(Warning: contains self-promotion and potentially hazardous
levels of theory).
It is a bit of an occupational hazard for bloggers that one
is always tempted to comment on current events. It’s the pundit temptation that
comes from suddenly coming into (temporary, fragile) possession of an audience.
And it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single blogger in possession
of an audience must be in want of an opinion. (Or is it that a single blogger
in possession of an opinion must be in want of an audience?). I try to avoid
this, since for the most part my opinions on most current topics are not that
insightful, and besides they are often more than a little uncertain and muddled.
The #OccupyWallStreet movement is no exception; I am still trying to figure out
what I think about it. (I’ve been thinking of visiting the “Occupy Wellington”
camp to see what’s going on, among other things). But it so happens that I have
an actual academic article coming out early next year [update: now out!] that might (might – results not guaranteed!) shed
some light (laterally, at odd angles) on the “Occupy X” protests taking place
around the globe. The piece is called “Spaces of Surveillance and Spaces of
Appearance” ([update: gated final version here] ungated nearly-final version
here), and it is forthcoming in Polity (vol. 44, issue 1, January 2012, pp. 6-31). Here’s the abstract:
Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault
developed different but complementary theories about the relationship between visibility
and power. In an Arendtian “space of
appearance,” the common visibility of actors generates power, which is
understood as the potential for collective action. In a Foucauldian “space of surveillance,”
visibility facilitates control and normalization. Power generated in spaces of appearance
depends on and reproduces horizontal relationships of equality, whereas power
in spaces of surveillance depends on and reproduces vertical relationships of
inequality. The contrast between a space
of appearance and a space of surveillance enhances both Arendt’s and Foucault’s
critiques of modern society by both clarifying Arendt's concerns with the rise
of the “social” in terms of spaces of
surveillance, and enriching Foucault's notion of “resistance.”
Basically, your bog-standard interpretive piece on Arendt
and Foucault, mostly of interest to specialists in (certain kinds of) political
theory; I try to put Arendt and Foucault in dialogue with one another with
respect to the question of the relationship between power and visibility, and
to extract some ideas from both I think are useful for thinking beyond Arendt
and Foucault (and not necessarily in harmony with their specific theoretical
projects), especially about the relationship between surveillance, appearance,
and forms of economic organization in society. But the key points of the piece
are relatively intuitive, and some of its arguments may have some relevance to
current events, particularly the concluding thoughts on how modern society
could do with more spaces of appearance and fewer spaces of surveillance
(which, if I’m not too mistaken, is at least in the spirit of the “Occupy”
movement). So let me see if I can explain the main points of the paper without
too much reference to Arendt and Foucault. (Those who prefer a fuller discussion
of Arendt and Foucault can read the paper – and I’d be happy to hear your
thoughts about it).
The paper starts by considering the relationship between
visibility and power. We can distinguish four ideal-typical ways in which visibility
and power are related in particular spaces:
1)
In some spaces, the visibility of those present generates power (the capacity for
collective action) by enabling people
to act with, and in front of, others. We can call these, following Arendt,
spaces of appearance. Her main examples are “egalitarian” democratic spaces
like the participatory Soviets of the early Russian revolution, the New England
town council, and the classic public spaces of the agora, the parliamentary
assembly, etc.; the “General Assembly” at a typical “Occupy” event would be one
such space. But lots of other spaces, including spaces structured in
non-egalitarian ways, also have the characteristic of generating (forms of) power
and influence for those who are visible: consider how a politician’s power is often
mediated through his/her visibility to many, and would be reduced by becoming
less visible. The key point is that in such spaces visibility enables those who
are visible to initiate and coordinate action.
2)
By contrast, in some spaces, visibility subjugates or subjects people to power, insofar as they are prevented from
escaping (or find it costly to escape) the gaze of particular spectators
(including, sometimes, one
another). We can call these, following Foucault, spaces of surveillance.
The panopticon is
Foucault’s ideal-typical case, but one can easily think of many other spaces
where visibility functions in this way. Modern society is in fact notable for
the wide variety of spaces in which people are surveilled (for good and bad
reasons, by the way – I’m not passing judgment on any particular form of
surveillance at this point). Spaces of economic production within firms, in
particular, tend to be spaces of surveillance due to obvious principal-agent
problems. The key point is that in such spaces it is difficult (but not impossible) for those who
are visible to avoid various kinds of sanctions for deviating from whatever norms
or rules are current among spectators. These sanctions do not need to be very “explicit”
to work: the permanent and unavoidable gaze of others (who may not themselves
be visible) can induce powerful pressures for conformity even in the absence of
explicit or obvious punishments for noncompliance. People want to get along, or
they dread ridicule, and even the otherwise powerful politician fears scandal.
