Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T22:06:02.477Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Democratic curiosity in times of surveillance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2016

Jef Huysmans
Jef Huysmans*
Affiliation:
Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London
*
* Correspondence to: Jef Huysmans, School of Politics and International Relations, ArtsOne Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS, London. Author’s email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Taking my cue from feminist curiosity and literature on the everyday in surveillance studies, I am proposing ‘democratic curiosity’ as a tool for revisiting the question of democracy in times of extitutional surveillance. Democratic curiosity seeks to bring into analytical play the social and political power of little nothings – the power of subjects, things, practices, and relations that are rendered trivial – and the uncoordinated disputes they enact. Revisiting democracy from this angle is particularly pertinent in extitutional situations in which the organisation and practices of surveillance are spilling beyond their panoptic configurations. Extitutional surveillance is strongly embedded in diffusing arrangements of power and ever more extensively enveloped in everyday life and banal devices. To a considerable degree these modes of surveillance escape democratic institutional repertoires that seek to bring broader societal concerns to bear upon surveillance. Extitutional enactments of democracy then become an important question for both security and surveillance studies.

Keywords

SurveillanceDemocracyExtitutionThe EverydayDispute
Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of International Security , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 73 - 93
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bigo, Didier, Carrera, Sergio, Hernanz, Nicholas, Jeandesboz, Julien, Parkin, Joanna, Ragazzi, Francesco, and Scherrer, Amandine, National Programmes for Mass Surveillance of Personal Data in EU Member States and their Compatibility with EU Law (Brussels: European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, 2013)Google Scholar, available at: {http://www.europarl.europa.eu/studies} accessed 15 December 2015), p. 11. Similar concerns have been expressed elsewhere: for example, by the Human Rights Watch in the US. See Human Rights Watch, With Liberty to Monitor All (Human Rights Watch, 2014), p. 4Google Scholar.

2 Haggerty, Kevin D. and Samatas, Minas, ‘Surveillance and democracy: an unsettled relation’, in Kevin D. Haggerty and Minas Samatas (eds), Surveillance and Democracy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 2Google Scholar.

3 Dubrofsky, Rachel and Amielle Magnet, Shoshana (eds), Feminist Surveillance Studies (London: Duke University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ruppert, Evelyn and Savage, Mike, ‘Transactional politics’, Sociological Review, 59:2 (2011), pp. 73–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Madsen, Anders Koed, Web-visions: Repurposing Digital Traces to Organize Social Attention (Phd thesis, Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School, 2013)Google Scholar.

5 In Security Unbound I define the securitising technique of surveillance as ‘assembling suspicion’ and draw out its difference with a technique of security that works by means of intensifying relations between enemies and sudden ‘life-threatening’ disruptions. See Jef Huysmans, Security Unbound: Enacting Democratic Limits (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

6 Andrejevic, Mark, ‘Foreword’, in Rachel Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet (eds), Feminist Surveillance Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

7 One of the few exceptions is the volume Surveillance and Democracy; see Haggerty, Kevin D. and Samatas, Minas (eds), Surveillance and Democracy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar.

8 Mass surveillance refers to large increases in the scale of data extraction and analysis; it risks blurring the line between targeted surveillance – justified for the purpose of fighting crime – and data mining. Bigo, Didier, Carrera, Sergio, Hernanz, Nicholas, Jeandesboz, Julien, Parkin, Joanna, Ragazzi, Francesco, and Scherrer, Amandine, National Programmes for Mass Surveillance of Personal Data in EU Member States and Their Compatibility with EU Law (Brussels: European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, 2013), p. 15Google Scholar.

9 Ulrich Beck posed a similar question in light of the Snowden revelations, emphasising in particular the limits of nation-state democracy, law, and citizens protests. See Ulrich Beck, ‘The digital freedom risk: Too fragile an acknowledgment’, openDemocracy (30 August 2013) available at: {https://opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/ulrich-beck/digital-freedom-risk-too-fragile-acknowledgment} accessed 22 July 2015.

