Surveillance (A Special Issue of Social Text)

Contents

Surveillance Dossier Editor Richard Maxwell Surveillance: Work, Myth, and Policy

Richard Maxwell 1

Every Move You Make: Bodies, Surveillance, and Media Michael J. Shapiro 21 Biometrics and Post-9/11 Technostalgia

Kelly A. Gates 35

Surveillance in Decolonized Social Space: The Case of Sex Workers in Bengal Swati Ghosh 55 Resisting Surveillance

John Gilliom 71

Global Citizens and Local Powers: Surveillance in Turkey Çag˘atay Topal 85 From Privacy to Visibility: Context, Identity, and Power in Ubiquitous Computing Environments David J. Phillips 95

Suppressing Grief: The Politics of “McCarthy”-Era Testimonies Margaret Morganroth Gullette 109 Copying Kill Bill

Laikwan Pang 133

Contributors

Rebecca Baron is a Los Angeles–based fi lmmaker and faculty member at CalArts School of Film/Video. Her experimental and documentary fi lms have been screened extensively in the United States and internationally at the Whitney Biennial, New York Film Festival, Cinémathèque Française, Oberhausen, Viennale, and in Rotterdam. She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship. More information about the Mass Observation movement can be found in her article in the fall 2004 issue of Cabinet. Kelly A. Gates is professor of media studies at Queens College of the City University of New York. She is the author of “Wanted Dead or Digitized: Facial Recognition Technology and Privacy,” in Television and New Media (Sage); “Authorship and Identity in the Genome Age,” in Information, Theory, and Society (James Nicholas); and “Technologies of Identity and the Identity of Technology: Race and the Social Construction of Biometrics,” in Race Identity and Representation in Education, vol. 2, ed. Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy (Routledge). Swati Ghosh is a lecturer in economics at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata. She publishes occasionally in Economic and Political Weekly and is a member of the editorial collective of from the margins, a journal of concerned writings on gender, coloniality, and postcoloniality. John Gilliom is a professor in political science at Ohio University. He is the author of Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy (University of Chicago Press) and Surveillance, Privacy, and the Law: Employee Drug Testing and the Politics of Social Control (University of Michigan Press). Margaret Morganroth Gullette is the author of Aged by Culture (University of Chicago Press) and the prizewinning Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (University Press of Virginia). She is also the author of Safe at Last in the Middle Years. Her articles have appeared in American Prospect, the Nation, American Scholar, Representations, Feminist Studies, New Political Science, Profession 2001, PEN American Journal, and many other literary quarterlies. She is a scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.

Richard Maxwell is a professor of media studies at Queens College of the City University of New York. His recent publications include Herbert Schiller (Rowman and Littlefield) and (as a coauthor) Global Hollywood 2 (British Film Institute). Laikwan Pang teaches fi lm and cultural studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema, 1932–1937 (Rowman and Littlefield) and Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, Piracy, and Cinema (RoutledgeCurzon). David J. Phillips is a professor of radio-television-fi lm at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies the political economy and social shaping of information and communication technologies, especially technologies of privacy, identification, and surveillance. He is the author, most recently, of “Negotiating the Digital Closet: Online Pseudonymity and the Politics of Sexual Identity,” in Information, Communication, and Society (Taylor and Francis), and “Cell Phones, Surveillance, and the State,” in Dissent. He is working on a book exploring identity, visibility, and power in surveillance infrastructures. Michael J. Shapiro is a professor of political science at the University of Hawai‘i. Among his recent publications are Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (Routledge), For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family (University of Minnesota Press), and Cinematic Political Thought (New York University Press). Çag˘atay Topal holds degrees from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His recent research papers include “The Proletariat of Empire or the CounterEmpire of the Proletariat” and “Surveillance over Life-Production: Turkish Migrant Workers in Germany.” His dissertation is titled “Surveillance over Migrant Workers from Turkey in Germany: From Disciplinary Society to Society of Control.”

Surveillance: Work, Myth, and Policy

Go back to work. —President George W. Bush to the CIA workforce, 26 September 2001

The Problem of Surveillance Labor Surveillance is tough work. Depending on the job, the U.S. Department of Labor tells us that working conditions can include any combination of the following: stress, considerable time spent on the feet, danger, confrontations with angry or upset individuals, risk, physical discomfort, lethal hazards, fieldwork in high crime areas, monotony, constant alertness to threatening situations, irregular hours, and a heavy toll on private life.1 On top of the physical and psychological strain, a surveillance worker must also possess great self-discipline to control unproductive ethical impulses to look away, to perceive innocence instead of guilt, to see a friend not a foe, to accept the ineffable and resist the probable. Such care for the person being watched may not be so tempting as screwing around on the job, which for a surveillance worker could amount to the same thing as having an ethical moment. Whatever the case, the humanity of the surveillance worker has always been a weakness of surveillance systems, especially in the eyes of those overseeing the work. The problem of surveillance labor has been recognized in surveillance architectures at least since the 1780s when Jeremy Bentham modified his brother’s plans for his Krichev estate in Russia to conceive the panopticon. In “Letter VI” of Panopticon, Bentham fl attered himself with a smug assessment of the key advantages of his Inspection House, admiring above all how the “apparent omnipresence” of the all-seeing chief inspector kept the population of inmates from misbehaving. Then, in the remaining paragraphs of “Letter VI,” Bentham outlined further “fundamental advantages” that envision nothing less than a division of panoptical labor based on a coercive system that would restrain workers’ temptations to slack off or to moderate their judgment with forbearance toward the people they were watching. 2 It is well known that the fi rst aim of the panoptical design was to

Social Text 83, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Richard Maxwell.

