is forced to see the individual’s problem as a social problem, thus moving it outside the domain of the personal to the socio-cultural. Every individual story thus acquires, in the format of a programme like Satyamev Jayate, the shape and form of a cultural script that we are all equally responsible for producing, and
156 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject now of resolving. Self-disclosure which places an individual under the willing surveillance of strangers at a distance is socio-cultural exposure. There are a couple of other features of this form of self-disclosure. The victim’s frozen, disturbed, teary gaze that stares at the camera holds us to it, daring us to look away. In addition, the distant audience—those of us who are watching the shows on TV—is offered shots of the proximate audience (in the studio) with their expressions of sadness, horror and disbelief. Numerous members of the audience break down on Oprah and Satyamev Jayate. Very often the host’s expression—Aamir Khan’s traumatized expression—is also focused on, as the camera pans from the victim-narrator to host to the studio audience. I propose that the recording and broadcasting of their expressions— essentially the ‘presentation of the self’ (in Erving Goffman’s terms)—for public consumption is a form of participatory surveillance. This has a particular role: it functions as a pedagogic tool that educates us on the appropriate response to the unfolding narrative. That is the proximate audience’s responses and reactions serve as indices of what our, the distant audience’s, responses ought to be. So we are essentially looking at two levels of self-disclosure in a talk show where individuals confess to traumatic experiences: the victim who narrates her/his story and the proximate audience that visibly responds to her/him right there in the studio. My argument is that together these levels of self- disclosure constitute an instructional device about the adequate and appropriate response to trauma and victimage. It is a surveillance device that mobilizes compassion, shame, discomfort and outrage in the distant audience by making visible the articulations of the same in the proximate one. This too, therefore, becomes a mode of governance (regulating social responses and triggering activism, calls for action, etc) by focusing on affect. This cultural script in the talk show, I propose, is one of national shame around issues of caste and gender discrimination, the war over water, the neglect of elderly and disabled individuals, etc. Writing about national shame Sara Ahmed argues that the role of the witness is to ‘transform shame into an identity’ (2004: 107–8). A nation brings shame ‘on itself’ by its treatment of others (108). Ahmed argues that the testimonies of victims and witnesses produce a particular effect: ‘readers … are asked to witness their shame as “our shame”’ (108). Further, ‘those who witness the past injustice through feeling “national shame” are aligned with each other as “well-meaning individuals”; if you feel shame, you are “in” the nation, a nation that means well’ (109). In the episode on untouchability, using manual scavenging as an instance, Aamir
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Khan refers to the ‘social truths’ (‘saamajik satya’) that need to be revealed so that we can ‘move towards becoming a better society’. In the write-up on the issue, the website puts it this way: ‘For a country which has been independent for 65 years, it is a matter of shame that we have not yet shaken off the tyranny of caste-based discrimination’ (emphasis added). What the self-disclosures by victims and witnesses in such episodes do is to shame as viewers and as Indians. The shame we share is the failure of a national ideal and the continuity of a brutal history. What we witness, in Ahmed’s words, ‘is not the brutality of this history, but the brutality of the passing over of that history’ (111). What talk shows do when speaking of say manual scavenging or child sexual abuse or female foeticide is to bring to the surface this brutal history, preventing it from being buried, so that a national identity can be forged, for better or for worse, around a national shame. Calling for social change, as Aamir Khan does in these episodes, is a call for a ‘re-covering of the nation’ (Ahmed 112).7 ‘And we can only be considered a progressive nation when we refuse to accept caste differences’, says the episode write-up. But this ‘refusal’ as a nation can occur only after we reveal these ‘differences’ as shame. Once we make national shame of this kind public, visible—even a spectacle, as Satyamev Jayate does—and a cultural script, it makes shame a feature of Indian national identity. It is the necessity of witnessing—in the individual’s stories—shame that India comes to terms with its history and the covering-up of history (in fact Aamir Khan uses this metaphor of covering up—‘shame’ is etymologically linked to ‘sharm’ meaning to cover-up—when he speaks of the society’s efforts to place certain issues ‘under purdah’, episode 2).8
Witnessing and dissident surveillance A particular form of participatory surveillance that has now acquired considerable legal and socio-cultural mileage is the sting operation. Journalists and law enforcement officials in disguise lure the potential criminal/rapist/ corrupt official into seeking bribes/assaulting and then trapping them with visibility and arrests. Sting operations are to be seen as a part of surveillance
7 Ahmed is playing on the etymology of the Indo-European word, ‘shame’, which comes from ‘to cover’. 8 For a more skeptical view of the role of talk shows as therapy see Abt and Seesholtz (1994). 158 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject culture because they are modes of exposure. These are usually conducted to expose people in power to reveal the exact machinations and mechanics of the authority where these mechanics do not conform to legal and social norms of conduct. Closely aligned, in terms of participatory surveillance culture (which involves our participation in informal surveillance of the neighbourhood, public spaces, etc), is dissident surveillance, wherein we see the increase of video-activism and the large-scale circulation of what has been termed ‘witness video’ (Wilson and Serisier 2010). In this case the functioning of the police and such people in authority is documented by passers-by, eyewitnesses and then broadcast/ uploaded. Both sting operations and video activism hinge on notions of official accountability and transparency. In dissident surveillance the watchers becoming the watched in video activism; larger volumes of amateur visuals and videos enter the public domain disrupting the hegemony of both the state and corporate news feeds (leading Yasmin Ibrahim (2007) to propose a ‘post-surveillance society’). Dissident surveillance is the surveillance of power/ authority, often by culturally literate people, who capture excesses, violations and deviations from the law or socially acceptable norms. Dissident surveillance is the key to a public guarding its sense of publicness by placing those entrusted with the task of governance under the camera’s eye. It must be noted that amateur videos and accidental spectatorship might be appropriated by dissident surveillance structures with the explicit purpose of rendering the atrocity or violation transparent and visible. As speakers at the 3rd Digital Media India meet of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, South Asia, reiterated on 5 February 2014, ‘public interest’ and the ‘larger common good’ are clear justifications for the use of surveillance as a news source (‘Public Interest the Only Justification for Use of Surveillance as News Source’). We can examine the role of dissident surveillance under two heads, of (i) video activism and mobile witnessing and (ii) Sting Operations, Leaks and the Political.
Video activism and mobile witnessing For an example, see the footage of protests on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9RunFM44S4. Last accessed 26 June 2014. Witness videos revealed high-handed and brutal behaviour by the police against young men and women. As dissident surveillance strategies these videos
159 Citizenship and Identity captured the imagination of the nation. But besides the theme of the cultural script (of police brutality and of the democratic right to protest) encoded in these videos and visuals, we see specific features of the witness video as tying in with the larger argument of this book: of the public’s safeguarding of itself as a public by participating in surveillance. The protestors see videotaping police action as an instrument that prevents excessive violence by the police. In this, the dissident surveillance by video activists serves as a ‘pacifier’ (Thomas Harding cited in Wilson and Serisier 2010: 168), ‘a strategic tool that contained potential violent actions on the part of police’ (169). It must be noted here of the complex nature of this dissident surveillance. The police are the watchers watching the protestors in order to ensure that they stay within acceptable norms of protest-behaviour. Yet, the simple equation of watcher/police-watched/protestor is complicated because as the protestor is being watched—she/he expects to be monitored today, not just by police but by cameras, newspaper and TV reporters and bystanders—she/ he is watching the watchers (the police). Thus dissident surveillance must be seen as an instantiation of an entire culture of visibility facilitated by commonly available technologies of witnessing, documenting and distribution (the mobile camera, camcorders and of course later, YouTube). The hierarchy of watcher/ watched is no longer valid in the age of mobile witnessing and video-activism because it is now almost impossible to stay within one role as either watcher or watched: we are almost invariably both. Projects like Copwatch (http://www.copwatch.org/ ; Last accessed: 26 June 2014), with its tagline, ‘policing the police’, thus offer advice to video activists on how to perform dissident surveillance. Such projects are not only a means of ensuring transparency and legitimate actions by the police but also serve as evidence-gathering modes about the functioning of the law enforcement agencies. They constitute modes of resistance to the power of the state as well, because activists with cameras serve as a deterrent to misbehaviour by those in authority. It also serves as a counter to ‘the escalating visual surveillance of protest events undertaken by police’ (Wilson and Serisier 2010). Websites like www.witness.org (Last accessed: 26 June 2014 ) become archives of amateur videos—such as the famous Rodney King beating, recorded by accident by a man in a nearby apartment trying out a new handy-cam—and thus possibly muster social and legal evidence of the mechanics of power. They constitute important steps in Human Rights activities as well.
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Video activism projects constitute, further, ‘sousveillance’ (surveillance at/ from ground level rather than sur-veillance, from above) and a participatory one at that.9 Let me turn here from video activism which is a focused and trained domain of activity to something more ‘innocent’: mobile witnessing. I am moving the debate beyond the question of spectator’s surveillance to something more, of spectatorship that is also active witnessing. Witnessing, as Anna Reading (2009) points out, has cultural and historical contexts where frames of interpreting the event are already in place. Similarly the circulation of such uploaded images from video cameras and mobile phones also occurs in specific contexts (Reading’s illustration is of Adam Stacey’s famous London bombings visual taken from his mobile phone and which started its career as a visual on a blog. See http://moblog.net/view/77571/). Reading therefore suggests that we need to see mobile witnessing as a performative act, linking the dead, the survivor witness and the witness to the survivor witness (66–7). Such a framework might very well be used to examine the new forms of spectatorship that transform spectators into active witnesses. As an instance, let me turn to the infamous slap administered by B S Ahlawat, a senior police officer, to a girl protesting the rape of a 5-year old girl in New Delhi in April 2013. What we see here is dissident surveillance where amateur and accidental photographs and videos expose the process of the law-and-order machinery, the conflict between the apparatus of the law and those it is meant to protect. The camera converts the policemen into perpetrators and the citizens into the former’s victims so that campaigns for greater sensitivity and accountability of the authorities might be launched. Visuals uploaded by amateurs via mobile phones and YouTube become part of an archive of suffering and cruelty. Sometimes these are uploaded under Creative Commons and copy left arrangements, such as Nilanjana Roy’s photograph of the police firing on protestors on her website (http://nilanjanaroy.com/2012/12/22/notes-from- raisina-hill/ Last accessed 26 June 2014). Archived thus, any of these visuals, ‘traversed the established ethical and legal restrictions associated with copyright and news agencies. As part of the copy left movement it was not subject to commodification in the usual way and
9 For a detailed study of video activism and tips for potential activists, see Thomas Harding’s Video Activism Handbook (1997). Harding, Thomas. Video Activism Handbook. London: Pluto, 1997.
