Table Of ContentA critique of surveillance
Presentation 1
Paul Ghils
Cosmopolis welcomes Philippe-Joseph Salazar as a guest editor of this special issue, devoted
to the theme of “surveillance” in its varying forms and perceptions across the world.
The current upsurge of surveillance policies and, to a minor extent, of defensive movements
to limit their expansion, appears to parallel escalating and overlapping conflicts in a shrinking
world. Thousands of state agencies across the world, as well as private associations, lobbies,
research bodies and observatories capture data, procedures, policies, issues and
developments in their respective fields of interest to exert power or protect privacy,
guarantee secrecy or expose abuses, defend corporate interests or work for the public good,
extend or limit rights, regulate or deregulate, destroy or preserve the social fabric, control or
build firewalls.
Far from being a feature of today’s mediatized world and its cyberspace, this phenomenon
can be seen as deeply rooted in human beings’ age-old attitudes and interactions, in a
complex network of “interveillance” that blurs the lines between trust and distrust, empathy
and dispathy among individuals and communities. One resulting paradox is that, while the
rule of law is entrusted to governments, parliaments and civil society, intrusions into privacy
and espionnage may come from both public agencies and civil society, considering that
commercial lobbies, hackers or terrorists are as often components of civil society, uncivil
though these may be.
Where a borderless online world and communities jealous of their borders intersect, an old
question is posed in new terms, to which succesful responses will depend on a proper
balance between autonomy and control, and on setting standards to meet the differing
needs of digitalized forms of globalization, traditional behaviours, collective security and
basic civil rights.
Cosmopolis 2015/2 1
Guest Editor’s Note
This Special Issue brings together nine scholars who, from different regions and Humanities disciplines,
put under their crossfire a new dimension of cosmopolitics: the modern complexity of surveillance,
control and strategic communication.
Contributions range from China to Argentina, Egypt to South Africa, the United States to the new
Caliphate. They cut across disciplinary boundaries. They fall into four broad sections: theory of
surveillance, strategic communication and globalized control (Salazar, Ornatowski, Ghils), state
strategic communication (Liu, Styszynski), military and police intelligence (Doxtader, Vitale), gender
and higher education control (Saleh, Glenn).
The Guest Editor wishes to thank Paul Ghils, Editor in Chief of Cosmopolis, for welcoming this
Special Issue.
Some support from the National Research Foundation of South Africa is recognized (grant 81695 -
Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the
authors and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto).
Ph.-J. Salazar.
A Critique of Surveillance
SURVEILLANCE IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE: A RHETORICAL CRITIQUE
Philippe-Joseph Salazar
Centre for Rhetoric Studies
University of Cape Town
South Africa
Abstract: This paper offers a new frame of analysis for surveillance studies, recasting surveillance as a
field for rhetoric (i.e. strategic persuasion) and critical communication. In dealing with surveillance as a
persuasive structure, the author proposes five points of entry (or prolegomena): the triage of secrecy,
the archaic paradox of surveillance, the fallacy of individualization, the public as noise and attunement,
and the public’s power of abstraction in persuasive communication. In conclusion he questions
surveillance agencies’ archaic misconception of communication in the electronic page.
Keywords: biopolitics, intelligence, panopticon, rhetoric, secrecy, Stimmung, surveillance, WikiLeaks
INTRODUCTION
My approach to surveillance studies (and strategic communication; Salazar, 2014c) is that of a
philosopher of rhetoric (Surveillance/Rhetoric, 2012). This angle of attack pays tribute to the initial
gesture of Aristotle (1991, 2003) who, seizing up the lack of theory and reflective practice in public
address, public debate, and public discourse in the declining years of Athens’s imperial democracy,
directed his strictures both at public affairs practitioners who used “limited technical manuals;” and to
decision-makers engaged in public life who acted successfully, but “by chance or by trial and error”
(Aristote, 2003, 1354 a11 and a9). These words open his Rhetoric, a discipline conceived by him as the
practical study of politics that is to say, how to be an effective agent in a self-organized society under a
commonly acceptable rule of law, or constitution (politeia; Aristotle, 1952, III, 7, 1279a 25-39).
