oversight

Ethnic and Racial Studies ISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20 Oversight Gil Anidjar To cite this article: Gil Anidjar (2017): Oversight, Ethnic and Racial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1346268 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1346268 Published online: 12 Jul 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 24 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rers20 Download by: [Gil Anidjar] Date: 17 July 2017, At: 14:25 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1346268 Oversight Gil Anidjara,b a Department of Religion, Columbia University, New York, USA; bDepartment of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, New York, USA ABSTRACT Is surveillance a weapon? Does it have a destructive dimension, destructive effects and consequences? Revisiting Foucault on the productive dimensions of power, this article attends to these questions by focusing on the question of subjectivity. It acknowledges the importance of reflections that take the target of surveillance as their primary concerns – Islamophobia – but proposes that vigilance and insomnia (notions that were conceptualized in Levinas’ early work) provide the premises of a different account of surveillance and the nature of its power. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 27 May 2016; Accepted 20 June 2017 KEYWORDS Surveillance; insomnia; Foucault; Levinas; weapons; Islamophobia Confronting the problem of surveillance and Islamophobia, the authors of a remarkable paper on the topic ask that we not surrender to the universalizing and levelling rhetoric, which seeks to convince us that we are all under surveillance. For if the problem is mass surveillance, then what is at stake is not a violent geo-political agenda led by a few very powerful states or the deliberate targeting of communities within national contexts, but that now “everybody” is under surveillance. (Gürses, Kundnani, and Van Hoboken 2016, 582) The crucial point is that, along with the “terrorist assemblages” scrutinized by Puar (2007), the “surveillance assemblages” (Hagerty and Ericson 2000), which we must now take for granted (whether to affirm or resist them), constitute, as David Lyon argued, unequal and divisive mechanisms of “social sorting” (2003). This means that we are hardly all equal in facing the surveillance apparatus, which is why it is crucial to examine the singularity of “thorough surveillance” (Sa’di 2014), to underscore as well “the surveillance of blackness” (Browne 2015), and – with regard to arguments about privacy, for instance – to recall that “workers, the under- and disemployed, the incarcerated, the homeless, and those dependent on welfare (most of whom are CONTACT Gil Anidjar ga152@columbia.edu © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 G. ANIDJAR women) are the most exposed to surveillance and the least enfranchised of privacy rights” (Maxwell 2005, 13). Acknowledging the multiplicity (rather than the universality) of targets, and the way in which surveillance buttresses and deepens inequalities among them, the question that must be raised is how subjectivity – in the case at hand, “Muslim subjects” – and the problem of surveillance have been or should be understood or articulated together. Hagerty and Ericson phrase this matter in terms that are at once proximate and troubling to the concerns I will want to raise in what follows. “In the face of multiple connections across myriad technologies and practices”, they write, struggles against particular manifestations of surveillance, as important as they might be, are akin to efforts to keep the ocean’s tide back with a broom – a frantic focus on a particular unpalatable technology or practice while the general tide of surveillance washes over us all. (Hagerty and Ericson 2000, 609) Between general and collective subjects and privacy, between “every body” (and their “body cams”) and the terrifying specificities of targeted communities and individuals, surveillance – like prejudice, persecution and outright assault – insistently raises the question of subjectivity (name, label or “data double”) in the context of a struggle with and within power. Indeed, since Michel Foucault opposed the assujetissement, subjectivation, of the incarcerated to the invisible anonymity of the panoptic tower, subjectivity and subjectivation have been at the centre of surveillance concerns and objectives (Gilliom 2005, 72). And this obviously applies to the widespread monitoring of Muslims, and to Islamophobia, when “surveillance becomes intertwined with the fabric of human relationships and the threads of trust upon which they are built” (Kundnani 2014, 41). What I would like to isolate is of a different order than the production of new subjectivities, without, however, returning to a model of coercion where the power of surveillance is conceived as dominantly repressive or, as the language often goes, “chilling”. Such are, of course, urgently pertinent dimensions of the “surveillance society” in which we live, but as Puar has it, what emerges through the practices and technologies of surveillance is “not necessarily the crafting of the individual subject cohered through acquiescence to or internalization of norms but assemblages of ‘militarized bodies’” (Puar 2007, 156). My own narrow and specific focus will obliquely follow on Puar’s suggestion and seek to confront the destructive dimension of surveillance. At stake is something like “the