Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC
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- The aff’s controlled transgression upholds the surveillance state
Link – GenericIf we really wanted to decrease surveillance, it would have happened already – periodic revelations about the NSA have occurred throughout its history, and to what effect? We sweep it back under the rug or create short-lived legal changes because our collective unconscious remains unchanged and sets the norm for surveillance --- analyzing it is possible, but it has to come before effective legal actionAristodemou 2014 --- Senior Lecturer in Law (Maria, “Law, Psychoanalysis, Society: Taking the Unconscious Seriously” https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5M3pAwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%22nsa%22+AND+%22psychoanalysis%22+AND+%22desire%22+&ots=lDnuDxQFMZ&sig=7H0c6GELtGQ6U53BZ8NtxhN7oh8#v=onepage&q=nsa&f=false)//trepka Psychoanalysis throws into doubt the assumption of a division between the public realm of law and state on the one hand and the private realm of the individual on the other because for psychoanalysis, it is the distinction between self and other, subject and neighbour, inside and outside, that is precisely blurred: the most intimate part of ourselves is actually taken from the outside, from the other. Indeed, to pursue Freud's own description of the uncanny as the horror of the all-too-familiar, we could say there is nothing more uncanny than the experience of analysis itself. In analysis, what is most intimate to oneself appears as if for the first time to an unwilling and hostile audience: the subject herself encounters the self she didn't know she harboured. No wonder psy- choanalysis is the ultimate horror story, confronting the subject with her own limits, in effect, with her own relation to death. As we will see in pages to come, Lacan coined a beautiful neologism for this intimate yet disavowed place, denoting the fact that it is excluded in the interior; it is a term thatZizwill be returning to time and again, the 'extimate'. For psychoanalysis, attempts to understand and legislate for the individual cannot take place without understanding how the individual and the social interrelate: unless we understand the nature of the individual and her relation- ship to the social, our ability to reform the social, including the legal, realm, will be sadly limited. It is in the human psyche and its relationship to the Big Other, that we must look for the potential for change if meaningful and lasting social and legal reforms are to be achieved. Conversely, our difficulty, or inability to affect social structures even when we appear to try to, is due to the fact that those structures are entrenched not only in the symbolic realm but in our own unconscious. Politicians know this only too well and are quick to stoke and incite our fantasies, some more success- fully than others. Whether the fantasy is of a nation, a religion, a common friend or a common enemy, nothing will command more lasting support than the ability to reach the parts laws and policies on their own cannot reach: our unconscious. As we will see in the course of this book, there is nothing harder or more painful than letting go of our fantasies, the stories we weave and come to believe about ourselves and others. It is our fantasies, after all, that constitute us as subjects so if any meaningful change is to take place it requires the shat- tering dissolution not only of our laws and policies but of the unconscious beliefs and fantasies that support them. How do we access those beliefs and fantasies? How do we put law on the couch, listen to its monotonous ramblings and excavate its unconscious desires? To attempt to examine law and legal discourse through the psychoanalytic lens is, of course, no easy task. How can one uncover the unconscious workings of the rules and principles that make up the symbolic order in general and of the legal system in particular? As we know, it can take years of painstaking and expensive analysis before an individual, kicking and screaming no doubt, can be said to come face to face with their idiosyncratic and invariably embarrass- ing and shameful desires. How do we get law to lie on the couch, start talking to the analyst (and who, if anyone, could Law develop a transference with), and then gradually move from empty to full speech, let alone pay the debt for its analysis? My wager is that these questions are not only rhetorical but also meta- phorical. AsZizhave started describing, those beliefs are already 'out there', in our practices and products of our culture: like the activities of Jimmy Savile or the NSA, they are open for us to see, if only we dared to. In the same way that the abuses by public figures like Jimmy Savile had been an open secret at an organization like the BBC, we do not need 'Law' to lie on the couch because the unconscious laws that influence and determine our behaviour do not reside in some unexplored recesses of the mind but are displayed in all their (dirty) glory in the practices and products of our culture. Cultural, no less than legal, texts proclaim knowingly and unknowingly, consciously and unconsciously, the ineluctable rules and mores that make up the social order, whether we are aware of them or not, like them or not, suffer them, tolerate them, or enjoy them. In the same way our myths and cultural texts, to follow my own Law & Literature thesis from over a decade ago, are just as influential and norm- making, if not more so, than so-called 'real' laws." Rather than hidden away beyond our reach, the unconscious rules and principles that order our individual and collective lives, are established and displayed by our cultural practices under the full lights of our social order. Most of the time, of course, as in the Jimmy Savile example above, we prefer to stay blissfully unaware of them; they are the 'known unknowns', to use Slavoj Zizek’s poignant corrective to Donald Rumsfeld's epistemological categories, that is, things our unconscious knows, but our conscious selves prefer to ignore. They are the disavowed practices and beliefs that co-exist and underline the official practices while remaining firmly swept under the carpet. Needless to say, Donald Rumsfeld is not the only person suffering from a blindspot in their field of vision, and not only when it comes to illegal wars; the 'known unknowns' are a blindspot for us all, hence the need for what Holderlin called a 'third eye' to remind us of what we know but daren't openly acknowledge let alone pay the price for." This 'third eye' can be provided not only by the occasional Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, not even only by an analyst, but as we will see, by our cultural products and practices. The focus of the book will be the unconscious law inscribed in cultural no less than in legal texts and manifested in our society's cultural products and practices, in our aesthetic as well as political choices and preferences. Poets, as both Freud and Lacan acknowledged, understood societal norms and the unconscious processes supporting them long before psychoanalysts and have always been adept at taking seemingly marginal phenomena to epitomize what is central and inherent to society. Whether we are referring to well-known and best-selling cultural texts or less celebrated products, it is through the interstices of culture, through its loud as well as its less noisy manifestations, that the core of the unconscious can be gauged: in the same way that, as Freud insisted, it is in our mistakes, our jokes, our slips of the tongue or of the pen, that the truth of our desire may be gauged. State action to address surveillance sector just draws people to corporate surveillance – reform can’t overcome Americans’ compulsive desire for securitySmecker, 13 – BA, Philosophy