Aristotle knew of democracy, and of surveillance. In Ancient Greek the word “theory” refers
to “observation,” and specifically a “théōros” was an observer sent abroad overtly (as an ambassador),
or covertly to observe how rival cities functioned (Joly, 1992, p. 50). Political “theory” was born of this
comparative study of foreign polities, gathered through intelligence, in order to enable Athens to
understand better her commercial adversaries (hence, “intelligence”), to respond swiftly to military
challenges, and to develop rhetorical tools for strategic communication as a corollary to military action
(Canfora, 2013) – this is the unspoken core of the Rhetoric, as I will show in my forthcoming book on
terror and the Caliphate (Salazar, 2015). Aristotle’s approach is valid for the study of surveillance
today.
First, with regard to strategic communication we observe today a similar inability to lift
practice out of hastily put together technologies of influence, notably set up by NATO or the United
States communication agencies, civilian or military, firstly in the aftermath of the bombing campaign
of March-June 1999 against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, de facto Serbia, followed by the
creation of the Kosovo protectorate; and secondly (as from 2001) in Afghanistan in regard of ISAF
communicational and propaganda strategy (Salazar, 2013b). Both strategies appear to have been
developed at random, under pressure, and be made to respond to policy shifts decided by political
leadership, often in disregard for their own intelligence. The effectiveness of these strategies of
influence, especially ISAF (Salazar, 2013c), is not dependent upon proven theories and tested methods,
but are dependent upon the savviness of whoever is ultimately in charge on the contested ground, often
right on the battle field, and the “hands-on” experience of the chief communication officer in charge. In
an Aristotelian perspective such techniques work by chance, or by trial and error. They are pre-
conceptual. They bear a signal responsibility for the counter-insurgency’s strategic failure to “win
hearts and minds” (CDEF, 2011), and for the deep and wide “radicalization” of opponents we currently
witness across the Middle East theatre of operations, aptly described as “an inflexible hostile world”
(Jacquier, 2014). The media-propagated buzzword of “radicalization,” a crux for surveillance theory in
that context, remains aporetic in spite of cautious attempts to conceptualize it (Horgan, 2014).
“Extremism” has received better attention, but it is side-lined (Backes, 2007).
Second, in regard of surveillance, the recent history of state security (or financial and
corporate) leaks, from Julian Assange to Edward Snowden, evinces the same stochastic attempt by
agencies caught unprepared to “deal with it.” This knee-jerk response is echoed in the unpreparedness
of major institutions, such as the European Union, to respond to surveillance challenges. Their response
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is dogmatic, and consists mainly in a roll call of legal and regulatory documents (European Parliament,
2014). No attempt is made to theorize why it happens, how to make it not happen again, and whether it
should be opportune to let it happen in a controlled way. Again, intelligence agencies, together with
their upstream (state level) and downstream (medias, social networks), act at random, or by trial and
error. They “plug” a leak. They do not reflect on reasons why techniques of “plugging,” as it were, are
limited, and do not provide for an understanding of their predicament. They remain descriptive or
prescriptive (Erwin & Liu, 2013).
There exists, of course, a growing literature concerning the ethics of statal or corporate
surveillance, or data collection and analysis vis à vis privacy (Goldman, 2006; Leonard, 2014, on “de-
identification”), in addition to a debate regarding the sovereign right and duty of a democratic state to
protect its citizens against terrorism risks and massive threats (ACLU & HRW, 2014; Kuner et al,
2014). The case is also being made for human rights monitors to develop a “comprehensive reporting”
tantamount, in my view, to counter-surveillance (Alston and Gillespie, 2012). Either way, there exists a
multifarious threat to the traditional, Kantian, and democratic concept of the public nature of
information, or Öffentlichkeit (Brüggemann, 2005). These contrarian sets of positions regarding
surveillance are dialectical, if not systematically adversarial, and they help little in theorizing the field.
They add to literature, and enrich practices, but they detract from theory building.
In this paper, I will step back from the prolixity of surveillance, intelligence, and strategic
communication studies, in all shapes and sizes. I will recast the issue as a “general rhetoric of
surveillance,” in five points or prolegomena. By “rhetoric” I understand the study of the persuasive
structure of any given public phenomenon.
This analysis pertains only to democratic societies, where universal suffrage, fundamental
freedoms, representative and civilian institutions, regularly elected and accountable officials, an
independent judiciary, and the sovereignty of the rule of law are guaranteed and effective and sustained
over a reasonable length of time. Surveillance in non/pseudo-democratic societies is of necessity a
different subject, and requires a different treatment.