161 Citizenship and Identity could be easily picked up and used by broadcasters and newspapers’ (Reading 2009). Images of ordinary people in extraordinary situations circulate and this makes us witnesses to survivor-witnesses. The visuals demonstrate, with India’s Parliament House as backdrop (recalling, no doubt Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the earlier Beijing’s Teinemann Square as well), the nature of the public space as the space of conflict between government and people, citizenry and authority, all filmed by journalists, passers-by and accidental observers. Symbolically, such visuals cause us to ponder over the nature of law enforcement and the state of the democracy itself—and this, I propose, is what dissident surveillance provokes. Unlike ‘mere’ participatory surveillance where we might simply go along with the larger agenda of law enforcement set by authorities and structures of governance, dissident surveillance turns the focus on to these later structures itself. Acts violating social and legal codes are very often now ‘witnessed’ by members of the public. Thus the video of a minister distributing cash during the election campaign in Madhya Pradesh, taken on a mobile camera, went viral (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/news/Caught-on-cam-MP- minister-distributing-cash-during-campaigning/videoshow/24204419.cms, accessed 16 October 2013). From other parts of the world famous videos of acts of Human Rights violations and crime have made passers-by and bystanders witnesses. Reading’s argument that such witnessing is ‘active’ and produces or at least demands an ethical response, especially when these are images of atrocity, is a useful way of thinking about participatory surveillance. Witnessing atrocity in the form of a participatory surveillance set up—I film an atrocity and/or upload the survivor’s testimony, or forward the visuals uploaded by somebody else— constructs a particular subjectivity as witness. Subjectivity emerging within conditions of such a participatory surveillance of atrocity—witnessing—‘is experienced as a sense of agency and response-ability that are constituted in the infinite encounter with otherness, which is fundamentally ethical’ (Oliver 2001: 17). It emerges from a cultural literacy about rights, suffering and violation, themselves a part of the social imaginary due to the circulation, over a period of time, of similar images from dissident surveillance. It is in the response to such a witness-image, in the ethical act of responding in particular ways that my subjectivity is forged. When such visuals go global/viral via the virtual—on people’s blogs, responses to the images on websites like www.witness.org or Copwatch,
162 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject they induce an engagement of strangers and distant audiences people with the witness image. This is what Reading (2009) thinks of as the performance of witnessing. People witness distant suffering as a form of surveillance, and enabled by technologies that might be thought of as ‘vernacular’ or at least non-official. Surveillance here might be seen as active witnessing that at least minimally serves the social function of response-ability, of bearing witness to an atrocity committed elsewhere due to the performance initiated through the devices/ services of mobile phones, MMS, YouTube, Witness and others. I am clearly here claiming a valuable social role for mobile phone technology and the very act of visual archiving when I treat surveillance as not a top-down but as participatory, rhizomatic, vernacular process. It generates a community of viewers across geopolitical spaces that then constitute a ‘witness’ to the atrocity. I shall return to surveillance’s more active-ethical aspect of bearing witness in the next chapter. For now, it is adequate to suggest that we see participatory surveillance as a process that involves performative acts of documenting, archiving, circulation, commentary that are not within the purview of the state or its organs of government. Participatory surveillance of the kinds discussed above would therefore be a democratizing of processes of documentation, of the very structure of making-visible, and of the channels of information exchange through which social critique, commentary and activism could possibly emerge. With such activism a sense of the to-be-improved or to-be-protected- public emerges. Participatory surveillance is the organization of the public into surveilling itself and its borders in order to ensure the smooth, legitimate functioning of the state, the safety of the public itself and to guard the erosion of freedoms and rights of that public. Accountability of the state in achieving all of these is at stake when the public decides to surveill itself and its structures. Sting operations are an instantiation of participatory surveillance where the citizenry turns the camera on to those authorities and centres of power tasked with protecting the citizens, but found wanting.
Sting operations, leaks and the political Central to participatory surveillance acts like sting operations is a philosophico- cultural assumption: that the mechanics of government, administration, the law, business can be made to yield their secret. Adapting Kirstie Ball’s (2009)
163 Citizenship and Identity arguments about interiority and exposure, it is possible to see sting operations as a process through which the interiority of the subject is made visible. The term ‘exposure’ here is being used in a slightly different sense from that in chapter Three (Data) where it was defined as ‘the making public of intimate moments, functions and emotions’. In that case exposure was a negative form of surveillance, while here, when it unravels the mysteries of a state or authority, it performs a different order of things. Exposure here is the ‘presentation to view in an open or public manner’ (Ball 2009: 648) Sting operations are central to participatory surveillance’s larger socio- cultural project because aspects of an organization or state’s ‘interiors’ become exposed through the process of data gathering, representation, interpretation and circulation within the surveillance assemblage that involves technological devices (cameras, servers, editing rooms), people and a cultural belief in the necessity of this information. Sting operations are therefore the consequence of a cultural phenomenon in the power of information to reveal the legitimacy or illegitimacy of particular acts of those in power. Sting operations presuppose that structures can be opened up to inquiry. That is, they assume that processes of the state or the corporate body can be rendered transparent. The accompanying assumption here is that the opacity of a system is a deliberate rendering-invisible of its processes. Founded on the assumption that what is hidden is most probably socially and legally unacceptable, the sting operation seeks to dissect and expose the innards. Sting operations presuppose criminality, deviance and wrong-doing in the object of their operations. Such operations also imply that the innards once exposed yield meaning— whether of the corruption of the individual or the illegality of a process. The state or administration or the individual who is the object of such an operation is rendered into a textual artefact whose meaning is readily available once the exposure-process is complete. By participation in such a project the public and its intermediaries (the actual individuals involved in the operation) seek to assert control over the surveilled-exposed object. Thus power shifts away from the state or the ‘body’ exposed towards the instruments and individuals (public) of the operation. Just as witnessing makes a different subject within the surveillance assemblage (as discussed above), sting operations reconstitute the figure of authority into the object of critique, ridicule, criminality or deviance. The authority’s public face, as authorized by social and legal norms, and their ‘interiors’ are both to be visible. In other words, the society expects the person
164 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject behind the public face to be as visible as the persona. It is the person behind the public face, taken to be ‘authentic’, that is assumed to lend credibility to the public face. When this person is revealed to be corrupt or degenerate then the public face is affected as well, or exposed as a mask. What we are looking at here is the judging of the public face by the person behind it—now standing exposed—and evaluation of the person in conjunction with the public face of the authority that stands between its ‘true’ self and the world. Exposure is the attempt to connect the person’s interiority with the public face, the subject with the social world of its existence and functions. Since all subjects exist and are formed in and through social interactions it is assumed that when sting operations reveal the corrupt person behind the public face all of the authority’s (embodied in the individual just exposed) social and official interactions are to lose their credibility as well. There appears in discourses of transparency, a link forged between public accountability and the visibility of processes, between transparency and accountability. This relies on an older notion of the public trust as possible when the workings of the authority are visible. Transparency therefore makes a direct connection between visibility and trust, and sting operations are attempts to test the trustworthiness of people, organizations and processes whose workings are not publicly visible. Closely aligned with the culture of transparency and its articulation in the form of sting operations is the culture of whistle-blowing. Whistle-blowing, like sting operations, is founded on the visibility principle, and generates what legal scholars have termed ‘involuntary transparency’ (as opposed to mandatory transparency embodied in processes like the RTI), that is more or less forced on reluctant state agencies and organizations (Shkabatur 2012). Involuntary transparency is the consequence of what those in power claim are ‘leaks’. Leaks imply porous borders and the transmission of objects or data from the inside to the outside and sometimes vice versa. Sting operations, whistle-blowing and leaks—such as the twentieth century’s most famous instance, Wikileaks (WL)—demonstrate a major shift in notions of the state’s ‘body’ or self where its borders are not impervious but penetrable and vulnerable. If, as Laura Otis (1999) in her famous study of scientific and literary writing of the nineteenth century has shown the idea of the self demanded a sense of closed borders that separates the self from the world, leaks represent the collapse of the idea of the government or any authority as bounded, limited and closed-off. Whistle-blowing and sting operations therefore constitute a dual move, of
165 Citizenship and Identity surveillance-as-invasion and surveillance-as-revelation. First there has to be the penetration of the thus-far secure and secretive organization or state agency and second, there has to be the extraction of materials (data) from the inside to the outside. Sting operations as surveillance is about the flow of information from the inside to the outside when the agency refuses to open up its borders (America has the Free Flow of Information Act). This participatory surveillance of the dissident kind when organized into processes such as WL becomes central to the defence of the public as public. Note The Hindu’s ‘Behave Yourself, India. The Youth are Watching’ campaign. It suggests that the politicians be ready to have the answers to the questions likely to be asked by over 150 million young people making their voting debut in the 2014 general elections. This surveillance by the general public is born out of a cultural imaginary where the public has to be defended against the wiles and guiles of dubious politicians. Such a participatory surveillance becomes a mode associated with public truth-telling, or parrhesia. I have elsewhere argued that WL represents a digital parrhesia. Democracy and public space, I proposed ‘is the space where new communities are formed and civil societies energised through practices of truth-telling’ (2011). Participatory surveillance such as sting operations, mobile witnessing, WL and whistle-blowing are key elements that defend the publicness of the public and possess, as a result, considerable political relevance in ensuring that the public stays a public. This ‘publicising’ into the public space of matters of relevance for the democracy to function through the rise of mobile witnessing and increased emphasis on transparency marks the new visibility regimes of governance. Epistemic models of democracy emphasize the ability of the democratic system to track the truth, especially about what the common good is. For the people to select the best candidates, in a variant of this model of democracy, they need to have ‘politically relevant information’. What is crucial is to have institutional mechanisms through which politically relevant information can be transmitted to the people. This implies, as should be evident, the existence of communications networks—and here the overlaps with Habermas’ views on communication and public sphere should be evident—through which the politically relevant information is transmitted to all people, where they can then deliberate and make their political choices. The production and supply of information through, for instance, dissident surveillance modes such as sting operations, might, in this (maybe idealistic) view, further a political maturity:
166 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject is India old enough to take the truth about itself (such as the revelation that we are one of the most corrupt nations in South Asia now). Can its people, who are proud of its democracy, engage in sustained thinking about the revelations and what they say about India, instead of merely starting out on riots and violence? (The threat of violence and rioting serves the government with a brilliant excuse to not release information. Thus we have essentially gagged ourselves by not taking these truths and examining them critically—instead we start a riot, and the government is able to tell us that we are not politically mature to handle disturbing information, and so gagging is necessary). Do the revelations, still on as I write in the last months of 2013, about corruption of UPA ministers, bureaucrats, MPs and MLAs, enable a political literacy? Will the Indians be willing to take consistent revelations (not one-off subjective opinions, but sustained discoveries of cables that reveal corruption across the political leadership and spectrum) seriously and ensure that these politicians do not get re-elected? Will PILs be filed based on these discoveries and revelations, or will it turn future generations away from politics? We do not yet know if such deliberations will take place. There is still a long way to go. Deliberations about what constitutes the common good are possible only when the right kind of information is available. Historically we know that democracy demands a free press (dictatorships are characterized by a tight state control over the media). While in recent times there has been an erosion of faith in the media (with embedded journalism and paid news that makes newspapers government or corporate PR agents), WL represents a quasi- institutional media and communications mechanism through which politically relevant information can be transmitted. Another form of deliberation might emerge. The unsettling cables (The India Cables, from WL) do not replace existing political views of parties or the public. Rather, the parties and public contest these cables (as we can see from the comments of Sushma Swaraj, Manmohan Singh and others on the India cables) and their meanings.10 This is good. The contest over the meanings of the cables (do they signify a failure of a mechanism, or simply an individual’s dishonesty?) is central to political life and political culture itself. They intensify
10 See ‘What WikiLeaks said is what people also think of BJP', The Hindu 27 March 2011 (http://www.hindu.com/2011/03/27/stories/2011032764981200.htm, accessed 10 December 2013). Also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKZC1FLYPb0 (accessed 10 December 2013) 167 Citizenship and Identity public debates as well (we see these already appearing in the form of letters to the editor): does corruption stem from a weak legislature? Or should we demand greater judicial activism? Current political views on such matters as judicial activism are unsettled by the evidence about the corruption in the legislature and executive. Such unsettling accounts are healthy for democ racy precisely because they call for different viewpoints on various political issues: ‘contentious coexistence [of unsettling accounts and official stories] … is democracy in practice’ (Payne 2008: 281). Studies of parrhesia have suggested that the culture of truth-telling is connected to not only knowledge but to education and democracy (see, for example Peters 2003). It also entails, according to others, a duty to improve conditions once the truths have been told (Sementelli 2009). If democracy depends on informed choices then: (i) the digital parrhesia constitutes a mecha nism through which politically relevant information can be disseminated; (ii) there has to be a concerted attempt to keep these mechanisms functioning; and (iii) an obligation to respond to the truths revealed in the process. (This last assumes a certain political maturity on the part of the civil society in its response.) WL’s revelations have been used in various parts of the world. The Charles Taylor case in The Hague is among the most prominent. More recently and spectacularly, the revolution in Tunisia might have found some inspiration in WL’s disclosure of the regime’s extent of corruption—one anonymous Tunisian referenced WL’s revelations about his government on the Guardian website. Quotes from WL have been used in Spanish cases, etc.11 A juridical-political response to the information, it seems, is made possible by digital parrhesia. When WL announces ‘help us keep governments open’ as its tagline, it is placing an injunction on us in civil society to further the cause of information- sharing, to enable the parrhesia. For people to make democracy work, everybody has to be able to participate. This ‘ability’ to participate is, I suggest, what WL encourages and enables. I can now participate in discussions on Indian democracy, even without being trained in political theory, because, as an informed reader with access to the India Cables, I can see that something is
11 See Andy Worthington’s despatches and coverage of the Obama government’s attempt to stall proceedings against Bush regime torturers, some of it at http://www.worldcantwait. net/index.php/wikileaks/6847-wikileaks-bush-and-obama-pressured-spain-germany- not-to-investigate-us-torture. (accessed 10 December 2013) 168 Performative Surveillance and the Witness-Subject wrong with democracy. Information here makes me a political literate, and participatory surveillance is central to the acquisitions and circulation of politically relevant information that makes me literate. Democracy is about the visibility of power and of openness about this power. The New York Times when it launched, in collaboration with WL and the Guardian, the publication of the cables, described the function of WL thus:
The cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations – and, in some cases, the duplicity – of allies on the receiving end of American courtship and foreign aid … As daunting it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.
