Big Brother is Watching You (Again): Britain under Surveillance

Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Vol. 19, No. 1/2012.

Das E-Book Big Brother is Watching You (Again) wird angeboten von Königshausen & Neumann und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Big Brother is Watching You (Again), British Culture, Journal for the Study of British Cultures

• Language: English
• Publisher: Königshausen u. Neumann
• Release date: Sep 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9783826080173

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Contributors

Introduction: How Powerful is Big Brother?

Anja Müller-Wood (Mainz)

It seems that we live in a time of total surveillance: CCTV cameras everywhere, the uncontrollable spread of biometric recognition systems and more and more and increasingly surreptitious forms of data mining. Features that until not too long ago were the staple of dystopian sci-fi scenarios have infiltrated our everyday lives, lending support to the popular contention that ours is a ‘culture of control’ (David Garland). That these phenomena would be of particular interest to scholars of ‘British cultures’ clearly has to do with the fact that contemporary Britain appears to have become the Orwellian society to which the title of this issue of the Journal for the Study of British Cultures beckons: the UK is not only the one industrialised nation where surveillance is most widespread and ubiquitous – whose urban citizens are watched over from cradle to grave (Norris 2012: 252) – it also is at the forefront of the development of surveillance technologies and their export to technologically less advanced countries (see Doward & Lewis).

The academic project of surveillance studies began about twenty years ago in response to the developments illustrated in such striking and troubling ways by contemporary Britain. In investigating them, surveillance studies draws on and connects with numerous other disciplines: from sociology, which provides much of its theoretical-methodological basis, via the political sciences, geography, law and criminology, to cultural studies in its different manifestations more generally (cf. Lyon 2007: 18-22). The multi-disciplinarity of surveillance studies explains why it can feed so fruitfully into disciplines to which it is only tangentially related, and this compatibility is also illustrated by the present collection. Based on some of the papers presented at the 2011 conference of the German Association for the Study of British Cultures at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, it documents that the topic of surveillance flourishes even in apparently unrelated academic contexts.

Yet the same conceptual fuzziness and thematic breadth that has made surveillance studies extremely adaptable have also led to an increasing scepticism within the field regarding its own identity and the ability of its methods to adequately grasp the complexity of the experiences and practices that it sets out to analyse. In fact, some of its own practitioners have described surveillance studies as both methodologically intransparent and ideologically dogmatic (cf. Ball & Haggerty 2005: 133). The resulting, and rather fraught, ‘search for surveillance theories’ (Lyon 2006) that would do justice to the complex realities that they seek to describe has to do not least with the difficulty of grasping the multifarious practices and technologies that the term ‘surveillance’ encompasses beyond its foundational association with supervision. The seminal reference point for surveillance studies was Jeremy Bentham’s design for a panopticon as appropriated by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975/1977) to capture the essence of modern social control; for quite some time now, however, surveillance studies has been at pains to go beyond this Foucauldian model (Coleman & McCahill 2011: 26), or even to ‘demolish’ it (Haggerty 2006). Critics not only point out that the panopticon’s emphasis on the visual does insufficient justice to the multitude of surveillance techniques currently in use, but also that the reference to this model must lead to simplistic results when not supported by extensive empirical data (see Zurawski 2007a: 8 and Kammerer 2008: 12; for an illustrative empirical micro-study see McCahill 2002). And even if the panopticon refuses to go away (2006: 4), as David Lyon, the doyen of Surveillance Studies, maintains, it cannot be denied that this powerful metaphor has undergone substantial differentiation and refinement in recent years.