and Psychology, University of Vermont and Writer, Peace and Justice Center (Frank, “1984.0: The Rise of the big Other as Big Brother,” Truthout, 6/20, http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/17111-19840-the-rise-of-the-big-other-as-big-brother)//SY Perhaps, then, the normalization of domestic spying is already underway. Virtually the entire nation is under surveillance. Phone records, emails, documents, photographs, connection logs, audio and video chats and more are being handed over without reluctance to the NSA, the data scraped and archived. Why? So that this information can be accessed at any time, for reasons not entirely clear. OK, ostensibly it's a safeguard against terrorism. But these days everybody and their political representative appear to have their own respective fetishes for what qualifies as an act of "terrorism"... and so the gamut of reasons behind this surveillance monstrosity, at least those that have been disclosed to the public, ends up serving to maintain its ambiguous, secretive impression. In any event, now that the cat's out of the bag, it seems most people aren't too outraged over this domestic spying business - to wit: Verizon's stock is going up despite their complicit role in all this (people are continuing to buy their products and services). And many of those who do appear to be bothered nonetheless launch their invectives in the form of pithy cynical quips posted from their Facebook and/or Twitter accounts - their incessant lamentation is, by these lights, feeding the very source of their lamentation. The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel coined a term for such individuals - "Beautiful Soul": that specific "I-told-you-so!" individual who, by incessantly complaining about this whole debacle, is actually contributing, in a way, to the preservation of this despicable situation - for, first of all, the Big Culprit against which the Beautiful Soul takes issue is none other than the external point of reference by which this dissenting character acquires his or her "dissident" personality; and second of all, if you're using Facebook to express your contempt for being spied on, at least try to be a little more consistent. If you signed up for Facebook, you are, in some form or another, being watched. That's the point of the damn thing: to be seen. Don't pretend like you don't enjoy it, even if your enjoyment appears in the form of angst. In other words, people may be angry over being spied on, but not so much with Verizon, not with Facebook, nor with Sprint. Not with any of the private companies involved. Everybody seems upset primarily with The Government. Thus in the wake of being spied on, Americans show resolute loyalty to the very companies that collude with the federal programs doing the spying. It's as if the idea of boycotting these companies and their products and services, is, for the vast majority of the US, more deranging than the fact that hundreds of millions of lives, perhaps yours and mine even, are being tracked day in day out. The point I'm alluding to here is this: a classic example of abuse of power is to present its victims with a series of false choices whereby no matter which choice the victim makes, those in power win: do you want security or do you want privacy? Do you really want to trust the government, or do you want to trust the private sector that provides you with a false sense of security through things like smartphones, Internet access, social media, and so on? One has to wonder then, if pooled distrust is being directed toward Big Government, does this sentiment of suspicion merely act as a catalyst for consolidating more power in the sphere of Big Business? If so, we end up with the following logical absurdity: the more surveillance, the more "privacy." More correctly, that is to say: the more security we want, the less privacy we'll have, and the stronger the private sector will become. And that's why the more I think about this situation and its seemingly irrational, stupid-as-shit absurdity (that, by dint of purchasing things like smartphones and dicking around on Facebook - in the face of being spied on through these very things - people are thereby giving their (unwitting) consent to being spied on by some sort of "Big Brother" agency), the more I realize that there is something rather philosophical in nature going on here. Perhaps this situation has less to do with some secretive "Big Brother" entity tracking peoples' everyday behavior. Rather, what if this situation is exactly how it appears to be? What if this situation is essentially an ideological problem - having everything to do with us, the body politic, and, our immensely complex relation to the very "locus of power" that gives substance to the body politic? What if, and I don't intend to sound cynical but rather skeptical here, this surveillance scandal is the logical, though odious, result of America's desire for security? The surveillance state is too entrenched to solve with legal reforms – debate about the unconscious effect of digital surveillance on the public is necessaryGray, 14 – Director of Policy, Open Policy Foundation and Doctoral Researcher, History of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London (Johnathan, “The Snowden Files: so much more than state surveillance,” Open Democracy, 2/6, https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jonathan-gray/snowden-files-so-much-more-than-state-surveillance)//SY The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan complained that American interpreters of Freud had missed the point of his shockingly radical decomposition of the human mind. By locating the unconscious inside the mind, like an iceberg partially submerged underwater, Lacan argued that they left the traditional conception of the conscious subject largely intact, albeit complemented by a dark, unknown portion which they considered it the job of psychoanalysis to uncover. On the contrary, Lacan argued that the unconscious is something that resides outside of us, in language, in our relationships with others, beyond our reach and beyond our ken. The NSA documents leaked by Snowden highlight the dizzying experiential gulf between on the one hand the seamless, multi-coloured user interfaces with which we are so familiar, worlds of windows and folders, apps and icons, loved ones and deadlines and distractions; and on the other hand the monumental physical infrastructures of thousands of miles of intercontinental fibre optic cable, immense server farms, satellites and tunnels that enable us to connect to each other, the corporate giants that own and run them, and the geopolitical forces at play around them. Decades of mythology, marketing and rhetoric around cyberspace and personal computing have led us to imagine and talk of our online lives as autonomous, deterritorialised public and private spaces in which we can conduct our business or leisure, unimpeded and free from watchful eyes. We know this not to be true: we know, at least in the abstract, that our personal information is very often coveted by tech corporations, sold to advertisers, and used to train the algorithms and improve the offerings of commercial services. Our every click, pause and keystroke is grist in Silicon Valley’s lucrative mill. Snowden’s “PowerPoints, training slides, management reports, [and] diagrams of data-mining programs” give us a glimpse of a yet bigger picture: of how these transactions are bundled up, sold, stolen and secretly haggled over by governments and corporations at an enormous scale. In a project called UPSTREAM, the NSA intercepts an estimated 80 per cent of digital communications going in, out and around the US using an extensive network of oceanic cable taps in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It pays hundreds of millions a year for access to 81 per cent of international