The making of a narrative society through the archive that is WL may not directly be about democracy. But it embodies, in my view, a process of democratization. The stories making up a narrative society question established norms of interpreting these and other similar stories, and thereby cause the production of new ones. Thus, after the Abu Ghraib pictures were released debates within the USA raged as to how the visuals need to be ‘read’. News of the civilian deaths in Iraq, in conjunction with the Iraq Body Count project, sparked great anger at American interventionism. They ruptured political silence and political consensus, and sparked debates at both private and public levels, from church to blogs, TV to newspapers. The most dramatic outcome of the Abu Ghraib disclosures was that former prisoners from US detention centres also spoke out. Ethan McCord, formerly of the Bravo Company involved in the Baghdad helicopter incident (he was the one filmed rescuing and carrying the injured children into the van), was moved to speak out after he saw the work on WL. All this means that the space of debate is opening up, where official accounts do not have the monopoly on legitimacy: there are, WL shows, other stories as well.
The rise of the witness-subject From the above analysis it is clear that the responsible citizen is one who takes charge of herself/himself, seeks improvement (medical, financial) and management (risk). Self-surveillance is the first stage in the making of such a
169 Citizenship and Identity responsible citizen. This also involves the consensual sharing of information by way of loyalty cards and the publicizing of private emotions, confessing to quirks and personal preferences on TV, thus exhibiting voluntarily, the self to the gaze of the public. In talk shows such self-disclosures place an individual under the willing surveillance of strangers-at-a-distance in what is essentially a socio-cultural exposure, and very often produce cultural scripts about that society—about exploitation, cruelty and corruption. Self-surveillance transforms the surveilled citizen into a willing participant in the conditions and processes of surveillance, which then asks her/him to move beyond the self. Surveillance becomes an acceptable, indeed necessary, part of citizenship and generates the sense of belonging. Self-surveillance thus becomes a mode of governance itself, where self-disclosure and self-monitoring become pedagogic devices that teach us how to lead better lives. But participatory surveillance also takes more active forms (a part of what I have termed dissident surveillance), moving outward beyond the self through the acts of mobile witnessing that we now see on TV and the digital media. Mobile witnessing converts the amateur passive spectator into a witness and helps reconstruct the subjectivity of the spectator as a witness-subject. More organized forms of such participatory surveillance also morph the citizen into the surveilling citizen-subject, even as processes like sting operations and leaks ensure a certain visibility of the processes of democracy and the state. Founded on assumptions about the need for visibility and transparency, such forms of participatory surveillance might be read as the public’s attempt to stay a public. It generates a political literacy based on the availability and circulation of politically relevant information. The new citizen subject is the responsible citizen who monitors herself but also crafts a role for herself in subjecting to scrutiny the social and political realms. Witnessing becomes a form of orientation towards the world and the witness- subject is a watchful citizen who reports atrocity, corruption and ‘deviance’. The citizen’s subjectivity is forged in the crucible—should he or she so choose—of such a surveillance of the public around her/him. By participating in the surveillance of politicians, bureaucrats, authority and, in the larger context, the state itself the witness-subject establishes a different order of linkage with the state. The witness-subject is one who is called upon to establish this different order of relationship, of being responsible for monitoring the functioning of the state.
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Participatory surveillance is a mode of participation in the larger social, economic and political processes of the society and government. The demand for information, the exposure of the mechanics of power, documenting atrocities, posting and passing on information, and the informed political literacy generated by the above two constitutes the citizen subject’s intervention in the socio-political processes. A cultural literacy grows among the governed through the dissident surveillance of the governors, of processes of law, and about their own rights through the acquisition of information, leaked or acquired legally. Surveillance has the potential to produce a shift, from spectator to conscious witness-subject. If the public space is the space produced by sharing of information, the witness-subject by participating in the surveillance mechanisms not only claims the right to be in that space but also performs essential services to keep that space public. What makes me a full-fledged, responsible citizen of this public space is my acceptance of the role as witness-subject.
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6 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship
he end of the previous chapter postulated the emergence of the witness- subject, a more complicated category that evolves out of the vulnerable subjectT I spoke of in the early chapters. I also argued that surveillance is increasingly multiveillance and participatory, whether as Neighbourhood Watch or sting operations. When we make a case for surveillance as participatory we could also, I think, speculate about an alternate view of monitoring as only top-down, oppressive and panoptical. We volunteer information in order to establish sociality and/or gain benefits from manufacturers and retailers. But, even more significant than such a form of participation in surveillance and data-gathering, as I have argued in the preceding chapter, is a condition where the watchers become the watched and vice versa in participatory surveillance when sting operations and such processes turn the camera on to structures and figures of authority to dissect their mechanics in order to reveal their ‘true’ character. We actively participate in surveillance cultures as individuals and as members of the public thereby defending the publicness of the public. I wish now to move beyond this notion of participatory surveillance. I now propose that surveillance can provide a social framework for memory in any society. Indeed it functions as a form of social memory and as a system of social relations. The witness-subject produces memory as an individual but also interprets the past, and what she/he sees in the present, because of social 172 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship frameworks of memory. To witness is to participate in meaning-making, and meaning-making is a social process. If witnessing produces subject-positions in particular social contexts and through social interactions (Oliver 2004) then these social interactions now include surveillance. In other words, the witness- subject is constituted through surveillance and produces meaning based on these and other social frameworks but—and this is the key point—it is in her/ his address and response-ability to what is witnessed that her/his subjectivity emerges. To phrase it differently I am arguing that surveillance enables not only the emergence of the witness-subject but also of the very subjectivity of this subject when she/he responds to the distant Other appearing in data or on screen. The witness-subject in this ‘form’ of surveillance is the ethical respondent to the Other and bears witness to this Other. Surveillance might then be said to be: a system of social relations in that it is a condition in and through which we relate to people we know and do not know; a process of making social memory; a condition of organizing distant strangers as proximate at least culturally and; as a condition of bearing witness to the less privileged or suffering Other, even as it produces the intersubjectivity of the global witness-subject. Surveillance enables a global witness culture, especially in the age of digital media, and carries within it the possibility of the making of a global witness citizenship. As should be evident I am now moving away from surveillance as a top-down mechanism of social sorting and even participatory process towards a sense of surveillance as a process that generates particular frames of reading the world, the suffering Other and which, as a consequence, reconstitutes us as witness whose subjectivity emerges in conjunction with the suffering Other. I am now thinking of surveillance as a globalizing process that mobilizes compassion and is a preliminary moment to humanitarian intervention into the lives of Others. This is not to deny the authoritarian and oppressive nature of most surveillance today: what I am proposing is that structures of surveillance carry/offer the potential to effect other kinds of monitoring if founded on a different cultural literacy and assumptions. Surveillance instituted by threat, hatred and tyranny might be profitably opposed by that instituted by cultures of compassion, notions of human rights and acknowledgement of suffering. It is not the technology of surveillance that drives a cultural change, but rather the converse: it is the culture that produces certain kinds of technology. Hence the assumptions behind the construction of surveillance mechanisms are important in determining what these mechanisms might be used for.
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It is my contention here that the amplification of surveillance in civil society, what I have called dissident surveillance in the preceding chapter, cannot be evaluated in the same way as the intensification of surveillance by the state that we see around us today. First, surveillance of this kind posits a new order of social relations that is not about monitoring and social sorting for control purposes (which would be state surveillance) but about safeguarding the social spaces of our lives, the structures put in place to serve us and processes that are, or ought to be, about us. It is civil society’s surveillance of itself and of its constituents that converts us into witnesses from passive spectatorship. Dissident surveillance also places structures of power under scrutiny so that the civil society can defend its ‘civilness’. Second, the structure of transmissions of memory, archives and experiences—compiled through surveillance— through the digital world is an instance of an amplification that relies more on reciprocity and sharing that places distant Others in our line of vision.
