Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian And Dystopian Literature And Film

185 Pages·1.889 MB·English

by  Peter Marks

Imagining Surveillance
Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film
Peter Marks
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© Peter Marks, 2015
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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The right of Peter Marks to be identified as Author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
Acknowledgements iv
Introduction 1
1 Surveillance Studies and Utopian Texts 12
2 Surveillance Before Big Brother 36
3 Nineteen Eighty-Four 62
4 Visibility 83
5 Spaces 104
6 Identities 124
7 Technologies 141
8 Things to Come 155
Bibliography 172
Index 177
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, to Jo Watson and Ella Watson Marks, with gratitude for the
patience and love that got me through.
To my friends and colleagues in the Surveillance in Everyday Life group
(Pat O’Malley, Charlotte Epstein, Mehera San Roque, Harriet Westcott, Garner
Clancey and Pete Brown) thanks too for your intelligence, support and companion-
ship. A special thanks to Gavin Smith for encouragement and libations far above
the call of duty.
Institutionally, thanks to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for the grant
that got the Surveillance in Everyday Life group going. Versions of the arguments
presented here were given, among other places, at the University of Sydney; Clare
Hall, Cambridge; University of Michigan; and Queen’s University, Ontario. My
especial thanks to Rowell and Penny Huesmann and to David Lyon for asking me
to come by.
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Introduction
In May 2013, a young American fled Hawaii, bound initially for Hong Kong. He
planned to seek political asylum in Ecuador, knowing that massive amounts of
classified information he had leaked to liberal newspapers in the United States
and the United Kingdom about surveillance carried out by the National Security
Agency (NSA) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
would lead to his arrest. Rather than escape in total secrecy, he conducted a televi-
sion interview in Hong Kong with the journalist Glen Greenwald. His name, he told
Greenwald, was Edward Snowden. Snowden justified passing on the restricted mate-
rial by saying that citizens needed to know about the scope of surveillance carried
out by their governments, surveillance that accessed their personal information and
communications to an unprecedented degree. He argued that the public should be
in control of the decision-making processes on mass surveillance. Snowden under-
stood, he told Greenwald, that as a result of his actions he might be ‘rendered’ by
United States security agencies, and that possibly his life was at risk. Within days,
the previously unknown operative was a global celebrity, denounced as a traitor by
some, lauded as a courageous whistle blower by others. Revealingly, his defenders
came from across the political spectrum, as did his accusers.
Ultimately, the United States government ensured that Snowden was denied
access to Ecuador. At one point, Bolivian President Evo Morales’s jet was held
up in Europe on suspicion that Snowden might be on board, secretly en route to
Ecuador. This incident temporarily threatened diplomatic relationships between
the United States and several Latin American countries. By the end of 2013 Russia
had granted Snowden asylum, to the obvious annoyance of United States officials.
Many suspected that the Putin regime had aimed for just that effect, part of a larger,
self-assertive diplomatic push. The Snowden revelations created a rolling sequence
of international and internal scandals, inquiries and debates. Commentators, politi-
cians and citizens in the United States decried what they saw as the violation of
the Fourth Amendment of that country’s constitution, which prohibits unreason-
able searches. US President Barack Obama was forced to apologise to German
Chancellor Angela Merkel after it was revealed that her personal mobile phone had
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2 imagining surveillance
been tapped. China expressed possibly disingenuous outrage at the scale of United
States monitoring, warning that it threatened Sino-US ties. Global corporations
denied allowing governments access to information their customers believed was
private.
This thriller scenario – with mass surveillance, deception, clandestine flights,
international diplomatic intrigue and embarrassing public revelations – eerily
reprised the Cold War, its plot twists and characters worthy of John Le Carré or
Graham Greene, writers whose tales of espionage and realpolitik had defined the
spy genre for much of that period. But the author most commonly invoked by
Snowden’s actions was George Orwell. Sales of Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
spiked sharply in the United States as Snowden’s disclosures became widely known.
Mass media and public forums repeatedly employed Orwell’s totemic creation, Big
Brother, and the adjective ‘Orwellian’ as shorthand for the state intrusion that
leaks by Snowden appeared to uncover. The book simultaneously measured and fed
public anxiety. Time Magazine reported Barack Obama using Nineteen Eighty-Four to
fight off criticism of the ‘Prism’ programme, by which the NSA gained access to the
systems of Google, Facebook and Apple. ‘In the abstract you can complain about Big
Brother and how this is a potential program run amok,’ Obama claimed, ‘But when
you actually look at the details, I think we have struck the right balance.’1 A New
Yorker article asked rhetorically, ‘So Are We Living in 1984?’2 (The implications of
treating the novel’s title as a date are considered in Chapter 3.) Snowden himself,
in an alternative Channel 4 Christmas message to the Queen’s traditional BBC
message, observed that Orwell had ‘warned us of the dangers’ of mass surveillance.
Yet much of what Snowden revealed – the tracking of mobile phone metadata; the
monitoring of computer use, including through Google; the interception of unfath-
omable amounts of information carried through cables under the Atlantic – bore
little resemblance to what Orwell imagined in a novel first published in June 1949.