phone calls coming in and out of the US. It cajoles, compels and partners with major tech companies and infrastructure operators for access, front or back door, given or taken. GCHQ allegedly reports a 7,000 per cent increase in the amount of information they have access to in the past few years. This is not just a simple case of state overreach. This is the surveillance industrial complex: the deep entanglement of entrenched public and private interests, woven together by contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, secret deals, legal immunities, power games and revolving doors. Despite the loud protestations from Silicon Valley that “the balance … has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual”, this is just as much about the nefarious secret activities of unaccountable corporations as it is about the nefarious secret activities of unaccountable governments. As many have pointed out, the debate which Snowden started should not just be about curbing the excessive and unaccountable enthusiasms of the surveillance state but also access capitalism, corporate influence, undermining global institutions and trust and new forms of information consumerism. While some have recently condemned the way in which the debate has been framed as a cyberlibertarian distraction, surely what is needed is a broadening and deepening of the debate, rather than ignoring it or moving on. Perhaps we should take it as an opportunity to discuss not only how to strike the right balance between security, privacy and liberty, but also about the composition, functioning and regulation of the invisible world that gives life to the light from our screens, and the effect that this world has on us and how we collectively think and operate. The pervasiveness of state surveillance demands a psychoanalysis of why people submit their data to be observed rather than single-issue reformsBurnham, 15 – Associate Professor, English, Philosophy, and Cultural studies, Simon Fraser University (Clint, “Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?,” The Freudian Legacy Today, 168-169, http://www.cnpc-rcpc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/10-Burnham-Does-the-Internet-Have-an-Unconscious.pdf)//SY I am not arguing that one should ignore the practices of state and corporate surveillance, although I find Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s contention that privacy is a nineteenth century bourgeois liberal fantasy compelling.10 But certainly, as revelation follows revelation of the data mining of one’s personal information (the ideology of a subject ‘owning’ or ‘having rights to’ one’s information must be questioned and historicized), one feels that there is a certain structural relentlessness on the part of such apparatuses. Perhaps what we need is a psychoanalysis of those apparatuses, of their perverse need to compile all of one’s data. Let us now turn to Freud’s famous remark that the unconscious knows no contradiction. This is so because the unconscious is the site of our desire, of our “wishful impulses,” which “exist side by side without being influenced by one another, and are exempt from mutual contradiction” (186). I would argue that this lack of contradiction is also what is so prevalent and annoying about social media and online email web browsers. Consider how, when Facebook or Gmail is up on our computer screen, we see our intimate thoughts surrounded by ads for belly fat or ESL or gay photography. Facebook now asks me: “How are you doing, what’s happening, how’s it going, what’s going on, how are you feeling, Clint?” Here the unconscious of the internet, via the shared characteristic of a lack of contradiction, relates to how the algorithms work. On Facebook, ads are triggered by your profile information (if you like cookery, you will get cookbook ads) and your likes (you are what you like, as one online posting explains), whereas Google ads are triggered by your search terms. In both cases, we find precisely what Freud discusses in terms of the contents of the unconscious: wishful impulses, with the exception or caveat that we may not, in fact, like cookbooks, even if we clicked on that link, or want cookbooks. Indeed we may have used that search term because we wanted to buy one for our cousin for his or her birthday. Thus, when I go to Amazon I am continually offered books I bought not for myself, but for my son or my brother. This is my point: our subjectivity as worked out in the unconscious does not conform to how we want others to see us (the imaginary: cookbooks versus cultural theory; YA novels versus police procedurals). Instead it discloses the real of our desire, in my example actually to please my brother or my son. In this sense, it’s a matter of desire (Lacan), and not taste (Bourdieu). Policies decreasing surveillance are worthless transgressions --- limiting the NSA because they restrict our freedom is a token action that puts the locus of value in the OtherAndrejevic 2013 --- Associate Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies (Mark, “Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know”, https://books.google.com/books?id=b1MXhS71t40C&pg=PA137&lpg=PA137&dq=Mark+Andrejevic+psychoanalysis&source=bl&ots=u7EOqDowuO&sig=Yjh5iuA--vWmFoMWS7eWyBOBxAw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VcmOVYHaMYarsAHgzY6IBg&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false)//trepka The psychoanalytic relationship between desire and drive, as described by Jodi Dean (following the work of Zizek and Lacan) is invoked by this infinite recession. Desire, according to her account, is about constant pursuit and disillusion - the endless attempt to catch an ever elusive object. With each gesture of capture, the obtained object is revealed not to be it - the true object of desire - and the chase begins anew. By contrast, the logic of drive reflexivizes the process, conceding the impossibility of ever catching up with the infinitely deferred object, although "conceding" isn't the right term - enjoying or "getting off on" this impossibility might be a better way to put it: "Drive cir- culates, round and round, producing satisfaction even as it misses its aim, even as it emerges in the plastic network of the decline of symbolic efficiency. There is a self-satisfied gesture of the "non-duped" in this reflexive recognition - a certain glee in "getting" what the dupes do not. But there is also something altogether too facile about this recognition insofar as it imagines in its reflexive wisdom that it has captured a bit of truth about truth - in this regard, it is not quite reflexive enough. As Alenlta Zupancic puts it, "If we simply keep repeating that all our knowledge is subjectively mediated and necessarily partial, we have said nothing of importance. Echoes of the perverse enjoyment of the drive resonate in the right-wing embrace of what the comedian Stephen Colbert famously dubbed "truthiness" (a "zeitgeisty" term, according to the New York Times): a cynical and ultimately conservative realism that concedes the demise of symbolic efficiency while continuing to rely upon it. Consider the example of a vexed exchange about the details of Obama's health care plan between CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien and Republican mouthpiece john Sununu during the 2012 US Presidential campaign: O'Brien: I'm telling you what factcheck.com [sic] tells you, I'm telling you what the CBO says, I'm telling you what CNN’s independent analysis says… There is independent analysis that details what this is about… Sununu: No there isn't! O'Brien: Yes there is! Sununu: [shouting] No, there's Democratic analysis… there's Democratic analysis! The very attempt to appeal to a notion of independent analysis or objective fact is aggressively (and somewhat gleefully) debunked. On its face, this dynamic might seem an instance of the logic of