Citizen n-1: Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour as a Reparative Reading of a Paranoid World (original) (raw)
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Chapter 12: Citizenfour and the Antirepresentational Turn
Reclaiming Popular Documentary, 2021
The prominent quote on the large poster in the lobby of the theater for the 2015 Academy Award winning documentary Citizenfour (2014) reads “the year’s most hair-raising thriller.” The description of this documentary film as a thriller is also invoked in A.O. Scott’s New York Times review, describing Citizenfour as “a tense and frightening thriller that blends the brisk globe-trotting of the “Bourne” movies with the spooky, atmospheric effects of a Japanese horror film.” Released theatrically on October 24, 2014, this documentary provides viewers with a kind of cinematic déja-vu of one of the biggest international news stories of 2013. Yet, beyond the hyrbid nature of a documentary-thriller, what is most striking about Citizenfour is the way this film fails to meet mainstream expectations of what documentaries should do—failing to provide any new information or personal insights about the figure at the center of its story. Rather than delivering any introduction or backstory, the film assumes that the viewer already knows who Edward Snowden is and that the American government is collecting and storing huge amounts of electronic data about all of us, around the world. In fact, we get significantly less than what has been reported about Snowden in many other venues. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which Citizenfour, a documentary about data and information, frames the story of Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA spying program in the context of the aesthetic and political conditions of our post-9/11, globalized landscape of government surveillance. Presenting itself as a form of ironic pedagogy with a confoundingly “anti-representational” ethos, Citizenfour resists previously held assumptions about the didactic and political functions of visible evidence, and reframing the role of the personal and of identity politics in documentary film practice. For example, at the end of the film, the audience witnesses Greenwald and Snowden silently passing scribbled notes to each other, while we are, absurdly, kept ignorant of the meaning and details of this exchange. Placing Poitras’s film in the context of what Paul Arthur called an “aesthetics of failure,” I argue that Citizenfour changes the conditions of documentary representation for our post-9/11, digital age and reverses prevailing progressive ideas about the politics of representation. In this paper, I will establish a theoretical context for the “anti-representational turn” in documentary and explore how Citizenfour (2014) exemplifies and popularizes this aesthetic shift in documentary film.
This issue of the Digital Culture & Society journal invites theoretical and artistic contributions on citizen engagement, digital citizenship and grassroots information politics. Today, engagement and participation are considered key when we investigate media and user practices. Participation has become a popular imperative of digital societies: “Calls for greater transparency and participation are heard not just by elected officials, but also in corporate headquarters” (Geiselhart, 2004). A number of theoretical reflections on digital societies assume that social media are becoming a dominant media channel for participatory engagement. Practices of participation and engagement are an indispensible part of our digital everyday lives: from chat rooms to community forums, from social media platforms to image boards, and from rating platforms to whistle-blowing websites. The Internet is used for a wide variety of forms of participation in culture, education, health, business and politics. On the one hand these ‘digital collectives’ are deemed the torchbearers of the coming social and political transformation or hailed as self-organized collective intelligence. On the other hand state apparatuses are asking for participative activities to increase efficiency and to avoid friction. It is argued that the use of technology fosters participation and processes of consensus-building. This discourse almost implies that these processes can be hardwired into digital technologies. The terms “cultural citizenship” and “digital citizenship” are expected to provide a broader but also a more critical approach to citizen engagement. In the meantime, there are numerous studies that examine the different forms and effects of participation on the Internet and its limitations (e.g. Fuchs, 2014; Trottier/Fuchs, 2015). Critical voices show that participation has long become a buzz word, often related to one-sided, positive perspectives: applauding the possibilities of user engagement and ignoring issues such as information politics and a digital divide, not only based on technological access but also on a lack of digital literacy (e.g. Jordan, 2015; van Dijck et al., 2017). We observe not only liberation of users based on participatory practices but exploitation at the same time. The information politics behind design decisions are a relevant topic for a deeper understanding of the interrelation of technological developments and user practices. Participation and sharing data by users also led to critical debates about surveillance (Albrechtslund, 2013; Lyon, 2017) and whether privacy matters any longer if we “have nothing to hide” . Under which circumstances do we have to consider privacy a commodity and how can we reestablish mechanisms of forgetfulness? Surveillance as observation and control from those in power has been accompanied by a discussion about “sousveillance”, a term coined by Mann, Nolan, and Wellman (2003) to describe instances in which people watch and control those in power. What tools have been developed both for collecting private data and for protecting our privacy and in how far do they challenge our platform society? In our special issue we aim at including approaches from fields such as: (digital) sociology, STS, (digital) media studies, cultural studies, political sciences and philosophy reflecting on the role of the digital citizen. We ask for the role and value of a digital sociology exploring the practices of digital citizens. We particularly welcome contributions that are critically reflective about online practices in relation to new concepts of surveillance and control society. Paper proposals may relate to, but are not limited to, the following topics: Digital citizenship, networked publics, information politics, engagement, participation and sharing, transparency, surveillance, urban informatics, citizen score, democracy as a service, participatory engineering, data commons, large scale protests and trending topics, slacktivism and clicktivism, participation divide.
