Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays on Canadian Culture

1. (Im)Possible Exchanges: The Arts of Counter-Surveillance

My Grandmother’s Violin Frances Dorsey artist’s statement Frances Dorsey In common with many of my generation, I grew up with a father who relived his World War ii combat experience daily. He would never speak of the war. But he could not tolerate sudden loud noises, jingoistic political talk, or being woken up from deep sleep. Just before his death, he unexpectedly began to recount his experiences to his family and friends and work on essays addressed to a larger public. A few months later, I discovered quite a bit of writing, as well as a handful of tiny, yellowed snapshots of too-young soldiers. These were taken in Germany, after the war had ended. These fragments were poignant. They were silent yet evocative of a time which unleashed events and consequences that are still shaping our worlds today. As a second-hand witness I felt singed by the flames of war, yet protected from the burn marks. This project tells the story (real and imagined) of my grandmother’s violin. This instrument was made in Mittenwald, Germany, in the mid-1800s. She stopped playing it when my father went overseas as a rifleman. Ironically he mainly used his weapon to shoot up trees in the Black Forest, where the wood for the violin was most likely harvested a century before. The allied forces later conquered Mittenwald . The work is a composition of type, photographed Japanese paper, and violin contours. It tells a simple story about an instrument and a war. 31 Introduction Social theorists consider surveillance to be a key institutional dimension of many contemporary, technologically advanced, capitalist societies. Resistance to surveillance has not, however, taken the form of a mass oppositional social movement. The study of counter-surveillance has tended to focus on specific campaigns of resistance in urban centres against particular technologies, as well on disparate groups who perform their resistance as a kind of neo-Situationist protest before public video cameras. It is against this background that I want to critically analyze the activities and publications of University of Toronto engineer Steve Mann and his development of wearable personal technologies that permit him to “shoot back” at surveillance cameras. Mann has an unfortunate tendency to blame front-line workers in the service sector for their own oppression, figuring them as agents of surveillance . His recent response to this charge was to caricature it as a reductionistic , left-wing defence of “workers” that failed to grasp his goal of psychically liberating individuals in the name of the protection of a “humanistic space” otherwise under constant pressure from intrusive surveillance technologies.2 Mann’s efforts lack a theoretical appreciation of a microphysics of power that cannot be frozen in such an opposition, and his tactics are overly symmetrical and beholden to an insufficiently analyzed image of “mirroring.” Nevertheless, his efforts expose a fundamentally It [a tactic] must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse. In short, a tactic is an art of the weak.1 1 (Im)Possible Exchanges The Arts of Counter-Surveillance Gary Genosko 32 Media and Its (Dis)Contents important point: the need for reciprocity in a distanciated form of observation (anonymous surveillors operating at a distance from those under surveillance ) that does not permit reciprocal exchange (i.e., the exchange of visual information issuing from surveilled to surveillor). Mann may not appreciate the thesis on power elaborated by Michel Foucault, who suggests that if power is a relational energetics, then it is everywhere and opposition to it is also everywhere; hence it does not pool in one place. Neither does Mann reflect on the discursive production of subjectivity and knowledge about it that invalidates his essentialistic conception of the subject. Those social theorists who ask why there is not a social movement against surveillance also fail to grasp this point in posing the question in the form of a sociological lament. By “shooting back” at unidirectional mechanisms of distanciated observation by means of his own innovative engineering designs, Mann attempts to steal away a surveillance system’s monopoly over disciplinary gazes. He has understood this much: surveillance systems, no matter how much...