ABSTRACT
In recent years, critics have raised well-founded concerns about the extent to which surveillance is affecting the health of democratic life. Practices of data collection and retention, as well as the unprecedented development of traceability through digital relational databases, have recently been addressed as sensitive topics in surveillance studies (Lyon, 2001; 2007). Even without resorting to conspiracy theories or “Big Brotherist” visions, which have already been effectively criticized by various scholars (see, in particular, Lianos, 2003), concerns about a growing tension between the requirements of democratic life and the surveillance activity carried out by governmental agencies appear to be well founded. It is especially so if one takes into account the larger picture, which also includes the rise of “securitarian” and “dangerization” versions of the law-and-order ideology. Waves of securitarian panic stirred up by moral entrepreneurs in Becker’s sense and mirrored by the media have led to racial targeting and racial profiling of groups seen to “pose a threat” to public safety (for the Italian case, see for example De Giorgi, 2008). Concurrently, the growing motivational deficit at the heart of contemporary democratic regimes (Critchley, 2007) and the rise of economic inequalities are likely to multiply anti-democratic tendencies. The public appears as a crucial dimension in the relationship between
surveillance and democracy. However, a problem arises when, on the basis of an assumption grounded in political liberalism, the private is simply opposed to the public in a dichotomous way. Concerns about the political effects of surveillance are often interpreted as the task of protecting private life against surveillance. Throughout this chapter, I show the limitations of this view of the private/public divide. We need to replace the false dichotomy of surveillance and privacy with a more nuanced and pluralist understanding of the social working of surveillance. Three main concepts will be at the center of my discussion: visibility regimes, technologies of power, and the public domain. Visibility regimes are constitutive of political regimes and as fundamentally interwoven with technologies of power. Because of this interplay, the idea of
retreat into the private domain as a means of avoiding surveillance is chimerical. Rather, the real challenge posed by surveillance is the re-articulation of the public domain. An Arendtian conception of democracy, as I argue below, best captures this process, revealing the delusion inherent in the idea of being “free at one’s own place.” Here again technology plays a crucial role, not simply because power deploys a set of technologies but, more radically, because-following a Foucauldian insight-power itself is a technology, it is one among the specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves (Foucault, 1982). To begin with, it should be specified that in this context visibility cannot be
reduced to a mere visual issue. Visibility is a symbolic field of social meaning: seeing and being seen do not simply correspond to given power positions. Visibility relationships are also constituted by many other, not directly perceptual, forms of noticing, managing attention, and determining the significance of events and subjects. In short, visibility lies at the intersection of aesthetics (relations of perception) and politics (relations of power). From this perspective, to describe visibility as symbolic does not equate it to a
matter of cultural repertoire. Culture is indeed symbolic, but in the case of the visible the symbolic perspective should be taken and turned upside down, so to speak. Images and gestures do not so much constitute the perceptible symbols of some intangible meaning, but rather symbols are images and gestures, in the sense that they have the same structure and the same way of functioning. Symbols are nothing more and nothing less than what is made visible, and, complementarily, what makes the visible. Thus, symbols are the material element of the visible as well as the identifiable Gestalten that are drawn in the field. The visible is not only the field where broad cultural meanings are worked out, but also a much more compelling material and strategic field. Visibility is not free-floating meaning, but meaning inscribed in material processes and constraints (see also Brighenti, 2007). Visibility is a domain that is crucially located at the interface between the domains of the technical and the social. Contemporary sociotechnological complexes are intimately linked to the forms and features of social visibility and intervisibility, as, for instance, mass media as collective apparatuses of social networking clearly reveal. Social and political theorists have provided important conceptualizations of
the public domain. Hannah Arendt (1958:50) insisted on the existence of a “world in common” among humans as the pivotal condition for politics. In Greek and Roman culture, Arendt argued, it is the experience of the common that defines the public sphere as the place where “everything that appears … can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity … [and] appearance-something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves-[is what] constitutes reality” (Arendt, 1958:50). The public sphere is defined by its publicity and commonality, in contrast to the private sphere, which is characterized by deprivation: “To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a
truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others” (Arendt, 1958:58). The existence of the public sphere as a world-in-common which joins and separates is, for Arendt, threatened by mass society, which undermines the capacity of the public to articulate meaningful relationships and separations among people. Such “meaningful separation” speaks to the Hegelian theme of recognition, which has been taken up, for instance, by Charles Taylor since the 1970s (see Taylor, 1989). In particular, Taylor argued that the sources of the subject in Western political thought should be conceived by taking into account not merely large-scale social projects (such as theories of justice etc.), but especially the personal desire for recognition as constitutive of life in common. While disagreeing with Arendt’s thesis that modernity is a time of decline
for the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas (1982 [1962]) similarly defined the public sphere as a realm of social life that provides a forum for the articulation of common issues. The public sphere emerged in modern society over the period from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, as a third domain, distinct from both private household and public power. The public sphere is the space of civil society, as distinct from private association on the one hand, and institutionalized political society on the other. Its specificity consists in providing the infrastructure for the elaboration of public opinion through public debate-that is, debate on matters of general interest and issues of common concern. Such debate is joined by all those citizens potentially affected by the outcomes of political decisions on the issues at stake. Participation and deliberation are the crucial aspects of this sphere of social action. Linked to institutions such as coffee houses, public libraries, and, above all, modern mass media such as the press, the history of the public sphere is the history of the consolidation of bourgeois society. The defining features of the public sphere are its essential accessibility to all citizens and the principle of the public availability of proceedings (Publizitätsvorschriften). Habermas also diagnosed a crisis of the public sphere during the course of the twentieth century, in the form of a “refeudalization.” On the one hand, new powerful private actors, such as large corporations, started to undertake direct political action through control and manipulation of communication and the media, thus promoting their private interests in a way that is at odds with the original logic of the public sphere. On the other hand, the Keynesian configuration of the Western welfare state corresponded to a more active engagement of the state in the private sphere and everyday life, leading to an erosion of the distinction between political and civil society which was itself the object of criticism (see e.g. Young, 1990). Following the Frankfurt School’s line of analysis, Habermas described the decline of the public sphere as a process of transforming citizens into consumers, which eventually leads to a decline of interest in the common good and in direct participation. In his theorization of politics, Norberto Bobbio (1999) identified democracy
as a type of power that poses a specific challenge to the older elitist tradition
of the arcana imperii (literally, the secrets of power). The elitist tradition is grounded in a negative anthropology maintaining that there is no cure from the evil of power. In this view history is reduced to a contingent series of facts that do not alter the human being’s thrust towards power. Power is believed to have been, and necessarily always bound to be, in the hands of a minority, an elite which is not legitimated from below but rather legitimizes itself. Understandably, this bitter reality of power is often kept hidden to avoid contention and political turmoil. Arguably, conspiracy theories are an offspring of elitist theories, insofar as they extend the elitist belief in the-at least partialinvisibility of power to the idea of the invisibility of power-holders themselves, organized in an invisible ruling synarchy. By contrast, Bobbio defines democracy as “power in public,” i.e. power the inner mechanisms of which are made visible and therefore controllable. Modern democracy was born in opposition to medieval and early-modern treatises on the art of government, such as the Machiavellian-style “advices to the Prince.” Whereas the preceptsto-the-Prince literature looked at power ex parte principis, from the point of view of the prince, modern democracy begins when one begins to look at power ex parte populi, from the point of view of the people. The gaze from below amounts to a vigorous call for the openness, visibility and accountability of power. Whereas all autocratic regimes are founded upon the conservation of secrecy in proceedings, the crucial democratic challenge is to achieve a deployment of power that is ideally without secrets. The device of political representation is necessarily public, as recognized even by opponents of this view, such as Carl Schmitt. For his part, Max Weber (1978[1922]: I, §III, 3-5) saw quite clearly that