Richard Maxwell

reduce the effort it took to watch over the carceral theater, automating the effect of surveillance with its famous circularity, central inspection lodge, and individuated cells. Less commentary has been spent on the layer of under keepers, who Bentham said would not only subject the inmates to more individuated inspections but who would themselves fall under the watchful eyes of the chief inspector, or Director, as Bentham would subsequently call him in the postscript to Panopticon. The “under keepers or inspectors, the servants and subordinates of every kind,” wrote Bentham, “will be under the same irresistible controul [sic] with respect to the head keeper or inspector, as the prisoners or other persons to be governed are with respect to them.” In Bentham’s plan, the under keepers would be more responsive to those under their supervision. But it was precisely this close encounter that enhanced the possibility of a “prisoner . . . appealing to the humanity” of an inspector. Bentham could only promise to his interlocutors—the potential funders of his panopticon—that the Director would certainly see to it that the underlings did not succumb to such weakness: “In no instance could his subordinates either perform or depart from their duty, but he must know the time and degree and manner of their doing so. It presents an answer, and that a satisfactory one, to one of the most puzzling of political questions—quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ” (who will watch the watchers?). Today there are about 3 million people employed in the protective services in the United States, as well as an estimated 82,000 intelligence agents employed by the U.S. government. 3 These combined job categories involve varying amounts of surveillance work, commonly defi ned as the continual observation of an individual or group of people, and include nearly 1 million security guards, over a million jailers and local police, and tens of thousands of spies, game wardens, private investigators, detectives, U.S. Marshals, FBI agents, drug enforcement agents, immigration officers, border patrol agents, customs agents, secret service, as well as public-safety employees (so-called fi rst responders working as police and fi refighters). Virtually all of these jobs have come under greater scrutiny since the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, in September 2001, when the work of surveillance became a key problem for the management of the U.S. political crisis. Starting with public criticism of the interagency rivalries “built in” to President Truman’s 1947 National Security Act, subsequent efforts to reorganize surveillance labor included passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 (Patriot Act II), and The 9/11 Commission Report released in the summer of 2004.4 The Patriot Act was passed hurriedly in the aftermath of the 9/11

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attacks by a stunned Congress that did not pay close attention to the act’s content until civil liberties groups began to highlight its overreaching authority to snoop on Americans and the fact that it did little to alter the preexisting capabilities of domestic intelligence agencies to collect and share information. The Patriot Act II enacted in early 2004 was a modified version of a controversial set of proposals circulated in 2003 that were fi nally rejected by Congress after widespread public resistance. In this version, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was granted wider power to subpoena personal information from insurance companies, travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos, car dealerships, and other “fi nancial institutions,” which were thus incorporated into a larger surveillance industrial complex.5 The DHS was created at the urging of Congress in response to public pressure to do something about the crisis in the national security system. Initially resisted by the Bush administration, the DHS would unify and coordinate twenty-two separate agencies and the work of over 180,000 federal employees. By unifying the surveillance workforce under the massive umbrella of the DHS, the U.S. government created new problems of coordination, provided inadequate funding, and allowed the DHS to reorganize the workforce in a way that made much of the surveillance work harder while also undermining the federal employee unions’ institutional support of the workers.6 Before discussing the DHS solution to the labor problem, I consider in more detail The 9/11 Commission Report’s answers to the failures of surveillance work in the United States, which the report argues resulted from technical, legal, and human obstructions of information flows.7 Presenting detailed reenactments of the training and surveillance work carried out by the 9/11 hijackers, the report describes how administration officials in both the Clinton and the current Bush administrations could not comprehend the connection between events and reports of midlevel inspectors in different agencies who, for the most part, were well aware of the activities of those under their watch. The salient organizational problems were compartmentalization of surveillance work and poor information management, a combination that created informational blind spots that prevented inspection of the entire carceral theater of terrorism and counterterrorism. The problem of compartmentalization became a crucial predicate for the report’s most widely publicized recommendation that the U.S. Congress create a “single, principle point of oversight of all surveillance work related to national security.” 8 Responding as if to the everlooming presence of Orwell’s 1984, (libertarian) Right and Left pundits attacked this recommendation, respectively, as “central planning” 9 and “the fi nal ingredient for absolute power.”10 Meanwhile, factions within

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the U.S. intelligence elite raised quite different though self-serving concerns about how such reform would redistribute the intelligence budget, over 80 percent of which was reportedly controlled by the Department of Defense.11 Because the 9/11 commission’s proposals targeted technical and organizational reform, public commentary alighted on the failings of the “intelligence apparatus” and on identifying those in the U.S. leadership who were accountable for these failings.12 The discussion of solutions predictably centered on the report’s technical stopgaps, including proposals for horizontal information networks, interoperability, database management, and so on.13 Ignored was the commissioners’ blueprint for a new division of surveillance labor in the United States, one that absorbed the workforces of the DHS, military intelligence, FBI, and CIA into a single coordinated system. The 9/11 commission recapitulates Bentham’s thinking about the “puzzling political question” of who will control the under keepers, though it does this using two distinct registers, both alien to Bentham. The fi rst envisions a pastoral form of control over the surveillance workforce. While the report subordinates surveillance labor to the information technology and the management team that will be deployed to solve (or further complicate) the nation’s crisis, it also offered a plan to care for some of the frontline surveillance workers. The field agents, said the report, had been ill prepared to understand the strange threats emerging in the post–Cold War world. They need better training, better education, better organizational skills, and better understanding of the specialized technical and legal possibilities of national security work.14 Perhaps because he straddled absolutist and modern disciplinary societies, Bentham did not have quite such a caring view of his under keepers, much less any sympathy for them. Indeed, he said they would feel the panopticon’s “necessary coercion” as a “curb to delinquency” and a “scourge to guilt.”15 The contrast between methods of coercion and care sharpens when the antecedents of Bentham’s panopticon are contextualized.16 The immediate source for Bentham’s plan to control the under keepers was a group of rowdy English workmen at his brother’s Krichev estate. Hired in 1785 to train and supervise the Russian peasants in shipbuilding and manufacturing on the estate, the English supervisors had begun a year later to slack off, drink too much, get into fi ghts with each other, and clash with their boss, Samuel Bentham. By applying the panoptical method to the organization of estate labor, the Benthams successfully raised the peasants’ productivity, but failed utterly to improve the Englishmen’s discipline. The problem of how to control the under keepers would not go away, except in the idealized panopticon that Bentham insisted offered a civilized form of coercive force over this inferior strata of surveillance worker.17