3)
Conversely, in some spaces invisibility enables some people to escape subjugation or subjection, and can even empower them in
various ways. We can call these private or secret spaces. The private space of
the home, for example, enables people (on occasion) to escape the prying eyes
of others; and the secret recesses of intelligence agencies enable people in
suits to plan mischief against the rest of us and their invisibility prevents
us from controlling their activities. In accordance with the
logic of exit, invisibility (or at least the possibility of making oneself
invisible) can have a liberating effect.
4)
Finally, in some spaces invisibility marginalizes people, disempowering them.
For completeness, we call these marginal spaces. For example, the oikos to which the Greek citizen could
retire after a day spent at the agora was
at the same time the space to which women were confined.
These spaces are all related, of course, and they are not
always sharply distinguished. Within any given space some people may have power that is mediated through their
visibility, while others may be surveilled and marginalized. Surveillance is
not always asymmetrical, as in the Foucauldian panopticon; it may also be
mutual, as in David Brin’s idea of the “transparent
society.” It is also never perfect. By the same token, any significant degree of visibility in spaces of appearance is
accompanied by the potential for surveillance: the politician who is powerful
precisely because he is in the public eye faces powerful pressures for
regulating his behaviour so long as he cannot escape that same public eye or hide
parts of his life from it. (Even voluntary self-disclosure, as when people share stuff on Facebook or blog, is subject to these pressures to some extent). Spaces of appearance are always tainted by
surveillance and pressures for conformity; invisibility often implies some
degree of marginalization even if it sometimes also serves to escape from subjugation;
and marginalization is often accomplished through various forms of surveillance.
Much of Hannah Arendt’s political
theory is a defence of certain kinds of “egalitarian” spaces of appearance
on non-instrumental grounds. For Arendt, egalitarian spaces of appearance are
valuable not because they promote specific ends like welfare or justice, or
because such spaces somehow represent the only way in which political life
could be organized so as to respect the equal rights of people, or because they
induce appropriate forms of deliberation, but because they are the only spaces
in which we can truly be “persons” – actors with individual stories that
transcend the routine and repetitive aspects of the human condition. In acting
together with and in front of others, we disclose ourselves as virtuous or
vicious, or as the people who are responsible for this or that act; we acquire
a story, rather than a living. And in acting together with others in such
spaces, we can modify the roles and rules that regulate our ordinary
intercourse; our actions put these norms in question and enable us to “begin
something new,” i.e., to come up with new ways of regulating our ordinary lives.
But action itself in such spaces is never “ordinary” or “routine,” and it is
never simply effaced behind some achievement. In fact, Arendt indicates that what
matters most about action in such spaces (from her perspective, if not necessarily
the perspective of the activist, who certainly has some objective in mind) is not the achievement of some particular goal,
an achievement that is at any rate uncertain, given human freedom: political
activity is not, in her view, like the making of a work of art, or the
implementation of some blueprint. What matters is the possibility of appearance
in front of others as such; without such a possibility, in her view, our lives
tend to the routine isolation of “making a living,” or the self-effacement of
other forms of creative activity where what matters ultimately is the work produced (the painting, the book,
the poem, etc.) rather than the person
and his/her story.
This distinctive understanding of what we might call the joy
of public action seems to be echoed in many
descriptions of what
happens in OWS protests. People discover a sense of themselves as joint
actors in the world, and they generally enjoy this above and beyond anything
they may or may not accomplish; to put the point in non-Arendtian terms, there
is something fun and exciting about revolutions, even when they are supremely
risky, and there is something about the public spaces that such movements create
that help people experience each other as people who are engaged in a common story in which they all have some part. (This
is also what makes some people annoyed about things like the OWS protests: participants
seem too concerned with their own
voices and actions, and too little concerned with “getting things done.” There
is something narcissistic about every “revolutionary” movement and every
protest: admiration is an important part of any space of appearance).
But Arendt was also concerned about what she called the “substitution
of making for acting,” which involved (in her view) the attempt to use these
modes of action characteristic of spaces of appearance for the solution of very
specific problems through the implementation of “policies” understood as blueprints
for social organization. This, I argue in the paper (drawing on Foucault),
always requires not appearance but forms of surveillance:
the uses of collective action that can be geared towards the production of
specific effects in the world necessarily involves forms of visibility that are
in conflict with the possibilities of self-disclosure through stories in spaces
of appearance. E.g., if you provide food to people, unless you have unlimited
resources, you
will need to monitor your activities and make distinctions between those who should
and should not receive it.