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.
Beyond Big Brother - Symposium (Chomsky, Assange, Poitras...) (EN-FR-PT-SP) - DRAFT
Fiction and reality. Here is the twosome that Edward Snowden has perhaps the most sustainably shaken. Some alerts had already been raised with the revelation of the Echelon system at the end of the last century; the ever-growing number of terrorism laws, the progressively more oligopolistic Internet ecosystem during the 2000s… But, by revealing - that is materialising - the surveillance mechanisms that control every aspect of our lives, en masse and with no criteria, Edward Snowden has turned the anxiety of the future into a terror of the present. Thus fiction and reality, but also, perhaps especially, fiction and (im)materiality. Because if no one could have imagined, nor anticipated the art and the scope of the surveillance we are submitted to, it is due to that immateriality of surveillance that we should question. How can Cinema or Literature capture what from now on goes without a body: that circulation of bits that cannot be controlled? How to narrate those lives that each day stray away from the physical world we know. What links can we find between the activists’ technical resistance to rebuild our autonomy and sovereignty and the new narratives taking control over the digital universe? Have we returned to the starting point, when Ivan Illich and a few critical thinkers described computers as a vehicle for a society of surveillance and control, and when Michel Foucault described the deeply securitarian nature of modern States? Is it necessary to repress the enthusiasm with which individuals take control of the digital world to communicate, to express or invent themselves in a new space? Though our relationship with the world seemed defined, the invisible and the monstrous suddenly appeared to remind us of the siege that the powers put us under. How do we respond to that? Do we need to use figuration to denunciate more efficiently – exposing those interdependent bodies mutated into cyborgs – rather than the suggestion of this impalpable influence that surrounds us, dominates us and threatens us with all its weight? In the end, it’s the relationship between art and resistance that this case questions. Because if there’s any lesson to take from the continuous discoveries about the massive surveillance we’re under, it’s that the simple fact of showing is a resistance act per se. Showing those who want to see everything on the condition of not being seen themselves. Showing, as well, how we can build our own narratives, conceiving a different digital universe, independently or in response to their vigilance. At the time of faceless powers, how to structure this resistance? On whom will we henceforth rest to defend our freedoms in the future, besides whistleblowers? Are artists, eternal image revealers, shouldn’t they have their saying on this endless struggle? Isn’t creation itself threatened by this flood of bits, algorithms and automatic restriction devices, which obsession is to erase unpredictability, risk and anomaly? Those are the questions we will seek to answer by gathering some of the advocates of the virtual struggle (Julian Assange, Jérémie Zimmermann, Jennifer Robinson…) and some of the creators and thinkers invited to the festival. Because, in the end, though the fight of the invisibles has begun, what is better than a festival made of images and image creators to open the debate?
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.
A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance
Journal of Social Issues, 2003
Eleven behavioral techniques of neutralization intended to subvert the collection of personal information are discussed: . In Western liberal democracies the advantages of technological and other strategic surveillance developments are often short-lived and contain ironic vulnerabilities. The logistical and economic limits on total monitoring, the interpretive and contextual nature of many human situations, system complexity, and interconnectedness and the vulnerability of those engaged in surveillance to be compromised, provide ample room for resistance. Neutralization is a dynamic adversarial social dance involving strategic moves and counter-moves and should be studied as a conflict interaction process.