PROLEGOMENA
Prolegomenon 1: The rhetorical structure of secrecy.
Surveillance is an integral part of life in a highly technological society. To quote a European
Parliament report: “Surveillance of population groups is not a new phenomenon in liberal regimes and
the series of scandals surrounding the surveillance programmes of the USA’s NSA and UK’s GHCQ
… uncover a reconfiguration of surveillance that enables access to a much larger scale of data than
telecommunication surveillance of the past ” (European Parliament, 2013).
Surveillance is both omnipresent (from CCTV cameras to “cookies”) and “unpresent,” that is
to say, their presence is covert: processes and technologies, such as “upstreaming,” of which we are not
aware (see their nomenclature in the above-mentioned European Parliament report); or the retention of
communications data as opposed, or in addition to that of content (Intelligence and Security Committee,
2013). Clearly, the irksome part of surveillance’s “unpresence,” which propels a host of irrational
reactions and strong affects into public debate, is its secrecy. But, why does secrecy bother us? Or:
What is secrecy?
At face value, “secrecy” does not seem to articulate a complex set of notions: “dissimulation”
is a standard in the history of European culture and politics (Snyder, 2009). Current studies of secrecy,
by surveillance specialists, are mostly historical or descriptive (Moran, 2013; Cormac, 2014). They do
not clarify the ontology of secrecy.
However, in his work on words as mental institutions in the Indo-European sphere, the great
linguist E. Benveniste outlines how “secrecy” came into existence as a mental category, a
“representation” as he puts it (1969). Secrecy is the result of a process that sets into motion a number of
legal-political-religious-economic instruments. Anthropologically speaking, secrecy did not appear
because one wanted to hide something. It appeared within a set of social actions. Secrecy belongs to a
mental and social structure. Benveniste points out that secretum refers to the result of an agricultural
action (cernere), using a sieve to separate the wheat from the chaff. This practical gesture provides, in
Benveniste’s terminology, a “representation,” that is to say, an action translated into a mental structure
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which shapes further social actions, detached from their agricultural origin: what is kept for public
usage is declared so, via a decretum (the anthropological source of the Law); what is rejected as useless
is named an excretum (the source of modes of exclusion, and discrimination); and what is kept, but
withdrawn and concealed from public usage (and set aside for a use different from the obvious, public
one) becomes a secretum (the source of government). Secrecy is the result of a triage, and can only be
understood within this rhetorical structure: what is declared legitimate, what is excluded, what is
reserved.
This triage reveals a structural, strategic process that sustains public life as controlled by
agents of government: they sort out information and, from what has been set aside they decide what is
to be made public; what is to be made secret; what is to be held as redundant, or excluded. Let us
remind ourselves how the English word “riddle” means both a sieve and an enigma: in intelligence
analysis it is quite often the case that, in order to resolve an enigma, the analyst has to separate
elements of information, to separate them in a sieve, and to solve the riddle with the riddle. This triage
also accounts for the general functioning of state secrecy (Salazar, 2014b): to collect, to sort, to release,
to archive (archiving is a form of excretion as destruction is rare, unless accidental), in sum to “classify”
(Moran, 2013).
Surveillance today is a hyper-technological form of such a strategic triage. When public
debate concerning surveillance is centered around “The state/the corporations/the networks are prying
into our privacy,” that is our own secrecy, it refuses to confront the actual nature of surveillance – a
triage of information upon which political life is naturally constructed, and is delimited by what is
supposedly “inherently governmental” (Chesterman, 2008). Indeed, a rhetorical drive, and an intended
effect of surveillance strategies, and strategic communication applications, is to propagate the political
belief that societies, which are both democratic and technological, are more “open,” hence naturally
more “at risk” than traditional ones, hence inherently more subject to surveillance. This is hardly ever
articulated in such a brutal way, and an effect of triage is to set aside precisely such an explicit
argument. It would defeat the triage itself by exposing its rhetoric, and uncovering a paradox
concerning biopolitics in a postmodern, surveillance society.
The triage process is a rhetorical construction, and any case study should begin by examining
it, and how each set of decretum/excretum/secretum is developed into public arguments. It is
counterproductive to tackle a particular surveillance phenomenon head-on. Disassembling the triage
and its rhetorical construct should be the first analytical manoeuvre.
