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.