We need not fault Orwell for this, for computer technology was still in its infancy.
And Orwell died barely six months after the publication of the work that would
ensure his posthumous reputation and which in time be recognised as a ‘touchstone’
of surveillance (Nellis 2009: 178). The brave new World Wide Web, social media,
mobile phones and body scanners, identity theft and GPS tracking, let alone the
aggregation and assessment of Big Data by governments and corporations, was
unknown and unknowable to the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four. To this we might
add, among other developments, the rupture caused by the events of September
11, 2001. That attack, incessantly replayed on television screens around the world,
helped reset the security coordinates (and some would argue the moral coordinates)
of many nations. It gifted government agencies in supposedly liberal countries new
and controversial surveillance powers and resources, contributing significantly to
what Torin Monahan labels ‘the time of insecurity’ (Monahan 2010). Did the rush
1 Available at <http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/06/11/sales-of-george-orwells-nineteen-eighty-
four-soar> (last accessed 23 October 2014).
2 Available at<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/so-are-we-living-in-1984.
html> (last accessed 23 October 2014).
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introduction 3
to reference Nineteen Eighty-Four in the post-Cold War, post-September 11, hi-tech
scenario exposed by Snowden signal a failure of public and media imagination? Is it
time to move beyond Big Brother?
This book answers ‘yes’ to those questions. Surveillance scholars regularly com-
plain that the concept of Big Brother is ‘out of date’ (Gilliom and Monahan 2013:
7), and that ‘no single Orwellian Big Brother oversees [the] massive monitory effort’
that is surveillance in the twenty-first century (Haggerty and Ericson 2006: 5–6).
In technological terms, Oceania certainly is profoundly outmoded. Yet we might
temper this dismissal by accepting surveillance expert Benjamin Goold’s statement
that:
Looking at the discourse of surveillance and technology over the past fifty
years, it is difficult to overestimate the impact that Orwell’s novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four has had on the popular and academic imaginations. (Goold 2004:
208–9)
This admission suggests that if we aim to understand the scope and impact of sur-
veillance in the contemporary world, evaluate its history and speculate on its future,
Nineteen Eighty-Four still has something to teach us. The world Orwell projected
remains the most emblematic depiction of state monitoring in all literature, a still-
terrifying case study of the dehumanising effects of surveillance on individuals and
groups, and a compelling warning against the type of society that might evolve,
given a complacent, fearful or compliant citizenry. The novel continues to stimulate
and perplex readers, its ongoing centrality to public debate saying much about the
power it retains to entertain, provoke, inform and, on occasion, to activate. David
Lyon, one of the world’s leading authorities on surveillance, recognises this:
How do we know what being under surveillance, or engaging in surveillance,
is really like? Why do we experience surveillance in specific ways? It is possible
that we have been deliberately watched . . . Equally it is possible that we have
studied surveillance . . . Far more likely, however, that we know about surveil-
lance because we have read about it in a classic novel such as Nineteen Eighty-
Four (1949) or that we have seen a film depicting surveillance such as Enemy
of the State (1998). Such movies and novels help us to get our bearings on what
surveillance is all about and – because they are usually negative, dystopian –
give us a sense of the kind of world we wish to avoid. (Lyon 2007: 139)
Lyon indicates the important way in which novels and films offer vicarious experi-
ences of surveillance. They provide us with scenarios, narratives and characters
through which we can imagine surveillance worlds similar to, or intriguingly differ-
ent from, our own, and in which we see individuals, groups and societies responding
to the existence or development of surveillance regimes, technologies and protocols.
Surveillance often is presented in terms of rapidly evolving technology and over-
whelming, impersonal systems. Certainly these are powerful, important and conse-
quential elements of what Lyon calls our Surveillance Society (2001). The impact of
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4 imagining surveillance
technology becomes even more apparent and pressing in the age of Big Data, when
computers have come to supplement and in many instances to supplant cameras
as the key instrument of surveillance. Individuals can be considered less important
than their ‘data doubles’, aggregates of 0s and 1s that are collated with those of
countless others to produce mass information that can be sorted, sold and assessed by
state agencies and corporations. Surveillance scholars have underlined the ubiquity
of disembodied transactions and interactions in a world where identification systems
rely less on our actual selves than on our digital profiles (Solove 2004; Lyon 2010,
among many others). Gilles Deleuze’s provocative term ‘dividual’ (the individual
shorn of distinctiveness and merged into ‘samples, data, markets or “banks”’(Deleuze
1992: 5), captures this potential loss or absence of embodied selfhood. Yet the reality
of actual humans being under surveillance as opposed solely to their digital dop-
pelgängers has not been discarded. Lyon begins his synoptic account, Surveillance
Studies: An Overview, by stating plainly that ‘Surveillance is about seeing things
and, more particularly, about seeing people (Lyon 2007: 1), while John Gilliom and
Torin Monahan ‘define surveillance as monitoring people in order to regulate or govern
their behaviour’ (2; original emphasis). We might further underline the italicised
‘people’ in that quotation to suggest the distinctive value that literature and films
retain in conceptualising surveillance. They supply a critical human dimension,
dramatising conflicts about individual and social identity, tackling ethical problems
and ideological debates, investigating why people comply with or rebel against
monitoring, and supplying creative projections on the shape of surveillance things
to come. In their variety and inventiveness they illustrate the critical interplay
between people and processes, supplying judgements, options and possibilities at
the personal and societal levels. Literature and films have regularly been used by
surveillance scholars to illustrate specific aspects of surveillance, or to measure the
impact monitoring has or might have. Monahan acknowledges that ‘Because the
topic of surveillance seems to lure creative minds, the field [of surveillance studies]
has been in a loose conversation with artists, fictions, and their robust material for a
while’ (Monahan 2011: 501). This study aims to transform loose conversation into
productive dialogue by contributing to what Monahan labels the ‘emerging “cultural
studies” of surveillance’ (503).