Prolegomenon 2: The archaic paradox of surveillance.
However, the public perceives that democratic surveillance is paradoxical: the more advanced we are in
terms of freedoms, the more protected we must be; or: the more adult politically, the more infantile too.
The public reacts to the perception of this paradox with anger or indignation, or sullen
acceptance of a de facto triage that has some every day practicality. For instance, the dupe’s quid pro
quo of personal access to easy and limitless storing, or searches in exchange, tacit or otherwise, for
commercial data collecting by providers. Yet to move from perceiving the paradox to conceiving it
requires more than an affective or utilitarian response. This is where Foucault’s concept of biopolitics
comes into play (Foucault, 1978).
Postmodern, democratic societies are supposed to have moved away from archaism. The shift
is supposed to have occurred with the rise of the idea and practice of the state as “governmentality”
which, glossing on Foucault’s genial mapping (devalued by policy agencies as “governance”), was
marked by the following features (Foucault 1978, Lesson 9): the state as endowed with rationality; the
invention of a secular society; the invention of economics to measure, and to manage its resources; the
invention of public security (an enabler for secular links, once religious bonding has been removed, and
an enabler for stable trade and financial flows); finally the invention of freedoms that ensure
identification with the state, identification with communal values, identification with free fluxes of
labour (under the disguise of free fluxes of people, Marxists would argue plausibly). A new political
nature was born that cast aside what Foucault called a “pastoral power.” It refers explicitly to a
“ministry,” a religious ministry (a notion lost in the English translation).
In Foucault’s archaeology of governmentality the phase preceding the State, and its security
apparatus, was a “ministry” endowed with three main features or “economies:” rulers minister to their
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subjects, not to assert power in our common sense of “power politics,” but with a view to help the latter
secure their salvation after death. Living together in this world is of lapsarian necessity. Living
politically has no meaning per se. Living together is to respond to an “economy of salvation.” Secondly,
rulers and ruled are expected to decipher signs of the divine, and to respond to them through rituals.
Natural events out of the ordinary (earthquakes, plagues) are signs to be interpreted, with lessons
deduced to obey. Again, living together has no political meaning beyond a communal observance of
rites whose signified is life after death, outside this world. Thirdly, entailed by this duty of
interpretation, the world is regarded like a book at once wide open and closed – open to interpretation
but closed unless one masters techniques of interpretation. Foucault calls it an “economy of truth,”
whose functionaries ensured the coherence of the whole system through technologies of interpretation.
Such was, before the advent of the state, the natural state of living together, which could not
be defined as “politics” as we know it. This was archaism.
What is then the postmodern paradox of surveillance? Clearly, with surveillance we witness a
return to “pastoral power.” In this instance I make use of “pastoral power” inasmuch as a democratic,
surveillance society is not merely a come back to what Foucault analysed as pastorat/pastoral ministry,
but an augmented return that takes into account, and factors in that which was in between pastorat and
us, i.e. modern biopolitics – the state and its rationality.
Indeed the three aspects of pastoral biopolitics are active in surveillance society; but each one
is given a particular twist, or declension I would rather call it, by the massive presence of statal
biopolitics.
For instance the economy of salvation has undergone a declension: saving citizens of Western
democracies from being “radicalized,” as if free citizens, sovereign citizens, could not exert a power of
choice, and were simply malleable subjects. This idiom of “salvation” has been propagated by security
agencies, and slavishly relayed by the medias since the Boston massacre in 2013 (Salazar, 2013d). It
implies that surveillance, as complete as the law allows, or provides leeway for, will save normal
citizens from falling prey to “radicalization,” in a perverse scenario whereby the potential agent is also
a victim who must be “saved.” In sum, surveillance is a ministry: the world outside the borders of
democracy is evil, and one has to be saved from it, against one’s own will. The fact radicalization is a
form of idealism or, as I have suggested, “heroism” (2013d) is never mentioned, as it would challenge
both the salvatory function of the process, and statal powers of interpretation and decipherment of
bewildering, violent events that rupture the natural order of things.