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Despite the panopticon principle, the problem of surveillance labor remains an unstable element in the foundation of the surveillance state. The 9/11 commissioners acknowledge as much when speculating that a well-tempered surveillance workforce will be less of an obstruction and more productive of useful information flows. But if the past is any guide, even productive surveillance labor can generate intelligence that the supervisory machinery cannot consume or has historically consumed to ill effect. The public record is rife with intelligence failures—political, marketing, and economic—some failures were the stuff of farce, others the cause of bloody tragedies. The 9/11 report nevertheless dreams of a pastoral system that increases consumable intelligence in the day-to-day surveillance of the lower orders. When discussing the role of the overseer, the 9/11 report shifts from the pastoral to the language of nation and sport. In their conclusion, the commissioners ask: “Who is the quarterback? The other players are in their positions, doing their jobs. But who is calling the play that assigns roles to help them execute as a team?”18 In their Knute Rockne reading of Hegelian dialectics the quarterback possesses the higher consciousness of what history holds in waiting for the United States. The quarterback in question will be a “National Intelligence Director,” one who needs no pastoral care because he will be drawn from a special class already endowed with the power and consciousness of the all-seeing sort. It will be the job of this director to carry out one of the commission’s most bizarre recommendations: “To fi nd a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination” within his national surveillance team—the sort of imagination that would foresee the unseen and unknown threats to national security, which the report likens to thinking up scenarios that one could fi nd in a Tom Clancy story.19 The panopticon principle of enhancing the Director’s virtual presence through a clever use of light and space in the centrical lodge gave the Director a bit more freedom to enjoy his position of authority without constant vigil over his underlings who, by contrast, are supposed to be kept in thrall by the Director’s apparent freedom to control when and where he will be watching them. The source of this design feature was Orthodox Church architecture, which was confi gured to remind peasants of their place in the cosmological order and give the clergy—the middlemen between God and dirt—a symbolic power over their subjects via their visibility as God’s active agents. 20 The peasants were mere spectators, who passively watched from the nave, knowing “that God was judging and watching over them.” 21 In the contemporary management structure proposed by the 9/11 commission, the National Intelligence Director works above the tier of

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unfreedom where, under his watch, his deputies and their agents are fated to labor. We can imagine a clever use of public relations playing the panoptical shell game with the director’s presence to keep the under keepers on their feet. In their present-day roles, a second tier of under keepers will work within “a National Counterterrorism Center,” while a third tier will work in one of three reconfi gured agencies for domestic, military, and foreign counterterrorism. All agency heads will report to the National Intelligence Director. 22 And like the Director of Bentham’s panopticon, the National Intelligence Director will be subject to visitation by a “higher order” of superintendent—in the panopticon: magistrates and judges; in the new division of labor: Congress and the president—who would be “called down . . . from the superior ranks of life” to the “irksome task” of inspection of the lower orders. As in the design for the gentlemen visiting the panopticon, these latter-day lords will not feel the “proportional repugnance” toward the surveilled, fi nding that the new division of surveillance labor had eliminated a “great load of trouble and disgust.” 23 The 9/11 commission also reiterated the last of the advantageous forms that Bentham attributed to the panoptical division of labor: the publication of the 9/11 report, which immediately became a best seller, made the contemporary carceral theater of counterterrorism a theater accessible to “the curious at large—the great open committee of the tribunal of the world,” as Bentham put it. In our present context, the question remains how passive the spectators will be after seeing the proposed new division of surveillance labor, especially when they fi nd out that the U.S. leadership will zealously control its own visibility within it while denying that same freedom to the rest of us. One answer to this question is that a growing number of communities in the United States are not content to watch from the wings. By the end of summer 2004 numerous city councils had gathered to read and debate the unconstitutional provisions in the Patriot Act. By that point over “330 cities, towns, and counties” in the United States and four states (Alaska, Maine, Vermont, and Hawai‘i) had passed resolutions condemning the act. This growing resistance has helped give municipal, state, and local employees the freedom not to follow provisions in the Patriot Act that would have transformed them into surveillance agents for the U.S. Department of Justice. 24 Another possible answer will come from the ranks of surveillance workers themselves. After the DHS overhaul of the surveillance workforce, there was a surge of resistance from the unions representing federal workers involved in some form of surveillance—homeland security, counterterrorism, and so on. The main confl icts fractured the Bush administration’s fantasy of automating a more efficient surveillance state. A principal point

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of contention was privatization, or outsourcing of surveillance work to private corporations. According to a report issued by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2004, aptly titled The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society, corporations have been enlisted to make up for insufficient federal surveillance operations. 25 The insufficiencies involved politically imposed structural limits on the number of surveillance workers the government was willing to employ and on the funding the government was willing to provide for research and development, as well as infrastructural improvements throughout the national defense system. Another study showed that the Bush administration was so reluctant to form the DHS that it not only bungled preparations for housing the DHS—its headquarters ended up in a warehouselike building in an old naval intelligence complex—but the administration ensured that funding for the DHS would not expand much beyond what was effectively money previously budgeted to the twenty-two agencies that comprised the new Homeland Security behemoth. 26 Next to the amount of federal dollars that bled into Iraq and the pockets of privateers like Halliburton and Bechtel, the U.S. government was starving its own domestic surveillance operations. By outsourcing to private corporations, the Bush administration also condoned the elimination of public oversight of certain counterterrorist surveillance operations in the United States while it undermined whatever role the federal unions representing surveillance workers might play in development and deployment of surveillance technology. Clearly, there was a conscious, politically motivated strategy to disempower the lower strata of federal surveillance labor; it was not merely an accident of an inept administration. The U.S. leadership targeted the federal workers by adding into the Homeland Security legislation rules to replace the old pay schedule for federal employees with a new merit or performance pay system. This alone created new insecurity for workers whose commitments to the job were tested rather than encouraged. The U.S. leadership also allowed the DHS to impose a new human resources system—with little negotiation in what is known as a “meet and confer” process, which the DHS walked out of in August 2004. 27 The nature of these changes led to an extraordinary standoff between the three major labor unions representing surveillance workers and the DHS. On the one side, the DHS and administration were touting the new efficiencies in the way Homeland Security coordinated surveillance work in the United States. 28 On the other side, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and the National Association of Agriculture Employees (NAAE) greeted the new DHS human resources system as an attack on collective bargain-

