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Surveillance Bad Colonialism
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Surveillance BadColonialismThe colonial desire to make people more identifiable is the worst form of objectification Eileraas, Karina received her doctorate in Women's Studies from UCLA in June 2003. Her areas of interest include feminist theory, colonization and transnational studies, performance and visual culture, 4, September 2003 (Reframing the Colonial Gaze: Photography, Ownership, and Feminist Resistance, MLN, Volume 118, Number 4 (French Issue), pp.807-840) DJ During the Algerian revolution, Algerians were required to carry identity cards that would render them "visible and 'legible'" to French colonial authorities. Soldiers rounded up entire communities of Algerians, and forcibly unveiled Algerian women, to take their ID card portraits. Although the French practice of unveiling sought to render Algerian women identifiable to colonial authorities, it also violated local custom and religious practice. Identity cards formalized the French fantasy of empire, and functioned within a broader discursive network to deny citizenship rights [End Page 812] to colonial Algerians who were not of French descent. As a final attempt at French signature or authorship within the receding colony, Algerian identity cards marked an effort to both defer and compensate for impending national loss on the dawn of a traumatic rupture within l'empire français. Within this context, the Algerian identity portraits composed by French army photographer Marc Garanger can be read as ambivalent performances of national fantasy. Photography enlists Garanger and his subjects in arduous negotiations with popular narratives of racial, sexual, and national identity. In a sense, their fraught subject positions bear out the Freudian psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity as an ongoing struggle to negotiate ambivalent identifications—or as the history of those shifting affiliations. 17 Yet the asymmetric positions occupied by Garanger and his photographic subjects highlight the need for a critical vocabulary with which to address a broad range of national traumatic experience. Colonial representation and identification, in particular, need to be rethought in terms of the negotiations between fantasy and identity that they may permit relative to visual stagings of race, gender, and ethnicity. In the context of forced unveiling, Algerian women's identity card photographs can be understood as uniquely staged. Although they are military rather than studio photographs, they bear some resemblance to the posed images exhibited in Malek Alloula's study of French colonial postcards entitled TheColonial Harem. Both sets of photographs manifest a history of colonialist intervention into the image or self-presentation of women, especially efforts to refashion or redress Algerian women's bodies according to divergent political objectives. Aesthetic investments in the fantasy of the unveiled Algerian woman—and in the veil itself as the primary trope for the "Oriental feminine"—impact colonial postcards and identity photographs alike. Marc Garanger, a Frenchman born in Normandy, helped to orchestrate women's images during the revolution. Garanger served as a photographer in the French army from 1960-1962, where he composed Algerian cartes d'identité. His photographic experiences converted Garanger to a staunch critic of colonial policy and practice. He especially opposed the campaigns of torture conducted by the French [End Page 813] Organisation de l'Armée Sécrète (OAS), and the forced unveiling of Algerian women prior to their portraiture. An evolving consciousness spurred Garanger to work feverishly during his two-year tenure to create a portfolio of images that would memorialize colonial injustice. Although photography constituted Garanger's official duty relative to the French nation, it also offered a tool with which to record his opposition to colonial practice: To express myself with my eye, I took up my camera. To shout my disagreement. For twenty-four months I never stopped, sure that one day I would be able to testify, to tell stories with these images. . . . All of this I did with more force than the dominant military ideology of the era that surrounded me with hatred and violence. My spirit's revolt was proportionate to the horrors that I witnessed. 18 Driven by this spirit of revolt, Garanger exploited photography's capacity to shape the national imaginary. He tried to create images that would question the authoring (and authorizing) functions of the colonial gaze. Given his ambivalent position vis-à-vis la mission civilatrice, Garanger opens up a space for dis-identification with the racial and sexual politics embedded in colonial imagery. Garanger's photography foregrounds tense encounters between colonial desire and the disarming looks of photographed subjects. During his tour of duty in Algeria, Garanger was repeatedly struck by the violence in Algerian women's eyes as they met his camera's gaze. His work registers profound ambivalence about the objectifying function of colonial photography—ambivalence that frequently haunts or disturbs the surface of his images. Garanger's most provocative images record not only the violence of colonial representation, but also the destabilizing potential of Algerian women's looks. ControlSurveillance is not just a collection of information, but a material force used to control subjects. And as technology grows so does the modes of surveillance Thompson, teaches in the English Departments of Fordham University and Adelphi University. A former student of Seamus Deane at the University of Notre Dame where he completed his Ph.D., 2002 ( Spurgeon, Vol. 2, pp. 96-97) DJ It is my premise that surveillance in general is less about information, as most theorists would claim, and more about the material display of force -1ess about taking notes than spatializing the force monopolized by the state. The most influential theorization of surveillance for cultural studies scholars is that of Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1977). lt is clear, however, that something has changed between the older forms of surveillance that Foucault critiques -the model of surveillance, for him, being the Panopticon that Bentham sketched out- and contemporary surveillance. For one, these modes of surveillance are material forces of social control, not sketches and not plans or theories to be generalized later, hypothetically, into all possible social institutions. They are not, in other words, Bentharn's unbuilt architecture. Secondly, what once was to be applied in prisons, insane asylums, or schools, is being applied to society in general. out 'in the open', in public space. And third, expensive technologies and procedures of instruction (backed by the accumulated resources only available to the state) are necessitated by these new modes of surveillance (most exemplified by helicopter surveillance). These developments, I think, transform the concept of surveillance itself. We can no longer think of it as an activity in which anybody off the street can participate, for example, as a sort of self-sustaining auto-mechanistic practice. Foucault's observation about the ultimate surveillance "machine", the Panopticon, no longer holds: "Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants" (Foucault, 1977: 202). Today the servants would be powerless to operate (or to turn off) the machine of surveillance or in the case of helicopter surveillance- powerless even to access the equipment. With the advent of photographic, and specifically filmic modes of surveillance the concept of surveillance within critical discourses needs to be retrofitted. One reason why is that surveillance has always been for its theorists a problem of information: it involves the recording and processing of information about (national, colonial, etc.) subjects as a way of locating and fixing individuals by means of a vast structure of data. The central point about surveillance in the plague town for Foucault is that it is based "on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, frorn the intendants to the rnagistrates or mayor" (196). At the heart of this logic of surveillance is an "uninterrupted work of writing" (197). It is a body of information, written down in "reports", which enables the "capillary functioning of power". This description of the relations between power, information, and surveillance is still of course useful to critiques of the state. The North of Ireland is a site of constant and pervasive processing of inforrnation by the colonial state. For exarnple, soldiers flying aerial surveillance for the RAF in Belfast have boasted publically that not only do they have the license plate nurnbers of every car moving in and out of the city in their on-board cornputers, but that they know the color of every sofa in every living roorn in the city. (Whether this is true, or even possible is of course another question.) This is indeed an advanced exarnple of the kind of inforrnation-based rnodel of surveillance Foucault rightly foregrounds. The advancernent of cornputer technology, as some critics have noted, represents a sort of technological amplification of the structures states or imperial powers employed to control and reproduce subjects. This, to some theorists, represents simply an intensification of surveillance. And ways of describing and critiquing it must therefore match this exponential expansion. Cornputers, by this logic, sirnply enhance the sarne, classic structures of information behind surveillance. The cornputer and the technologies accornpanying it, like closed circuit television (CCTV), are sirnply conceived of as more sophisticated procedures of writing, recording, of registration. In sum, the practice of surveillance has always been theorized as a sort of locator service, which produces and secures subjects by keeping track of them in textual forms. New technologies simply ramify and reproduce on a massive scale old modalities of surveillance. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.71 Mb. Share with your friends:
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