Indeed, in keeping with the second feature of pastoral biopolitics, postmodern world politics
has assumed a sheen of constant extraordinariness, near-magical events which, on the one hand, are
elevated to repetitive, “critical” crises, and, on the other hand, require the intervention of experts,
specialists, professionals whose function is interpretative. Future institutes, rating agencies (Salazar,
2014a), global reports consultancies (Salazar, 2013a) are all endowed with that function, while being in
effect and in purpose surveillance agencies. The second and third economies of pastoral biopolitics find
their declension as public security alerts in all shapes and forms, and controls of social movements,
labour, people and capital fluxes (material and immaterial), all in the name of restoring normality in the
world – an idiom often phrased as “making the world safer for our children.”
Surveillance society (in a democracy) is therefore pastoral and statal, archaic and modern.
Such is the paradox, and it goes a long way to explain the rhetoric used by governments, and
internalized by citizens, of a compromise between restricting liberties in order to live “normally.”
The public perceives this collapsing together of archaic and modern biopolitics, when
surveillance interrupts the assumed autonomy of one’s privacy, when it enters the subject’s inner
sanctum. The usual response is then indignation or outrage. However, if affects cannot pose a lasting
challenge to surveillance in a democratic society, they form a powerful, and irrepressible background
noise (as I will show later in this essay). Affects are an un-mediated form of moral response.
However, to question surveillance on moral, or affective grounds without questioning its
“unpresence,” that is to say, without having a concept that goes beyond either its technology or its
legality, is limited. This limitation is best defined by what philosopher Lyotard described as “differend”
(1988). In short, those who criticize surveillance, or revolt against its perceived immorality in the name
of democracy or privacy, speak and appui themselves the language of surveillance as codified by
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surveillance agencies. Protesters name the “tort” (that their privacy is treated like a merchandise, for
instance), and may engage in “litigation” against prying agencies (statal or corporate), or simply
express indignation on online fora. But they remain caught within the rhetoric of surveillance itself, and
the protection it says it affords. The differend is not declared. It is striking that many in the public are
willing to accept restrictions of liberties, and find it insufferable that agencies are monitoring
communications data. They do not step outside the language set by surveillance. They do not declare a
differend. At best, they litigate.
This non-recognition of the differend, and of its archaic substratum, is an enduring aspect of
the rhetoric of protest against surveillance in democratic societies.
Prolegomenon 3: The fulcrum of de-individualization.
However this disconnect leads, or explains, a further, remarkable disconnect between the reality of
postmodern surveillance and its popular representations.
Surveillance technologies are naturally expert, focused technologies. They target. They home
in. They use algorithms. They cross-reference. They classify. They memorize. They retro-survey
through data activism (Tealium, 2013). To use two Aristotelian logical categories: they turn quantity
into quality. And, quite often, intelligence operators are some of the best minds (in American parlance
“leverage people/talent,” National Commission, 2013)). The popular idea of surveillance is that of a
panopticon, the Benthamian model (Foucault, 1975), whereby everyone and every action are
observable, and observed from one single point of observation in the system. This model has been
replaced by a multiplicity of points of observation, multiple in space, and multiple in time. The
panopticon observer is nowadays polyvalent and depersonalized, unlike the unique watchman in his
Benthamian tower.
Popular films continue to propagate the archaic scenario of “big brother.” In doing so they are
cultivating an archaic fallacy, the Benthamian model: someone behind a screen, a camera, a system, a
matrix – whatever the device chosen by the filmmaker – is observing the victim, soon turned hero. The
actantial model of most surveillance movies follows therefore a Greimasian structural narrative: it is
formulaic (an event, a object, a subject, an addressor, an addressee, an opponent, adjunct actants), and
patterns for action are limited (Greimas 1984).
In surveillance-themed movies the enunciation of agency makes it necessary to meet the
horizon of expectations of a given audience: the audience wants to be re-assured that someone they can
see, identify, blame and engage with, is there watching and controlling, and be defeated ultimately.
Media narratives concerning anti-surveillance individuals such as Assange, Manning or
Snowden reinforce this subliminal reasoning: if one person can uncover such massive surveillance, the
next step is to assign responsibility to a single agency. Or: It only takes one courageous person to do
the work for all of us. This hyper-individualization is a rhetorical fallacy.
Postmodern surveillance is essential depersonalized, but popular culture cannot think in terms
of de-individualization. It demands individualization of events, identification, and individuation.