mortification of the self” (Harcourt 2015, 217–233) or indeed, the dismantling, fragmenting or undoing, that is, the destruction of subjects. For, as Martin Harries rightly explains, “we may learn as much about how we imagine subjects from how we imagine their destruction as from how we imagine the ways in which they are made” (Harries 2007, 15). For my part, I shall here remain agnostic on the history of such famously made, ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3 constructed, or produced subjects, about which I have written elsewhere, or on the novelty of the instruments of their targeting (see Anidjar 2003, 2008, 2015). Mindful of “efforts to keep the ocean’s tide back with a broom”, I shall stubbornly treat surveillance as a weapon (political, military or other), at once a means of inscription and of destruction. Great awakenings There are two words – words rather than concepts – that have failed to receive the attention they seem to deserve in the work of Michel Foucault, “the grandfather of contemporary surveillance studies” (Marx 2015, 734). I am referring to French words that, though articulated in opposition to each other by Foucault himself, nonetheless partake of a joined supplementarity, an elevated or heightened dimension, perhaps an extended and hyperbolic measure. These are not particularly strange words, except for the fact that they share a prefix, the prefix “sur”, which has been rendered into English as “over”, “above”, or even “super” or “hyper”. And yet, the first of the two words, surpouvoir, seems striking enough, over-powering enough. It was translated by Alan Sheridan as “super-power”, which in the context of the Cold War is both odd and potentially misleading. In Discipline and Punish, at any rate, once and once only in the book, Foucault deploys that word as a name or an attribute of sovereign power, the hyper-demonstrative form of power “which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations, … a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as ‘super-power’” (Foucault 1975, 61, 1977, 57). The scare quotes, by the way, have also been added, supplemented to the French original, which testifies, I think, to the discomfort of the translator, who otherwise conveys quite accurately the seminal idea of a significant and historical distinction between sovereign and disciplinary power. But what I mostly wish to call attention to here is the way Foucault himself renders this distinction in a peculiar lexical fashion; the way he distinguishes between “continual supervision” – notable at this stage by its absence – and surpouvoir. By now, it will have been easy to surmise that the English word “supervision” is (and translates) the second sur-mot or super-word, which really interests me here, namely, the word surveillance. It is, first of all, the apposition, and the opposition, of surpouvoir and surveillance that should have attracted, I think, a more scrupulous philological attention for it underscores the composite nature of both words as well as the etymological and semantic peculiarities of their constitutive elements. I do speak of a philological or literary attention which, considering the significance of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the representation and conceptualization of hyperbolic surveillance, is surprisingly lacking in surveillance studies (see e.g. Lyon 1994, 11; Kammerer 2012; Berlatsky 2014; Harcourt 2015, 26–27, 31–53). 4 G. ANIDJAR Now, “supervision” is not a bad translation for this difficult and quite successful “multidimensional concept” (Marx 2015, 736) even if it did give some trouble to the translator from the book title onward. Indeed, it is well known that “Discipline and Punish” remains a poor or inaccurate translation of Foucault’s original title. As Sheridan puts it: Any closer translation of the French title of this book, Surveiller et punir, has proved unsatisfactory on various counts. To begin with, Foucault uses the infinitive, which, as here, may have the effect of an “impersonal imperative”. Such a nuance is denied us in English. More seriously, the verb “surveiller” has no adequate English equivalent. Our noun “surveillance” has an altogether too restricted and technical use. Jeremy Bentham used the term “inspect” – which Foucault translates as “surveiller” – but the range of connotations does not correspond. “Supervise” is perhaps closest of all, but again, the word has different associations. “Observe” is rather too neutral, though Foucault is aware of the aggression involved in any one-sided observation. In the end, Foucault himself suggested Discipline and Punish, which relates closely to the book’s structure. (1977, ix) Sheridan is correct, of course, though it is notable that the Oxford English Dictionary does have an entry for the verb “surveil” (“to exercise surveillance over (someone), subject (someone) to surveillance. Also with a place or area as obj [ect] . … ”), the first listed use of which, in Federal court documents, is dated 1960 (OED Online 2015). According to the same OED entry, by 1966, Harper’s Magazine was wryly referring to the CIA as both subject and (evasive) object of surveillance (“If the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is as adroit in surveilling others as it is in escaping surveillance of itself, the Republic can relax”). What we are confronted with, in any case, are two words that, among other things, strikingly summarize and illustrate the famous Foucauldian transition, which