10 Bauman, Zygmunt, Bigo, Didier, Esteves, Paulo, Guild, Elspeth, Jabri, Vivienne, Lyon, David, and Walker, R. B. J., ‘After Snowden: Rethinking the impact of surveillance’, International Political Sociology, 8:2 (2014), p. 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See also Lyon, David, ‘Surveillance, Snowden, and big data: Capacities, consequences, critique’, Big Data & Society, 1:2 (2014), pp. 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Haggerty, Kevin D. and Ericson, Richard V., ‘The surveillant assemblage’, British Journal of Sociology, 51:4 (2000), pp. 605–622Google ScholarPubMed; Haggerty, Kevin D., ‘Tear down the walls: On demolishing the panopticon’, in David Lyon (ed.), Theorizing Surveillance: the Panopticon and Beyond (Cullompton, Devon: Willan, 2006), pp. 23–45Google Scholar; Bauman, Zygmunt and Lyon, David, Liquid Surveillance (Cambridge: Polity, 2013)Google Scholar.

13 Mathiesen, Thomas, ‘The viewer society: Michel Foucault’s “Panopticon” revisited’, Theoretical Criminology, 1:2 (1997), pp. 215–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Dupont, Benoît, ‘Hacking the Panopticon: Distributed online surveillance and resistance’, Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, 10 (2008), p. 262Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., p. 268.

16 Haggerty and Ericson, ‘The surveillant assemblage’, p. 608.

17 Ibid., p. 609; Lianos, Michalis, ‘Periopticon: Control beyond freedom and coercion – and two possible advancements in the social sciences’, in Kevin D. Haggerty and Minas Samatas (eds), Surveillance and Democracy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 69–88Google Scholar.

18 Bogard, William, ‘Simulation and post-panopticon’, Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon (eds), Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 30–37Google Scholar.

19 Haggerty, ‘Tear down the walls’; Bogard, ‘Simulation and post-panopticon’.

20 Michel Serres, Atlas (Paris: Flammarion, 1996 [orig. pub. 1994]), pp. 195–6.

21 Tirado, Francisco and Domènech, Miquel, ‘Extitutions and security: Movement as code’, Informática na educação: teoria e prática, 16:1 (2013), pp. 123–138Google Scholar.

22 Lyon, ‘Surveillance, Snowden, and big data’; Bauman et al., ‘After Snowden’; Beck, ‘The digital freedom risk’.

23 Lyon, David, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. For example, Ball et al. show in great detail how the market logics enacted in private firms shape counter-terrorism surveillance: Ball, Kirstie, Canhoto, Ana, Daniel, Elizabeth, Dibb, Sally, Meadows, Maureen, and Spiller, Keith, The Private Security State? Surveillance, Consumer Data and the War on Terror (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

24 Bogard, ‘Simulation and post-panopticon’, p. 35. On questions of subjectivity in relation to new surveillance technologies, see also Hayles, Katherine N., ‘RFID: Human agency and meaning in information-intensive environments’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26:2–3 (2009), pp. 47–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Amoore, Louise, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Dubrofsky and Magnet (eds), Feminist Surveillance Studies.

27 Bennett, Colin J., ‘In defence of privacy: the concept and the regime’, Surveillance & Society, 8:4 (2011), pp. 485–496Google Scholar; Regan, Priscilla M., ‘Response to Bennett: Also in defence of privacy’, Surveillance & Society, 8:4 (2011), pp. 497–499Google Scholar; Stalder, Felix, ‘Autonomy beyond privacy: a rejoinder to Bennett’, Surveillance & Society, 8:4 (2011), pp. 508–512Google Scholar.

28 Bigo, Didier, ‘Globalized (in)security: the field and the ban-opticon’, in Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala (eds), Terror, Insecurity and Liberty (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 10–48Google Scholar; Jeandesboz, Julien, Les usages du voisin: Genèse, enjeux et modalité de voisinage de l’Union européenne (Phd thesis, Ecole Doctoral de Sciences Po, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, 2011)Google Scholar; Amoore, The Politics of Possibility.

29 Ball et al., The Private Security State?; de Goede, Marieke, Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wood, David Murakami, ‘What is global surveillance? Towards a relational political economy of the global surveillant assemblage’, Geoforum, 49 (2013), pp. 317–326CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Ruppert, Evelyn, ‘Population objects: Interpassive subjects’, Sociology, 45:2 (2011), pp. 218–233CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 See, for example, Bigo, Didier, ‘Security, surveillance and democracy’, in Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon (eds), Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 277–284Google Scholar.