desire: the ongoing attempt to capture an infinitely receding piece of the real - as if a more accurate, better constructed analysis might reveal the true impact of policy in question. However, such a formulation doesn't capture Sununu's position, which is not "you need better analysis," but the post-reality-based community assertion that "your analysis can never catch up with my (affective) facts." The assertion is a self-undermining gesture for pundits and commentators insofar as it highlights the futility of analysis altogether (at least insofar as its purported goal of clarification and explication is concerned), and yet the endless loops of analysis proliferate on 24-hour cable news, blogs, and Websites. To point out, as one systematic study Did, that a coin flip is more accurate than the predictions of expert commen- tators and analysts is to miss the point: in a post-deferential era, analysis is simply more "word clouds": "elements that reinforce the collapse of meaning and argument and thus hinder argument and opposition.” The fact-checking cottage industry is a legacy of the journalism of the 1980s and 1990s, which replaced an ostensibly outdated commitment to "objectivity" with the convention of balance - a convention that was so badly abused by skilled public relations strategies and spokespeople that some news outlets felt compelled to revive the notion of objectivity as a separate division, like the Tampa Bay Times’s, to which reporters could have recourse as one more "source." This kind of sock puppetry along, with the occasional willingness of a mainstream media outlet to identify a politician's blatant lie has been greeted in some circles as a welcome exercise in "shucking the old he- said-she-said formulation and directly declaring that some claims are False. But the damage might run too deep for the occasional invocation of a truth claim to heal. As the Atlantic put it in a hand-wringing piece on the fate of political campaigning triggered by a misleading ad run by the Romney cam- paign: "But what if it tums out that when the press calls a lie a lie, nobody cares? The bottom line, of course, is that the ad is continuing to run. It is continuing to run because the Romney campaign's polling shows it to be effective. The aff’s controlled transgression upholds the surveillance stateGlassford, Professor, 2004 (John, “Representations of Surveillance”, http://www.angelo.edu/faculty/jglassford/my%20publications%20encrypted/representations%20of%20surveillance.pdf)//trepka The state already has the capacity to intercept private communications, either electronic or regular mail, it can listen to conversations through the traditional wiretap or wireless communications, it can bug and listen to people calling out in the night while asleep or dreaming, it can engage in sneak and peak surveillance of property undetected, it can examine all private financial transactions and an individual’s credit history, it can monitor and collect a wealth of biological data on suspects, including blood type, dental records, fingerprints, both standard and DNA, ear-lobe identification, and voice pattern recognition, it can follow a person’s daily routine while remaining undetected. In fact it can close down the individual’s physical and mental scape to the extent that it could leave them literally with no home to go to. The game is not to find out whether an individual has the ability to commit an offense, thousands of citizens in the average urban setting now have the capacity to commit acts of terror, the goal is to establish if they are “thinking” about committing an offense. Some recent Hollywood movies, especially those released after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attacks on the World Trade Center have tried to engage with some of the issues associated with these events. Films such as The Pelican Brief, directed by Alan J. Paluka, 1993, Enemy of the State, directed by Tony Scott, 1998, Minority Bourne Identity, directed by Doug Liman, 2002. These films have had something to say about life after the political certainties of the Cold War and the World Trade Center attacks, the growth of surveillance power, and especially the manipulation and control of human biology. In all of these films the most consistently applied theme suggests that surveillance technology allows a state to clandestinely operate within a state, and that rogue elements who control this surveillance technology will inevitably attempt to expand their own power at the expense of concerned politicians and the American public alike. Thus the assassination of ecologically friendly Supreme Court judges, inquisitive Senators, and foreign policy embarrassments of one kind or another, as well as the unwarranted harassment of innocent members of the public are all de rigueur in most of these movies. Often it is the sanctity of key American values which are under threat, values such as property or privacy; “that’s my blender” says the captured, outraged lawyer character played by will Smith to a rogue NSA operative who stole it from his kitchen during the course of a sneak and peak raid in Enemy of the State. Writing off habeas corpus is one thing, but stealing a man’s blender is an affront to every decent American. The surveillance movie genre is inherently paradoxical. As well as being good entertainment these movies are clearly intended to be a running commentary on the dangers posed by the state to individual civil liberties, they are meant to be a wake up call to decent liberty-loving folks every where. Yet the entertainment function is not irrelevant, since these films have a need to thrill they are fundamentally structured by what Lacan called jouissance, or the sheer inertia created by the pleasure principle. Although these movies are clearly alert to the possibilities of abuses of power by the new surveillance wonks, for the most part these films are sentimental or sanguine and seldom dwell on the destructive details of spying or the ultimate ends of such human behavior analysis and control. The rush of the action is seldom allowed to run into unknown cultural and political terrain or to rebellion or transgression. Transgression, where it does occur, is often neutered. This Hollywood strategy of ambiguous protest is nothing new, in his “Fantasy as a Political Category”, Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian analysis of fantasy demonstrated with regard to the 1970 Robert Altman film, M*A*S*H that acts of transgression need not automatically qualify as acts of rebellion if such acts operate as a controlled release of wholly legitimate anger and rage. Indeed in the case of the 4077 it helped to keep the participants sane and the war effort going. The social relations governing society and the way our personality is constructed means we want to be watched, we desire surveillance --- that affirmative reforming one program can’t change thatHumphreys 6 (Ashlee, Northwestern University, “The Consumer as Foucauldian “Object of Knowledge””, Social Science Computer Review, Volume 24 Number 3, page 296-309, Sage)//trepka The Cookie Surveillance on the Internet works in much the same way for tracking desire, but one should not overhastily assume that it controls consumer desire in the same way as the gaze of the tower (individuation from the surveillance is much more productive for creating desire). Surveillance does, however, play an important role in making the consumer an object of knowledge, in enabling individuation. Through cookies, files placed on each computer that serve to track and document Internet activity (e.g., purchases, name, address, and other information), surveillance is ever-present. The cookie used by Amazon.com, for example, is used to identify and greet the customer when she or he visits the site, then to literally bombard she or he with products that she or he might be interested in: sidebars of book reviews, lists (made by other, similar members) of CDs along a certain theme or genre, new releases from movie genres of the consumer’s previous choices. This is not, however, a covert practice—it is one that is encouraged by visitors and advertised by Amazon: “Get instant personalized recommendations based on your prior purchases the moment you log on” (Amazon.com, 2002a). Although consumers may not be aware of the extent or the machinations of this technology, they are continually made aware of Amazon’s presence as a watcher by the personalized feedback that Amazon provides. The log-on serves to instantly identify but also to instantly and continually track. Only, in this case, the continuous gaze from the tower is often welcomed because it is conflated with the gaze from other consumers. As evidence of this desire to be watched, customers contribute lists, reviews, and guides to Amazon.com, often developing personalities as a “top reviewer” or an expert on some domain of consumption. Integral to this practice is a process of rating others based on their contributions. Thus, one driving factor for both the desire to gaze and the desire to be gazed at is “scopophilia” and, more historically speaking, the rise of “image culture,” as Fredric Jameson (1998) identifies it. Now suddenly a hitherto baleful universal visibility that seemed to brook no utopian alternative is welcomed and reveled in for its own sake: this is the true moment of image society, in which human subjects henceforth exposed (according to Paul Willis) to bombardments of up to a thousand images a day (at the same time that their formerly private lives are thoroughly viewed and scrutinized, itemized, measured and enumerated, in data banks) begin to live a very different relationship to space and time, to existential experience as well as cultural consumption. (pp. 110-111) Thus, image culture inspires in consumers not only the desire to watch but also to be watched (Kozinets et al., 2004). Some compelling examples of this phenomenon include reality TV shows and the proliferation of personal, voyeuristic, 24-hour web cameras. In the specific case of Amazon.com, consumers exercise their desire to be watched through “Listmania!” a service offered by Amazon that allows consumers to display their preferences in a themed list to be looked at by other consumers and (implicitly) by Amazon.com. Of this practice, Amazon says, “Go ahead and create a favorite item list now to help other customers discover products that you enjoy. It’s free, democratic, and fun” (Amazon.com, 2004). Because consumers derive pleasure from being watched by other consumers, the gaze in general is welcomed, whereas the gaze from marketers in particular is seldom noticed or differentiated. Surveillance is so pervasive that it may not occur to consumers to care if they are being watched by marketers. They may assume, in many cases, that they always are being watched anyway. However, paranoia,Zizwould argue, is unwarranted as a metaphor because consumers in this paradigm, as evidenced by the shoppers at Amazon.com, want to be watched. We have not a culture of paranoids, as in the Panopticon, but a culture of narcissists. This narcissism, also noted by Kozinets et al. (2004), is one reasonZizargue that a refracted or prismatic Panopticon is a more apt metaphor than the obverse Panopticon. The obverse of the Panopticon, for Foucault, would be consumers looking back at marketers rather than the marketers looking at the consumers. The spectacle—consumers all fixing their gaze on some image or another—is not the obverse of the Panopticon; consumers do not look back at the marketer, they look to the image or other consumers. In the present case of the spectacle, the consumer not only is watched but is watched watching. This model of consumers being “watched watching” has three levels: marketers watching consumers, consumers gazing at an image, consumers gazing at other consumers (cf. Kozinets et al., 2004) and—admittedly the perspective of this essay—the consumer-researcher watching all of this watching. The refracted Panopticon is one of maximal scopophilia in which everyone gazes: The marketers watch consumers who watch other consumers, a cycle that only terminates with a consumer’s gaze at an image, to the degree that everything in this space is always already an image (Baudrillard, 1983; Derrida, 1978b). It is like two mirrors held up to one another. The image moves back and forth regressively, an infinite dialectic. As Jameson notes, “image society” created around consumption—and in fact almost indistinguishable from it (Firat & Venkatesh, 1995)—instills in the consumer a desire to be watched, but also to be watched watching. The image has become so revered in contemporary culture that some consumers not only feel compelled to gaze, they feel compelled to be gazed at. Here we can see how being watched has amplified and altered consumer agency. Consumers not only have the scopophilic desire to look at images but also the desire to be an image themselves. Thus, the spectacle as theorized by Debord (1967/1983) and Baudrillard (1983) is intricately linked with surveillance by way of scopophilia. The embracement of both surveillance and spectacle issue from the same source: image culture. To theorize further as to the cause of image culture itself would necessarily, as Jameson argues, be linked with the historical condition and the dynamics of global capital, a discussion that is beyond the scope of the present essay. In image culture, the embeddedness of the gaze, addressed earlier with regard to prisoners, recurs only in more advanced form. The gaze is internalized by controlling how consumers themselves see. An overly deterministic view might assert that consumers have so internalized the gaze that there is no resistance to it, that there is a continual performance of preferences, and that they never truly originate from the consumer. This view has the downside of neglecting human agency. If we subscribe to a more liberatory view, it could be argued that consumer preferences are co-constituted by both consumers and marketers through dialectic interchange that meets the needs of both groups. Unlike the case of the prisoner in the Panopticon, the gaze is welcomed because it serves a different, more indirect, even playful function of power than it did in the penal system. Here, surveillance is used, on the surface of it, to improve consumer satisfaction. Cookies are used to remember consumer preferences and information to make the process shopping faster and more pleasant. And what consumer (uncritically) would resist that? The practice of using cookies fulfills, to some degree, both the consumer and the marketer goals. These goals are for both constituencies local or instrumental goals; they do not call into question the orientation of more global goals. This kind of institutional rationality may thus benefit neither consumers nor companies on a larger, more global level (Weber, 1922/1968). One-shot solutions to surveillance fails --- the modern subject jumps into strangers’ pictures, posts endless updates of the burrito they ate for breakfast on Facebook and Instagram, constantly desiring an outside gaze by an important, governmental OtherTziallas 2010 --- Ph.D. student, conducts surveillance research (Evangelos, “Torture porn and surveillance culture”, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/evangelosTorturePorn/text.html)//trepka Surveillance is everywhere, and its social ubiquity has led to it being a common element or mode of representation in contemporary moving image culture. As Thomas Levin has argued, “By the 1990s…cinematic narration could be said, in many cases, to have effectively become synonymous with surveillant enunciation as such.”