moves us from sovereignty to discipline; two hyperbolic markers that seem to take us from the spectacular mode of sovereign super power, that must be seen by all, to the ubiquity of supervision, which observes and oversees all: from surpouvoir to surveillance. There are a few rare occasions when Foucault referred again to surpouvoir (mostly in the context of psychiatric power and in his lecture of 29 January 1975 on Sade in Abnormal); yet, the discursive potential of that word does not appear to have sufficed for an uptake, for the word to morph into a full-blown concept, and certainly not one of the magnitude of surveillance. My own wish here is to capture and mobilize the parallel and supplemental potential of these two über-words, to awaken, as it were, the augmented, elevated, and hyperbolic dimensions that operate in and through both of them. It is perhaps easy to understand (or to misunderstand) what the “sur” of “surpouvoir” refers to or modifies, even if it is by no means identical to what used to be called superpowers (in French, superpuissances, back in the good old days when there were more than one of those), and what we ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 5 may think of today in the power and superpower-saturated atmosphere we live and breathe – or merely watch, perhaps. But pouvoir and surpouvoir aside, what is it exactly that the “sur” of “surveillance” signifies or modifies? (Szendy 2007). What is it that it comes to affect or fashion? The etymology of the English word “surveillance” is, interestingly enough, French, though the word evidently finds its origins in the Latin vigilo, vigilare, which also gives us the word vigilance, common to English and French. In French, at any rate, the word surveillance comes from “veiller”, meaning to guard or to watch, to watch over and watch out; to exercise one’s attention or one’s caution or indeed, to watch over someone else’s behaviour, to keep an eye on them; to oversee and supervise. Primarily though, and just like its Latin antecedent, veiller refers to being or staying awake and aware, to keep vigil in the sense of postponing sleep, refraining or altogether abstaining from sleep. One engages in this kind of practice, this kind of veille or wake, or indeed, vigil, in relation to the sick or, obviously, to the dead. One keeps watch, one wakes, over them. Generally, the word has something to do with an extension of wakefulness (éveil or réveil), an extension and an intensification of awareness or watchfulness, of vigilance. Not unlike surpouvoir, then, with its augmenting and elevating prefix, the word surveillance would thus suggest a kind of hyperbolic attention or wakefulness (one that is hardly dented by the increasingly popular “sousveillance”). More than a negation of sleep, it would designate its extreme and heightened opposite, a state where sleep becomes close to impossible or even implausible, a state, if you will, of insomnia. The society of surveillance, to which Foucault awoke us (or awoke us again) and in which we live, may or may not stand in (historical) opposition to a sovereign, and hyperbolic, surpouvoir, but it has everything to do with our current understanding (or is it over-standing?), with the state of our extended awareness, and with our sleeplessness. And if Marshall McLuhan was correct in understanding media (and among them, weapons) as “extensions of man”, then surveillance, the vigilant ubiquity of supervision, must surely be conceived as a medium, an extension, and it is one to be reckoned with. Indeed, Gary Marx ascribes to “the new surveillance” precisely such an extended character. The new surveillance, he writes, “tends to be more intensive, [it] is extensive, extends the senses … and cognitive abilities” (2015, 735). Surveillance thus would signal the extension (and, as we shall also see, the extinction) of our most prized possession – our consciousness, our conscious awareness. It constitutes, by Marshall McLuhan’s account at least, a kind of ultimate weapon (2013). Yet, if it has been broadly recognized that surveillance is a weapon – a hunting, warring or ruling weapon – that it is structured like a weapon (“the biometric system is the absolute political weapon of our era”, insists Nitzan Lebovic), it remains unclear what consequences such recognition might bring, what reflections might ensue (2015, 853). There is here, to a surprising 6 G. ANIDJAR extent, a largely uncharted territory. For surveillance, scholars have largely neglected the military dimension of their subject, despite their recognition of its foundational importance (Wilson 2012, 269, but see Dandeker 1990 and Graham 2010). By the same token, “little discussion has connected surveillance, intelligence and military security”, and security studies at large (Bigo 2012, 281; and see Bigo and Tsoukala 2008). For my part, by underscoring, in a military or, more broadly, hoplological context, the link between sleep (or sleeplessness), wakefulness and surveillance, and by considering surveillance, after McLuhan, as the hyperbolic and weaponized extension of our conscious awareness, I mean first of all to echo Jonathan Crary’s study of “late capitalism and the ends of sleep”, which opens by looking at military and scientific efforts “to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep and to function productively and efficiently” (2013, 2). Crary also explains that sleeplessness and surveillance, the extension of wakeful awareness, is not something that is