32 See, for example, de Goede, Speculative Security.

33 This ‘mismatch’ is not limited to surveillance. Analyses of transnationalising and globalising societal and economic relations have raised similar issues about the structuring of societal and economic power not fitting the territorialised institutional repertoires of democracy in states. See, for example, Kaiser, Karl, ‘Transnational relations as a threat to the democratic process’, in Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye (eds), Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 356–370Google Scholar; Walker, R. B. J., Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 143Google Scholar.

34 Bauman and Lyon, Liquid Surveillance, pp. 5–8.

35 Amoore, The Politics of Possibility, de Goede, Speculative Security; Lianos, ‘Periopticon’.

Similar concerns have been expressed in relation to contemporary policing practice and financial surveillance: Loader, Ian, ‘Plural policing and democratic governance’, Social & Legal Studies, 9:3 (2000), pp. 323–345CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wood, Jennifer and Dupont, Benoît (eds), Democracy, Society and the Governance of Security (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Amicelle, Anthony, ‘Towards a “new” political anatomy of financial surveillance’, Security Dialogue, 42:2 (2011), pp. 161–178CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Bennett, ‘In defence of privacy’.

37 For an excellent analysis of this ambiguous nature of democratic repertoires of action, that is, them simultaneously being a repertoire for limiting and enhancing surveillance tools, see Rocco Bellanova, The Politics of Data Protection: What Does Data Protection Do? A Study of the Interaction Between Data Protection and Passenger Name Records Dispositifs (Phd thesis, Political and Social Sciences, Université Saint-Louis, Brussels, 2014).

38 Bauman et al., ‘After Snowden’.

39 Abrahamsen, Rita and Williams, Michael C., ‘Security beyond the state: Global security assemblages in international politics’, International Political Sociology, 3:1 (2009), pp. 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; de Goede, , Speculative SecurityGoogle Scholar; de Goede, Marieke, Mitsilegas, Valsamis, Amoore, Louise, Bellanova, Rocco, and Eijkman, Quirine, ‘IPS Forum: The politics of privacy in the age of preemptive security’, International Political Sociology, 8:1 (2014), pp. 100–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lianos, ‘Periopticon’; Loader, ‘Plural policing and democratic governance’; Wood, Jennifer and Shearing, Clifford, Imagining Security (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2000)Google Scholar.

40 Translation largely taken from the English translation but slightly changed by me based on French original. de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984 [orig. pub. 1980]), p. xivGoogle Scholar; Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien: 1. arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1990 [orig. pub. 1980]), pp. xxxix–xl.

41 Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1 (London: Verso, 2008)Google Scholar; Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (London: Verso, 2008)Google Scholar; Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 3: From Modernity to Modernism (London: Verso, 2008)Google Scholar.

42 This was a widespread area of debate in the 1970 and 1980s in Europe. It included among others the move towards Alltagsgeschichte in Germany, and (post-)Marxist cultural studies in the UK.

Eley, Geoff, ‘Labor history, social history, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, culture, and the politics of the everyday – a new direction for German social history’, The Journal of Modern History, 61:2 (1989), pp. 297–343CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

43 Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992 [orig. pub. 1987])Google Scholar; de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, pp. 59–60.

44 Enloe, Cynthia, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations (London: Pandora, 1989)Google Scholar; Wibben, Annick T. R., Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar.

45 Marx, Garry T., ‘A tack in the shoe and taking off the shoe: Neutralization and counter-neutralization dynamics’, Surveillance & Society, 6:3 (2009), pp. 294–306Google Scholar; Gilliom, John and Monahan, Torin, ‘Everyday resistance’, in Kirstie Ball et al., Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, pp. 405–411Google Scholar; Aas, Katja Franko, Gundhus, H. Oppen, and Mork Lomell, Heidi (eds), Technologies of (In)security: The Surveillance of Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar; Ball, Kirstie, ‘Organization, surveillance and the body: Towards a politics of resistance’, in David Lyon (ed.), Theorizing Surveillance (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2006), pp. 296–317Google Scholar.

