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Link – PRISM/NSA Programs
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- [the king was] merely the retroactive effect of the general will-of-the-people.
- Lacan, gave an account of the gaze
- The big Other
- The subjects big Other
- Uncle Sam, the American soldier trope, "God" and Tim Tebow.
- Virtually everybody shares in the Symbolic big Other, for its that very point from which the general "will-of-the-people" is reflected back to the people
- Wherever we go, our image of self, as seen by the gaze of the big Other, always functions for another.
- in - then this zeitgeist of the modern majority will inevitably converge at a centralized point
Link – PRISM/NSA ProgramsPost-plan, surveillance like PRISM will continue unabated because of the narcissistic desire for the gaze of and recognition by the otherKriss 13 (Sam, University of Sussex, MA Critical Theory, “Prism: the psychopathology of internet surveillance”, https://samkriss.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/prism-the-psychopathology-of-internet-surveillance/)//trepka Neurosis. Top-secret documents released recently by the Guardian and the Washington Post reveal the existence of a far-reaching surveillance programme operated by the National Security Agency (a part of the US military), codenamed PRISM. Under the programme, personal communications from nine Internet services – including Facebook, Skype, and Google, but with the notable exception of Twitter – can be accessed at any time by government security agents. Not just public postings but also private emails and video calls; in a separate scandal it was revealed that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of US citizens. What’s more shocking is that these companies voluntarily signed up to the programme; they abused the trust of their users in handing over private data to government spies. What we’re seeing is the development of a surveillance society far more insidious than any historical totalitarian regime. You can still think and say whatever you want, but you’re always being watched; your right to privacy has disappeared without you even noticing it. In some sinister concrete server complex there’s a digital file on you, containing everything you’ve said and done. Government agencies listen in on your telephone calls, software built in to your iPhone records your exact location, web cookies track your browsing habits. This is what radical openness means; it’s a laceration. The government-corporation complex is with you at every moment, and should it decide that it doesn’t like what you’re thinking and saying, it has the power to murder you on a whim. Psychosis. There’s something grimly humorous about the whole situation. One of the nine services that forms part of the Prism system is YouTube; the unbidden image arises of a young, driven NSA staffer going in to work – his tie fastidiously knotted, his shoes gleaming like an oil slick – to watch hundreds of videos of cats falling over in the defence of American security interests. With every new maladroit kitten the aquiline focus of his eyes sharpens; the furrows on his forehead grow glacial in their cragginess. Ashley’s going for cocktails with the girls, Matt’s watching the football, Tariq’s eaten too much Ardennes pâté, and the government has to take note of it all in a desperate and doomed attempt to regulate our world. Except what if that’s the entire point? The programme isn’t political, it’s sexual. It’s not surveillance, it’s scopophilia. You think the NSA is trudging through millions of hours of Skype conversations just so they can catch out a couple of would-be terrorists? What do those initials really stand for, anyway? Nudes Seekin’ Agency? Nasty Sex Appraisers? Our agent isn’t watching out for coded communications, he’s got something entirely different in mind. A couple are talking into their webcams. She’s gone off to university, he stayed at home; they’re still together but in her absence he’s been feeling kinda down. He wants to touch her, he wants to hold her, he wants to feel flesh against flesh, but he can’t. As he talks a smile slithers across her face. “Oh, don’t,” she says. “Not now.” “Come on,” he says. “Please. I’m going crazy out here.” They think they’re alone. “OK,” she says. She takes off her shirt. As her tits flop out our agent bellows in exultation. There are hundreds of workstations in the big tile-carpeted room in Fort Meade, Maryland, and they all spout arcing parabolas of cum… Schizophrenia. Internet surveillance is different from ordinary surveillance. The NSA isn’t putting bugs in your home or following you down the street; you’re giving them everything they want. You’re putting all this information out there of your own free will, and you can stop any time you want. We all know that everything we post online is monitored, that every ‘like’ on Facebook is worth £114 to advertisers and retailers, that Google knows far more about our shameful desires than our sexual partners or our psychotherapists, that intelligence agencies routinely prowl through our communications. And yet we still do it. Some people can’t eat their lunch without slapping an Instagram filter on it, others feel the need to tweet the precise consistency of their morning shit. Planet Earth produces 25 petabytes of data every day, a quantity of information several orders of magnitude larger than that