William,
many thought-provoking points - but i'll pick up just one that i think
goes back to my original question: if surveillance is ultimately a kind
of enterprise that is destined to fail, i wonder why that is? certainly,
there can be an objective technical aspect, i.e. a kind of surveillance
that would include all the necesarry data would be too complex to govern
and use, however, in this case one can work harder and invest more
resources into new technology. on the other hand, and i wonder what you
would think of that, surveillance will have failed because it does not
clearly know what it is that it is after: even if all of one's daily
movements are captured on camera and one's talks are recorded, what is
then that would make us know and understand a surveilled subject? if one
can provisionally distinguish between fact-oriented surveillance that is
targeting, say, terrorists or any other type of group that plans actions,
and thought-oriented surveillance that, as in the former USSR, targets
deviation or subversion, then still we have a problem of interpretation of
the surveillant data - in case of Lives of Others we have a Stasi operative
who has to decipher hours and hours of data and determine if anything "bad"
takes place...
another angle, if you allow me, even in Lives of Others we have a visual
translation of what Stasi officer only hears, i.e. for the sake of a film,
his listening is visualised and we see actual scenes that he can only hear -
and even though he does ocassionally sneek into the apartment and we might
say he imagines things accurately, imagining and seeing isnt' the same. so
in this sense, it is not our infantile-narcissistic desire (vis-a-vis Henry M.)
that requires us to see as if we were omnipresent, it is our awareness of the
ultimate uselessness of surveillance that makes us enjoy representations of
omnipresent eye of the camera - i wonder if here this surveillant enjoyment is
close to, if not the same as, voyerist enjoyment: it is not in the learning
everything about another person, but about watching another person live his/her
life (Lives of Others), a kind of a glimpse of ultimately purposeless habitual
behavior that surveillance allows to collect but before a surveillance person
or a machine select that which is meaningful.
evgeni
PS. is people-watching a kind of voyerism? is film-watching a kind of surveillance of
lives of (even if fictional) others?
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