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ing, on the right to organize, and on other statutory protections of the workforce. 29 Within days of this standoff, the National Border Patrol Council and National Homeland Security Council of AFGE released a survey from its membership of Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) inspectors. 30 Membership in these unions account for about 65 percent of all customs and border patrol workers. The survey results showed that a majority of these frontline inspectors, all of whom were selfidentified patriots, did not support DHS strategies to “fight terrorism.” This general attitude was accompanied by low morale, a feeling that the management was weak, a sense that the DHS’s pay and job security reforms along with the DHS’s failure to provide adequate tools and equipment had threatened their protective mission. There was also strong opinion among the inspectors (nearly half of those surveyed) that the United States was no safer from terrorist attack in 2004 than it had been in the fall of 2001. One frontline worker said that there was “just no support from the higher-ups from DHS. . . . people talking about us doing our jobs, but [not supplying] us with what we need to do them.”31 The AFGE leadership was especially angered by the DHS’s unilateral creation of the new “CBP inspector” job and the centralized rules for training and deployment of these agents. Prior to the creation of this job category, there would have been three distinct specialists working the border—one in agricultural surveillance, one in immigration, and one in customs. The DHS rolled all three of these specializations into one job and then offered only seventy-one days of training for these new “specialists.” By reconfiguring a CBP position during the hiring freeze of 2003–4, the DHS created a managerial improvement on paper that proved to be an unqualified disaster in practice. Charles Showalter, president of AFGE’s National Homeland Security Council, noted that these officers simply weren’t trained to do the job and, moreover, had been restricted by a “one face at the border” rule that deployed agents to one site to “meet and greet” people entering the United States. Showalter described the new role as akin to an amusement park worker welcoming patrons and held up a DVD instruction guide on good “meet and greet” manners as evidence of the measly tools for training that the DHS had provided to the CBP inspectors. 32 Further, by collapsing the three positions into one, the DHS bypassed the unions to unilaterally pull the surveillance agents out of job categories represented by each of the three main labor unions, leaving the CBP inspectors in a state of institutional limbo about their statutory rights as federal workers. Without labor representation, as an AFGE vice president noted at the press conference where the border patrol worker survey was announced, surveillance agents would be less likely to voice

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concerns about weaknesses in the DHS’s national security organization and its management structure, recalling that the post-9/11 whistle-blowers in nonunion shops like the FBI were no longer working there. 33 These disruptions tell us something about the contemporary problem that surveillance labor poses for the state, in particular how the Bush administration responded with a division of labor that hindered rather than enhanced the work carried out by the lower strata of surveillance personnel. The tensions between the workforce and the “higher orders” exacerbated the political and ideological crises of national security. With its campaign to assail federal surveillance labor, the Bush administration managed to devalue frontline national security workers and alienate them from the state’s war on terrorism (AFGE endorsed Kerry in the 2004 election). In addition, as I have shown, the conditions of state-sponsored surveillance labor are no longer solely determined by centralized state operations à la Big Brother. The antistatist ideology of the Right—while contradictorily enlarging government—has been driving work into the commercial sector with outsourcing and privatization. This has further expanded private control over domestic surveillance systems, reduced the power of unions, and encroached on public oversight of funding and custody of the surveillance workforce. Though it is too soon to know the impact of these changes, there can be little doubt that this political economic realignment will increasingly determine the way surveillance technology and labor are developed and deployed.

Myths of Surveillance Power It is striking then how the general literature on surveillance has been silent about the problem of surveillance labor and has had little on the whole to say about the political economy of surveillance. One cause of this may be what David Nye and others have called the technological sublime, in this case the sense of the awesomeness of modern surveillance technology that overwhelms and defi nes how we think about surveillance. 34 Surveillance technology can be both conspicuous and innocuous in the travails of daily life. The sublime response relies on and resides in the publicity of the technology’s grandeur, whether the source is political or cultural commentary, popular culture, architecture and urban planning, commercial advertising, or scholarly writing. Once it becomes spectacle, surveillance technology can dazzle and intimidate. But for surveillance technology to overwhelm thought, a culture must embrace a living myth of the technology’s awesome, central presence, from its barefaced and breathtaking forms to its unannounced operations within modern institutions. The technological sublime exercises a powerful hold on the imagination.

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Vincent Mosco extends this notion to encompass the digital sublime, the present-day mythos engendered and sustained by the hyped-up mania for new digital media and information technology. There is little to be seen of labor in the cultural discourse of the digital sublime, which captivates the imagination of surveillance writers through paradoxically linked myths of the divine and demonic powers of information technology (IT). 35 The 9/11 report is redolent with this muddling mythos—“Technology as an Intelligence Asset and Liability,” the openness of the Internet serving good and evil alike, and so on. 36 We have seen elsewhere how an incessant reverie, even ecstasy, inflated the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. Then, of course, the true believers of Total Information Awareness and Homeland Security were getting their own incredible buzz from ingesting these myths of an all-powerful digital presence. The DHS and Department of Justice were, for their part, enraptured by the quasi-private Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX), which was created by a Florida database corporation and shepherded to Washington, DC, by Florida governor Jeb Bush—MATRIX has reportedly identified 120,000 people in the United States with a “High Terrorist Factor” (HTF) score. 37 In the digital sublime of counterterrorism, suspicious types appear to have surrounded us; they may even be us. As Mosco says, the myths guiding the application of such technological wonders “matter in part because they sometimes inspire powerful people to strive for their realization whatever the cost.”38 Induced into this sublime disorder, the Bush administration and its fellow travelers seemed to be in the thrall of the ubiquitous surveillance machinery, perhaps less to catch the bad guys than to sate an infantile desire for omnipotence or to serve the divine mission of the all-seeing Christian god, or both. 39 But then these reveries are matched by quite different but equally captivated musings about communitarian nirvanas in the global cybervillage, transidentitarian polities, hybrid constituencies, and smart mobs. Marketing researchers are no less spellbound by the identity-defi ning powers of cyberspace and IT in general—every innovation for improved data mining, market segmentation, and Internet-based targeting is an invocation of the powerful myth. IT feeds the faith that inspires marketers and advertisers to strive for more control over the infrastructure of consumption. At the same time, these myths of progress are shadowed by their demons: fi nancial bubbles and day trading, terrorist cells, the Unabomber, genetic mutations, social isolation, political apathy, child pornography, the end of privacy, and so on. The end of privacy has become a particularly powerful myth about freedom’s withering in the presence of the digital sublime. As Mosco points out, the government “plays an enormous role in

