Tom Jennings

VARIANT 32 | SUMMER 2008 | 9 Craven New World Tom Jennings Documenting attacks on civil freedoms in anti-social crime and terror hype, hypnotised by Britain the film Taking Liberties (2007) was made spectacular media, wrong-footed by seductive for cinema because such a “one-sided” (read virtuality, and domesticated by reality TV? honest) appraisal of the Blair regime’s record Given that no less a figure than the government’s was thought unlikely to survive the requirements Information Commissioner Richard Thomas deems of “balance” (read censorship) on television1. us to have already “sleepwalked” into dystopia, it Supported by Fahrenheit 9/11’s producers, Taking seems pertinent to ask – riffing on Dr Strangelove Liberties apes Michael Moore’s populist combo – whether we have ‘learned to stop worrying and of comic buffoonery and acid commentary and love Big Brother’7. romps through New Labour’s neurotic erosion Media art collective Ambient TV share of rights to privacy, protest and freedom of the concern, and decided to extend their Spy speech, its tacit embrace of imprisonment School (2002) dramatisations of hitherto hidden without trial, unaccountable extradition and assemblages of data held on citizens into a torture. Recounting the personal experiences of a increasing regulation of the populace in terms of “science-fiction fairytale” patchwork comprised swathe of victims, from peace protesters to those administrative efficiency rather than historical of visual material plucked from this matrix, with persecuted in the War on Terror, a convincing precedence or legal niceties. Even a cursory a storyline fitting the philosophical framework picture of escalating totalitarianism is then questioning sees the pragmatic justifications for used to justify and regulate official omniscience. sketched against a background of animated the National Identity Register and attendant The result is Manu Luksch’s surprisingly beguiling vignettes showing centuries’ worth of legal ‘checks technologies collapse like a house of (identity) Faceless (2007) – helped in part by Ballet Boyz and balances’ on state power. This is all set to a cards, yet the debate stubbornly clings to choreography, Mukul Patel’s haunting soundtrack jaunty Britpop soundtrack. Unfortunately, the nationalist sentiment3. The latest edition of and Tilda Swinton’s austere voiceover – which potential of mocking the powerful is undermined Mute magazine helps make the stakes clearer. emphasises the DPA stricture that individuals by a tone veering from flippant to hysterical, As Josephine Berry Slater points out: “The deemed uninteresting have their features before being ultimately ruined by dissolving basic survival of the poor, undocumented or obliterated, with those remaining targeted for into overstatements of incipient Nazi-ness ‘illegalised’ often depends on the ability to action8. The tragic protagonist (necessarily played among parliamentary leaders and an astounding operate [in a] ... grey zone of anonymity [which] is by Luksch herself) lacks reflexivity or emotion cluelessness about the prospects of influencing constantly squeezed in the interests of population beyond the narcotising flow of interaction with them.2. management, border enforcement, welfare clamp- the ubiquitous New Machine. Then, a sudden Worse; the film’s broad-brush, knee-jerk downs, technocratic convenience and, of course, discovery: she has a face! In her job as data jingoism cripples any political understanding of the economy”4. In fact, precisely those realms of monitor this signifies a disturbance to the status past or present. Ancient constitutional antecedents experience which Taking Liberties ignores. quo, destined to be corrected in the interests of are all very well for patronising children with, Meanwhile, mainstream political discourse stability and safety. But with personal identity but the routine reality of peremptory injustice brooks no argument that only the free come fragments of memory and fantasy, prompting in recent decades has shaped the patterns of movement of capital allows society to survive awareness of possible pasts and futures along close interference now being ratcheted up: from and prosper, thanks to the expert, rational- with uncertainty and fear. Exploiting newly Northern Ireland policy, racist policing and the market disposition of resources. But accelerating incipient agency, her quest to evade oblivion internment of immigrants; to Tory anti-union and human and environmental degradation resulting is enlivened by encounters with mysterious criminal justice legislation and the penalisation from the application of neoliberal ideology Spectral Children, whose joyful unpredictability of ‘antisocial’ behaviour. Kowtowing to globalising generates inevitable crises, the intransigence confounds the control apparatus. Sadly, they