[1][open endnotes in new window] Surveillance has become a mode of visual production, as in reality television shows like Big Brother (US, 2001) or films like Timecode (2000); it has become a narrative and thematic element, as in Caché (2005), Disturbia (2007) The Borne Ultimatum (2007); and sometimes it serves as both a mode of production and narrative theme, as in The Conversation (1974), Sliver (1993), The Truman Show (1998), or the British sitcom Peep Show. When surveillance functions as both mode of production and major script element, as Levin puts it, “It is this ambiguity—between surveillance as narrative subject, i.e. as thematic concern, and surveillance as the very condition or structure of narration itself—that will become increasingly characteristic of the cinema of the 1990s.”[2] The prevalence of surveillance in contemporary media is now so vast that, for the purpose of this paper,Zizwould like to focus on a small group of films that exemplify contemporary discourses on surveillance in a specific way. This group of films is collectively known as “torture porn.” The label “torture porn” refers to a loose association of feature fiction films featuring scenes of extreme violence and torture. David Edelstein coined the phrase in his 2006 New York Magazine article as he quickly surveyed a common trend of violent representations in popular cinema. The catchy term became a trendy buzzword and now torture porn is considered a horror sub-genre in its own right.[3] AlthoughZizwill in part investigate torture porn as a cinematic sub-genre, my goal is to demonstrate the centrality of surveillance in these films as shaping narrative elements, modes of presentation, and iconographic motifs in ways that convey deep anxieties about the alteration of “the gaze.” Surveillance in torture porn allegorizes larger cultural and political trends in panoptic (the few watching the many) and synoptic (the many watching the few) subjectivities. Surveillance metonymically encompasses looking and the complex and ambivalent nature of looking and being looked at, and these elements of human social life are currently undergoing radical transformation due to technological advancements spurring on a “culture of surveillance,” or “surveillance culture.” As Nicholas Mirzoeff has noted, “Since the 1970s, one of the striking phenomena that have come to make visual culture seem a vital topic has been the convergence of spectacle and surveillance.”[4] “Surveillance” and the larger category, “image,” are merging together into surveillant images. If these two methods of representation have united, then this union requires us to investigate how the act of looking follows this social and technological change and what the ramifications of this merged, or altered, cultural gaze are. Looking is biological; gazing is cultural. As culture evolves, so too does the gaze. Torture porn is a sub-genre invested not just in looking or visibility but in panoptic and synoptic watching and hyper-visibility, which are rendering privacy and invisibility a thing of the past. The label “torture porn” combines reference to two of the most intense bodily acts and visible bodily representations; “porn” (sex) and “torture” (violence). The label itself is symptomatic of the extreme forms of visibility that torture porn engages with, bringing the body, but most importantly, visibility to the foreground. These films are partially concerned with “torture” and “porn,” but their consistent underlying structure rests on the sub-textual desires of looking embedded within “torture” and “porn.” Indeed “torture” and “porn” are actions and/or representations designed for maximum visibility. “Torture” and “porn” come to represent two increasingly intertwined discourses: first, the loss of privacy brought upon by, and commonplace attitude towards, institutional/corporate/government surveillance (the culture of surveillance); and second, our appropriation of surveillance as a form of entertainment (surveillance culture).Zizargue that torture porn is an extreme reaction to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance protocols and policies. Entangled with various issues and anxieties relating to the ubiquity of surveillance, we have now also culturally appropriated surveillance as a form of entertainment. In his book The Culture of Surveillance Staples argues, “As a society, we have become obsessed with the gaze of the videocam, not only because we perceive that it brings us ‘security’ but also because we are fascinated by the visual representation of ourselves.”[5] The ever-looming presence of potential surveillance, either via our own “videocams” or CCTV, makes us “comfortable with, and even drawn to, the idea of being preserved on tape.”[6] The converging of these forms of surveillance suggests that a contemporary psychoanalytic approach to understanding gazing (voyeurism, scopophilia, exhibitionism) requires a nuanced expansion and re-conceptualization. Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki investigates the effect of surveillance within pop culture phenomena in his 2009 book The Peep Diaries. For Niedzviecki, “Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook. It’s blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn sites, virally spread digital movies…cell phone photos—posted online—of your drunk friend making out with her ex-boyfriend, and citizen surveillance.”[7] Peep culture then, is “a cultural movement steeped in and made possible by technological change.” It implants the belief, “You need to know. You need to be known.”[8] Why do onlookers jump around behind news reporters filming on location? Because they know they will be seen on TV. People used to avoid walking into strangers’ pictures, now they often jump into the frame because they know they will be uploaded onto Facebook or Myspace, or Flickr, increasing their visibility. Niedzvicki’s book casts a wide net, weaving personal observation, experience and interviews into an exploration of contemporary “surveillance culture.” Topics he investigates include the following: reality television, celebrity “news,” amateur porn, serial YouTubers, camboys/camgirls, social networking, GPS obsession, government surveillance, spying technology, the urge to “confess ourselves,” and the dissolution of community and identity. His thesis is that we have entered an age where surveillance proper (military/security/institutional) has merged with and is appropriated by cultural industries and individuals, resulting in new surveillance-inspired forms of representation and entertainment. We have entered into an age defined by “wanting to know everything about everyone and, in turn, wanting to make sure that everyone knows everything about [us].”[9] In short, people live for the surveillance gaze. Niedzvicki does not see this as a positive turn of events, as surveillance remains a key tool of corporate and governmental power. People’s desire to rid themselves of their privacy has dangerous consequences, and the underlying fear and anxiety about these consequences is what torture porn draws upon and implicitly replicates. Subjects in the media age abhor privacy --- modern narcissism requires the surveillance gaze in the other in order to validate our existenceTziallas 2010 --- Ph.D. student, conducts surveillance research (Evangelos, “Torture porn and surveillance culture”, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/evangelosTorturePorn/text.html)//trepka Voyeurism was a hidden, somewhat shameful, secret gaze, while surveillance is a flaunted gaze. The voyeuristic gaze seeks others as a way to acknowledge the self, while the surveillance gaze only seeks itself; it is a further intensified narcissistic gaze. It is no longer voyeurism’s “I see you,” or exhibitionism’s “I want you to see me,” but surveillance’s “I want you to see me seeing you,” and surveillance performers’ “I want you to see me seeing you see me.” Rather than seeking the human gaze of the other for mirrored identification, we now seek the recorded gaze of the mechanical: we increasingly know ourselves (and others) as images rather than people mediated by images. For Ursula Frohne, “This desire to attain telepresence, to verify and validate one’s own existence…under the gaze of the media society and thereby to anchor one’s cultural self-realization is characteristic of contemporary media narcissism.”