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manufacturing cyberspace magic because much of its legitimacy is based on identification with this future wave.”40 We can see this magic at work in the 9/11 report. It is also there if we look more closely into the moment of Porter Goss’s Oedipal embarrassment when his own children chided him for lacking computer skills.41 The crucial mythos was not residing in his children’s attack but in the question of whether Goss (Bush Minor’s fi rst choice to replace the feckless George Tenet as director of Central Intelligence) would suitably fit the Olympian role of a DCI who must manage those aspects of the “transcendent spectacle” that attends to digitized supersurveillance power.42 This mythical role was amplified by the 9/11 commission’s recommendations for a new chief inspector to oversee surveillance management in the U.S. government, and then again in an August 2004 executive order that gave the DCI expanded oversight of some of the fi fteen intelligence agencies operated by the government.43 It remains to be seen what power, if any, the überinspector will exercise over the privatized sector of domestic surveillance run by commercial businesses. The myths of the digital sublime and the metaphors that join them— the library, road, bazaar, community, and narrative44 —not only shape thought and debate about surveillance technology but also inform the competing aspirations over how to use or disable it. Myths “can foreclose politics, can serve to depoliticize speech,” says Mosco, “but they can also open the door to a restoration of politics, to a deepening of political understanding.” Myths can be repoliticized if treated as prepolitical—that is, as a starting place for a “critical retelling [and] a political grounding that myths appear to leave out.”45 Myths of surveillance power have been increasingly politicized in analyses of biopolitics, as exemplified by the contributors to this issue of Social Text. In the lead essay, Michael J. Shapiro revisits the stories of bodies, surveillance, and imperial violence from antiquity to the contemporary media representations of war and sci-fi crime fi ghting, fi nding restive memories disrupting the state’s dream of a quiescent populace. The system-serving narratives of all-powerful surveillance enshrine the state’s capabilities for successful governance by information management, but these are inevitably shot through with weak plots and a stable of unreliable surveillance workers: the heretical antiheroes, converts, and whistle-blowers. A contemporary manifestation of these instabilities can be found in the recent success story of biometric surveillance and face-recognition industries. Perhaps more than other pretenders, these folks have cashed in big on the digital sublime, as Kelly A. Gates shows in her analysis of the emergence of these predictable but powerful sectors of the informationalized political economy in the immediate post-9/11 period. Drawing on the seductions

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of technostalgia and the demand for information technology to manage systemic crises, these surveillance businesses have engorged themselves on their growing authority to deepen their pockets, despite the considerable imprecision of their services. One wonders what other stories might be circulating within the lower strata of the biometric workforce to disturb the fault lines in an already shaky industrial-surveillance complex. Turning to what might be called postcolonial biopower, Swati Ghosh examines how state and local “watch-care” forms of surveillance in Bengal have recast prostitutes as sex workers worthy of welfare and health care but disqualified from having moral rights of full citizenship because of the very bodilyness of their work. Their visibility as deserving citizens is paradoxical: they are not granted full personhood and yet are made objects of state care; their social visibility is championed by artists, progressive civic organizations, and politicians, and yet their publicness remains both proscribed and compulsory, coordinated through disciplines of geographic confi nement and health services. In this context, a Westerner might invoke the power of privacy rights. But here such an option is nonexistent. Exiled outside the moral boundary of privacy protection, those who resist surveillance come to rely on what John Gilliom calls, after James Scott, the “weapons of the weak,” the often lonely, often selfless tactics to preserve dignity, defend loved ones, and “work the system.” Gilliom reveals in his essay how the commitments to families, friends, and the fight for a modicum of freedom inspire a group of women caught in a net of welfare surveillance in the poorest reaches of Appalachian Ohio. Drawing on their experiences, Gilliom shows how privacy rights talk becomes unintelligible and irrelevant for the weakest among us and argues that the Left must discover new ethical and political sources for fi ghting or reforming system-serving surveillance. When a nation’s role in the current geopolitical realignment is both central and uncertain, biopolitics tends to get knotted up by transversal lines of crisis management, as Çag˘atay Topal shows in the case of Turkey. The Turkish state’s ambivalence toward modernization, globalization, and informationalization has created conditions for weak central population surveillance. But rather than seeing this as creating spaces of freedom from surveillance power, Topal argues that weak surveillance places Turkish citizens in a precarious liminality between a society of control and a society of discipline. Topal perceives this as another of the tragicomedies of Turkish life and proposes that the outcome will become clearer as the state advances toward a “rationale of control suitable for capitalism’s global de/recodification strategy.” Returning to the United States in David J. Phillips’s essay, we fi nd no such ambivalence in government or business toward informationalized capitalism. Echoing several of the other con-

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tributors, Phillips challenges liberal notions of privacy for failing to grasp or contain the power of contemporary surveillance societies. He then develops the concept of “resources of visibility and knowledge production” to argue for ways to modify ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) systems through the ethical allocation of these resources. Phillips draws on the experience and political expediencies of “coming out” to fi nd alternative ethical and political sources for distributing resources of visibility within ubicomp systems. Phillips’s impulse to get into the workings of ubiquitous computing environments and away from the mythos of the digital sublime questions how contemporary political economic alignments have transformed surveillance from a “resource of visibility” into a system-serving economics of display. In this political economy the balance of power to control these resources tilts decidedly toward the state and capital. The struggle to wrest control of these resources away from their current commanders turns our attention fi nally to the question of policy.

The fact of the matter is that workers, the under- and disemployed, the incarcerated, the homeless, and those dependent on welfare (most

Policy There is a tendency to frame policy about surveillance in terms of technological developments and civil rights. The fi rst is predicated, either explicitly or in unstated fundamentals, on the idea of technological determinism—the technological revolution changed us, technology will solve this or that social problem or threatens to create new ones, technology changes the nature of work, and so on and so forth from Theodore Vail to Daniel Bell to Howard Rheingold. Moreover, technological determinism underpins the ideology of the information age—again the mythos that attends to the spread of global networks, post-Taylorist discourses about knowledge work and workers, and postindustrialism.46 Policy therefore needs to critique technological determinism while it focuses on reform or more radical challenges to the technology of surveillance. It would be foolhardy not to confront the technological dimensions of surveillance, but not at the risk of reiterating another version of technological determinism. In contrast, a focus on civil liberties related to the sanctity of private life presupposes universal attainability of privacy—a right endowed to varying degrees by capitalist property relations. Privacy is a right best protected as private property. This is true whether we are talking about sovereignty of hearth and home or image rights. The fact of the matter is that workers, the under- and disemployed, the incarcerated, the homeless, and those dependent on welfare (most of whom are women) are the most exposed to surveillance and the least enfranchised of privacy rights. These

Surveillance: Work, Myth, and Policy

of whom are women) are the most exposed to surveillance and the least enfranchised of privacy rights.