targeting the individual alone, or even primarily. In fact, the incessant surveillance of the individual belongs to the macro structure of state terror and “the military-police paradigm of full-spectrum dominance” (32). Along this political line, Crary mentions the US Air Force aptly coded “Operation Gorgon State”, which is “a collection of surveillance and data-analysis resources that ‘sees’ unblinkingly 24/7, indifferent to day, night, or weather, and that is lethally oblivious to the specificity of the living being it targets” (32). One of the names for this general situation is, I have suggested, insomnia. It is in this context that Crary briefly attends to the striking reflections on insomnia that were offered by Emmanuel Levinas. Dormio, Ergo Sum Towards an understanding of surveillance as the intense overextension of wakeful awareness, and its significance as a weapon (subjects are being destroyed), and an Islamophobic weapon at that, Levinas hardly seems the best or most obvious choice. And yet, notwithstanding his assertions on Palestinians (Anidjar 2003, chap. 1) and the dramatic transformation of his views on insomnia over the course of his philosophical career – a transformation that has been brilliantly analysed by Elisabeth Weber in a recent essay (Weber 2015) – I want to argue that Levinas (who did offer the thought that “being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought” and that “war is produced as the pure experience of pure being” [1979, 21]) is singularly attentive to a different modality of power – surpouvoir and surveillance – than Foucault. Aside from the repressive or the productive, we might provisionally call this modality a kind of sous-pouvoir. For we must remember that, through the layers of elevated and elevating prefixes, what is persistently inscribed and reinscribed is that we – we underpowered underdogs, we subjects – would ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 7 find ourselves under surveillance. Listen, then, to the contemporary relevance of Levinas’ words, words of vigilance and on vigilance, from the late 1940s. “This time it is not a matter of an imagined experience”, writes Levinas ([1947] 1987, 48, 1991, 27). Insomnia is constituted by the consciousness that it will never finish – that is, that there is no longer any way of withdrawing from the vigilance to which one is held. Vigilance without end. From the moment one is riveted there, one loses all notion of a starting or finishing point. Insomnia is vigilance without end, it imposes itself as an unwanted but inescapable watch, yet it is also an infinite exposure, the target or object, that “to which one is held” without recourse or “way of withdrawing”. Insomnia is therefore suffered “without end”. This state of wakefulness “without possible recourse to sleep”, is a vigilance “without refuge in unconsciousness, without the possibility of withdrawing into sleep as into a private domain”, and it corresponds, for Levinas, to a primordial experience of being, which insomnia singularly reveals (49). Insomnia is a sur-veillance, the elevated and hyperbolic extension of wakefulness. It answers, if one can put it this way, to the unmitigated horror of being, what Levinas calls the il y a (an idiomatic phrase that is itself badly, if somehow unavoidably, translated as “there is”). I will not expand on the critical (and persecutory) sense of Being that operates through Levinas’ work, but I do want to insist on a particular, and particularly striking, moment of his argument about insomnia and the “there is”, where he asserts – Simon Morgan Wortham calls it an “extraordinary claim” (Morgan Wortham 2013, 102) – that “existing is affirmed in its own annihilation” (Levinas [1947] 1987, 48). What could that mean? In this early text, Levinas does not elaborate much further. He only says that this state of overextended wakefulness, this hyperconsciousness is, in a way, the opposite of subjectivity, bringing about a kind of annihilation. It puts an end, as it were, to the self. “This existing is not an in-itself [en-soi], which is already peace; it is precisely the absence of all self, a without-self [sans-soi]” (49). Another text, also published by Levinas in 1947, elaborates further on subjectlessness, the annihilation and anonymity of the veille, of the vigil and the wake. “La veille est anonyme, wakefulness is anonymous,” Levinas says there ([1947] 1993, 111, 2001, 66). There is no such thing as “my vigilance”, then, strictly no subject thereof. “It is not that there is my vigilance in the night; in insomnia it is the night itself that watches.” In this “impersonal vigilance”, in the “anonymous nightwatch where I am completely exposed to being”, which is insomnia, Levinas sees not simply “an experience of nothingness” (65), but an “experience of depersonalization”, something that ultimately precedes or brings about “the dissipation of personages” (66). That which is, what Levinas calls the “there is”, occurs therefore as “an impossibility, an opposition to possibilities of sleep, relaxation, drowsiness, absence”. But how could this 8 G. ANIDJAR be construed as an annihilation of existence? Of the subject? Are not subjectivity and consciousness synonymous with awareness, with wakeful awareness? Not so, for Levinas. What insomnia reveals, what vigilance as it were establishes, is that “the ego is swept away by the fatality of being … Attention presupposes the freedom of the ego which directs it; the vigilance of insomnia which keeps