Surveillance, Privacy and the Making of the Modern Subject. Habeas What Kind Of Corpus? (original) (raw)

WHY PRIVACY MATTERS? Surveillance and the Private Life

HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, 2016

To ask the question of why privacy matters, it is important to recognize the ways in which we simply do not value privacy. Everyday we sign up for websites and offer up private information for free. We fret about government surveillance, but willfully subject ourselves to physical and virtual security checks. In short, while we say that privacy matters, our actions suggest otherwise. There are three reasons why we are willfully and willingly losing our privacy. First, privacy is inconvenient. Second, privacy is dangerous. And third, privacy is anti-democratic. Taken together, these reasons show that while we talk about the fact that we like our privacy and want to preserve our privacy, most of us are actually quite happy to give it up. I want to ask the question of what privacy is by looking at the last and perhaps only great political thinker who set privacy at the center of her thinking: Hannah Arendt. Arendt writes about privacy in nearly all her many books and essays. Privacy is part of the core of her thought. Despite this, it is largely overlooked in discussions of Arendt’s work. And so I want to try to articulate for you what is privacy for Hannah Arendt, why it matters. And what I’m going to suggest is that there is a reason that most Arendt scholars ignore her approach to privacy; this is because Arendt’s defense of privacy leads to some very uncomfortable and difficult conclusions.

LOCATING SURVEILLANCE AND PRIVACY IN THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM OF THOUGHTS

Vidyabharati International Interdisciplinary Research Journal (Special Issue), 2021

The technological explosion of Covid-19 era and the subsequent increase in the dependence on surveillance technology has amplified the privacy and surveillance debate. To a large extent the current sensibilities appear to present the debate as a contest between surveillance and privacy, driven by the presumption (both in popular and academic circles) that surveillance is either an aberration or antithetical of privacy. This segregation of surveillance and privacy misses two significant points. One, on a discursive level privacy and surveillance share the genealogical trajectories as both operates within the larger system of informational control. Second, surveillance, like privacy is an abstract notion and could only be understood under the condition and the context in which it operates. This article argues that the ideals of privacy and surveillance as professed and practiced are deeply entrenched in the institutional structure of capitalism, which rather than segregating, necessitates a certain kind of mutuality between the two. Furthermore, in this paper we explore how privacy protection is not the counter to surveillance, rather how both co-exist in the Capitalist discourse and how individuals participate in it

Agency in the Era of Mass Surveillance

This project seeks to investigate the influence surveillance has on agency and actions of the individual, through an analysis of Laura Poitras’ documentary Citizenfour including interviews, debates and trials regarding the subject matter. Theories creating the framework for the project are Foucault’s Panopticism, in addition to his Subject and Power and Richard Bernstein’s text Praxis and Action, which aims to portray Hegel and Marx’ understanding of the principle regarding the master & slave- dialectic. By examining the interplay between individual agency and government forces, we discovered that these entities are interdependent and that one must investigate government forces as a result of initial individual agency, and that these cannot be seen as two binary positions. However, the mass surveillance carried out by agents within government forces, mainly as a result of economic interests, leads to a self-disciplining practice among individuals, transversed throughout the social body of society. We argue that technology facilitates mass surveillance extensively, making it a constitutional factor of modern society. However, there are still possible existing options to battle these enforced structures from within.

Surveillance and the redefinition of individuals and reality

Teknokultura, 2022

This essay provides an overview of the relationship between surveillance, individuals, and reality. To do this, I use a multilevel perspective that connects power (from agency to structure) to social systems theory. This novel approach means taking a holistic view on how individuals are managed beyond ideas of resistance and technology. At the agency level, individuals are constrained by continuous interactions through digital and behavioral exploitation. In the second meso-level, individuals attach to an informational system that renders, sorts, and distorts data fragments that resemble their ontology. Finally, at the structural level, more than being fragmented subjects, I argue that individuals and data constitute a new hermeneutic cycle in which reality itself is redefined in an autopoietic reading of things distanced from subjects and knowledge. Keywords: hermeneutic differentiation; power relations; resistance; systems theory

Self, Surveillance, and Society

The Sociological Quarterly, 2002

There is much to admire about Thomas Voire. At a time when many contemporary observers express concern about increasing crime rates, an economic downturn, xenophobia, and political apathy, Tom is presented as a law-abiding and hard-working citizen. We do not use the word "citizen" lightly. Born in 1966, Tom has lived peaceably, stayed gainfully employed, served his country, explored non-US. cultures in libraries and museums, and, most laudably, demonstrated a willingness to articulate and defend nationally cherished and constitutionally protected personal freedoms. In Thomas Voire, Gary T. Marx provides us with an archetype of the postmodern democratic maneducated, tolerant, worldly, and a staunch believer in equality under the law.

Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life

Surveillance has become a crucial component of all environments informed or enabled by ICTs. Equally, almost all surveillance practices in technologically 'advanced' societies are enhanced and amplified by ICTs. Surveillance is understood as any focused attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, or control. Thus in addition to those who may be 'suspects' (because of alleged offences), ordinary persons in everyday lifeworkers, consumers, citizens, travellers --find that their personal data are of interest to others. Agencies process personal data in order to calculate risks or to predict opportunities, classifying and profiling their records routinely. While everyday life may thus seem less 'private', and ordinary people may feel that they are more vulnerable to intrusion, the use of searchable databases for categorizing and profiling means that deeper questions of power are involved. Life chances and choices are affected -sometimes negatively -by the judgments made on the basis of concatenated data, which means that such surveillance is implicated in basic questions of social justice, to do with access, risk distribution and freedom. There is increased need for ethics and politics of information in an era of intensifying surveillance.

Techno-Securitisation of Everyday Life and Cultures of Surveillance-Apatheia

Science as Culture, 2019

As a result of digital technologies and the internet becoming increasingly ubiquitous, security technologies and surveillance systems are progressively encroaching upon peoples’ privacy. Yet concerns about this appear to be relatively muted. Why is this the case? Is the public generally indifferent about it or perhaps silently in agreement with its increased presence? As techno-security systems are becoming increasingly complex, multiple, normative, hardly recognisable, often covert and all encompassing, positioning oneself in relation to them can be a difficult process. Hence the techno-securitisation of everyday life has psychological effects which are multiple and largely unconscious. Indeed, we are all somewhat uncertain about the spin-offs of surveillance technologies and practices – in terms of their capabilities, who has access to the data they produce, and the ways that they might affect subjectivity. Rather than being plainly indifferent or silently consenting to increased techno-securitisation, some participants in this study developed an attitude of surveillance-apatheia. They tended to state that ‘as there is no avoiding these systems and not much one can do about them, why consciously worry about them?’ This attitude is not necessarily a lack of interest, but rather a way of managing associated undesirable affects, feelings and emotions