Witnessing The inadvertent filming of legislators watching porn in the Legislative assembly (2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzczRVL3yoo , Last accessed: 26 June 2014) , policemen riding without helmets or on vehicles without proper number plates, politicians’ vehicles parked haphazardly, wardrobe malfunction at celebrity events and intimate moments of celebs caught by passer-by—all flit across screens for our viewing pleasure. We also see the Arab Spring and Occupy unfolding on our screens, with startling similarities in both sets of images where, according to at least one commentator, ‘the hard revolutions of the Arab Spring, which ask for not much more than democracy, civil liberties, and a decent Keynesian economy, turn out to be the inspiration for an American imitation that takes on the very center of American capitalism’ (Mitchell 2012: 8–9). And then there are the Hazare campaigns across the streets of India’s metropolises and spontaneous protests against the Delhi rape in the NCR. We are everyday bombarded with accidentally captured visuals and randomly collected data about people and places. We live in the age of spectatorship, whether we wish to or not. But the key shift is from spectatorship, which implies a rather passive condition, to witnessing in the age of YouTube and other multimodal services for sharing images and all kinds of data. Websites like www.witness.org (and
174 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship we shall see other examples later in the chapter) demonstrate this shift as well. I am working here with the standard dual meaning of witnessing: to be an eyewitness to something, i.e., based on first-hand knowledge, but also to bear witness to something beyond recognition, beyond perhaps even seeing. And as we shall see towards the end of this chapter the witness in the spaces of the nation constitutes a certain form of occupation and offers the potential to construct a different kind of subjectivity. Bearing witness demands of the spectator a conscious cultural literacy, about rights, about the inviolability of the human being, of dignity and pain. In what is surely a circular condition, increased surveillance by the people of tyrannical systems and governors produces a cultural literacy about what it means to be subjects, a public or a democracy, even as this cultural literacy demands greater surveillance of the power structures. I refer to this culturally literate ‘viewer’ as witness rather than as spectator. This witness is an important constituent of the civil-public culture of rights, compassion and human dignity. Commentators have proposed that Human Rights campaigns require cultural foundations because the culture of Human Rights can revitalize public institutions as well as civil society (Slaughter 2007, Nayar 2012 ). Surveillance when turned around onto power structures carries the potential to serve the civil society in this manner, when it fashions spectators as witnesses. With Bluetooth, MMS and instant uploads to the WWW we enter a new era of surveillance that demonstrates the power of the amateur eyewitness to generate images and documents for world-wide dissemination at a click.
Eyewitnessing and bearing witness Anna Reading treats mobile witnessing—witnessing and memory-making made feasible by prosthetic, wearable and interpenetrating media forms—as a performative act ‘between the unseen dead, the survivor with the camera, the other survivors captured in the image, and the public witnesses to the survivor in the form of blog friends, co-bloggers, and news, editors’ (2009: 67–8). What Reading focuses on is not only the content made possible through the performance with the mobile phone but the mobilization and mobilities of the image by the public and by institutions. In the age of the digital an immediate sensory and private experience becomes a matter of public record. Such a mobilization is the ‘performance of witnessing that involves people who are not directly involved but who witness
175 Citizenship and Identity the testimony of the witness’ (72). Mobile witnessing therefore suggests the making of a performative act involving a series of interpenetrating structural conditions and processes: (i) proximate and distant others near-simultaneously linked, (ii) media forms and technology that pick up and transmit images and (iii) blogging and instant messaging, plus scraps and posts on FB that enable immediate response-ability to the events being uploaded. Mobile witnessing links those who are eyewitnesses and those bearing witness in an almost instantaneous performative that together stage the event, in what I think of as an extension of surveillance culture. This performative of the extended, or amplified, surveillance culture of the new age is one which locates the body of the eyewitness (or witness-subject), the event and the body of the distant witness in multiple temporalities. Made possible by digitization and globalization the three are located in the ‘globital memory field’ where ‘events are witnessed in time and people’s mediated witnessing, including mobile witnessing of events is articulated, rearticulated and disarticulated through intersecting temporalities’ (Reading 2011: 299). Surveillance now in the age of mobile witnessing and globital time is the making visible of events through the mediated linkage (in time) between ‘the time of the event itself, the time(s) of the utterance or text and the time(s) of audiences witnessing the utterance’ (Reading 2011: 304). More importantly for social memory is the text’s iterability—what Reading following Derrida and others distinguishes as the instance of witness testimony as opposed to the instant of the event (304)—across platforms and geopolitical, social and cultural formations. What used to be previously the domain of state surveillance with its satellite mapping or dossier-building is now commonplace. As a case of witnessing that is more inclusive and not predetermined by the state let us turn to the Satellite Sentinel Project under the Enough Project (‘The project to end genocide and crimes against humanity’). In its post of 22nd October 2013 there is a ‘Human Security Warning: Sudan Army Poised for Offensive in South Kordofan or Abyei’ (www.enoughproject.org/blogs/new-report-human-security-warning- sudan-army-poised-offensive-south-kordofan-or-abyei, accessed 27 October 2013). The aim is first and foremost to ‘provide a human security warning for civilians’ living in the area. The satellite visual shows heavy truck and artillery movement. With updated visuals and details we become privy, for the first time in human history, to such activities as they happen, but also, due to the forum where these visuals appear, to the larger issue of connecting whatever is happening on the ground in Sudan with multiple histories of genocide. That is, even as 176 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship we become eyewitnesses to the events on the ground, the very intertextual nature of digital media’s archiving causes us to bear witness to the events as yet another instance, rather than an instant, of inhumanity. This productive tension between eyewitnessing and bearing witness, reflecting that between the instant and the instance, is specifically an achievement of global media. I propose that in this new age of surveillance we all have the potential, if we so choose, to bear witnesses although we might not be in the subject positions of the eyewitness to the events. Eyewitnessing is the factual recording of events by an individual who is ‘at the scene’. Eyewitnessing produces a subject position. Subject positions are historically and culturally determined. Eyewitnessing is spectatorship while bearing witness has a moral and ethical response woven into it. The eyewitness could be an accidental spectator at the event, the one who bears witness is removed from the event and yet linked to it. Bearing witness is something more than the physical presence at the time and place of the event. Bearing witness, in Kelly Oliver’s words, is about ‘bearing witness to a truth about humanity and suffering that transcends those facts’ (2004: 80). It is about interpreting an extreme or horrific event and bearing witness to the unspeakable. If the eyewitness is the embodied viewer of an event, the one who bears witness might very well be the distanced viewer of the same. The distant/distanced viewer is armed with social frameworks of interpretation and recognizes whatever the eyewitness is reporting or showing. Bearing witness is to see more than what is shown, and this demands an insertion into the shared social memory. Eyewitnessing stages the events for us distant viewers, and leads us to bear witness to something more.
Witnessing as occupation Witnessing is an act of occupation. I use ‘occupation’ adapted from WJT Mitchell’s innovative reading of the ‘Occupy’ campaigns (2012). That is,
occupatio is … the seizure of an empty place, one that is supposed to be res nullius, not owned by anyone, not private property. It is a demand in its own right, a demand for presence, an insistence on being heard, before any specific political demands are made; a demand that the public be allowed to gather and remain in a public space. But the demand of occupatio is made in the full knowledge that public space is, in fact, pre-occupied by the state and the police … (10, emphasis in original)
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Witnessing is a form of surveillance that takes up the space of the public sphere, disallowing potentially the take-over of this space by figures of authority. It places, from a distance, through mobile phones, video cameras or handy-cams, our eyes in that space. That is, we occupy the space, demanding that our presence as citizens, victims, those who belong or ought to belong to that space and to whom the space belongs, be acknowledged. It becomes, I propose, an indirect and potentially political way of occupying that public space. (By public space I do not mean strictly the spaces of roads, parks and streets, but any space—such as the legislature or the state ministry office, or the police station—from which/where proceed the governance and regulation of the life of the public.) Further, as Mitchell suggests, occupation has a ‘negative role in the production of an empty space that is, paradoxically, a space of fullness and plenitude’ (10, emphasis in original). The monitoring of forms of governance is occupation in a different (perhaps negative) sense that it is only by exposing the nature of these spaces by illegitimately filling them up with our presence that we defend our right to be a public. Witnessing is the potential to seize the spaces of governance, authority, the law, institutions and organizations by placing millions of eyes upon them. Occupation is not therefore a mere trope for witnessing, it represents surveillance carried to its fullest potential because the positions of the thus-far distant and passive spectator and the power structure have been reversed: the spectator bears witness to the events unfolding on the Delhi streets during the protests through mobile witnessing and archivization. Witnessing of this kind transforms the nature of the space being occupied by cameras and therefore, by extension, distant eyes and bodies generating and transmitting information behind those eyes. Live telecasts, podcasts, commentaries, YouTube uploads, file sharing and numerous such modes transform the public space of protest and resistance. It is through such a direct and/or indirect occupation of the space that we come to witness the Other in this other space, and thereby to our own subjectivity as witnessing-subjects. If subjectivity is, as Kelly Oliver following Emanuel Levinas proposes, ‘an openness to the other’ (2001: 206) then contemporary surveillance culture’s globital memory fields that makes us bear witness to that which is distant—removed from any direct ‘vision’, so to speak—offers the potential to produce new regimes of subjectivity founded on relations with this distant other. I am here clearly shifting surveillance away from not only its pejorative and oppressive connotations but also from its
178 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship commonly accepted grounding in vision and visual culture. Instead, by focusing on memory citizenship—to which I shall return in the next section—in globital contexts and the new forms of subjectivity suggested by such a citizenship I hope to indicate a different order of seeing the Other. I return to Kelly Oliver who argues:
Seeing is not just a matter of matter, but also a matter of the circulation of ideas, language, and images. Vision is the result of a process of relationships between bodies in the world, between images, traditions, institutions, laws, myths. What we see is the product of the process of coming to vision that is invisible yet can be interpreted and elaborated in its performance and effects. Vision is the result of the circulation of biosocial energy … Subjectivity is the result of a process of witnessing that connects us through the tissues of language and gestures. (2001: 222–3)
This circulation of biosocial energy, albeit mediated, is what links us to distant Others. Surveillance here is the set of social relations established through this circulation. All subjectivity therefore has, in the age of global circulation of biosocial energy, globital memory fields and transcultural memory citizenship, the potential for intersubjectivity. The occupation of spaces of everyday life, authority and victimage in this fashion—mediated, with cameras and equipment, but also dangerously amateurishly—is a precondition for knowing the Other, whether victim or oppressor. To occupy the spaces of the Other by extended visual means and media might also be supplemented by occupation through the imagination. Representations of the Other, as several scholars and theorists, including Edward Said in his classic Orientalism (1978) and more recently Roger Silverstone (2007) and Shani Orgad (2012) have shown us, are central to how we understand ourselves through how we imagine the Others. If, on one axis (of representation) the Other is the strange, primitive and hostile Other to us, on another axis the Other is like us, a stranger with whom we share a common humanity (Orgad 55). Judith Butler’s thesis about the shared vulnerability that unites us (2004) is an argument that builds on this solidarity of possible suffering, a solidarity made possible by imagining ourselves, after an encounter with representations, in the place of the Other. That is, Butler asks us to consider, to imagine, how we might possibly come to occupy in a particular way the place of the Other but never supplanting the Other.