46 Marx, Garry T., ‘A tack in the shoe: Neutralizing and resisting the new surveillance’, p. 298Google Scholar.

47 Ibid., pp. 295–6.

48 Enloe, Cynthia, The Curious Feminist (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

49 Ibid., p. 3

50 Enloe, Cynthia, Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

51 Marx, ‘A tack in the shoe’.

52 ‘Trolling’ refers here to hacktivist actions disrupting or destroying data sites.

53 Mann, Steve, Nollman, Jason, and Wellman, Barry, ‘Sousveillance: Inventing and using wearable computing devices for data collection in surveillance environments’, Surveillance & Society, 1:3 (2003), pp. 331–355Google Scholar.

54 Ball, ‘Organization, surveillance and the body’; Huysmans, Security Unbound, pp. 158–72.

55 Sajed, Alina, ‘Everyday encounters with the global behind the Iron Curtain: Imagining freedom, desiring liberalism in socialist Romania’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 24:4 (2011), p. 560CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Smith, Gavin J. D., ‘Exploring relations between watchers and watched in control(led) systems: Strategies and tactics’, Surveillance & Society, 4:4 (2007), pp. 280–313Google Scholar; Smith, Gavin J. D., ‘Empowered watchers or disempowered workers? The ambiguities of power within technologies of security’, in Katja Franco Aas, Helene Oppen Gundhus, and Heidi Mork Lomell (eds), Technologies of Insecurity: The Surveillance of Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 125–146Google Scholar.

57 Ball et al., The Private Security State?, ch. 7.

58 Sajed, ‘Everyday encounters’, p. 563.

59 Smith, ‘Exploring relations between watchers’, p. 292. A similar case for breaking down dyadic renditions of surveillance but more narrowly focused on multiplying the actors included in surveillance studies is made by Martin, van Brakel, and Bernhard. See Martin, Aaron K., van Brakel, Rosamunde E., and Bernhard, Daniel J., ‘Understanding resistance to digital surveillance: Towards a multi-disciplinary, multi-actor framework’, Surveillance & Society, 6:3 (2009), p. 217Google Scholar.

60 Rancière, Jacques, La haine de la démocratie (Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2005), p. 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Bayart, Jean- François, Mbembe, Achille, and Toulabor, Comi, Le politique par le bas en Afrique noire (Paris: Karthala, 2008), p. 26Google Scholar.

62 Although the concept of ‘dispute’ as used here draws on Boltanski and Thévenot’s studies, I am not following the precise meaning they give to the concept, which in their use is explicitly focused on practices of justification. For the purpose of this article, I am more interested in developing the uncoordinated quality of disputes. See Boltanski, Luc and Thèvenot, Laurent, ‘The sociology of critical capacity’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2:3 (1999), pp. 359–377CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boltanski, Luc and Thèvenot, Laurent, De la justification. Les èconomies de la grandeur (Paris, Gallimard, 1991)Google Scholar.

63 Gilliom, John, Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

64 Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

65 ‘In the end, the everyday resistance seen among the Appalachian welfare poor formed a pattern of widespread behavior that produced or supported an array of important material and symbolic results, including cash and other necessities of survival, a status of autonomy, a potentially powerful collective consciousness of the struggle of welfare mothering, and a strategic opposition to and undermining of surveillance mechanisms.’ Gilliom, John, ‘Resisting surveillance’, Social Text, 23:2 (2005), p. 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Nicholas de Genova makes a similar point in relation to undocumented migrants. de Genova, Nicholas, ‘The queer politics of migration: Reflections on “illegality” and incorrigibility’, Studies in Social Justice, 4:2 (2010), pp. 101–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Tirado and Domènech, ‘Extitutions and security’, p. 135.

68 Serres, Michel, The Parasite (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982 [orig. pub. 1980]), pp. 224–230Google Scholar.

69 Monahan, Torin, ‘Surveillance as cultural practice’, The Sociological Quarterly, 52:4 (2011), p. 495CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

70 Enloe, The Curious Feminist, p. 3.

71 Beck, Ulrich, ‘The cosmopolitan society and its enemies’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19:1–2 (2002), pp. 17–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Dean, Jodi, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.