Surveillance | Society | Culture CONTRIBUTIONS TO ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES (CEALS) Edited by Ingo Berensmeyer, Christoph Ehland, Julika Griem, Andrew S. Gross and Antje Kley Editorial board: Martine W. Brownley (Emory University, Atlanta) Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex, Brighton) Heinz Ickstadt (Free University of Berlin) David James (Queen Mary University of London) Maurice S. Lee (Boston University) Laura Marcus (University of Oxford) Marek Pary (University of Warsaw) Gill Plain (University of St. Andrews) ż Andrew Sanders (Durham University) Hans Ulrich Seeber (University of Stuttgart) Vol. 3 CONTRIBUTIONS TO ENGLISH AND AMERICAN Florian Zappe / Andrew S. Gross (eds.) LITERARY STUDIES (CEALS) Edited by Ingo Berensmeyer, Christoph Ehland, Julika Griem, Andrew S. Gross and Antje Kley Editorial board: Martine W. Brownley (Emory University, Atlanta) Surveillance | Society | Culture Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex, Brighton) Heinz Ickstadt (Free University of Berlin) David James (Queen Mary University of London) Maurice S. Lee (Boston University) Laura Marcus (University of Oxford) Marek Pary (University of Warsaw) Gill Plain (University of St. Andrews) ż Andrew Sanders (Durham University) Hans Ulrich Seeber (University of Stuttgart) Vol. 3 Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Cover illustration: © Madita Oeming Printed by CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 2366-5068 ISBN 978-3-631-79881-2 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-80235-9 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-80236-6 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-80237-3 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b16151 Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ © Florian Zappe / Andrew S. Gross (eds.), 2020 Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Acknowledgments The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Many colleagues and friends contributed to the creation of this volume Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data and to the conference that was its origin. Special gratitude goes to Madita A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Oeming, who designed the cover illustration, and to Wiebke Kartheus, Library of Congress. who helped edit and format the manuscript. Cover illustration: © Madita Oeming Printed by CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 2366-5068 ISBN 978-3-631-79881-2 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-80235-9 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-80236-6 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-80237-3 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b16151 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2020 All rights reserved. Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com Table of Contents Florian Zappe and Andrew S. Gross Introduction ...................................................................................... 9 I. Agencies Bernhard H. F. Taureck Surveillance – A Complex Relationship ............................................. 27 Florian Zappe Gazing Back at the Monster – A Critical Posthumanist Intervention on Surveillance Culture, Sousveillance and the Lifelogged Self ................................................................................... 39 Bärbel Harju Too Much Information: Self-Monitoring and Confessional Culture .............................................................................................. 57 II. Stories and songs Felix Haase Death by Data: Identification and Dataveillance in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story ............................................ 85 Birgit Däwes Flickers of Vision: Surveillance and the Uncertainty Paradigm in Dave Eggers’s The Circle ................................................................... 103 Andrew S. Gross The Black Box of Humanism: Surveillance, the Spy Narrative, and Literary Form ............................................................................. 119 Silke Järvenpää Rap vs. Big Brother: The Conscious and the Comical ........................ 137 8 Table of Contents III. Visualities Hugh Davies The Art of Surveillance: Surveying the Lives and Works of Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei ...................................................................... 153 Marek Paryż Paranoia and Surveillance in Andrew Dominik’s Film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ................. 175 Caren Myers Morrison Mythologies of Violence in American Police Videos .......................... 191 Garrett Stewart Afterword ......................................................................................... 213 About the Authors ............................................................................ 235 Index ................................................................................................. 239 Florian Zappe and Andrew S. Gross Introduction On October 11, 1986, the German daily die tageszeitung ran a short article entitled “No Such Agency,” written by the iconic media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Initially commissioned as a review of the German translation of James Bamford’s investigative bestseller Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization (1982), Kittler’s text provided a concise yet striking reflection about the impact of the digital revolution—still in its infancy at that time—on the everyday practices of the intelligence business. With unabashed fascination, Kittler describes the National Security Agency, then largely obscure to the gen- eral public, as a highly efficient cloak-and-dagger force operating in the shadow of smaller but more glamorous agencies: The National Security Agency—the USA’s surveillance institution—is the only one among all government agencies and intelligence service bureaucracies enjoying the right to deny its own existence. A secret squared prevents informa- tion squared, as president Truman decreed in 1952. ‘No Such Agency’ or ‘Never Say Anything’ are just two of the decryptions of the acronym NSA (not lacking intra-agency humor). An organisation with 70,000 people surveilling—cautiously estimated— approximately every thousandth telecommunication message on the planet with spy satellites or radio relay systems, and using Platform, a network of 52 glob- ally linked computer systems, to automatically decipher, store and evaluate them, leaves public relations to the CIA and its 4000 agents. (Kittler) Now, thirty years later, in the post-Snowden era, the thought of the NSA monitoring merely a tiny fraction of the entirety of global communication seems like a lost Eden of privacy. The dizzying development of surveillance technologies has turned Kittler’s prediction that “one day, those 99.9% of the data flow that still run past the NSA might become graspable and evaluable” into an uncanny reality (Kittler). What Kittler could not foresee was that surveillance would go far beyond the comprehensive interception of global communication by a governmental agency. Given the accumulation and commercialization of personal data by private companies—aided by advances in digital data 10 Zappe and Gross mining, biometrics, and social network exhibitionism—it is hard to dis- pute the claim that we have grown accustomed to living in what sociol- ogist David Lyon calls a surveillance society. What the liberal-humanist consensus in Western democracies once considered a totalitarian night- mare has now become reality: surveillance practices and technologies have infiltrated all aspects of our lives and caused fundamental shifts in estab- lished notions of privacy and subjectivity, thus altering the status of the individual within the social realm. Affecting issues of security, power, technology, economy, social con- trol, and individuality, surveillance is a topic of extreme social, political, and ethical ambivalence. Shean P. Hier and Joshua Greenberg aptly note that today [s] urveillance functions ambiguously in everyday life to enable efficiency, conve- nience and security while simultaneously constraining the opportunities and life chances of individuals and social groups with shared characteristics—be they eco- nomic, sexual, radical, geographic or cultural. The ambiguous nature of surveil- lance also facilitates the penetration of information and data gathering/storage systems into the deeper recesses of everyday life, and the pervasiveness of surveil- lance systems, although put in place to increase safety and provide security, tends to generate greater levels of insecurity, anxiety and fear. (5) Defenders of surveillance justify it as a means