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Witnessing and its representational modes, which enables us to bear witness to the distant Other, as I have emphasized earlier, is the preliminary moment to the possible imagining ourselves occupying the place of the Other. To imagine sharing ‘their’ vulnerability, whether in Sri Lanka or Somalia, by entering ‘their’ repertoire of recalled images—memory citizenship, as noted earlier—is to occupy the same space as the Other. To imagine pain—the pain of Others, as Susan Sontag famously argued (2003) as did Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello in the novel of the same name (Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, 2004)—but to imagine being in the same space where such pain is imminent. This is occupation of an entirely different order that calls upon us to place ourselves in a geopolitically and culturally distant place. When, for instance, the Satellite Sentinel Project (www.satsentinel.org) an offshoot of the Enough Project, documents crises—from Starvation Warfare in Sudan (archived on 18 October 2012 at the www.satsentinel.org) to genocides across the world—it not only makes us bear witness to whatever horror is unfolding in the here and the now, it also visually places us in these zones of conflict, deprivation and suffering, enabling us to navigate burnt-out villages, the ruins of cities and the overflowing refugee camps. Admittedly, this witnessing structure and attendant imaginative occupation of the place of the Other relies excessively on the visual. With Google Earth and projects like Crisis in Darfur people sitting in any part of the world can come to occupy the place of genocide, natural disaster and injustice. Surveillance’s Others demand an ethical witnessing to this geography of oppression and suffering. If, as in Holocaust memories or memories of similar atrocities, we can potentially participate in the archives as migrants, it should surely be possible to conceive of new technologies of surveillance as enabling not just a memory citizenship—which is about access to archives—but into witness citizenship. Intersubjectivity through such a citizenship that constructs our self in mediated conjunction—as address and response-ability—with the suffering distant Other is the pre-cursor (since most of it is possible through the movement of the cursor on your screen) to the making of the compassionate cosmopolitan.
Witnessing memory Surveillance is representational technology, mostly in real-time, but also open to archiving and later retrieval. As sociologists like David Lyon have pointed out, surveillance is based on certain assumptions about people, identities,
180 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship behaviour and characteristics. That is, surveillance relies on a priori notions about people and their attributes and intentions (‘potential terrorist’, ‘incipient trouble maker’, ‘corruptible politician’). Through the data compiled within surveillance profiles are built up, dossiers prepared and biographies composed. It is when civil society, consciously or inadvertently, does this same compilation, that it moves from passive spectatorship to witnessing. Founded, very often (as we saw in the case of sting operations), on assumptions about, say, institutions or offices, witnessing involves an intentionality: of documenting wrongs or deviations from law or social norms. Such assumptions simply mean that we as monitoring agents in a participatory surveillance culture recognize what/who is being surveilled— that a certain kind of action with luggage or vehicles constitutes ‘suspicious behaviour’ and therefore a possible terror threat. Surveillance technologies such as cameras are objects functioning as interlocutors between us and the world which generates a shared recognition of whatever is recalled from the shared database. Surveillance organizes our perceptions of the world, of the Others in the world, because it draws on social memory which it had constructed in the first instance. Surveillance relies on the relations across objects (cameras), people (those surveilled and those that surveill) and networks of information that store the data about those surveilled for recall later. This ‘recall’ constitutes, then, the social memory of that culture. This argument about surveillance culture as producing a community’s social memory might be further refined via Kevin Walby (2005). Walby suggests that we see the video surveillance text as an ‘initiating text’ where the ‘CCTV video is rewritten and reinterpreted as a series of texts which can coordinate social activity between different complexes of social organization’ (191). He adds: ‘Through the video as an “initiating text,” the act of the offender is written up and distributed to various institutions in a process involving televisual mall surveillance, risk detection and risk communication’ (191). Thus, in ‘neighbourhood watch’ in any community, the monitoring of passers-by on video produces a chain of responses, from the immediate viewer of the video, to the concerned authorities to finally the people who are tasked with intercepting or intervening in the unacceptable behaviour. Walby’s argument is that the text of the video initiates a series of responses that engage the dynamics of the community and, more importantly, deploy the community as a well-connected organization. The community’s responses and dynamics are coordinated by the presence of the text of the video camera. Thus, the camera and the resultant text
181 Citizenship and Identity can be seen as a kind of social glue that generates and organizes a community’s internal and external relations (i.e., within the community as well as with communities outside its borders). Various ranks, functions, people and services of the community are linked by this text, just as social memory does.1 What emerges from this discussion is that in place of a state-surveillance structure we can now see a civil society surveillance movement, controlled by culturally literate members of the public whose interests lie in keeping the civil society and by extension democracy, free and civil. Social memory is the memory of the past and the meaning of that past of a people, of civil society. It is distinct from collective memory in that collective memory references a particular group of people. Social memory is the ‘vaster collective memory’ (Brian et al 2012: 10). When surveillance throws up, through its networks of interpenetrating media—consisting today of corporate-owned, state- owned, independent and amateur media—images of caste atrocities, political corruption, police excesses, violence against women or terrorist acts, they are not simply monitoring events unfolding. Rather, these are archiving the events for future recall, and hence are representational strategies that stage these heinous and horrific acts. By staging these acts surveillance functions as a contributor to and instantiations of social memory because it is the latter that at once informs the interpretation of the events in the archive and is formed by the archive. To put it differently, surveillance enables a particular perception of the world (because it is, after all, a representational strategy) even as it is these perceptions that drive surveillance itself. Surveillance constitutes the frameworks of a society’s memory. And the best instances would be of Mumbai 26/11 in India and NYC 9/11 in the USA. Surveillance mediates our perceptions of Arabs, Pakistan, terrorism, even as these events or groups of people become objects of surveillance because they reside in India’s and America’s social memory. As members of this society or nation we are by necessity forced to generate a responsible response to the re-enactment of these surveilled events, of the very act of remembering, even as that remembering demands ethical response and desire to protect the community/society. Michael Rothberg and Yasmin Yildiz argue that ‘performances of memory can function as “acts of citizenship”’ (2011: 34). Migrants to archives of memory, they propose, ‘prompt a reconceptualization of memory as transcultural that leaves behind residual and unwittingly ethnicized models of remembrance’
1 On surveillance and social memory in cinema see Catherine Zimmer (2010). 182 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship
(34). When we participate in commemoration—whether of mourning or celebration—of national heroes or events we are engaging in acts of memory citizenship that reinforce our position/status as citizens belonging to a particular ethnic group, community or nation. Memory of the social kind is instantiated as cultural practices of recall—commemoration—and increasingly these memories are generated by what we can think of as non-formal or vernacular forms of witnessing. That is, where the social memory of a nation often had state sanction we now find the capture and circulation of images of that particular society—forming a repertoire of images, or social memory— being produced by/in civil society. When we forward the link, upload the link, comment on the content we are in the process of enlarging this archive of memories, even as we commemorate the events. Witnesses (or survivor-witnesses) who surveill scenes of disaster when they upload their images – such as the video by Adam Stacey, the London 7/7 survivor, and the subject of Anna Reading’s essay (2009)—often become focal points of extended links and personal stories by other victims. The linking facilitated by the new technologies offers private recollection the chance to merge into social memory. It is through such a conjoining of grief, of memories, that the victims participate in memory citizenship. More importantly, as the Holocaust demonstrates even today, such participation enables the carving out of an identity for the individual: the Holocaust survivor, the tsunami survivor, the Bhopal survivor.2
2 The social memory of Bhopal 1984 is a case in point. Suroopa Mukherjee writes about how, every December, on the 3rd, people holding candles assemble at a memorial for the victims of the gas leak. The police, she notes, are present as ‘watchdogs’ (2010: 42), that is, keeping the mourners and ‘rememberers’ under surveillance. Mukherjee then examines the nature of memories produced for the archives: any attempt to create a memorabilia for the Bhopal gas tragedy has its own limitations. Right from the beginning, two kinds of testimonial gathering were undertaken, one by survivor groups and the other by the mainstream media. The first kind was meant to feed into activism, keeping a target audience in mind, while the second was largely used to highlight human-interest stories. As mentioned earlier, human interest remains a staple middle-class response, and both types of testimonial gathering have been criticized for catering to populist demands and therefore discounted by oral history. It has been recognized that oral testimonials are “used” by hegemonic discourses to appropriate “voices” of people who are otherwise never heard. (42) 183 Citizenship and Identity
Memory citizenship when performed by witness-survivors who documented their acts of survival and ensuing victimhood gives them a sense of identity, a subjectivity that proceeds from their subject-position of having been historically located as eyewitnesses to the events. But the rest—as campaigners, activists, sympathizers—are migrants into these acts of memories, just as the memories of the witness-survivors migrate elsewhere. Received memories in the form of archives of mobile witnessing migrating into new social formations have the potential to not only energize the conscience of the receiving society but also enable it to bear witness to what was unspeakable about the event. I am claiming for memory work the task of producing bearers of witnesses whose subjectivity is produced not as historical subject-positions located at the events as they had unfolded but as sharers and even co-producers of the memories of those events. Rhizomatic acts of memory overflow the boundaries of ethnic groups or specific victims to become multidirectional and therefore possess the potential to convert even distant viewers/audiences into migrants into these archives of suffering. The distant viewer also, in other words, might actually bear witness, and develop an intersubjectivity through this participation in memory citizenship and distant witnessing. I will have reason to return to the theme of intersubjectivity constituted by witnessing later.