modern bureaucracy is an ambivalent institution. On the one hand, bureaucracy is necessary to achieve the legal-rational form of power, based on the specialization of competences and the standardization of procedures. Bureaucratic apparatuses can attain the highest degrees of efficiency and are the most rational way to control people because they guarantee highly calculable outcomes. On the other hand, however, not only does bureaucracy produce conformity and uniform technical competence, but it also tends to breed plutocracy and dominance of formalistic impersonality, and, above all, it is constantly tempted to restrict open access to government records, through the production of “classified” documents (“Amtsgeheimnisse”) and other inaccessible technicalities. These perils of technocracy have also been analyzed by other democratic theorists, such as Robert Dahl (1989). Bobbio himself remarked that “the resistance and the persistence of invisible power become stronger and stronger, even in democratic States, the more one considers issues such as international relations,” (1999:365) which often include secret consultations and secret treaties. In spite of their differences, most social theorists share some concern for the
transformations of the public sphere during the twentieth century. The shrinkage of the public sphere-which, as mentioned above, Habermas dubbed
“refeudalization”—is regarded as threatening for democracy. In this respect, Craig Calhoun (2005) has observed that democracy requires both inclusion and connection among citizens; in other words, citizens should be able to access relevant information and communicate with each other in a common world extending beyond primary, private associations. This is why the public sphere materialized first of all in urban environments, and was later extended by the media: “Publics connect people who are not in the same families, communities, and clubs; people who are not the same as each other. Urban life is public, thus, in a way village life is not. Modern media amplify this capacity to communicate with strangers” (Calhoun, 2005:5). Hence, the importance of transparent and symmetric communication as constitutive of the public sphere. For Calhoun, indeed, the public sphere cannot be conceived of as the mere “sum” of a set of separate private opinions, for this deletes the fundamental process of the formation of public opinion itself, which takes place through discussion and deliberation. Overall, these theorizations point to the fact that the public sphere is a
sphere of visibility. But whereas political philosophers insist in particular on the procedural and deliberative dimension associated with communicative action, sociologists must also study the specificities of public space and the types and modalities of interaction in public. Richard Sennett (1978), for instance, focused on Western urban space in order to locate the public sphere. He argued that it was the very transformation of modern city life that caused a crisis in the public realm. The construction of the public sphere was the construction of an impersonal, role-based model of interaction, which enabled people to deal with complex and disordered situations. The fall of this model is marked by the rise of a new emotivism and the thirst for authenticity, community, and the expression of feelings and desires. Indifference, concerns for personal safety, fear of victimization, and a whole ideology of the “coldness” of public space caused a general retreat into the private, in search of the “warm” human relations supposed to be found in the family and community. Emotivism and communitarianism thus induced a crisis in the dynamism of the public sphere as well as a decrease in “civility,” understood as the capacity to relate positively to strangers-“the activity which protects people from each other and yet allows them to enjoy each other’s company” (Sennett, 1978:264). In other words, the fall of the public man corresponded to an increasing fear of strangers. Such incapacity to live with strangers, Sennett observed, is deeply problematic, because intimate relations cannot be successfully projected as a basis for social relations at large. Accepting the other as unknown is a crucial component of civility, which is an essential democratic capacity, similar to what Castoriadis (1997) used to call paideia. Castoriadis stressed that there is no ultimate guarantee for democracy, but only contingent guarantees. Paideia, or “education” in a very broad sense of the term, is one such guarantee that consists in the creation of political subjects aware of both the necessity of regulation
and the possibility of discussing, criticizing, and changing the rules of coexistence:
Rotation in office, sortition, decision-making after deliberation by the entire body politic, elections, and popular courts did not rest solely on a postulate that everyone has an equal capacity to assume public responsibilities: these procedures were themselves pieces of a political educational process, of an active paideia, which aimed at exercising-and, therefore, at developing in all-the corresponding abilities and, thereby, at rendering the postulate of political equality as close to the effective reality of that society as possible.