our eyes open has no subject” (65). That is how Levinas can oppose wakefulness (la veille) to consciousness (la conscience). To be sure, consciousness does “participate” in wakefulness, it has a share in it, but that only “means that it has already torn into it. [Consciousness] contains a shelter from that being with which, depersonalized, we make contact in insomnia” (66). To the extent that I suffer from insomnia, then, or more accurately, to the extent that I am in insomnia, “I am, one might say, the object rather than the subject of an anonymous thought.” Surely, this experience of being an object is still something, Levinas says. I am, after all, aware of this anonymous vigilance; but I become aware of it in a movement in which the I is already detached from the anonymity, in which the limit situation of impersonal vigilance is reflected in the ebbing of a consciousness which abandons it. (66) To the extent that there is vigilance, there might remain a trace of consciousness, but it is only a trace, a vanishing where, as we saw earlier, “existing is affirmed in its own annihilation”. That is why insomnia is a weapon of mass destruction. At the very least, it “puts us in a situation where the disruption of the category of the substantive designates not only the disappearance of every object, but the extinction of the subject” (67). In a state of constant vigilance, “amid the near-dissolution of the very terrain of objects and selves” (as Morgan Wortham aptly puts it), there are no subjects (2013, 100). “But then”, asks Levinas, “what does the advent of a subject consist in?” (2001, 67) Before answering this question, let me remark here on the uncanny way in which, about 15 years after Levinas began his meditations on vigilance and insomnia, Foucault also turned away from history and periodization as he undertook to reflect on the word “veille” (translated as “vigil” or “watch”). Foucault went on to explain that the word “evokes, first of all, sleeplessness; it’s the body withdrawn but tense, the mind at attention at its four corners, on watch” (Foucault 2015, 218). More important, though, is the destructive, desubjectifying moment to which Foucault points in strikingly Levinasian terms. Describing “the acute faceless vigilance” found in the work he was commenting on (The Watch, that is, La veille, written in 1963 by Roger Laporte), Foucault writes that “nobody keeps vigil on this watch: no consciousness more lucid than that of the sleeping, no subjectivity singularly worried. It’s the vigil itself that keeps vigil [ce qui veille, c’est la veille]” (218). It seems clear that, in Levinas and in this Foucault at least, we are led to think of surveillance, of the watch or the vigil, of the wakeful awareness to which insomnia testifies, in a way that is dramatically distinct from the ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 9 processes, formations, histories and trajectories of subjectivation familiar to us from elsewhere, and first of all from Foucault’s own work on surveillance and discipline. If anything, as he sets out to answer the question of the subject’s advent, Levinas describes surveillance – for Levinas’ entire lexicon here is a lexicon of surveillance from wakefulness to vigilance, from watch to nightwatch – as a radical, and anonymous process of de-subjectivation, of depersonalization. Just as surveillance is itself anonymous, we might say that it also anonymizes. It is impersonal through and through. It is never a person or a somebody who watches in the “there is” of being, in being as vigilance. Nor quite a subject that is being watched. Rather it is the night that watches. One might even say, “it watches, ça veille” or “ça surveille”. Il y a, or there is, surveillance. Levinas had acknowledged, in Time and the Other, that it might seem “paradoxical to characterize the ‘there is’ by vigilance, as if the pure event of existing were endowed with a consciousness”. But, Levinas goes on, it is necessary to ask if vigilance defines consciousness, or if consciousness is not indeed rather the possibility of tearing itself away from vigilance, if the proper meaning of consciousness does not consist in being a vigilance backed against a possibility of sleep, if the feat of the ego is not the power to leave the situation of impersonal vigilance. (51) Consciousness, the advent of the subject, can therefore only be found, Levinas reveals in a singular reversal of the entire philosophical tradition, in sleep. “What characterizes [consciousness] particularly is its always retaining the possibility of withdrawing ‘behind’ to sleep.” Ultimately, then, “consciousness is the power to sleep” (51). A challenging thought indeed, to which Levinas provides further clarification when he elsewhere writes that consciousness appears to stand out against the there is by its ability to forget and interrupt it, by its ability to sleep. Consciousness is a mode of being, but, in taking up being, it is a hesitation in being. It thus gives itself a dimension of retreat. (Levinas 2001, 67) I sleep, therefore I am. And consciousness must, therefore, not be thought in opposition to the unconscious. It “is not constituted by the opposition, but by this proximity, this communication with its contrary: in its very élan consciousness becomes fatigued and interrupts itself, has a recourse against itself … It never finds itself up against the wall” (67). As I mentioned, and as Elisabeth Weber demonstrates, Levinas did, quite dramatically, change his mind on the relation between the terms, between vigilance, insomnia, and the ethical (non-) subject. But the passages I have quoted, aside from the uncanny prescience they manifest, are remarkable in their diagnostic precision with regard to what it means to find oneself in a state of permanent vigilance and surveillance, the general condition of 24/7 wakeful alertness and exposure that Crary describes so compellingly. 