Images of Surveillance

Both surveillance and its theories have multiple, sometimes contradictory, valences. In their now seminal works Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari provide new topographies and new critical apparati to understand the networked and “rhizomatic” forms of capital and state in the contemporary world. Viewing their work as paradigmatically “radical” – overturning repressive and oppressive structures in politics, psychology, and epistemology – Deleuze and Guattari sought to provide a “toolkit” for a new revolutionary philosophy and politics. In this session, we will look at an unanticipated application of their radical theory for military use in remapping battlefields and generating new, interactive, creative thinking about outmaneuvering opponents in asymmetrical warfare. We will read Eyal Weizman’s “Walking Through Walls” in which he discusses the use of Deleuze of Guattari in officer training manuals for the Israeli Defense Forces and corresponding short excerpts from A Thousand Plateaus to explore how surveillance by the state and the counter-hegemonic surveillance proposed in theory are not as diametrical as they may first appear. Finally, we will interrogate the question as to just how and when “radical theory” is “radical politics.”
 

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the founding Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society through the MESAAS department specializing in comparative philosophy. His work on  education, political theory, cultural theory, Iranian and Islamic intellectual history, critical theory, religion, media studies, and post-colonial studies has appeared in Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The New Yorker, The Jewish Daily Forward, The New York Times, Filmmaker Magazine, 3quarksdaily, and The Huffington Post.

Between 1943 and 1949, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer – three theorists from the “Frankfurt School” – formed a key component of a working group for the “Office of Strategic Services” (OSS) in the United States, the forerunner of today’s CIA. These theorists saw the necessity of putting the tools and analyses of “critical theory” – without shying away from many of its arguments that would be unpalatable – at the hands of the American state first as part of the struggle against fascism and then in the goal of the surveillance, domination, and restructuring of the new postwar West Germany. In a kind of paradox, each of these theorists wanted to preserve what little hope remained for autonomous thought and autonomous life in liberal democracies that they saw as always already compromised and on the precipice of crisis and catastrophe. In this session, we will first look at the German philosophical tradition in Kant to begin a conversation about what autonomy meant in the Enlightenment tradition and then in critical theory. We will then look at a few of the papers produced in this working group for the OSS. We will also consider transatlantic approaches to contemporary social media and surveillance structure in the Germany and the United States more broadly to engage session participants in a wide ranging discussion of the value of autonomy, the power and role of theory, and the salutary and corrosive nature of surveillance regimes.
 

Jordan Kraemer is an anthropologist of media and technology, with a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently working on a book about emerging social and mobile media in late 2000s Berlin, titled Mobile Berlin: Transnationalism, Design, and Social Media. She teaches courses on emerging media, digital ethnography, and feminist technology studies, covering topics such as the materiality of information, ethnographies of infrastructure, media and affect, and interaction design, most recently as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities.

Michael Robert Stevenson teaches philosophy at Columbia University. He earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MPhil and a PhD from Columbia University. He specializes in the German philosophical tradition, especially Kant, post-Kantian Idealism, and 20th century phenomenology.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the founding Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society through the MESAAS department specializing in comparative philosophy. His work on  education, political theory, cultural theory, Iranian and Islamic intellectual history, critical theory, religion, media studies, and post-colonial studies has appeared in Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The New Yorker, The Jewish Daily Forward, The New York Times, Filmmaker Magazine, 3quarksdaily, and The Huffington Post.