
From a discussion at The American Reader in assocoation with the PEN Center:
Uzoamaka Maduka
When we talk about surveillance, it constantly vacillates between seeming real, and then so real it’s urgent, and then you wake up and you think, “No, that was a fever dream—it’s not that serious.” And you just keep on going on this loop, this eternal loop, of: “It’s real, it’s serious; it’s not real, I’m a freak.” You keep going round, and round, and round in this space.
I think it’s partially because we tend to place the reality of surveillance, or the idea of surveillance, firmly in the old days of American history—it’s not necessarily supposed to exist now. So sometimes, when you’re talking about surveillance existing in the present, you feel like you’re making an impossible claim—a claim that we’re existing in another time. I don’t know. There are so many different levels of impossibility to navigate, and so many levels of self-doubt. How would this actually work? Why would someone actually be watching you, and listening to you, and why would they care about you? And yet, if you look at FBI files from the mid-century, you are faced with this hard evidence that government organizations—American government organizations—did “care” about important or potentially influential people, and they cared deeply about the minutiae, the irrelevant things in their lives… So, with surveillance, you constantly have to mediate between the hard fact of its existence and the soft fact of your disbelief.
Jac F. Mullen
I almost feel like the reason there’s this doubt around it is that we lack the ability to imagine surveillance as a hard fact—we can’t imagine its possible consequences for us, on our individual lives. I’ve yet to hear anyone say: “Now that I know I’m being surveilled, I am going to change my habits, how I communicate, et cetera—not because I care about my privacy, but because I know that how I’m acting could jeopardize me, because it is political in a way that is not okay.” So I think one of the reasons there’s this doubt you’re talking about—“Is it or isn’t it actually affecting me? Does it exist or not?”—is because we don’t really know what actions are seen (or will eventually be seen) as politically suspect.
Uzoamaka Maduka
Well, I think that the point of surveillance is that you never know. It’s like your mother saying, “I’ve got eyes in the back of my head,” or “I’m watching you.” The fact is, you don’t know when the hand’s going to come; you just know that the eyes are always there. That’s what makes it so tense.
Where Jonathon started, I think, is pretty fruitful for talking about the way that surveillance affects narrative and expression. When you have a sense of this kind of thing going on, but there is no outside support for your perception of it; when you are made to think you’re a crazy person for thinking that, and the reality of the situation, the reality of the fact, is constantly put in doubt: How might this doubt start to subtly infect one’s writing, and infect, or chip away at the confidence and boldness that’s required of a writer when they embark on a certain project? And their own sense of reality? That can reverberate across many different planes for them. Not just in terms of what’s going on politically, but also: “Am I really seeing things clearly in other parts of my life, am I just a paranoiac?” Once you start to feel like you’re a paranoiac, I think that that feeling about yourself will not just exist in your relation to politics or the state at all; it will stay with you when you embark on your observations about humans and life in general.
Jac F. Mullen
The really strange thing about the way this conversation has played out since the first Snowden documents were released is that the entire conversation has had to do with privacy, right?
So you were presented with a set of governmental institutions that were indiscriminately collecting data on its citizens, which is a far cry from the equally pernicious but very different sort of domestic spy work revealed in the 1970s—operations like the FBI’s COINTELPRO, which was insane and illegal and would surveil, harass, blackmail and infiltrate dissident or activist groups, often totally law-abiding. But these were specific groups and individual people, targeted for legible, if still totally bogus, reasons, while what you have with the Snowden leaks is this sense of indiscriminate data collection towards not-necessarily obvious ends. And the main issue that was brought up—at least in the media—was one of privacy. It was a conversation about privacy. The contention over surveillance has been rhetorically positioned as: “This is a violation, this is a TSA scanner on my entire life.” And now we’re supposed to have “a conversation,” collectively, about privacy, about trading privacy for security. What did Obama say? “We welcome this conversation.” And I think it’s very interesting that the only way in which this was all spoken about was as a violation of privacy, and not a tool of control. Why do you think the conversation never shifted over to questions of control, of censorship and oppression?
Uzoamaka Maduka
Well, I think the government has an interest in doing this—in bringing about this “conversation,” maintaining a conversation that can then mediate us. To shift us from, you know, the libertarian cry of “Get off my lawn!” to the liberal conversation of, “Well, let’s say I let you on my lawn, are you then allowed to sit on a tree limb and look at me while I go through my house?” The notion of the devil being in conversation really finds its keenest expression in the government and the state. This is what [Slavoj] Žižek has talked about, how increasingly politics is about creating this space where we can have unimaginable conversations, conversations that degrade us and degrade our values and our ways of life. So we had that conversation about torture when we never should have had that conversation, and now we’re having a conversation about surveillance and being watched, when we shouldn’t have this conversation either.
That said, it’s also very difficult to say “no” to a conversation now because the government actually responds to that “no,” and this response to our refusal is surreal and terrifying. We, as a people, don’t expect a refusal of our refusal—it’s surprising—so the conversation almost happens accidentally, because we don’t know how to react. So as a society, we’re often tricked into a conversation. You can imagine an analogous, very sick scenario wherein a woman says “No” to a man who’s trying to force himself on her and the rapist responds, “But why not?” And she says, flustered, “I really don’t want to have sex with you,” and the rapist says, “But let’s talk about why you don’t want to have sex with me…” I mean, this is what is happening right now in our political life.
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