Surveillance agencies are well served by the archaic, popular representation of surveillance as a
Benthamian panopticon, and its sophistic propagation by the media. This tension is a fulcrum of
postmodern “rhetoric culture,” so far overlooked, and it requires careful attention from scholars
engaged in the field (Strecker & Tyler, 2009). An entire field for anthropological and rhetorical
research remains largely unexplored - in the same manner as science production remained stuck in
popular representations of “the great discoverer,” a personalized view of science, until the work done
by Latour (Latour & Woolgar, 1986) – with one notable exception (see Furtado & Ercolani, 2013).
Postmodern surveillance is multifocal, disseminated, and depersonalized, which makes it all
the more autonomous and, literally, “unconceivable” by the public who remains stuck in romantic
notions of heroic individualism.
Prolegomenon 4: Public noise and Stimmung.
Nonetheless, the dialectical tension between the multi-focality of depersonalized surveillance, and
fallacious popular representations regarding surveillance underscores the massive presence of the
public, just as massive as surveillance’s “unpresence.” A key notion put forward by Michel Serres in
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his radical philosophy of communication, Hermes, can help conceptualize the public’s presence.
According to Serres, “Communication is a sort of game played by two interlocutors considered as
united against the phenomena of interference and noise, or against individuals with some stake in
interrupting communication” (p.66). The key notion is “noise” (noise as in “interference”), the public
as noise.
For instance, at an everyday level, comments posted by readers on a forum, typically below a
story run by an online media, when they step out of the single post, and engage in a conversation, often
adopt the shape of (habitual) commentators’ vying with one another. Dialogists often home on
preferred partners, with whom they are acquainted already; they often give short shrift to others, or
newcomers – all this in a search for what online media cannot provide in reality: a face to face
conversation. In other words online exchanges wish to eliminate the public as noise, on the one hand
by pretending comments are not public in relation to moderating or monitoring agents (to the point of
ignoring rules, and being suddenly reminded of their invisible and censorial presence); on the other, in
relation to interlocutors, by selecting target interlocutors. This practice is the basic structure of online
fora, a “pathetic” simulacrum of dialogue against a massive, self-perpetuating background noise
generated by the public.
Another example, at a institutional level, is the unending debate regarding the “dumping” of
information by WikiLeaks in relation to journalism, and free flow of information. The most perceptive,
and yet self-defeating view, is that expressed by Slavoj Žižek: “ The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations
was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different
functioning of power that might reach beyond the limits of representative democracy” (2011).
Perceptive, insofar as it gives readers the possibility to have access to classified documents. Self-
defeating, because to read US diplomatic dispatches, for instance, is premised on a precise knowledge
of the State Department coding protocols (accessible if one has a researcher’s training). Individuals’
driven leaks, and “crowdsourcing” (Schilis-Gallego, 2014) have not altered our relation to power, they
have added merely to the noise against which we wish to have dialogic exchanges, while they create a
simulacrum of communication that is now potentially limitless. They have intensified our desire to
eliminate what Serres names “the third man.”
Serres borrows the expression from the famous noir movie by the same name (1949), in which
a third man is seen removing a dead man, who is in fact not dead as both are probably the same, and
whose ultimate death at the end of the movie is left to the public’s imagination. The “third man”
symbolizes our relationship to the cyber ecology of surveillance, at once pervasive, invasive, and
utterly desirable as it allows us to partake in a limitless game of relationships. In this process we want
the noise (the third man) to die and to exist at the same time, as it guarantees our communicational
existence.
Serres adds: “ In a certain sense, (communicators engaged in a dialogue) struggle together
against the demon” (p. 67).
Democratic, popular culture will call state or corporate surveillance “evil,” that is, demonic,
and some commentators elaborate on this immediate perception by calling it a “pathology” (Dedefensa,
2013). Both qualifications are valid, but there is a need to probe them further.
Regarding “evil,” popular culture perceives what it fails to conceive: the philosophical sense
of daímōn. A daímōn is an intermediary between human agents, who impels them to interact (for
instance, in love, Eros) (Balaudé 2004). Indeed what most online commentators forget, caught as they
become in the simulacrum of a personal dialogue, and caught in the limitless pleasure of playing the
game, is the fact they use always an intermediary – and this intermediary is the game itself, the network,
and linked to it, the web. “Noise,” whether covert or overt, is the system. The public replicates
surveillance in entering the great game of the internet and is being played by the third man,
Surveillance proper, who is never dead – to use the movie’s analogy. A Facebook page is a form of
surveillance, however amicable or gentle or casual it may look. Put differently, surveillance is the other
name for cyber communication.