Transcultural memory and global mnemonic itineraries In global cultures reliant on visual images being beamed onto shared, discussed, blogged about, morphed practically simultaneously as the event unfolds we need to think of the end-products of surveillance as instantiating mnemonic processes that are transcultural. Astrid Erll describes transcultural memory as the ‘incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their continual travels and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders’ (2011: 11). All
Although Mukherjee is speaking here of the appropriation of real-life experiences into one or other kinds of archive and narrative, a larger point can also be made. Societies choose to remember in multiple ways, and very often private memories are subsumed into social and even national memory (as is clearly the case with 9/11, see Simpson). The point I wish to make is that eyewitnesses enable the bearing of witness to larger trauma or horror when they cede their memories to social memory in some form. Private commemoration of grief does not enable the extension of private memory into the public realm. 184 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship memory now, she proposes, is ‘ travelling memory as a result of global media carriers, worldwide TV audiences – whether for 9/11, 26/11, Katrina (USA), the tsunami (South and South East Asia) or the more recent Phailin (India) – and we now have unpredictable mnemonic itineraries. The wandering of representations from witnesses’ experiences carry their memories across geopolitical borders. If globalization hinges on travel—of people, places, objects, ideas and memories (Anthony Giddens, Manuel Castells, among others)—then representations of memories in the form of visual images or data or interviews present a cultural mobility of witness experiences that flow beyond borders. In the age of YouTube and digital networks, mnemonic itineraries are unpredictable because the path taken by any representation is essentially unpredictable. Memories get appropriated, morphed, assimilated into somebody else’s memories and representations. They become points of comparison and contrast for activists, campaigns and advocacy processes. I return here to the Open Source sharing of surveillance and participatory surveillance images—whether sting operations and information that gets uploaded on Transparency websites, of atrocities on www.witness.org , or the release of information by Wikileaks—as marking the emergence of new mnemonic itineraries that are unrestrained by the geopolitical borders of nations, bounded ethnic identities or political concerns. We of course under these circumstances function only as secondary witnesses, since we only have access to the memory of the witness through having watched the witness’s memory of an atrocity. It is possible to argue a case that such secondary witnessing is simply the over-reliance on media representations arousing strong emotional responses. However it is surely not stretching credulity too much to argue that even such a ‘misrecognition’ or ‘misidentification’ of the suffering Other constitutes a version of what we have experienced or seen, or even what we can imagine.3 Would it be too much to think of a memory community built around affective responses to what we witness—second-hand—as the suffering of an anonymous distant Other? Robert Eaglestone writing about the Holocaust and its representations argues that when the five-year old boy identifies himself, even wrongly, with the characters of a Holocaust memoir, the ‘incomprehensible event seems to become comprehensible’ (Eaglestone
3 On the empathetic unsettlement of such a secondary witness see Dominick LaCapra (1999). 185 Citizenship and Identity
2009: 22). Eaglestone suggests that even as we are conscious that this is ‘illicit comprehension’, we cannot prevent it (23). I am proposing that even an illicit comprehension renders the suffering Other intimate in some flawed but very real sense. Surveilling the suffering Other in this fashion does enable a certain comprehension of both the safe distance we occupy from the suffering but also that suffering has the ability to reach across—travel, in the form of memories narrated by the primary witness—this distance to us. This is why—to reiterate a thesis I made at the very beginning of the chapter—the amplification of surveillance cannot, strictly speaking, be thought of in the same light as the intensification of surveillance by the state that we see around us today. The structures of transmissions of memory, archives and experiences through the digital world is an instance of an amplification that relies more on reciprocity and sharing that places distant Others in our line of vision—a theme I shall return to very soon. Where collective memory has generally been restricted to particular ethnic or culturally homogenous groups with the rise of digital technology and extensive screen cultures from www.witness.org, Wikipedia, the Creative Commons and Open Access archives, such a condition of memory, or mnemonic practice, built on eyewitness accounts or images (i.e., the products of surveillance and making-visible) has changed radically. Thus, if the American NSA seeks to bring together the world’s multiple peoples, cultures and regions onto its screens in what is surely a globalized surveillance culture then we also see emerging a parallel surveillance culture of organizations like Transparency or Witness that unifies the world through surveillance but with entirely different ends in mind. Such a form of participatory global surveillance is an amplification of surveillance, over and beyond the state’s or the manufacturer’s, and a preliminary moment in the making of a global civil society. Globalized resources for surveillance (of various kinds) enable people from the very different ends of the earth to bear witness to the sufferings of distant strangers and to utilize these images for humanitarian discourses and acts in other parts of the world. Surveillance thus enables social relations among strangers and the remaindering of images and archives ensures potential participation of these strangers in global projects. Social memory is therefore writ across geopolitical borders and temporalities, making witnesses of us all—even when the terms of our responses to the events, our participation in the memories, are set by the first witnesses to the events—through a participation in the memory projects when we post links, forward images and enter discussion groups. Such access
186 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship to archives of distant suffering documented and produced by eyewitnesses often without corporate or state mediation in the age of amplified surveillance is a means of entering a global citizenship. Even though the archives determine the future interpretations by distant people—and it could be argued that the Holocaust is an example of how the events will be ‘read’ today due to the nature of first responses and archives—a global participation in the memory of distant suffering offers a route into a particular cultural literacy. Surveillance thus produces a whole new order of belonging where the fidelity to the past—that is, memory citizenship bounded by ethnic frames and restricting access to the contents of social memory to that ethnic group—is performed across the world in strange, unpredictable ways. The new regimes of surveillance produce new transcultural and global regimes of memory and therefore offer the potential to enable a global substantive citizenship as well.
Global witness citizenship I have thus far, in the earlier chapter and in the preceding sections in this chapter, argued a case for civil society’s deployment of surveillance as a part of its ‘civilness’. It is now possible to extend this case. Surveillance today creates conditions for the theatre of the Other, with the possibilities of generating a humanitarian imaginary founded on the staging of distant suffering. If the subject position is historically and socially determined then subjects are those who can respond and bear witness to the unspeakable narrative that the eyewitness initiates and instantiates. Witnessing in the theatre of the Other entails an ethical viewing of the events unfolding, interpreting what we see through the framework of a memory that is now, especially after 9/11, irreducibly transcultural. (I understand the shift from ‘surveillance’ with all its pejorative, oppressive connotations to ‘witnessing’ is a difficult one, but this is something, I suggest, that can be treated as potential within existing cultures of surveillance.) The theatre of the Other where we see staged the sufferings of distant strangers, the atrocities of distant strangers and the humanitarianism of distant strangers also therefore (and I retrieve here the point made about Satyamev Jayate and such shows in the earlier chapter) generate cultural scripts that are global and transcultural. Social memory’s migrancy, multidirectionality and potential for making distant witnesses becomes increasingly transcultural and thus offers a whole new way of viewing the world: as a series of Human Rights
187 Citizenship and Identity violations, hot spots of suffering, or sites of emancipatory work, because distant audiences bear witness to the events on these sites. Admittedly violations in such cases of the digital circulation of Others are abstracted conditions, abstracted from varied experiences of suffering and violation, but the question we need to ask is: even in decontextualized ‘texts’ such as these visuals of suffering, do we ever doubt that the body/bodies are suffering bodies? Even when we are unaware of the contexts of specific violations—Guantanamo Bay, for instance—do we miss the crucial point of the suffering body? This sounds suspiciously as though a universal grammar of suffering exists across geopolitical and linguistic barriers, but we need to ask ourselves whether these are really mere abstractions, or do we discern something beneath the representations? It is perhaps important to rely on the unexpected and amateurish photograph or video—the Rodney King beating would arguably be the most famous instance of this—than the corporate media’s coverage of, say, war, for, as Susan Sontag tells us, ‘no sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer’ (2003: 55). Judith Butler addressing the thorny issue of the ‘abstraction’ of torture victims in Abu Ghraib-Guantanamo Bay photographs writes: ‘the humans who were tortured who do not readily conform to a visual, corporeal, or socially recognizable identity; their occlusion and erasure become the continuing sign of their suffering and of their humanity’ (2009: 94). It is the broken, bruised, fragmented body that tells us, the distant witness, that the identity of this broken body is indeed that of a human but one who no longer fits the norms of what it is to be a coherent human. Broken bodies tell us what it means to be no longer human in an accepted sense of corporeal integrity and wholeness. Dissident surveillance demonstrates and documents social inequity and keeps alive the indifference, ignorance and above all the threatening might of social and governmental authority. Witness-survivor stories are crucial in the transcultural itineraries of memory. Tsunami survivors, Bhopal victims, Uttarakhand earthquake-flood victims narrate stories of survival and loss which when shared across platforms and borders cause viewers to bear witness beyond mere recognition. If we accept the assumption—as several commentators from Boltanski to Roger Silverstone and Kelly Oliver do—that witnessing is an ethical act as opposed to mere spectatorship, then transcultural itineraries of memory make us ethical witnesses from/at a distance thus making surveillance acquire a whole new meaning. We witness victims and by extension the conditions in which
188 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship these victims have been produced. If, as proposed, surveillance by civil society produces and demands a cultural literacy, then this cultural literacy informs or at least inflects a suitably ethical response to whatever unfolds on screen. The dead on the screen refuse to look back at us, as Butler notes (2009: 100) and it is the ‘ethical force of the photograph, to mirror back the final narcissism of our desire to see and to refuse satisfaction to that narcissistic demand’ (100). When the photographs or screen representation refuse the return of the gaze it stops our viewing in its tracks, and causes the subject of the gaze (the witness) to (ideally) reflect on the irreducible alterity of what is being seen: everything hinges on what the witness chooses to bring to the photograph. This is the culturally literate witness, alert to her/his memory citizenship, and not a passive spectator. New technologies are crucial players in generating transcultural memories and producing what Macarena Gómez-Barris calls ‘witness citizenship’, ‘forms of cultural, social, and political engagement that share an imagination about a traumatic past in order to activate and promote usually local solidarity’ (2010: 31). Although Gómez-Barris’ focus is on local activism that draws upon a collective memory and that energizes a certain collective viewing practise generated through the imagination of the past, I wish to consider the prospect of a transcultural witness citizenship here. In order to examine this prospect I turn to the digital domain, arguably the place where distant places are rendered proximate for viewing. Take www.witness.org or the large number of Human Rights videos posted on YouTube, on networks like International Dalit Solidarity Network. Commentators writing about YouTube culture have argued that the digital network very often escapes the commodity exchange system of other mass media (Jenkins 2011). This means we see these activist videos of distant suffering being circulated, forwarded, commented upon and inserted into advocacy campaigns from around the world as a form of cultural work that is not subject to market rules or aspirations. It is founded almost entirely on reciprocity and exchange and therefore might be read as a new form of mediation in the archiving of memory, and of surveillance of the Others. Such amateur video activism that then circulates (‘goes viral’) across the world represents what commentators have termed ‘vernacular creativity’ which is more a means of social networking than a form of cultural production (Burgess and Green 2011: 25–6). My focus is less on the nature of this creativity than its spectacular transmissibility, of the infinite ‘circulability’ of images
189 Citizenship and Identity that, in effect, ensure that the ‘event has not stopped happening’ (Butler 2009: 86). The unpredictable itineraries of images enable all sorts of populations and groups to become migrants into archives of suffering but also to bear witness to distant suffering, generating a condition of amplified surveillance as cultural work. While Burgess and Green might deny YouTube or Witness the status and power of cultural production, the fact that communities take up such acts of creativity and pass them on suggests more than mere social networking processes. It is cultural work. Cultural work of this kind is, however, amplified surveillance with a difference because (i) it is not pre-determined by either the state or media corporates with specific agendas, and can be made to serve radically different agendas depending on how it is framed, (ii) its transmission does not seek commercial benefits (except perhaps in terms of advertising revenue) and (iii) its content, focus (target group being filmed) is often random and accidental. If civil society is founded on communication and sharing, then the digital world offers a non-territorial system of founding a global civil society. Google Earth’s magnificent mapping of crisis and humanitarian issues on World is Witness (also at http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/ updates/618/, Last accessed: 26 June 2014)—Darfur, aging, the Holocaust, natural disasters—converts us into active witnesses instead of retaining us as passive spectators when it persuades us to follow links. In a detailed analysis that informs my own comments here Joshua Ewalt (2011) argues that the rhetoric of Googe Earth ‘makes and frames place for the purposes of motivating action in users’ (335). Although Ewalt acknowledges the politics of Google Earth—especially its corporate-capitalist nature, its military aesthetic and its visual capital and, more worryingly, its presentation of Africa as a continent with ‘embedded injustice’ (339–41)—he also points to the witnessing condition. The Google Earth-using subject, he argues, is constituted as a ‘globally motivated witness’ (346). It encourages, suggests Ewalt, ‘global entrance into place … and constructs a global subjectivity (motivational frame)’ even as it may ‘unintentionally reinforce colonial perspectives’ (347). Ewalt’s argument regarding the retention of colonial perspectives is well taken but this assumes that no other way of bearing witness to global vulnerability exists. Viewing the Crisis in Darfur on Google Earth, any individual Indian viewer safely distanced in time and space from the events, can also, if she/he chooses to utilize the social memory of contemporary India, view Darfur and
190 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship its genocidal history through a local history: the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, Gujarat 2002 and the numerous ethnicides and tribalisms of Northeast India. Ewalt’s argument presupposes that the viewers of Google Earth are uninformed about their local histories that might enable them to draw connections across the map to see—witness—a globe connected through disaster, genocide and suffering. If, as I have proposed above, subjectivity in the age of witnessing can be intersubjectivity, then this intersubjectivity evolves because one is unable to dissociate one’s local history and location from a viewing of global genocide or disaster. That is, one’s witness citizenship is the conjunction of local memories with global ones, local disaster and distant ones. What we see unravelling when we survey the maps on Google Earth is a series of connections, not discrete pockets of cruelty and troubles. We are converted into a witness of global events even as we see similarities between India’s Partition, Sri Lanka’s ethnic strife and the continuing tribal/ethnic/racial troubles of Northeast India. One’s subjectivity is the intersubjectivity of a global witness and one’s citizenship a global witness citizenship. (Admittedly, this civil surveillance leading onto culturally literate witnessing positing turns the infringement of privacy—even dictators have this right—into a condition leading to Human Rights campaigns. The ethics seem murky here, but I posit it as a necessary anterior moment to a larger ethics of witnessing, surveillance and monitoring when human life and dignity are at stake in unequal social relations.) If consumer citizenship can unite Coke guzzlers in interior Africa with pizza loving Japanese surely it is reasonable to imagine identifications forged through surveillance of disasters across the world. I am proposing therefore that surveillance of the kind manifest in Google Earth’s humanitarian mapping carries within it the potential to not only make intersubjectivities of global witness citizenship but also of a particular counter-cosmopolitanism built around compassion and shared vulnerability. If communities have to be imagined, as Benedict Anderson (1983) famously argued, then surely transracial (and even transspecies) communities can be imagined as well through the mobilization of compassion within a ‘pity economy’?