Yet the lens of surveillance studies has not only widened because the proliferation and enhancement of technologies have made the act of surveillance more difficult to define, but also because of our increased awareness that the seemingly omnipresent regimes and techniques of surveillance are always potentially fallible and limited (see Norris 2012 and Williams 2009). Lyon cautiously notes that just because a network of searchable databases appears to be able to track down minute details of personal life does not mean that it will do so (Lyon 2007: 10). In fact, as is repeatedly pointed by surveillance scholars, given the sheer mass of information and data gathered with the aid of surveillance techniques, it is impossible to process, retrieve and evaluate (Norris 2012: 256-257). The fact that much of that data goes unnoticed and/or unanalysed has wide-ranging implications for our view of surveillance technology; above all, it casts doubt over the main arguments brought forward in its defence: namely that surveillance is crucial to the detection and prevention of crime, thus making our lives safer. Yet this, as surveillance scholars keep reminding us, is not the case. Rather, surveillance technologies contribute to the creation of a latent sense of fear which they simultaneously claim to abate (cf. Zurawski 2007b: 10). Instead of providing panaceas against real risks and dangers, they act like placebos (cf. Kammerer 2008: 347) – imaginary remedies against social ills whose extent and impact is often overstated.

If surveillance studies has in recent years become a more complex, diverse and dynamic area of research, much of this has also to do with the reintroduction of material reality into its debates. Lyon warns against a simplistic, totalising use of the term ‘surveillance society’, emphasising that reality is much more nuanced, varying in intensity and often quite subtle (Lyon 2007: 25) that such a label would suggest. In doing so, he implicitly expresses the need for local, empirical studies that can achieve this level of differentiation. Similarly, Coleman and McCahill contend that surveillance practice must be placed within actually existing social relations, political priorities and prevailing cultural practices (3) – already existing social frameworks that are complex, often asymmetrical, and marked by conflict: Ultimately, surveillance cannot be divorced from social, political, economic and cultural struggles. It is these struggles that both shape surveillance and are shaped by it (Coleman & McCahill 2011: 31).

In acknowledgement of this need, surveillance studies increasingly deal with what Foucault in his work following Discipline and Punish called ‘governmentality’, that is, the production and governance of citizens. However, as one of the contributors to this volume points out, governmentality is not only the province of the state, and includes techniques with a broader purchase on the development of societies, economies and selves, an awareness present[ing] a useful challenge to more limited understandings of surveillance (Kneale, this volume). This shift in interest is not only reflected by the field’s increasing concern with the discourses around the creation and maintenance of surveillance practices (cf. Coleman & McCahill 2011: 34), but also by its emphasis on the possibility that these practices are beneficial to their subjects (or at least seen as beneficial by them). In other words, moving away from a one-sided critique of surveillance technologies, scholars acknowledge their Janus-faced nature (Lyon qtd. in McCahill 2002: xi) and take surveillance to be a far from a unilateral process: in the words of David Lyon, it is not merely something exercised on us as workers, citizens or travellers, it is a set of processes in which we are all involved, both as watched and as watchers (Lyon 2007: 13). Despite surveillance studies’ understandable predilection […] of concentrating on institutional actors impinging on the rights and others (Monahan et al. 2008: 106), the representatives of the field have in recent years increasingly been attending to the topics of enjoyment and ‘empowerment’ (see the 2010 special issue of Surveillance & Society on the latter topic).

The beginning of this shift was marked by Thomas Mathiesen’s influential reconceptualisation of Foucault’s panopticon metaphor. In a media age, so Mathiesen’s view, the principle of the few watching the many underpinning this metaphor is insufficient and should be complemented by a ‘synoptic’ principle of the many watching the few (Mathiesen 1997: 230). The latter, he points out, facilitates the dissemination of power and ideology precisely because it provides an outlet for escapist desires. This view, with its echoes of a Frankfurt School Kulturpessimismus, has in recent years been rethought from the perspective of the more flexible Gramscian concept of hegemony which – because it invites a concern with currents of resistance (Doyle 2011: 290) – underpins much contemporary work in surveillance studies.