[79] Zizek echoes the same theme: “Today, anxiety seems to arise from the prospect of not being exposed to the Other’s gaze all the time, so that the subject needs the camera’s gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his/her being.”[80] Whether looking or being looked at, the gaze invariably turns back to the self, something Paul Virilio now sees as a merging of the human gaze and the technological surveillance gaze. For Virilio, we live with “Vision Machines,” within a system where machines watch us, and where we watch them as they watch us, ad infinitum, mimicking the endless gaze of two mirrors side by side reflecting each other’s reflectionreflection: an undecipherable world of mise-en-abyme. Surveillance culture produces “a new readiness to give up one of the fundamental principles of civilization—that of the legally protected private sphere and personal intimacy…”[81] and it is precisely this willingness to sacrifice our private selves to the media that torture porn is critical of. Niedzviecki quotes Renton and Reuben’s belief that “reality TV’s production techniques have aspects in common with torture” citing shows “like Fear Factor and Survivor and even The Real Gilligan’s Island, that regularly subject their contestants to confinement, starvation and degrading activities.”[82] In this regard, Saw II is the film most critical of surveillance culture. The entire film is constructed as a sinister version of Big Brother. Eight strangers wake up to find themselves locked in a large house with poisonous gas slowly leaking through the vents. Their mission is to find the code to the safe, a safe that contains the antidote. What the victims here are fighting for is “immunization,” or as in the reality television show Survivor, “immunity.” As contestants in reality television get knocked off, victims in Saw II get killed off, and as with most reality television shows, an implicit “award” for those who survive is additional visibility. In this instance, however, this “award” is perverted as it only prolongs one’s torture. The longer you last, the more screen time you get, but the more screen time you get, the more you suffer. A tape recording tells them to work together as a team, but each “contestant’s” greed takes over, leading to their demise. Saw II implicitly critiques reality television’s neo-conservatism and expresses disgust for our desire to rid ourselves of our privacy. Not only are people dissolving themselves into images, not only are they watching people being tortured, they are even letting themselves be tortured for this new social privilege. It is no surprise that the cultural appropriation and use of surveillance has focused so intently on the “average person,” and that this visual power of public looking, especially on the Internet, has been leveraged by individuals to expose themselves. Surveillance culture is an attempt to salvage ourselves. As Hal Niedzviecki argues, when people appropriate surveillance as a form of resistance, it does not mean they attempt to resist the institution but rather to resist the eradication of themselves. The surveillance gaze then is partly a gaze of lamentation. Perhaps then is why so many have churned out images of themselves on the Internet performing intimate, obscene or criminal acts, such as eating feces, having orgies, torturing others, attacking the homeless, or committing crimes; and perhaps this is why the public’s eyes are simultaneously attracted to these very same images. As the world becomes more virtual and fragmented, yet integrated, it seems people need to intensify the shock in order to feel something. Yet these grasps for attention only add to the seemingly limitless fragments available for consumption. As the protagonists of a film like Menace II Society indicate (they robbed a convenience store and stole the surveillance tape not to remove evidence of a crime but to play it repeatedly for friends as entertainment),[83] it seems that a condition of modern subjectivity is people’s need of the other’s gaze to validate themselves, regardless of what the gaze sees, whether it be mundane activities like washing the dishes or a crime. As the title of Sandra Bernhard’s one woman act/film puts it, “Without You I’m Nothing” (1990), or as Ursula Frohne has argued, our “internalized camera gaze[,] the all-seeing, seemingly omnipresent ‘eye of God’ is reincarnated in the presence of the observer in today’s media culture.”[84] Focus on macropolitical surveillance obscures individual complicity in monitoring – your aff is super obsolete and you’re worse than 1984
Andrejevic 6 “The Discipline of Watching: Detection, Risk, and Lateral Surveillance”. Mark, Mark Andrejevic is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Iowa. 14 Dec 2006. Pgs. 392 – 395. PWoods. The peer-to-peer monitoring practices described above have been characterized as a displacement of ‘‘Big Brother’’ by proliferating ‘‘little brothers’’ who engage in distributed forms of monitoring and information gathering. Whitaker (1999), for example, invokes the model of a ‘‘participatory Panopticon’’ in a double sense: it represents a form of consensual submission to surveillance in part because the watched are also doing the watching. As Miller (1988) put it in a succinct reformulation of the Big Brother slogan for a reflexive era: ‘‘Big Brother is you, watching.’’ But even the model of a participatory Panopticon tends to focus attention on the targets of surveillance* those who are subject to various forms of information gathering and the implications of peer-to-peer or commercial monitoring for those targets. Whitaker argues that the decentralization of Big Brother amplifies Panoptic control: ‘‘There is less need for a central command centre, a single focused Eye, when the same effect can be achieved by multiple, dispersed, even competitive eyes that in their totality add up to a system of surveillance more pervasive than that imagined by Orwell’’ (p. 140). Similar concerns regarding the invasion of privacy or the inappropriate use of personal information, as well as forms of discrimination, exclusion, and discipline, are raised by a persistent focus on the targets of Panoptic monitoring (e.g., Foucault, 1995; Gandy, 1993; Rosen, 2000). However, in an era of distributed surveillance, the amplification of panoptic monitoring relies on the internalized discipline not just of the watched, but also of the watchers. Absent the internalization of norms of conduct and governing imperatives by the watchers, distributed surveillance would amount to little more than the pluralization of control rather than a strategy for its centralization and amplification. The exposure of the watchers as objects of the gaze is the participatory twist highlighted by Room Raiders’ portrayal of peer-to-peer monitoring as spectacle. It is the moment, anticipated in Freud’s (1938, 1950) discussion of the scopic drive, wherein the role of the voyeur is redoubled by that of the exhibitionist. The savvy spy, engaged in an ongoing process of verification, is exposed as the object of what Lacan (1981) described as the imagined gaze in the field of the Other*a gaze literalized by the omniscient reality TV cameras. Room Raiders offers a reflexive distillation of the role of the savvy subject who, always on guard against the risks of deception, internalizes the norms and imperatives of surveillance, screening, and sorting. The contrived scene of surveillance on the show simultaneously exposes practices