‘We have become a society of surveillance.’ This refrain, once the stuff of fiction and born out on the pages of George Orwell’s now prescient 1984, is today a hackneyed fact. We have become a society obsessed with—as well as frightened of and exhilarated by—burgeoning technologies of surveillance. For some, the reiteration of this fact merely contributes to our complacency, to our embrace and internalization of the state’s surveillant eye. For others, it is a reminder that we are a society in urgent need of surveillant literacy.
This seminar addresses this need through a
historical examination of the emergence of new devices for seeing, looking,
counting, filing and recording in the 19th and 20th
centuries. Our goal is not—or not simply—to acknowledge the historical
precedents for today’s ‘Big Brother’ in earlier photographic and filmic
practices. It is to suggest that any
investigation of the post-9/11 frenzy with looking and seeing, witnessing and
being seen requires a parallel investigation of how we think about, examine,
critique and historicize technology. Focusing on a set of key episodes in the
history of American media (1880s-1950s), this seminar calls into question what
counts as a technology of surveillance. Is it the eye? Is it the lens? Or is it
the ways in which the eye and the lens mediate new social spaces and publics?
Should we focus on the visual or the ways in which new technologies—from
statistics to biometrics, for example—account for and address the limits of
looking?
The
seminar is divided into four sections, opening with an examination of how we
historicize technologies and how those histories have shaped our histories of
surveillance. Of particular importance to this conversation will be recent
debates about digitalization and the claim that photographic truth is no longer
possible. What are the implications of this history for the ways we look at the
past? Was truth ever the goal of recording devices and spying eyes? Taking this
theoretical ground as our starting point, the class will explore three aspects
of American film and photographic production, all of which stress the organization
of the American public: ‘Engineering Social Space,’ ‘Bureaucracy’ and ‘Public
and Counter-Publics.’ In each section, we will examine historical episodes in
photography and film production alongside contemporary artistic and cultural
examples of practices geared to frame and reframe debates about surveillance
and what counts as public. Key issues for debate will include the differences
between state and corporate surveillance as well as between private viewing and
public watching, resistances to technologies, the ways in which debates about
surveillance frame current studies of labor and technological determinism.
Suggested Summer
Reading/Films
- Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932)
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949)
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1952)
- Peeping Tom, dir. Michael Powell, 1960
- The Conversation, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974
- Caché, dir. Michael Haneke, 2005
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