eyescratch on Sun, 13 Oct 2002 08:39:28 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> DECONtamination CONtagium |
Ana, and, yes, it has taken some time to reply to your concise leveling of the issues surrounding the discourse on privacy. Some thoughts cobbled together over the last two weeks.... Well, in terms of artist using the medium of surveillance, a scheme of accountability would resultantly limit access to these streams of unconscious matter. Isn't it the thought behind these apparatuses that needs to be questioned, and not the medium itself? Accountability rings with the call to put a chip in your arm and all doors open. Man gets busted after using metrocard to enter @ avenue A and exit at boulevard B @ such-and-such o'clock. The number on the card matched the number on the amber alert sign. etc. A lottery of control. Does what we do and who we are privately make us recognizable to the system by making you uniquely you? No, I answer my own question, because we have a second self to represent us, which is monitored discreetly;- otherwise the idea of privacy as a social good escapes us. Video-surveillance has an eerie quality to it, but it has become a stage for some,http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html, and has even been conveniently picked up for re-staging and re-cycling. So accountability is mirrored sardonically by what can be recognized in the fuzzy picture. Not much to the naked eye, but that makes it all the more appealing to the generalized consensus. Police officers on the stage of retribution in the reality show. The kitsch, armored version can be found at JCPenny: http://www.antiwar.com/comment/0900631b805e1807L.jpg - the forward command post, easily designed with roof and just one wall - logically placed towards the line of fire. A plastic antithesis to _Ulysses Gaze_. But I am getting caught up in an aesthetic discussion. I wonder how your discussion of privacy as a social good contrasts with the sixties sedition on the constitution of group dynamics. Forming groups, acting in consort, creating fluid dynamics in groups, anti-authoritarian models. Should we demand personal victories from others or just from the system of control? When, and which way are we stepping out of bounds? And when a system does not constitute itself on values as such, perhaps instead, hinges on, say creative effort, like nettime perhaps, recently encountering a majordomo exception, do we need victories at all? When are we just wandering around in a MOO where everyone politely tips their hat? I guess I am wondering whether privacy constitutes itself of personal victories or is it just the ability to shut off every once in a while and not put on that morning face. I am reminded of _cocoon_ for some reason, its voyeuristic quality bathed in youthful exuberance. Today all these issues came to the forefront here in a central park dust bowl, where 40,000 people co-mingled to the chant of NOT IN OUR NAME. This slogan seems to put its foot on the issue squarely: people claiming a group identity that is opposed to wholesale peddling of rights and peace on earth so that the spoiled brats of oil riches may hijack history on the world stage. This is all sounding pedantic, perhaps because there was a pledge we all asked to make, to step out of the shadow of a chain of events that currently brew to the boil of war, and take a stand. We don't even know what a 'successful' war will bring; it seems those perpetuating are only interested in its means, to no end. I see a conundrum in the word private - sometimes denoting ownership and sometimes being something much more visceral, a la Wolf. But there must be a reason why you get busted down to private in the military. Does it have to do with the delegation of responsibility and accountability in a command structure? It seems that as the notion of private property erodes, our right to privacy erode as well, and all this due to the propping up of the regime of late capitalism. Vaclav Havel put it this way recently at the Graduate Center here in New York - after the velvet revolution, which he described as a fairy tale in this instance, he was forced to fall back to earth to the cold reality of politics. Yet after dealing in this political and very public space for thirteen years, which he characterized as eroding slowly his ideals he came to realize that another fairy tale was taking shape, a tale that did not constitute itself of questions of what his goals for changing the world are but of what he had achieved to change the world. Do we dare acknowledge another fiction taking shape? À 9:13 AM -0400 le 10/3/02, Ana Viseu a écrit: > >I agree with your definition of surveillance as a 'passive-agressive >non-entity'. Although I would say that the hope underlying it is not >that you don't step out of line (there are mechanisms to deal with >deviations) but that you internalize the logic itself. The moment >the logic of surveillance becomes internalized the disciplinization >comes from within rather than being imposed from outside. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net