Arendt thus worried a lot about the transformation of
politics into administration, and stressed that politics properly speaking should
not be concerned with “economic” and
social questions, a position that earned her much criticism. (What else are
politicians going to talk about?). But I think what she had in mind had to do
with the kinds of power appropriate to different kinds of activity. In her
view, “to the degree that politics (which is predominantly conducted in spaces
of appearance, however imperfect) becomes ever more directly concerned with the
management of production (a development that she connected with the rise of the
“social question” ever since the French revolution), the more politics turns
into bureaucratic administration (which is pre-eminently conducted in spaces of
surveillance): more like Soviet bureaucratic communism than like the original
Soviets Arendt praised in her book On
Revolution.” (Here I quote myself). Action in public spaces provides an
opportunity for putting in question, and perhaps changing (unpredictably), the
overall norms and rules that govern our everyday interaction, but it does not
offer a model for governing everyday life.
What this perspective suggests is that an important problem
about modern societies concerns the balance
between spaces of appearance, spaces of surveillance, and other spaces. Let me
quote myself again to close this post:
… Arendt’s worries about the colonization of
public space by the social can be restated as a worry about the balance between
spaces of appearance and spaces of surveillance, and their proper relationship,
within modern societies. The modern welfare state appears then less as a
successful or unsuccessful attempt to manage material inequalities than as a
diminution of available spaces of appearance and an expansion of spaces of
surveillance, and in particular disciplinary spaces. In such a state, any gains
in the “empowerment” of individuals occur at the expense of the possibility of
self-disclosing collective action (and hence “power” in a different sense).
Similarly, Arendt’s other complaints about the rise of the “social” realm can be
understood as concerns that even when this realm is not directly concerned with
economic production it nevertheless functions as a space of mutual surveillance
where common visibility leads to hypocrisy and conformism rather than to
self-disclosure and creative individuality.
Arendt’s views converge, on this reinterpretation, with Foucault’s views
on the expansion of “biopower,” where
the concern with the management of “life” was accompanied by the development of
disciplinary techniques and objects of surveillance (like populations) that
produced an intricate ecology of spaces of surveillance.
But where Foucault appears to
think that the problematic aspect of these developments lies in the way in
which previously more or less unregimented areas of human life come to be
regulated by infra-legal mechanisms, yet
at times seems to recommend a strategy of pure resistance that is at the very
least easily misunderstood as a kind of nihilism because of his inability or
unwillingness to articulate an alternative vision of the operation of
power, an Arendtian perspective is
perhaps more illuminating about what is lost in this process, and about what
sorts of political action might make things better. On the one hand, we find a
shrinkage of spaces of appearance, where human beings in their plurality may
emerge in their full individuality, and their replacement by “social” spaces
and other spaces where conformity rules, i.e., by spaces where visibility is
turned into an instrument of control or regulation, including self-regulation.
This includes the deployment of ever more elaborate technologies of
surveillance and (self)-monitoring that extend their tendrils into ever more
“ordinary” aspects of social life, and the relative narrowing of public spaces
to those mediated spaces of modern democracy where only relatively few
political leaders can appear and act. On the other hand, and less obviously, we
find the “unmooring” of important spaces of appearance from control by a
public, so that genuine action not only remains restricted to a few, but these
actors are now too much in control of their own visibility to be properly
accountable to their publics: the public’s surveillance is no longer
sufficiently effective to undermine [or at least exercise some degree of
control over] the ordinary hierarchical relationships that structure the modern
state. In other words, not only is the space of appearances colonized by people
who have too much control over their own visibility, but the spectators are in
turn more surveilled and normalized than before, losing control over their own
visibility.
(I draw here on an interesting book by Jeffrey Edward Green,
The
Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship, which I
should like to review properly at some point).
But if this is in fact a problem (a big if, I suppose), how
could we think about what to do? I suggest in the paper that “a solution to
these problems would at least involve the expansion of spaces of appearance
(even if they can never be untainted by surveillance) and the reduction of the
reach of spaces of surveillance,” which seems to me to be sort of what
movements like OWS are trying to do at some level. (Of course, they are also
trying to do all kinds of other things, like decrease income inequality and punish
bankers.) But I also indicate that the point is not to eliminate spaces of surveillance, or transforming all of society
into a big public space: any moderately complex society, and indeed any society
that aspires to a certain level of material security, will certainly contain a
very large number of spaces of surveillance, though it would be better if,
following on the work of people as diverse as James
C. Scott and Hayek,
these spaces of surveillance were not large
and centralized. But, to be honest, I’m
not very good at thinking about the classic “what is to be done” question.
[Update 10/28/2011 5:45pm - fixed some minor typos]
[Update 10/28/2011 5:45pm - fixed some minor typos]