13

are the semisovereigns for whom survival in the informationalized political economy depends on their relinquishing all “reasonable expectations of privacy.” The growing population of semisovereigns marks a clear trend. Between 1987 and 2002, for example, the number of U.S. companies conducting drug tests on their employees increased 277 percent. The ACLU estimated in 2003 that U.S. employers eavesdropped on over 400 million employee telephone calls.47 On average, 12 to 14 percent of the total population in the United States lives in poverty, while 75 percent of Americans are exposed to the statistical risk that within a ten-year cycle they could be one of the “40 percent of Americans who experience poverty for at least one year.”48 The average annual growth rate of incarceration was 3.7 percent throughout the 1990s, while the number of homeless tripled in the 1980s, with a growing proportion of families and children becoming homeless in the 1990s.49 And for those who can tap into the privilege of privacy rights, the right to be left alone is sometimes no match for powerful inducements to be watched. A discount shopping card is a reward for giving up a slice of personal information about your shopping habits. The indispensable credit card that mobilizes your movements through the informationalized infrastructure of consumption demands that you allow the card issuer to peek into your intimate fi nancial doings. An extreme version of this mobility surfaced in Barcelona last year when a club owner began to offer subcutaneous implants the size of a grain of rice to regular customers at a cost of 125 euros each. “I know many people who want to be implanted,” said the club owner. “Almost everybody now has a piercing, tattoos or silicone. Why not get the chip and be original?” With the equivalent of a debit card under your skin, you could leave home without any money, eat and buy drinks, and pay by being scanned. The account statement arrives later.50 For those who are limited to enjoying only the psychological benefits of spending and playing like the privileged, no amount of surveillance is too much. The popular culture of talk shows, reality TV, and Hollywood fi lms issues more authoritative representations of surveillance along with lessons on how to live under its gaze. Recent fi lms such as Enemy of the State (1998), Gattaca (1997), Sliver (1993), The Net (1995), Minority Report (2002), and a handful of others, while morally and politically ambiguous fi lms (though none as much as Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 fi lm The Conversation), are seductions into the power of surveillance, into the digital sublime. One fi lm in particular, Sliver, eroticized the leap into the surveillance image when one character learns that her lover, an apartment neighbor and secret stalker, has networked their building with minisurveillance cameras. She is drawn into his control room and slowly begins to switch from apartment to

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apartment, witnessing scenes of love, incest, fighting, sexual play, melancholy, and other intimacies belonging to her neighbors. She is sickened at fi rst but then at the tender urging of her lover, who remarks, “You like to watch . . . don’t you,” she becomes rapt by the experience of omnipresence and omniscience. The intended irony of the scene mixes toxically with her horny fi xation on the screen, which is intercut with her lover’s gratified expression and shots of unwitting neighbors’ personal affairs.51 Makers of reality TV, for their part, invite us to internalize this economics of display and to scorn whatever power privacy rights might promise, thus mitigating our resistance to surveillance. As Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray have argued, reality TV increasingly relies on “the willingness of ‘ordinary’ people to live their lives in front of television cameras. We, as audience members, witness this openness to surveillance, normalize it, and in turn, open ourselves up to such a possibility.” We learn “that in order to be good citizens, we must allow ourselves to be watched and watch those around us. Our promised reward for our compliance within and support for such a panoptic vision of society is protection from both outer and inner social threats.”52 Clearly, a progressive policy toward surveillance or, to borrow from Phillips, toward the allocation of resources of visibility will be allied with movements for enhanced civil liberties—tentatively and attuned to a classoriented interpretation—and with an informed critique of technology and the digital sublime as it circulates in the polity, among elites, and in the experience and amusements of popular culture. But such policy can enrich its ethical and political sources if it also accepts the simple premise that helped begin this essay: surveillance is work. Surveillance work is one of the three essential mediums through which the technology develops, along with organized and informal antisurveillance social movements and the political economic realignments that have installed information technology at the center of systemic crisis management. Work is also the means through which the technology is enabled. As Bentham knew well, the panopticon is not an automatic machine—it relies on the internal discipline of the under keepers’ behavior and the management of their humanity. So in the end a Left policy must confront a risky choice: What are the alliances the Left can make with the under keepers? The surveillance workforce has been a centerpiece of system crisis management at home and throughout the Imperium—all the protective service workers, soldiers, spies, and market researchers have played a role in the recent rearrangements of the imperial political economy. Surveillance labor was the U.S. leadership’s scapegoat for increasing domestic surveillance, then its predicate for the imperialist war in Iraq, then its heroes of national security, though this last encomium disguised how the Bush administration’s

Surveillance: Work, Myth, and Policy

Clearly, a progressive policy toward surveillance or, to borrow from Phillips, toward the allocation of resources of visibility will be allied with movements for enhanced civil liberties— tentatively and attuned to a class-oriented interpretation

15

zealous antilabor policies actually harmed the mission of “homeland security.” How the Left answers this vexed question will have an impact on the culture and politics that defi ne our relation to our publicness and delimit our influence over the distribution of the social resources of visibility. If we cannot contemplate such alliances, we might end up relinquishing the development of surveillance to the preemptive actions of the state and military leadership and leaving resistance to surveillance to prescripted political and cultural stereotypes generated by pollsters, bad journalism, and marketing research. And the more that private corporate interests intercede in the business of surveillance in the name of national security, the more structurally disengaged the American people will become from the processes that determine how surveillance is developed and deployed.53 If we cannot grasp the problem of surveillance labor, we leave little room for debate and deliberation over the need for or interpretation of market research, counterterrorist surveillance, soldiering, street-level surveillance, etc., and the technocratic solution will continue to be preordained. The people who run surveillance are not at the top. So let us not be confounded by the Benthamite bluster of the idealized panopticon or fall for the pastoral gimmicks that improve ways of watching the watchers. Provoke the internal disruptions of the surveillance society at the crucial points of weakness: the problem of surveillance labor, the fabulist’s myths of technology, and a failing policy based on technological determinism and the liberalism of stratified access to civil rights. Get yourself in trouble and speak to the humanity of the surveillance worker. As Joseph Welch once bravely said to Joe McCarthy . . . “at long last.”