contained in every book ever published – and most of it is banality or gibberish. A web developer named Mike DiGiovanni commented of Google Glass: “I’ve taken more pictures today thanZizhave the past 5 days thanks to this. Sure, they are mostly silly, but my timeline has now truly become a timeline of where I’ve been.” As if this perverse behaviour is somehow to be encouraged. Why do we do this? Why can we no longer handle unmediated reality? Why does it always have to be accompanied by a digital representation? The fear of death must play into it. We mustn’t lose a moment to the decay of time, it has to be electronically immortalised. But surely that can’t be all. Perhaps this is precisely what we were designed to do. It’s engineered into the fabric of our being, it’s what we’re for. Our world is a distraction, it’s light entertainment. The NSA existed long before our society. It existed before the first human being gazed at the stars and rearranged them into shapes it could comprehend, it existed before the first gasping half-fish hauled itself out of the slime to feel the sun on its back. The NSA is our demiurge, and we are its creatures. And as for what its agents look like when they take their masks off, perhaps it’s better for us to never know. Melancholia. There’s something odd about all these interpretations: they’re grotesque, but at the same time they tickle our narcissism – a narcissism which is, after all, founded on the gaze. In a strange way it’s nice to think that you’re being watched, it’s nice to think that whatever drivel you produce somehow merits the attention of big important government agencies. It’s far more horrifying to think that nobody is watching you, because nobody cares. The problem is that that’s the truth – that, as Lacan insisted, the Big Other doesn’t exist. You’re being watched, but only by machines. Your data is thoroughly chewed up in the inhuman mandibles of some great complex algorithm, and by the time it’s regurgitated for advertisers or spies you’re pretty much unrecognisable. You’re not a person, you’re input and output; a blip with a few pathetic delusions of sentience. And the narcissism of the surveilled is the most telling of those delusions. This is the complaint of the privacy campaigners: the flying robots of death were bad, but this is really the last straw. As if someone snooping on your emails was the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone. We don’t live in a society of surveillance; that’s ultimately ephemeral. Programs like PRISM are manifestations of Americans’ fantasies about being watched – people’s willful participation in surveillance means that legal reforms won’t deal with its problemsSmecker, 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 In the old days, before the advent of post-Grecian democracy, when civil society was presided over by a monarch, the monarch was, as director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at SUNY Buffalo, Joan Copjec, puts it: someone everyone - or everyone who counted - was encouraged to 'emulate,' [the king was] merely the retroactive effect of the general will-of-the-people. The place of this leader [was] thus a point of convergence, a point where the full sense of this unified will [was] located. [1] Obviously, these days there is no king. But as French philosopher Claude Lefort explained, the locus of power that was once embodied by a legitimate pretender - the monarch - has, upon the advent of modern democracy, become an empty place... Now that the "throne is empty," so to speak, and modern democracy (an "indetermination that was born from the loss of the substance of the body politic"[2]) has usurped its place, modern power, to paraphrase Foucault, is wielded by no one in particular, though we are all subject to it. In order to grasp what I'm getting at here, it's important to familiarize oneself for the time being with two theoretical terms: the "big Other" and "gaze." The latter often lends itself to a multitude of theoretical interpretations, each one replete with its own definition and conceptualization of functioning. To preempt against too much confusion, however, we'll focus on the gaze as discussed hereunder. To start, the twentieth century psychoanalyst Badass, Jacques Lacan, gave an account of the gaze with the following story he borrowed from Sartre: The gaze that I encounter [...] is not a seen gaze [not a set of eyes that I see looking at me] but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other [...] the sound of rustling leaves heard while out hunting [...] a footstep heard in a corridor [The gaze exists] not at the level of [a particular] other whose gaze surprises the subject looking through the keyhole. It is that the other surprises him, the subject, as an entirely hidden gaze. [3] And then there is what Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Žižek, calls the "impossible gaze": that uncanny perspective by means of which we are already present at the scene of our own absence. What this means is that, any good ol' fantasy functions properly only by "removing" ourselves from the fantasy we are having. Take as an example Disney's Wall-E, the story of a convivial little robot that looks like an anthropomorphized Mars rover, that "falls in love" with Eva, a robot that basically looks like an egg. Essentially, this is a fantasy of a post-human earth - though of course dreamed up by someone (human) and, definitely watched by a whole bunch of (human) people. Hence the perspective in which "I am present at the very scene of my own absence" - the human viewer reduced to the "impossible" gaze - as if I'm not a part of the very "reality" I'm observing. This is, in a nutshell, the definition of gaze. The big Other, on the other hand, is a bit more involved. Its definition is inherently nuanced. To start off, what we'll call the Symbolic big Other is something that is shared by everyone. It is none other than that which embodies the very ideological essence of the socio-symbolic order of our lives; rules and etiquette - especially juridical Law itself - customs and beliefs, everything you should or should not do, what you aspire toward, and who or what you aspire to be, all of this and more, individually or in combination, constitutes the Symbolic big Other. The subject's big Other (hereafter, the Imaginary big Other), however, is a sort of private investment in the Symbolic big Other, a personal allegiance to the ruling ideology which sustains the narratives, beliefs, and lived fantasies of the very culture in which the subject is immersed. Each Imaginary big Other is distinct in its own unique way: my Imaginary big Other may be, say, a patriotic bricolage (not really, but you get the point) - a composite of things like, e.g., Uncle Sam, the American soldier trope, "God" and Tim Tebow. And your Imaginary big Other may embody, say, just Emily Post, or maybe some vague ideological package of some other normative principles. In any case, the Imaginary big Other, the subject's big Other as such, designates a private virtualization of the socio-symbolic field in which he or she is inscribed. Whether it exists in one's private notion of God, or one's notion of government, or family, or "what's cool," or a combination of these things or whatever, the Imaginary big Other refers directly to that distinctly personalized social standard by which each of us respectively measures ourselves - 24/7/365 (yes, the big Other can make itself known even in our dreams). Virtually everybody shares in the Symbolic big Other, for it's that very point from which the general "will-of-the-people" is reflected back to the people, so that we can see ourselves as we appear in this reflection - as a consistent social "whole." In other words, the big Other is that which gives substance to the body politic. We are its subjects. And despite not really existing - that, at the imaginative level of the individual, it's really none other than one's own internalization of society's dos-and-don'ts - the big Other is nonetheless experienced as a sort of independent phantasm which situates itself smack dab in the middle of any social interaction like some kind of incorporeal incarnation of a necessary third-wheel that both instructs and scrutinizes our every thought, utterance, and move. As such, the big Other ensures that the rules of society are being followed, that we are conducting ourselves properly in society. Without the big Other the social fabric begins to fray, presenting the veritable threat of losing the constitutive substance of society itself, its governing laws, and its subjects. I suppose I should've been a little clearer earlier on: when we combine the Symbolic big Other and gaze, the result is the Imaginary big Other, the subject's big Other - that remote sense of being watched and evaluated by something that's not really there. It's sort of like a cross between a Jiminy Cricket figure of conscience and an iconic role-model of sorts, who, as such, seems to loom over your shoulder, telling you what and what not to do simply by "looking" at you, normatively shaping and informing your every thought and behavior. We all have a big Other. It is, to repeat an emphasis from earlier, that standard by which we measure ourselves: our own private piece of the larger, public social space we inhabit. To paraphrase Žižek, the gaze of the Symbolic big Other is my own view of myself, which I see through eyes that are not authentically my own. Here, one should not fail to notice the Symbolic big Other's striking resemblance to Bentham's "Panopticon," that omnipresent, omniscient "God's-eye-view" intended to watch over us wherever we go. The likeness is unmistakable, simply because Bentham's little wet dream embodies the big Other as such. The essential point to take away from this is that one's sense of (political) "self" is inevitably bound up with the localization of the panoptic gaze - that centralized point of omnipresent, omniscient surveillance. Wherever we go, our image of self, as seen by the gaze of the big Other, always functions for another. And further, in these times, do we not receive constant arousal, enjoyment, from the act of watching our own image of self, controlling our own image of self, tracking our own image of self? Though it's not: as if we were the Panopticon itself, but rather: because we are the Panopticon itself. We bring the Panopticon, the gaze of the Symbolic big Other as such, with us wherever we go. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., instantiate this. But what, precisely, does this even mean? Well, this is where things get both revelatory and a bit complicated. The trouble with all this is that, to return to Copjec's analysis, the Symbolic big Other is "a point of convergence of the general will-of-the-people." What this means - and bear with me here, because this may turn confusing - is that the Symbolic big Other, as such, signifies the very mode of appearance in which we appear to ourselves, for ourselves, as we desire to appear as such. So it would follow that, if we appear to ourselves, for ourselves, as images to be controlled, manipulated, tracked, watched, and so on, as we certainly do in today's digital medium of social networking - which, by the way, we collectively, willfully and, pleasurably participate in - then this zeitgeist of the modern majority will inevitably converge at a centralized point: which is to say, the big Other, both its Symbolic and Imaginary incarnations, will appear in the guise of "Big Brother." At the individual level, each of us embodies "Big Brother": we are intrigued with the act of watching, tracking, manipulating, images of ourselves. At the Symbolic level, the truth of this enjoyment expresses itself today in all of its unsettling perversity: PRISM. Their predictable calls to reform PRISM ignore the human relations that create the desire to be surveilled --- locks in totalitarianismO’Neill 14 --- focuses on Critical Theory Studies, Faculty Member of the Film and Digital Media Department @ University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Timi, “Michel Foucault and the NSA Panopticon”, https://www.academia.edu/9290473/Michel_Foucault_predicts_the_NSAs_cyber_Panopticon)//trepka The NSA controversy The Prism program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders. 2 On the morning of 5th of June 2013, the world woke up to the news that the US Federal Government had been collecting metadata from Verizon customers as part of their on-going war against...someone and everyone. The resulting outcry sent the by now predictive shockwaves around the world. How could the government of a ‘democracy championing’, freedom obsessed nation do such a wicked thing? Within days, the name of the deep throat was released and from that moment Edward Snowden became a poster child of government interference in our everyday lives. Obama’s response was to point to the needs of America to protect its national security interests and in so doing conjure up the ghost of 9/11. This specter has haunted the American political landscape with such force that it has perhaps changed the American mindset for generations to come – an almost forced jump in evolutionary terms. The problem in this case, is that the ghost of 9/11 appears to be more akin to the ambivalent vision of Hamlet’s father ; ‘Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,/Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,’ 3Zizsuggest this in the sense that the original event has now become split in perceptions and of the subsequent events since 9/11 led to The Patriot Act and this is turn has perhaps inevitably led to the NSA’s actions; Perhaps the most interesting remarks about the NSA controversy thus far came from Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of the USA PATRIOT [...] Sensenbrenner stated that particular provision of the Act requires government lawyers to prove to the FISC that a request for specific business records is linked to an “authorized investigation” and further stated that “targeting US citizens is prohibited” as part of the request. Sensenbrenner argued that the NSA telephone metadata collection is a bridge too far and falls well outside the original intended scope of the Act: “[t]he administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can.Zizdisagree.Zizauthored the Patriot Act, and this [NSA surveillance] is an abuse of that law.” 4 If the author has control over the intention of his work then by his words US government agencies were acting outside the scope of the law. Being so, what are we to make of this? Are we seeing a new approach to governance or in effect business as normal, but with a new strategy adapted to meet new demands? Worryingly so, if we remind ourselves of the words of Michel Foucault; Then it gets really scary. Foucault describes the observation of our private lives, as aided by new technology. Felluga notes the French philosopher’s emphasis on surveillance within an emerging information society and a developing bureaucracy that “turns individuals into statistics and paperwork,”... Lest we forget Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) In seeing Foucault, alongside his compatriots of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida as one of the pioneers of post structuralism, it helps the reader to locate Foucaultian ideas firmly and squarely at the heartbeat of this contemporary world we share. Although at times his work on madness and punishment could be said to be more historical than political in nature, thatZizfeel would be to misread both his methodological approach and closely philosophical conclusions that emanate from his work. His work on surveillance and power (highly influenced by both Nietzsche’s genealogical approach and Bastille’s ideas on otherness) help us to see ‘tried and tested’ mechanisms of power at play. His work on power and its analysis on political regimes can be said to have an even greater relevancy today than in the years he was alive. In today’s age we seem at times to be stumbling toward a dystopian reality; A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude 6. 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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