Regarding “pathology,” one way to explain the spell cast by surveillance on the public,
concurrent to the public’s deployment of desire to dialogue against and as noise, is to refer to
Heidegger’s concept of Stimmung: “ Understanding is always attuned” (Verstehen ist immer
gestimmtes) (Heidegger, 1996, paragraph 31). Stimmung or attunement (paragraph 29) matters for the
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subject under surveillance. Postmodern public who plays the game of the Internet and is always in
search of someone else with whom to measure oneself, thus creating noise in order to dispel it while
agreeing to the silent presence of surveillance, “understands” its situation in the ecology of the Internet:
it is “attuned” to it.
This “attunement” by the public to surveillance is at once i) the communicators’
understanding of their “standing under” cyber-processes that allow them to exchange information, ii)
the implicit accord (or mutual understanding) between communicators that they are “standing under”
surveillance, and iii) their further understanding that they are vying with the noise. This attunement to
surveillance allows the subject to project “the thrownness of this being into its there” (an apt definition
of how we behave in Internet communication) and, at the same time, to enact what Heidegger names
“the facticity” of this projection (paragraph 29). In Internet communication we project ourselves as
facts; we project Being not to face the dread of nothingness.
However, Heidegger stresses that Stimmung is a dis-position, a positioning, ruled by “pathos,”
enabling an “affective situation” (from the French translation authorized by Heidegger for German
Befindlichkeit, 1951, p. 31). Now, if “attunement” of the subject to Being has its source in the “dread”
(Angst) of no-thing” (Heidegger, nd, p. 63-67), what is pathological in cyber communication is not
merely the public’s (and especially new generation’s) addiction to facticity of projection, and
intelligence agencies’ reliance on it, on a scale never seen before, but the affective, irrational relation
that binds public to cyber-communication. This “affective situation” draws its energy from cancelling
out the dread of surveillance, while enabling each communicator to replicate surveillance, and to
behave like a small-time surveillance agency. The public is indeed attuned to surveillance practices;
while at the same time everyone it faces the dread of it. At once “attunement” positions the subject in
the world; it makes it exists factually; and it makes it enjoy doxa, the limitless exchange of information.
In such a perspective, being a cyber communicator is staring joyfully into nothingness – possibly the
best ontic definition of social networks.
This raises a further and last issue, that of the community of communicators.
Prolegomenon 5: The public as power of abstraction.
Instinctively we would ascribe scientificity to surveillance technologies and affective facticity in which
individual communicators. Put differently, surveillance technologies are seen, or unveiled, as massively
scientific, while individuals’ cyber-communications would both stand in the midst of the noise of
empirical actions (photos, clips, sms, posts, emails), and take a stand against it by trying to shut it out,
and to create relationships.
However, Serres proposes a different option. Dealing with the invention of dialogic
communication, in Ancient Greece, at the time rhetoric was born, and with it debate, Serres establishes
a correlation between the invention of dialogue and the invention of geometry. He describes an
isomorphic relationship between shutting out noise by creating dialogue, and mathematicians’ shutting
out the empirical noise (a line in the sand, a circle in the dirt), and inventing abstract figures. Thus,
dialogue is not on the side of the empirical, but it is isomorphic to geometry. Dialogic procedures are
an attempt to create abstractions, and to format a given, empirical exchange into a reproducible,
abstract pattern – namely the invention of systematic, enthymematic and topical reasoning in/by the
Rhetoric.
If we now transpose Serres’s argument to the public in the age of cyber-surveillance and
“generalized monitoring” of personal data (Kuner et al., 2014), Serres’s concept implies the following:
in spite of its scientific apparatuses, material and immaterial, technologies and processes, surveillance
is confronted, again and again, with the human instinctive, natural drive toward abstraction. It is an
interesting phenomenon that individuals imitate surveillance by using tools analogous to surveillance
agencies’. Individuals and agencies are a noise to each other – agencies have to develop complex triage
systems to isolate key indicators of threats or buying behaviours patterns, as the case may be, that is, to
sort out noise created by individual communications. Conversely, individuals have the ability, being
humans and not machines or animals, to invent bypasses, to find ways out, to play with surveillance, in
short to abstract themselves from the empirical mess where agencies trawl, and sift information, and for
which they have developed mathematical models for extraction of relevant information.
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