Notes 1. U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, Protective Service Occupations, reprinted from the Occupational Outlook Handbook (Washington, DC, 2004–5). 2. Jeremy Bentham, “Letter VI,” “Panopticon: or, the Inspection-House; containing the idea of a new principle of construction applicable to any sort of establishment, in which persons of any description are to be kept under inspection; and in Particular to Penitentiary-houses, Prisons, Houses of industry, Workhouses, Poor Houses, Manufacturies, Madhouses, Lazarettos, Hospitals, and Schools; with a plan of management adopted to the principle; in a series of letters, written in the year 1787, from Crechoff in White Russia, to a friend in England,” in The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic (London: Verso, 1995), 29–95, cartome.org/panopticon2.htm#I (accessed 4 August 2004). 3. U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment and Wages, 2003: Protective Services Occupations,” www.bls.gov/ oes/2003/may/oes330000.htm (accessed 6 August 2004). For estimates of U.S intelligence employee numbers, see Geoffrey R. Weller, “The Internal Modern-

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ization of Western Intelligence Agencies,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 14 (2001): 300. 4. Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt, Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society (Washington, DC: American Civil Liberties Union, 2003), www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=11573&c=39 (accessed 27 August 2004); The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004), 86, www.gpoaccess.gov/911/index.html (accessed 4 August 2004). 5. Jay Stanley, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society (Washington, DC: American Civil Liberties Union, 2004). 6. Department of Homeland Security, Major Management Challenges Facing the Department of Homeland Security (Washington, DC: Office of Inspector General, 31 December 2003). 7. 9/11 Commission Report. 8. Ibid., 421. 9. Richard A. Posner, “The 9/11 Report: A Dissent,” New York Times Magazine, 28 August 2004. The libertarian Right’s ambivalent public stance to statesponsored surveillance gets a run for its money from the Orwell fans in the U.S. government. In the midst of the cold war, the CIA’s Psychological Warfare Workshop employed future Watergate criminal E. Howard Hunt, who clandestinely funded the purchase and production of the fi lms Animal Farm (1954) and 1984 (1956). See Karl Cohen, “The Cartoon That Came in from the Cold,” Guardian (London), 7 March 2003. 10. Mike Whitney, “The 9/11 Commission and Civil Liberties: ‘We Need an American Secret Police,’” Counterpunch, 2 August 2004, www.counterpunch .org/whitney08022004.html. The Left has historically focused its critique on state-sponsored surveillance, largely neglecting the privatization of surveillance operations that were embedded in the wider political economic rearrangements that have positioned information and communication technology at the center of crisis management since World War II. 11. 9/11 Commission Report, 86. The exact amount of the intelligence budget is hard to track. See www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/budget.html. According to the Heritage Foundation, the “current level of overall spending on domestic and overseas counterterrorism activities is unclear. OMB reported that for FY 2003 total funding on counterterrorism was about $54.9 billion. . . . This estimate included funding for homeland security and counterterrorism operations overseas. Subsequently, OMB estimated homeland security funding at $42.5 billion. This would make overseas counterterrorism operations for FY 2003 at about $12.4 billion.” See Office of Management and Budget, “2003 Report to Congress on Combating Terrorism,” 9 September 2003, www.whitehouse.gov/omb/inforeg/2003_ combat_terr.pdf and www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/bg1767 .cfm#pgfId-1123798. Current estimates by the Heritage Foundation suggest that 57 percent of the $40 billion budgeted for domestic intelligence goes to the Department of Homeland Security (www.heritage.org/Research/Features/ Issues2004/HomeSecurity.cfm). See also Matthew Brzezinski, “Red Alert,” Mother Jones, no. 5 (2004): 39. 12. For a look at the commission’s “cop-outs,” see Matthew Rothschild, “Who’s to Blame for September 11?” Progressive, no. 9 (2004): 45–48. 13. 9/11 Commission Report, 418.

Surveillance: Work, Myth, and Policy

17

14. Ibid., 426–47. 15. “Letter IV.” 16. Simon Werret, “Potemkin and the Panopticon: Samuel Bentham and the Architecture of Absolutism in Eighteenth Century Russia,” Journal of Bentham Studies 2 (1999): n.p., www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/journal/nlwerret.htm (accessed 8 August 2004). See also Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Prince Potemkin and the Benthams,” History Today (August 2003), www.fi ndarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_m1373/is_8_53/ai_106423708 (accessed 28 August 2004). 17. Werret, “Potemkin and the Panopticon.” 18. 9/11 Commission Report, 400. 19. Ibid., 344. The report’s one example of such “imagination” was the counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke’s “awareness” of the “danger posed by aircraft in the context of protecting the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, the White House complex, and the G8 summit in Genoa.” Clarke himself attributed this vision “more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the intelligence community” (347). 20. Reflecting the Russian social hierarchy, the Byzantine inner central dome was illustrated with the “Christ Pantokrator, the ‘Ruler of All’” gazing upon the clergy who “were active, controlling their own visibility, and that of the sacred actions which only they were permitted to perform” (Werret, “Potemkin and the Panopticon”). 21. Ibid. 22. 9/11 Commission Report, 403–12. 23. “Letter VI.” 24. Timothy Egan, “Sensing the Eyes of Big Brother, and Pushing Back,” New York Times, 8 August 2004. 25. Stanley, Surveillance-Industrial Complex. 26. Brzezinski, “Red Alert,” 39. 27. Stephen Barr, “Homeland Security Management Walks Out on Union Talks,” Washington Post, 20 August 2004, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ articles/A18866–2004Aug20.html. 28. Brzezinski, “Red Alert,” 41–42. 29. “Joint Comments and Recommendations Submitted by the National Presidents of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and the National Association of Agriculture Employees (NAAE)” (Washington, DC: OPM Resource Center Office of Personnel Management, 22 March 2004). 30. Peter D. Hart Research, Attitudes among Front-Line Border Protection Personnel, www.afge.org/index.cfm?page=homelansecurity&fuse=document&Docu mentID=503 (accessed 26 August 2004). See additional material, including the survey details, at www.nbpc.net/survey/. 31. Hart Research, Attitudes among Front-Line Border Protection Personnel, 5. 32. Border Patrol Agents and Immigration Officers on Homeland Security, press conference, National Press Club, Washington, DC, 23 August 2004. Archived at C-Span.org. 33. Andrea Brooks, national vice president for AFGE’s Women’s Fair Practices Department, Border Patrol Agents and Immigration Officers on Homeland Security, press conference, National Press Club, Washington, DC, 23 August 2004. Archived at C-Span.org. 34. Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 22–24.

