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

In this article I consider how our experiences of bodily privacy are changing in the contemporary surveillance society. To this end I use biometric technologies as a lens for tracking the changing relationships between the body and privacy that underwrite our modern democratic polities. Adopting a broader genealogical perspective, however, I begin by retracing the role of the body in the constitution of the modern liberal political subject. I consider successively two quite different understandings of the subject, the political subject as theorised by Michel Foucault, followed by the subject of psychoanalysis analysed by Jacques Lacan. My genealogy of the modern political subject begins with the habeas corpus, and observes a classically Foucauldian periodization, the historical succession (yet enduring entwinement) of a ‘regime of sovereignty’ with a ‘regime of governmentality’, within which our surveillance societies are currently taking shape. In the final part of the article, instead of the unidirectional Foucauldian gaze, I switch to a two-way scopic relationship, by way of Lacan’s analysis of the mirror stage. I locate both the place of the body and the function of misrecognition in the constitution of the psychic subject. The psychoanalytic perspective, in which the powerful gaze is revealed as the gaze of the Other, serves to appraise the effects upon the subject of excessive exposure. I conclude to the importance of the subject’s being able to hide, even when she has nothing to hide. By considering these two facets of subjectivity, political and psychic, I hope to make sense of our enduring and deeply political passionate attachment to privacy, which is bound up with our capacity for resistance; notwithstanding the increasing normalization of surveillance technologies and practices.