give capitalism necessitates welfare suffering, while of which is disavowed when they are treated disastrous advice to trust her instincts, but with lower-class community, collectivity and autonomy merely as management conundrums. Thus no opportunity to develop such skills she soon is hammered to shortcircuit resistance. But Taking the incipient panopticon society obsessively succumbs to re-zombification. Liberties ignores the structural and economic maximises data collection, in the pretence that This apparently conclusive fatalism is frameworks within which governments discipline mass bureaucratisation allows the competent misleading, however, since the pivotal social their subjects, let alone how they achieve apparent administration of otherwise insolvable problems. engineering here occurs in reprogramming centres consent for it. Instead we’re asked to sympathise In the resulting climate of increasingly routinised which brainwash people into numb passivity – not with rich US bankers suspected of corporate fraud emergencies and attendant moral panics, and the global data-web itself (policed for deviation – after all, ‘we’re all in this together’, a supposedly the overall prospect of multiple impending as administrative corollary). But how these ‘freedom-loving’ people. This lack of analysis catastrophes, everyone excluded from polite function – or not, permitting escape – is withheld, leaves the film wallowing in middle-class moral society can be blamed and targeted while those thereby disabling viewers’ suspension of disbelief. superiority and outrage, urging self-righteous fortunate enough to temporarily reap the dubious Fittingly, the logistical nightmare of planning a symbolic protest. Is this more a recipe for apathy benefits of consumerism look the other way and coherent storyboard against the vagaries of CCTV than active opposition? defend ‘civilisation’5. With each burning issue operators complying with legislation (exposing The UK government legitimises the merely grist to media headline-mills, ordinary the fiction of state-dispensed ‘rights’) mirrors the current affairs paradigms plainly lack the impossibility of sketching dystopian citizens with imagination to make sense of such extraordinary subjectivities echoing digital representations. The circumstances. Conversely, the mysteries of the fairytale fails precisely because the principles future are science-fiction’s stock-in-trade, and behind Faceless were too rigorous, taking at ‘face so what follows seeks signs of hope in recently value’ the viewpoint of power. The government’s screened dystopian visions that reflect prevailing fantasy of comprehensive knowledge of the trends in biopolitical divide and rule6. population likewise makes scant human sense, whereas its implacable thirst for control will be far more pragmatically baleful. The film’s major Unpleasantville artistic weakness therefore signals crucial (though The Data Protection Act supposedly safeguards unacknowledged) political potential. As its makers against abuse by making transparent what conclude: “The panopticon is not complete, yet. information, about us, private and state agencies Regardless, could its one-way gaze ever assure an collect. In recognition of the epidemic of enabling conception of security?” Clearly, neither CCTV systems across the UK (now the internal that nor a secure ability to conceive – and although surveillance capital of the world) its scope was beyond this film’s ambition, the relationships widened in 1998 to include visual imaging. Crime between the excluded and included (Spectral prevention budgets are increasingly syphoned off Children, and adults, and the erstwhile organic into an expanding surveillance manufacturing robots) would be key to dismantling the rigid walls industry’s profits, despite failing to have any of regimented otherness. significant impact in the reduction of offences. Meanwhile, the sinister centrality of surveillance technology in New Labour’s plans for an integrated Apocalypse Soon database and ID card seems threatened only by Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men (2006) paints a the bungling of IT entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. contrasting but equally ominous picture of a near But, apart from the usual suspects, the wider future where dystopian ghosts in machines are British public seem remarkably acquiescent to exorcised by default – with global environmental intrusion. So, is the public really bewitched by collapse, mass starvation and a global pandemic 10 | VARIANT 32 | SUMMER 2008 leaving humanity infertile. Nevertheless, Bulldog despair of late capitalism, with no sense of logics of institutions. As in Children of Men, we Britain soldiers on, demonising tidal waves of history or agency

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