of investigatory voyeurism as forms of self-display. The drive to make oneself seen as someone not fooled by facades aligns itself with the performance of the savvy subject, who takes pride in the ability to discern the ‘‘real’’ (purely strategic and self-interested) agendas and personalities underlying public discourses and symbolic mandates. The ‘‘room raid’’ is thus both examination and exhibition. By going through the rooms with investigative tools, searching dresser drawers and hard drives, the raider guards against potentially unpleasant surprises and performs for an imagined audience the skills of detection and risk monitoring necessary for negotiating a world in which people are not always who they say they are. Practices of mutual monitoring, seen in this light, rely not just on a climate of generalized skepticism and wariness, but upon conceptions of risk that instantiate social imperatives of productivity, hygiene, and security associated with the maximization of productive forces. The discussion of Room Raiders is meant not as a comprehensive catalogue of the pathologies of lateral surveillance, but as a suggestive example*a pattern to ‘‘think with,’’ as it were, when considering other security or self-help campaigns that invoke the injunction to watch out for one another*whether for reasons of economy, efficiency, or security. As a diagram of power, mutual monitoring supplements the model of the (‘‘swarming’’ of the) Panoptic with the added discipline of watching one another in order to redouble the monitoring gaze of the authorities. The plan is a symptom of ambivalence about integration in the symbolic economy: privacy laws allow us to avoid analyzing our desire by making token gestures instead of confronting our ambivalence over the desire to be watchedMeyers 14 Zach Meyers Master of Public and International Law candidate, University of Melbourne. “Applying Psychoanalysis to Australian Privacy Law”. June, 2014. Pgs. 141- 143. PWoods. A key problematic addressed by Lacan’s theory is that, despite concerns about data protection, individuals are willing to trade their personal information for marginal, if any, gain. The argument put forward by legal economists such as Richard Posner to respond to this conundrum is predictable: ‘the fact that people surrender it for rather small gains is a sign they don’t really, or most people don’t really, value it that much’.91 Here we perhaps need to distinguish between the exchange of information between individuals (which one might imagine as governed primarily by a tort of privacy or notions of ‘intrusion on seclusion’) and the provision of information to the Other (which is the province of data protection law). The voluntary exchange of personal information between individuals in normal social interactions has nothing to do with the value of the personal information. It is akin to what Žižek calls an ‘empty gesture’:92 the point of the exchange is interaction itself (it is coupled with a mutual understanding that the information is not to be used inappropriately, that its potential value will not be realised). The application and implementation of these social rules is an example of the Other, but applied to relations between individuals – as Žižek notes, the ‘main function of the symbolic order with its laws and obligations is to render our co-existence with others minimally bearable: a Third has to step in between me and my neighbours so that our relations do not explode in murderous violence’.93 In this sense, the surrender of personal information in social contexts (as better reflected in torts of privacy) seems to reflect well Nissenbaum’s concept of breach of ‘contextual integrity’. The free exchange of information in this context is not a sign that the information itself is not valued – indeed, the social bonds of the ‘empty gesture’ are, paradoxically, better entrenched when the information is more valued and the trust between individuals is therefore greater. But the same rationale does not apply to the type of provision of information governed by Australian data protection laws, which is a unilateral, deliberate exchange where the personal information is indeed valued for its own sake. In fact, its value to us is determined precisely by the fact that it is perceived as being valued by an-Other, and that it is therefore seen as an inherent part of individual identity, an object potentially capable of being desired. The desire of individuals for privacy is therefore not a desire for the protection of specific information – instead, it is a (vain) attempt to invest in that information, to be able to explain the profound feeling of loss of autonomy that is entailed by entering the social order by reference to having lost control of something. This creates contradictory behaviour: on the one hand, a desire to achieve control over one’s self by claiming a right to privacy; and on the other, a desire for publicity because a person cannot fully achieve a withdrawal into privacy without confronting self-surveillance and the reality that autonomy can never be achieved. For Lacan, ‘the gaze must function as an object around which the exhibitionistic and voyeuristic impulses that constitute the scopic drive turn … producing not merely anxiety but also pleasure’.94 Data protection laws therefore function as a necessary safety net to enable individuals to disclose their personal information (if not to deliberately create a market for disclosure – an approach that perhaps explains the purely economic rationale for earlier Australian reforms).95 Westin has acknowledged this phenomenon, noting that ‘each individual is continually engaged in a personal adjustment process in which he balances the desire for privacy with the desire for disclosure and communication of himself to others’.96 Psychoanalysts’ emphasis on competing drives also explains the social phenomenon that many privacy scholars have noted: the fact that, at the same time as concerns about privacy are escalating (particularly due to the rise of new technologies), individuals have never been more willing to both provide and disseminate personal data and engage in exhibitionist activities.97 That is, despite psychoanalysis’s skepticism about the concept of autonomy, psychoanalysis does accept that the fantasy of autonomy remains important to human dignity. Importantly, it does so without disregarding the evident importance most people have for the protection of their personal information, and the apparently contradictory willingness most people have to disclose that information. As I have suggested in the sections above, privacy law creates a sense of control over one’s privacy (and so enables a person to avoid confronting the reality of their lack of autonomy), even as it continually reminds and creates anxiety about the enforced loss of privacy and the lack of autonomy that is being avoided. In terms of fulfilling drives, personal information becomes useful for individuals exactly because it can be traded, exchanged, disseminated and recollected (in other words, treated like the reel in the fort-da game). To the extent that data protection laws reflect privacy concerns, it is because they facilitate a marketplace and an economy for personal information. Psychoanalysis rejects the view that the increasing trend of individuals voluntarily allowing the public access to their personal information (for example, on social media) reflects a disregard for privacy; on the contrary, it suggests an increasing desire to engage in the practice of exercising control over one’s personal information.98 Psychoanalysis therefore explains why many prominent privacy theorists such as Prosser and Godkin have expressly referred to a person’s right to their personal information as being proprietary. 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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