Frames of (global) witnessing Judith Butler (2004) presciently points out that we now are all connected through shared vulnerability, through the shared precariousness of our lives,
191 Citizenship and Identity whether in terms of terrorist attacks or bird flu. Historian Dipesh Chakraborty (2012) writing about global warming says:
The need arises to view the human simultaneously on contradictory registers: as a geophysical force and as a political agent, as a bearer of rights and as author of actions; subject to both the stochastic forces of nature (being itself one such force collectively) and open to the contingency of individual human experience; belonging at once to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of human societies. (14)
And again:
Humans today are not only the dominant species on the planet, they also collectively constitute —thanks to their numbers and their consumption of cheap fossil-fuel-based energy to sustain their civilizations—a geological force that determines the climate of the planet much to the detriment of civilization itself. Today, it is precisely the “survival of the species” on a “world-wide scale” that is largely in question. All progressive political thought, including postcolonial criticism, will have to register this profound change in the human condition. (15)
In both of these thinkers we can discern a shift from local conditions and problems to a linkage of the local with the global, from an attention to embedded and situated knowledges/concerns and issues to interconnected ones. If we can therefore, as Butler and Chakrabarty in their very different yet similar ways propose, see ourselves as connected species then surveillance offers a technology of imagining this connectedness. The notion of a global witness citizenship approximates to the arguments of Butler and Chakrabarty by considering the (mediated, technology-driven) mobilization of compassion then global citizenship itself is contingent upon surveillance and ethical witnessing. Surveillance of this kind carries within it the conditions essential for the making of a compassionate vernacular cosmopolitan whose concerns are local but who immediately sees within local issues the presence of the global and vice versa. It should be clear that this is an argument in favour of a wholly different scale and nature of cosmopolitanism, one founded on surveillance, global witness citizenship, technology and the mobilization of compassion and whose philosophical foundations are connectivity and shared vulnerabilities.
192 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship
What the amplified surveillance of today offers us is the possibility of evolving new frames of apprehending and recognizing the lives (and deaths) of distant Others. If witnessing enables us to occupy the space of the Other, this occupation also needs a framework to interpret the lives unfolding in front of our eyes. The frames of witnessing, it might be proposed, can consist not of the irreducible biological ontology of life but of precariousness. Judith Butler, following Susan Sontag and others, makes a case for such a new frame of reference and viewing life:
To say that a life is precarious requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life, but also that precariousness be an aspect of what is apprehended in what is living … norms of recognition ought to be based on an apprehension of precariousness. (2009: 13)
This frame also draws attention to precarity of life as a social condition— and this is where the question of the witness who could do some-thing about what she/he apprehends as the victim’s precarity comes in—as Butler notes:
To say a life is injurable … or that it can be lost, destroyed, or systematically neglected to the point of death, is to underscore not only the finitude of a life … but also its precariousness (that life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life). Precariousness implies socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. (14)
Precariousness, Butler tells us, ‘is coextensive with birth itself, which means that whether or not this infant survives, and that its survival is dependent on what we might call a social network of hands’ (14). Further, ‘only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of life appear … grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters’ (14). Ethical witnessing of Crisis in Darfur or the videos on Witness or IDSN is primarily a framing of life as at once precarious and grievable. Once we accept that we are exactly like the Others we see on screen, ‘social beings … dependent on what is outside ourselves, on others, on institutions, and on sustained and sustainable environments, and so are, in this sense, precarious’ (23), we discover the fungibility of all life. Precariousness must be seen as a ‘generalized condition’ (22). Just as Butler calls for an acceptance of the condition of ‘precarity [as] … a politically induced condition in which certain populations
193 Citizenship and Identity suffering from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death’ (25), I propose that we see amplified surveillance, transcultural memory and global witness citizenship as founded on the sense of shared precarity. This means, we also accept that precarity is a social condition and political formation that can then be altered. Surveillance processes that frame life as precarious and grievable therefore, (can) function as a means of enlarging one’s interventionary possibilities. Such an enlargement of interventionary possibility is a part of the intersubjectivity of the new personhood of the global witness-subject.
Surveillance, global witnessing and compassionate cosmopolitanism The Not On Our Watch project (founded by Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and others, archived at www.notonourwatch.org. Last accessed: 26 June 2014). Activates our potential for compassion by drawing attention to history (links to earlier genocidal campaigns, for instance) and the present (as Sudan, for example, descends into civil war in 2009) simultaneously.4 It locates us as witnesses to global histories of trauma, genocide and suffering. This is globalization of a wholly different order, one where distant events, temporally separated ‘instants’—whether the Jewish genocide and the anti- Sikh pogrom—are brought together as instances, so that we bear witness to historical and contemporary wrongs, and discover patterns of human suffering across ages, countries and geopolitical locations. As we eyewitness one instant, we always already bear witness to an entire history and global spread of (similar) instances. It is in this (pre-Internet) awareness of the global extent of suffering that, early in the nineteenth century, globally targetted humanitarian regimes had their European origins, gathering strength and organizational
4 Such projects also often give the lie to mainstream narratives that deny the fact of genocide. Thus in Not On Our Watch’s coverage of Sudan we find a report that states how ‘the regime in Khartoum is systematically denying access to journalists, aid workers, and U.N peacekeepers, so the killing, looting, and burning occur in total silence’. It goes on to add that ‘diplomats and news reports … [the] UN and other officials have insisted that the Darfur civil war is largely over’, but interviews with survivors and refugees tell a wholly different tale (www.notonourwatchproject.org/ news/darfur_board_member>john_prederghast_joint_oped_darfurs_still_burning, dated 13 June 2013, accessed 27 October 2013). 194 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship professionalism into the 20th century. They focused simultaneously on instants and instances. David Jefferess’ work on contemporary global humanitarian regimes notes how a post-racial politics informs such notions of global citizenship where benevolence ‘provides the signature of this new modernity’ (2013: 78). To be ‘modern – to be fully human – is to have the responsibility to aid and uplift an Other, who is not (yet) modern’ (78). Benevolence, writes Jefferess, ‘normalizes the position of the global citizen as helper and constructs the relationship between caregiver and beneficiary as beginning with the act of aid’ (80). In order for this ‘global citizen as helper’ to emerge it demands a structural condition I have termed global witnessing. If surveillance and witnessing both occur from within specific forms and normative structures of viewing, then the discussion in the previous section of transcultural memory and its itineraries, global witnessing and new frames of viewing suggests that the semantic scope of the term ‘surveillance’ itself can be shifted away from its pejorative commonplace to something more in the direction of humanitarianism and ethical witnessing. The visual and narrative field is what influences the cognitive and affective fields. Our norms about who/what constitutes the human are enacted, reinforced or undermined by visual and narrative frames (Butler 2009: 75). If the ‘frame’ of apprehending life can become, through narrativizing, precarity and grievability, then it is possible to see the emergent intersubjectivity of such a global witness constructing the witness in an entirely new way. But this is only one frame that Butler identifies. There is a second frame that runs practically parallel with the first, and this is the frame of embeddedness. The intersubjectivity of the global witness citizen emerges in the intersection of local conditions with global events, of local histories and memories with global sufferings that mirror, however anamorphically, the local.5 Thus, the global witnessing citizen can only emerge from a sensitivity to local contexts and histories that leads her/him to understand the differential scales of life,
5 I am grateful to my friend Nandana Dutta for cautioning me on this point: ‘if you acknowledge the weight of “local history” then all of us who share suffering by watching “at the same time” the unfolding of an event somewhere in the world, bring to this experience and the way we carry it away in memory, a different frame each time depending “where” (literally, metaphorically) we are coming from’ (personal communication). It is this very unpredictable, random mnemonic itinerary that mixes the local with the global, that serve as the foundations of a globital memory field. 195 Citizenship and Identity death and survival in other parts of the world. That is, in order to measure the suffering of the Other, one needs to understand the safety of one’s self (the distance from the suffering Other) as well as the conditions of suffering we see around us everyday. Only the witness who looks around before looking outward can measure the differences of vulnerability, safety and survivor-possibility of Others. Intersubjectivity is the appropriation of the two frames of reference simultaneously wherein an awareness of the local suffering or violation energizes a connection to a similarly suffering but contextually different Other at a distance. To phrase it differently, we bring to our witnessing of global suffering our memories and viewing of local instances of suffering.6 To pause for a moment on this matter of space and global witnessing, I return to the spaces chapter which noted the ghettoization of people and communities, their separation from the local. Despite this increasing spatial separation it is within civil society’s informed surveillance that a new politics could possibly emerge. It could be argued that this engagement with the distant works mainly at the level of televisuality and online campaigns. But this cannot wish away the fact that online campaigns and activism have produced legislation and humanitarian intervention that are local, grounded and specific. If we see the (re)presentation of suffering, torture, deprivation as an instantiation of a veritable theatre of dehumanization (whereby beaten and broken bodies are reduced to the non-human, by humans) then we recognize the corporeal as the foundation of a humanitarian response as well: we respond, or ought to respond, so that the breaking and beating of bodies stops. The pity economy is founded on basic needs, and therefore we can conceive of compassionate cosmopolitanism as one that recognizes the basic needs of everybody. Kwame Appiah writes: ‘there are certain obstacles to a good life that ought not to be imposed upon them: needless pain, unwarranted contempt, the mutilation of their bodies’ (2007: 163). To ensure this, says Appiah, is the job of the nation-state and if the state cannot, then
all of us – through our nations, if they will do it, and in spite of them, if they won’t – share the collective obligation to change them; and if the reason they
6 Luc Boltanski writing about distant suffering makes the point that contemporary culture is dominated by the politics of pity rather than the politics of justice. Such a politics is about the theme of luck and life chances rather than about structural inequality and social injustice, argues Boltanski (1999). 196 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship
fail their citizens is that they lack resources, providing resources can be part of that collective obligation. That is an equally fundamental cosmopolitan commitment. (163–4)