10 G. ANIDJAR There is much to reflect on and further ponder obviously, beginning perhaps with the notion that surveillance was always already the new media, that as an “extension of man”, as McLuhan had it, it is also, and blatantly so, the ultimate weapon. As the depersonalizing and annihilating force Levinas describes, and well beyond its historical innovations and military uses, surveillance is undoubtedly a weapon, a means of inscription and of destruction. But is it an extension of man? It is an instrument, a technological extension, yes, but in whose hands exactly? And directed at whom? The generalized anonymity that Levinas insists upon raises a peculiar conundrum as we reflect on the militarization of our existence – or nonexistence. In the age of the world target, as Rey Chow so pointedly calls it, is there a subject of surveillance? (2006). Does there remain one? How do we think the anonymization to which Levinas alerts us (in a way that, again, might give pause to our usual reading of Foucault), the waning existence of the subject “in its own annihilation”, together with the urgency of addressing, under its heading, the clear and present targeting of Muslims the world over? It might be possible to move closer to the problem by engaging with its technical lexicon, and by returning to what happened to the opposition of surpouvoir and surveillance in Foucault’s text. I suggested early on that it was an oversight of sorts. The ambiguity of that word summarizes what I am trying to argue, as it signifies both a kind of attentive supervision and “the action of passing over something without seeing or noticing it; the unintentional failure to notice or act on something; the fact of having been overlooked or neglected in this way; negligence, inadvertence” (OED). There is a comparable ambiguity in the difference between “two models of privacy”, which Philip Agre describes, a difference placed under the heading of two different terms, namely, surveillance and capture (Agre 1994). That ambiguity might be said to begin today in the dual use of the word “information”. As Agre explains, that term too conceals a significant ambiguity. One the one hand, information can be defined … as a purely mathematical measure of information and information-carrying capacity, without regard for the content. On the other hand, information is information also about something (A similar point applies to customary uses of the term “data”). (107) To disregard the content is to perform an oversight. To gather information (to surveil, that is) and to make it actionable, to make it about something or someone – that is oversight too, but in that other sense. Now, Agre insists on the metaphorical dimension of the operative terms (“the capture model is a philosophical metaphor”, he asserts, somehow peremptorily, while “the surveillance model is a political metaphor” [107]). Yet, he also acknowledges that these very terms hark back to a hunting lexicon, returning us to the matter of weapons, or at least to “tracking” as the primary dimension of both models ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 11 (“Computationalists’ discourse rarely brings to the surface the connotations of violence in the metaphor of ‘capture’: captured information is not spoken of as fleeing, escaping, or resenting its imprisonment” [106]). More importantly, I think, Agre illuminates the processes of de-subjectivation at work in any system of tracking, the fundamental disconnection at work between the system of supervision (or indeed oversight) and the subjects or objects of its attention. Thus, although one might “distinguish between systems that track human beings and systems that track physical objects”, this distinction would be, Agre says, “misleading” since “many of the systems track both people and objects, and others track objects as stand-ins for people. A system that tracks people by means of identification cards, for example, is really tracking the cards” (104). What this ultimately means is that our model of representation, when it comes to surveillance (or, for that matter, capture) is, well, representational. It assumes a correspondence between that which is tracked – say, the person – and that which enables the tracking – the ID card (and consider what Mayanthi Fernando 2014 tells us about those called “Muslims” in France and elsewhere). Some operation must close the loop, bridge the distance, “between the tracked entity and the centralized system” (Agre 1994, 104). As Agre summarizes it, “some entity changes state, a computer internally represents those states, and certain technical and social means are provided for (intendedly at least) maintaining the correspondence between the representation and the reality” (104). This, you might say, is how anyone killed by a drone is always already a (dead) “militant”. The strike closes a loop (unless it is collateral damage), a loop that is always already broken (the idea of skin embedded chips also gives rise to “a grisly scenario in which identification can be removed from their owners”, in which case, it