Still, as the essays in this collection illustrate, we are […] in an important time of contestation over the cultural meanings of surveillance as control, as repression, and as empowerment and pleasure (Murakami Wood 2009: 57), at least in parts. The contributors focus both on the historical continuity that characterises the topic of surveillance and the multifarious specificity of its practices today; they are concerned with its function both as a means of social control and a medium of individual agency. The collection opens with an essay that assesses yet another shift in emphasis. Maintaining that the new millennium (in particular after the events of 9 September 2001) marked the beginning of an age of risk aversion rather than crime prevention and detection, Ben Harbisher illustrates how surveillance is currently used in the UK as a means to criminalise once legitimate forms of dissent; he thereby ties in with the perennial critique of the belief that surveillance is an appropriate and effective means to respond to crime (cf. Coleman & McCahill 2011: 3). He does so by drawing attention to the semantic shift that accompanies and makes possible these criminalising revaluations, which led to the equation of, for instance, environmental campaigners and terrorist within the same ‘regulatory space’.

A concern with the rhetoric employed to outlaw certain activities and attitudes is also at the heart of Nadine Böhm-Schnitker’s essay, the first of two contributions written from a decidedly historical perspective. Reading George Meredith’s novel The Egoist and his Essay on Comedy and the Comic Spirit alongside a number of recent postulations by David Cameron, she uncovers the argumentative convergences between nineteenth-century cultural politics and contemporary political culture. This allows her to argue that however much contemporary surveillance technologies may appear as cutting-edge, their underlying intentions may in fact be nostalgic – as neo-Victorian as the literary subgenre of that name that is currently enjoying great popularity in literary studies. Her historical perspective reminds us that, however complex surveillance technologies have become, surveillance is per se an old issue, and that there is continuity in the processes and concerns that ultimately underpin it (cf. Coleman & McCahill 2011, esp. 39-66).

But taking a historical perspective may also have an effect beyond the continuity described by Böhm-Schnitker: Rather than identifying the nostalgia of contemporary thought, it may also lead to a more differentiated vision of the past against which the present is being defined. In the second historical essay of this collection, James Kneale views the surveillance of pubs, their owners and their frequenters in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain within a larger context that illustrates not only the interconnectedness and diversity of surveillance mechanisms but also their different, sometimes even productive, effects. The surveillance of drink and drinkers in the period in question, then, was far from a monolithic affair, allowing for flexible action and interaction with the techniques and policies available. In making this point, Kneale affirms the critical contention that surveillance must not only be seen in light of its effects on and interaction with existing social structures (cf. McCahill 2002: xii). What is more, his essay is illustrative of the kind of disciplinary self-reflexivity demanded by Ball & Haggerty (2005), who emphasise the need to reflect on the processes of ‘doing Surveillance Studies’, e.g. by investigating the conflicts, compromises and double allegiances in which surveillance scholars find themselves ensnared. Pointing out that surveillance techniques from the past provide invaluable data for the contemporary historian, Kneale reminds us that in the engagement with the topic of surveillance they are inevitably indebted to technologies they critique.

In a similar way, the ‘images of surveillance’ (Kammerer 2008) produced by surveillance technologies are complex and diverse, providing information that is open to misinterpretation and subversion alike (cf. Kammerer 2008: 9). Unsurprisingly, surveillance technologies have proved an enormous inspiration for artists, the study of which presents perhaps the most exciting area of Surveillance Studies (Murakami Wood 2009: 57). However, as Michael Krause points out in his article in this volume, discrete representations of and references to surveillance do not turn a novel or a film into a surveillance narrative. That the samples he discusses – the novel What Was Lost and the movie Hot Fuzz (both 2007) – can be seen in this way, has to do with the way they deliberately engage with contemporary surveillance strategies and practices so as to lead the reader/viewer to ask relevant questions about the nature of surveillance in contemporary Britain (as well as the possibility of undermining it). However, representations of surveillance techniques possess important aesthetic reverberations even when the kind of thematic engagement illustrated by these particular examples is deliberately eschewed. Red Road, Angela Arnold’s acclaimed movie from 2006, to which Lucia Krämer’s contribution is dedicated, in fact refrains from engaging with the real phenomenon of CCTV so as to criticise it – even though it features in the film and has contributed to its particular aesthetics. Against critics of the movie who have found fault with Arnold’s apparent lack of political commitment, Krämer argues that her film’s use of CCTV has a metaphoric function, contemplating not the close circuit reality of contemporary