The present study concentrates on utopian novels and films, employing ‘utopian’
as an umbrella term that encompasses eutopias (‘good’ places) and dystopias (‘bad’
places), as well as texts that mix both places. These works provide immensely rich
source material for dealing with the creative representation and critical assessment
of surveillance. Other genres suggest themselves, most obviously spy, detective or
police procedural fiction, as Mike Nellis documents (2009). D. A. Miller’s influen-
tial The Police and the Novel (1988) presents an account of social discipline in terms
of Victorian fiction, while more recently, David Rosen and Aaron Santesso in The
Watchman in Pieces (2013) venture energetically and lucidly across the centuries
from Shakespeare to postmodernism, charting connections between surveillance,
literature and liberal notions of personhood. Sébastien Le Fait offers a thematic
account of surveillance over a range of genres in contemporary film and televi-
sion in Surveillance on Screen (2012), explaining the effect surveillance has had on
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introduction 5
our watching patterns. But no single genre depicts and assesses surveillance with
the creative vitality, social engagement and historical sweep of utopian texts. Spy
novels and detective fiction potentially can deal with larger social questions, though
they tend to be tightly focused. They tend not to investigate in any sustained or
encompassing way how societies are organised or might be organised differently
in the future as do utopian texts. Surveillance is pervasive and consequential in
contemporary life, constantly morphing and expanding as new technologies and
social situations arise. The future arrives early, so to speak, and we need ways of
thinking inventively about the challenges and questions surveillance continues to
raise. Modern utopian works overwhelmingly project forward, initiating imaginative
thought experiments that can feed into social awareness and discourse. Surveillance
is integral to questions of identity and privacy, the maintenance of social processes
and order, to social interaction through sites such as Facebook, and to questions of
border protection and crime prevention. Twenty-first century consumer capitalism
could not function without the collection, storage, processing and transmission of
personal information; the same could be said about modern social welfare. Gilliom
and Monahan accept that ‘our lives as citizens, students, employees, and consumers
are fully embedded in interactive and dynamic webs of surveillance’, adding that
‘such transformative changes require a complete reimagining of social life’ (vii). The
complete reimagining of social life functions as a serviceable working definition of
the utopian genre, and the endless diversity of those projections incorporate options
and possibilities, hints, warnings and aspirations.
Placing Nineteen Eighty-Four within this larger generic field maps on to develop-
ments in the academic study of surveillance itself. As later chapters explain in more
detail, the novel was referenced in some of the earliest scholarly accounts of surveil-
lance, most notably James Rule’s foundational Private Lives and Public Surveillance
(1973). Rule employed Nineteen Eighty-Four as a Weberian ideal model by which to
measure the degree and tenor of surveillance in the United States and Britain at the
time. Two decades later, another key text, David Lyon’s The Electronic Eye: The Rise
of Surveillance Society (1994), devotes much of a chapter to Orwell’s text, noting that
‘the majority of surveillance studies is informed by either Orwellian or Foucauldian
ideas’ (79). Lyon thoughtfully observes, though, that ‘Powerful metaphors lie
relatively unexamined in various films as well as novels such as Franz Kafka’s The
Castle or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’ (78). By 2007 he had extended
that list to include films such as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner,
Peter Weir’s The Truman Show and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (Lyon 2007:
139–58). Sean Hier and Josh Greenberg take a similar line in the introduction to
the 2009 collection Surveillance: Power, Problems and Politics, connecting Nineteen
Eighty-Four with a network of texts: Kafka’s The Trial, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and The Handmaid’s Tale (Hier and Greenberg
2009: 4). Zygmunt Bauman’s and David Lyon’s Liquid Surveillance (2013) acknowl-
edges that ‘the utopian and dystopian muses still offer scope for imaginative critiques’
(Bauman and Lyon 2013: 115). Bauman observes that ‘The authors of the greatest
dystopias of yore, like [Yevgeny] Zamyatin, Orwell or Aldous Huxley, penned their
visions of the horrors haunting denizens of the solid modern world’ (108) which has
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