The pity economy of compassionate cosmopolitanism, as it might be termed, is grounded in the key essentials—mostly material-corporeal—of all humans and recognizing that some bodies are deemed, in certain contexts, to not possess equal value. It seeks a redistribution of resources, by contribution, so that basic values of corporeal integrity, survival and security can be reinstated for all humans. The biopolitical imaginary staged for us is what drives our humanitarian imaginary. Lilie Chouliaraki defines the humanitarian imaginary as ‘that configuration of practices which use the communicative structure of the theatre in order to perform collective imaginations of vulnerable others … with a view to cultivating a longer-term disposition to thinking, feeling and acting towards these others’ (2013: 45). This shift to a focus on communicative practices in Chouliaraki’s definition is useful because it foregrounds the role of representation and mediation—communicative cultural flows across victims, media persons, viewers that draw attention to the inevitability of starvation, pain, death—in the construction of both imagination and subjective responses.7 Collectively they constitute the publics, writes Chouliaraki, as ‘moral subjects’ (45). People (will) respond because they (will) see themselves as included in the common fate of the race. The Not On Our Watch campaign forges this moral solidarity among those who bear witness even as it makes the recuperation of the world a non-state, individual or communitarian project (‘our’). This burgeoning emphasis on the ‘you-can-contribute’ role of the global helper/caregiver in the discourse of compassion ties in with the argument made in the preceding chapters: in the neoliberal and globalized age the onus is on the individual to respond to situations wherein the state no longer has an effective role. Humanitarian action and intervention also become domains in which the individual has to respond in certain ways to sights of global disaster or crisis. Thus humanitarian communicative cultural flows are also therefore forms of governance through which the individual’s moral and affective life is altered. Compassionate cosmopolitanism thus is founded on the emergence of a ‘global citizen as helper’ and whose gaze capturing differential values and
7 Kwame Appiah considers curiosity – about others’ lives and cultures – a preliminary to engagement and cross-cultural communications as essential to cosmopolitanism (2007). 197 Citizenship and Identity conditions life and death proceeds outward from the local and yet apprehends life’s precarity and grievability as a generalized condition. The lessons from mobile witnessing, participation in the itineraries of transcultural memory lead to this generalization. That is, compassionate cosmopolitanism is an aporia that seeks at once the local aspiring to the global, whose sense of the generalized condition of life’s precarity proceeds from a consciousness of local violation and the global scale and iteration of such suffering. A memory of genocide in India could, ideally, constitute the frame for viewing the Holocaust or Bosnia, just as Bhopal repeats Three Mile Island repeats Fukushima. It is the recognition of a broken human on screen that conveys to us viewers the generalized condition of the breakability of all humans, and thus, by extension leads us to understand the precarity of human life around the world. Compassionate cosmopolitanism built on witnessing—a version of surveillance, we can now say—generates a whole new order of globalization, a worldwide pity economy. This pity economy (not necessarily a justice economy, as one could say after Luc Boltanski, 1999) is a system for maximizing affective productivity through communicative strategies of filming, leveraging the film (say through Amnesty or Witness) and circulating. The pity economy is a system that accords value to bodies and structures (such as war, famine, distribution of social benefits, but also international financial aid campaigns to redistribute services). It is built on the intersection of material bodies and media representation of those bodies that then shows differential values of certain bodies (like the massacred tribes of Rwanda, the South Sudanese, Muslims in Gujarat, Pandits in Kashmir). Clearly, the compassionate cosmopolitan relies on an intertextuality of suffering, moving from the instant of suffering to instances of the same/ similar. Establishing a ‘field of perceptible reality’ in which the ‘notion of a recognizable human is formed and maintained’ (Butler 2009: 64) is crucial for us to respond in certain ways to images of suffering. Such a perceptible field relies on the continuous production of the intertextual frame of precarity, grievability and locality. A humanitarian response, including intervention (the marker of compassionate cosmopolitanism), requires such a framing, a framing that reveals to us the broken body as an index of what a human—who no longer fits the socially and corporeally constituted norm of ‘human’ as a result of torture, war or disaster—is. All intervention begins with this sense of having seen such a broken human before, just as we acknowledge having seen ‘normal’ humans as well.
198 Surveillance and Global Witness Citizenship
Surveillance is the to-and-fro of witnessing across visual fields, local to global and back, of suffering so that a new frame of viewing—precarity, grievability, suffering itself—might be put in place that constitutes as ethical those viewers possessing the capacity to intervene in some way. Compassionate cosmopolitanism is the accrued ethical effect of the potentialities generated by the circulation of representations and memories. Paul Frosh addressing the thematic of sharing and connectivity in the age of rapidly circulating media images writes:
The non-threatening appearance of diverse and transient others in these stories — in combination with many others — contributes to the low-intensity maintenance of a fundamental instrument of connectivity that is also a category of judgement regarding the status of a represented individual … If most individual strangers on television are viewed indifferently, in routine, unremarkable, nonhostile encounters, then their constant and cumulative presence within the home is a significant historical accomplishment. It produces for individuals in their intimate spaces a serial aggregate of the human figure as a shared ‘condition’, an instrument of similarity and interconnection, an interminably fluctuating and ever-present composite image: perhaps, even, the ‘face’ of humanity itself. It is only in so far as they are recognizable constituents of this serial aggregate (to which they are in turn added) that particular images and stories of specified individuals can be made ethically appealing … As a moral force, then, media act as a routine and institutionalized social procedure for placing strangers within the framework of those whom we can recognize as human like us, for ensuring that ‘others’ are always already ‘other people’ (Frosh 2011: 393-4, emphasis in original)
This of course is a utopian idealism around the role and power of the media to produce both intersubjectivity and ethical witnessing. Building on Frosh’s utopian idealism I have proposed that ‘a morality that triggers the sympathetic imagination because it calls upon us to recognize the suffering Other on our screen as a person, to imagine ourselves in that situation’ (Writing Wrongs 170). Acknowledging that the broken body we are seeing on screen is at once irreducibly Other—since we are not the self that is being broken or beaten— and yet similar to what we are (bodies vulnerable to breakage, like that one on screen) is the first step in framing our intersubjectivity in conjunction with the unspeaking and unspeakable Other. A compassionate cosmopolitan stance is also the self-fashioning as an ethical bearer of witness, a witness subject whose
199 Citizenship and Identity response to the global conditions of suffering might proceed from local histories and locations but will not stay circumscribed within the same. While there is an expression of planetary expansiveness in cosmopolitanism, argues Bruce Robbins, it is often combined with an ‘unembarrassed acceptance of professional self-interest’ (cited in Amanda Anderson 2006: 74–5). Such a cosmopolitanism resists national histories, parochialism and insists on a ‘worldliness’ (77). These tensions result in not detachment but ‘overlapping allegiances’ (Robbins again, in Anderson 2006).8 Compassionate cosmopolitanism is the potential effect of a process of witnessing that constitutes and reconstitutes us in significant ways and always in relationship with the less privileged, indeed suffering, Other. Bearing witness, conscious of the ethical burden of this witnessing, of shared precarity and the privileged distance from the actually suffering Other is the opening moment of a reinvented surveillance culture.
* Much of what this chapter has done is to open up possibilities within surveillance culture. Memory citizenship that leads to global witnessing is still, perhaps, a distant dream in the age of increasing ghettoization. If, however, we can consider a planetary consciousness through the sights beamed to us from Hubble or Pioneer X, then it should be theoretically possible to cultivate , even from within ghettos, a global compassionate consciousness. It is undoubtedly a moral turn to surveillance cultures that this chapter proposes, fully aware of the selfishness, cruelties and inequalities of the world. The points made by thinkers as diverse as Susan Sontag and Judith Butler are however indicative of other possible ‘turns’—such as the ethical—in cultural frames when we switch on the TV. It is precisely this turn that this chapter, in a modest way, seeks to gesture at in cultures of surveillance.
8 Amanda Anderson does however argue that such a ‘detached’ interest in the world is the consequence of a ‘privileged’ mobility (2006). 200 Bibliography
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214 Index
Index
Biobanks 48-51 Data invasion and decisional interference Biological citizenship 58-62 93-95 (also see disclosure, exposure, Biometrics (see Biosurveillance, body) distortion, data invasion, data theft) Biosurveillance 48-50 (also see Biobanks) Defensible Space (also see ‘landscaping of Body, disappearance 38-42 fear’) 120-123 Body, reappearance 42-48 Difference, fear of, 135-137 (Subjectivity, and fear of difference) Compassionate cosmopolitanism 194-200 Disclosure 88-89 Corporeality and surveillance 36-48 (see Dissident surveillance 158-168 (also see also body, disappearance and body, video activism, mobile witnessing, reappearance) sting operations) Cultural Autonomy 130-135 Distortion 92-93 Cultural membership (also see Loyalty Cards) 149-151 Exposure 89-91 Cultural scripts for change (also see Talk Eyewitnessing and Bearing witness 175- Shows) 151-158 177 Cultural Trauma (also see Social splitting) Function creep 91-2 123-126 Gated communities Data Age 70-75 Genetic Privacy 95-100 Data Doubles 87-88 Global Witness Citizenship 187-194 Data Subjects 75-80 (also see Personal Information Economy) Infrastructural Segmentation 114-118 Data Theft 88-95 (also see disclosure, Interactivity and surveillance 147-149 exposure, distortion, data invasion)
215 Index
Landscaping of Fear (also see Defensible Sting operations 163-169 Space) 121-123 Subjectivity (as vulnerability) 12-24 (also Loyalty Cards (also see cultural see vulnerable citizen, constructions membership, Performative of ) surveillance) 149-151 Subjectivity (as surveilled self ) 62-68 (also see surveilled self ) Memory citizenship 182-184 Subjectivity (as responsible self ) 101-106 Mobile witnessing (see also video activism) Subjectivity (and fear of difference) 135- 159-163 137 Neighbourhood watch (also see Vulnerable Subjectivity (and witnessing) 169-171 citizen+) 127-128 Surveillance Drama (also see Reality TV, New Regimes of the Self (also see Performative surveillance) 144-147 objectification) 140-143 Surveilled self 62-67 Objectification (also see New Regimes of Talk Shows (and self-disclosure) 151-158 the Self) 140-143 Transcultural memory 184-187 (also see Witnessing memory) Paranoia 21-25 Transparency and the public 165-169 (also Performative surveillance 143-158 (also see Sting Operations) see Reality TV, surveillance drama, loyalty cards, cultural membership, Video activism 159-163 talks shows) Vulnerable citizen, constructions of, 12-24 Personal Information Economy 75-79 (also see subjectivity as vulnerability) (also see Data Subject) Vulnerable citizen+ (also see Privacy, and interiority 82-86 (also see Neighbourhood watch) 126-128 Genetic Privacy) Vulnerable Data Subject 80-86 Reality TV (also see Surveillance Drama, Wikileaks 163-169 Performative surveillance) 144-147 Witnessing (as occupation) 177-180 Responsible Surveilled Subject 101-105 Witnessing memory 180-187 (also see transcultural memory) Safety state (Lyon) 26-27 Witnessing (mobile) 159-163 (also Safety, constructions of, 25-27 see video activism, dissident Social Sorting 52-57 surveillance) Social Splitting (also see Cultural trauma) Witness-subject 169-175 125-126
216