is the chips, and not the persons, that “will become very valuable”) (Michael, Fusco, and Michael 2008, 1197). The point here is that the distance between the ID card (or the label “terrorist”) and the tracking system can only remain an open one, which is to say that there must exist “some means of consistently ‘attaching’ a given entity to its corresponding representation” (105). Agre goes on to argue that to understand our current predicament, capture might thus be a better model, or an enriching metaphor, because it is more obviously sociotechnical. “If a capture system ‘works’”, he explains, “then what is working is a larger sociopolitical structure, not just a technical system” (112). Beyond the machinery, what is at stake are “grammars of action” (107), an entire network of practices (“the empirical project of analysis, the ontological project of articulation, and the social project of imposition”) that must be remaking the world in which surveillance and capture operate (113). What matters in each case is not the sequence of “inputs” to or “outputs” from a given machine, but rather the ways in which human activities have been structured. The capture model describes the situation that results when grammars of 12 G. ANIDJAR action are imposed upon human activities, and when the newly reorganized activities are represented in computers in real time. (109) Surveiller et détruire “A new way of seeing is giving rise to a way of constructing”, writes Michel de Certeau, who also underscores the constructive and the productive in his discussion of divine surveillance. “Such is the question Nicholas of Cusa poses: what does it mean to ‘see’? how can a ‘vision’ bring a new world into being?” (De Certeau 1987, 3) Following Mohamed Zayani, one might here translate and transition with de Certeau (and with Foucault) towards the fourteenth-century theologian Nicholas of Cusa (incidentally a major figure in the late medieval Christian confrontation with Islam) (see e.g. Levi, George-Tvrtković, and Duclow 2014). For what happens in the surveillance society, in the permanent state of vigilance so powerfully diagnosed by Levinas, seems an old-new world indeed, and a peculiar staging of an otherwise well-known script of interpellation (Zayani 2008). Subjects emerge when they are no longer relevant, identifications proliferate at the moment of their vanishing. Means of inscription and of destruction. Thus, de Certeau explains that “the gaze abolishes every position that would guarantee the traveler an acceptable place, an autonomous and sheltering dwelling, an objective ‘home’” (1987, 20). But this is less about the gaze as such, than it is about surveillance as the kind of weapon McLuhan described, a weapon that takes one out of place, that takes one out. Contra Zayani, who argues that the surveillance here described does “not allow for the existence of ‘a no-man’s gaze’” (Zayani 2008, 94), Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli phrases the matter more precisely: for “while you might feel singled out, you realize that this eye calls for a ‘you’, not as an individual subject under suspicion … .[W]hen it targets ‘you’ as a participant, it does so impersonally” (Ravetto-Biagioli 2010, 122). It would be pointless to argue that the “political technology of the body” Foucault taught is about anything else than assujetissement, subjectivation (Foucault 1977, 24, 26). Yet, it is remarkable that there is a profound duality at the heart of the subject hereby produced, “both a productive body and a subjected body” (26). Foucault strikingly evokes this dédoublement, the duplication of the body of the condemned as a parallel, indeed, as a division and a duplication of the body of the king made famous by Ernst Kantorowicz (“The King is Dead! Long Live the King!” as the formula has it). There would be, Foucault tells us, a production apparatus, un appareil de production, which gave rise to new forms of subjectivity, and which also produced new concepts. “On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc” (29). There is no mistaking the productive and constructive dimension Foucault describes, the reality-effect that results from the enabling ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 13 reaches of power (“we no longer need to ask about the aims of political regimes”, complains Martin Harries, “they are ‘in the business’ of making subjects” [2007, 15]). And what about the business of destruction? Beyond the “various concepts” Foucault invokes, is it always “a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection, or technical intervention”, that is at stake? It is, rather, “the effect of a subjection” (Foucault 1977, 30). Surveillance, “the mastery that power exercises over the body”, would therefore not be the mere tool Foucault describes. It would be a weapon. The prison (and the guillotine) would be its alternate figures, the soul its instrument. “The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” (30). Of course, much depends on what a prison is, or does; on what surveillance is, does, or on what it undoes. There are, in any case, numerous tools, instruments and indeed weapons in Foucault’s account, many of which are less coercive, less productive and constructive even, than has otherwise emerged. What I wish to underscore as I approach my conclusion is that, perhaps between the lines of his history of surveillance, Foucault is also teaching us about another history, which would not follow the same periodization or the same productive vectors: it is the history of destruction, the history of means of destruction. Here, the subject is less a product than a cog (or, we will soon see, a bullet), less a target than a side effect, collateral damage (Masco 2013). Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a bodyweapon, a body-tool, body-machine complex. One is as far as possible from those forms of subjection that demanded of the body only signs or products, forms of expression or the result of labour. (Foucault 1977, 153) And though, Deleuze-like, Foucault insists on the ways in which the body is plugged into a machine, an “apparatus of production”, much of what he describes, beginning with military grounds and fields of operation, would be more aptly rendered as an apparatus of destruction. There is, at the very least, a lack of completion that, when it comes to the ubiquitous subject, suggests an unfinished product, a non-achievement that is also an achèvement, the bringing about of death and of destruction. “Exercise, having become an element in the political technology of the body and of duration, does not culminate in a beyond, but tends toward a subjection that never reaches completion [un assujetissement qui n’a jamais fini de s’achever]” (162). Phrased otherwise, “troops were used as a projectile, a wall or a fortress” (162). Weapons making weapons. Or undoing them. Part of an apparatus of destruction (and its ever growing business arm), in the surveillance society the subject is at once target and weapon. Much more and no more than a marginal, and vanishing, object. 14 G. ANIDJAR He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (202–203) It is this duality at the heart of power that renders it “a technique of overlapping subjection and objectification” (305), at once inscription and destruction. Thus, just like the drill of the soldier and other technologies of power, the examination of the pupil or of the future administrator is made to “manifest the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected” (184–185). Surveillance, in this perspective, is not only about “emitting signs of potency”, about power “imposing its mark on its subjects” (187). It is also a technique by which power holds its targets “in a mechanism of objectification” (187). Truly, “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (194). But power also destroys (Vahabi 2004). “He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication” (Foucault 1977, 200). Whether “a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy”, or indeed a Muslim, the object of information trapped in the panoptical apparatus (“visibility is a trap”, says Foucault) is no doubt individualized. Is he, however, a subject? I have been arguing that the destruction of subjectivity begins on the “side” of power. As a form of power, meant to be “permanent in its effects”, surveillance is (about being) marked for disappearance. It is “the perfection of power”, yes, but it should also “tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” (201). What Foucault describes as “the automatic function of power” is very much a machine, therefore, a piece of technology, but it is one that is meant for destruction, for auto-destruction. At the very least, it is a machine that works to discard its operator, “a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it” (201). That is why surveillance must be understood as a mechanism, “an important mechanism” that “automatizes and disindividualizes power” (202). And that is why “it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine”. It could be one, anyone, no one or even many. In fact, “the more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are”, the more effective power will be (202, emphasis added). But if this structure of power, this machine, “produces homogeneous effects of power”, it is also because, however paradoxically, it generates anonymity, disindividuality, ephemerality. Power passes over to the other side (“The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side – to the side of its surface of application”, 202) and with it begins the destruction of the subject into anonymity. ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 15 We have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the functions of surveillance … any member of society … an observer may observe, at a glance, so many different individuals, [which] also enables everyone to come and observe any of the observers. (207) This generalization of anonymity (“its vocation was to become a generalized function”, 207) is the destruction of the subject, destruction as an internalization of power, which throws off “its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal” (203). There is indeed an exhaustive, and exhausting, dimension to surveillance, a process of extinction, akin to what happened after Napoleon’s death, when the whole of the long process by which the pomp of sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun. (217) What Foucault describes as “generalized surveillance” (209), for which he deploys an insistent lexicon of production (e.g. “the individual is carefully fabricated”, 217, “submissive subjects are produced”, 295), is also the generalized destruction of the face (a Levinasian moment, if there is one). Surveillance is a weapon, and it is definitely aimed at Muslims today. But it is something else than a mere instance of power as productive, of subjectivation. 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