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35. Ibid., 23–24. 36. 9/11 Commission Report, 88. 37. Jim DeFede, “Mining the Matrix,” Mother Jones, no. 5 (2004): 17–18. 38. Mosco, Digital Sublime, 24. 39. This should be modified when considering the fundamentalist Christian factions within the U.S. leadership. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, for one, may have thought of cyberspace as his hunting ground. But as a member of the Assemblies of God Church, he knows that his work is subordinated to the big eye in the sky. For example, see the lesson on cybersex posted on the Assemblies of God Web site: “Cybersex feels safer than buying pornographic magazines, visiting your local adult movie store, or having your pornography delivered in a plain brown wrapper. It feels like you are alone and nobody sees what you are doing. Yet we know that our Heavenly Father sees everything and is grieved when He sees us secretly committing these sins” (enrichmentjournal.ag.org/200101/0101_144_ cybersex.cfm [accessed 6 August 2004]). 40. Mosco, Digital Sublime, 43. 41. “Moore Embarrasses New CIA Chief,” BBC News, 12 August 2004, news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/3560484.stm. 42. Mosco, Digital Sublime, 41. 43. 9/11 Commission Report, 399–428; Douglas Jehl and Philip Shenon, “Bush Preparing to Bolster CIA Director’s Power,” New York Times, 27 August 2004. 44. Mosco, Digital Sublime, 51–53. 45. Ibid., 16. 46. Nicholas Garnham, “Information Society Theory as Ideology,” Loisir et Société, no. 1 (1998): 97–120; reprinted in The Information Society Reader, ed. Frank Webster (London: Routledge, 2004), 165–83. 47. American Civil Liberties Union, Privacy in America: Electronic Monitoring, Washington, DC, October 2003, www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID= 14170&c=132 (accessed 6 August 2004). For an overview, see Stanley and Steinhardt, Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains. 48. Michael Zweig, “Welcome to the Working Class!” New York Times, 13 July 2002. 49. U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Prison Statistics,” www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm (accessed 1 September 2004); for statistics on homelessness see www.nationalhomeless.org. 50. Chetna Purohit, “Technology Gets under Clubbers’ Skin,” CNN, 9 June 2004, www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/06/09/spain.club/index.html (accessed 6 August 2004). 51. Outside the mainstream Hollywood fare, we can fi nd more interesting examples of this eroticization of surveillance in such fi lms as Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980) and Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). See Toby Miller, Spyscreen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). And, of course, the resolution of Orwell’s 1984 fi nds the newly well-tempered Winston Smith at peace with his condition after he has learned to love Big Brother above all other loves. 52. Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray, introduction to Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, ed. Ouellette and Murray (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 6. 53. Stanley, Surveillance-Industrial Complex.

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Every Move You Make: Bodies, Surveillance, and Media

Every move you make, every vow you take, I’ll be watching you. —The Police

The Shibboleth Historically, the forms of surveillance attending episodes of militarization, warring violence, and internal surveillance are part of a more general biopolitics. They are articulated with other political functions aimed at accepting, rejecting, or managing bodies. The concept of biopolitics, which is increasingly invoked in critical political analyses, originates with Michel Foucault’s discussion of the “biopolitics of the population,” an exercise of governance that “brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations” in the nineteenth century.1 Whereas previously states contained a “people” who were subject to the sovereign’s prerogatives, by the mid-nineteenth century, governance involved more than merely extracting obedience from its subjects. It became involved in managing a “population,” understood in terms of the energy and cooperation that could be expected from bodies that work, serve in the army, or, at a minimum, maintain the coherence and positive functioning of the family. Foucault’s emphasis in his treatment of the biopolitics of the population is on the usefulness of bodies, the calculation of their performance capabilities. However, the contemporary problem of governance—after 9/11—has been on dangerous bodies, not only those that constitute threats from the outside but also those on the inside who collaborate with or serve as vehicles for enemies of the state. Addressing the global context of “the war on terrorism,” Giorgio Agamben revises the familiar Foucauldian notion of disciplinary power. He notes that the old forms of power that involved defense of territories is being displaced by an aggressive, outreaching securitization: “While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and globalization; while the law wants to prevent and prescribe, security wants to intervene in ongoing processes to direct them.”2 Nevertheless, the law, whose function Agamben

Social Text 83, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.

Michael J. Shapiro

sees as being transcended, has been complicit with the hypersecuritization, with its increasingly global reach. Under the Patriot Act of 2001, levels of surveillance have been intensified, and the surveilled body’s danger-related identity has been greatly extended. Its corporal boundaries constitute a mere core of a system of acts with considerable territorial extension, acts constituted with attention to the surveilled body’s money trail (e.g., purchases and donations), its library borrowing, its telephone conversations, its Internet travels, and its patterns of consumption, among other things. Two political issues are involved in those historical moments of securitization and militarization when bodies become subject to increased tracking and coercive management. The most manifest one is a process of distinguishing friends and enemies, the primary function of “the political,” as politics is famously theorized by Carl Schmitt. However, there is another, more complex way of constituting the identities evoked during intense periods of violent political contention. We can view the politics of identity as, among other things, a struggle between those seeking to control, eliminate, or impose meanings on bodies and the bodies themselves, understood as active agents impelled by their own willed and unconscious determinations. What is involved in such struggles is nothing less than the intersection of physical bodies, applied technologies of surveillance, and episodes of altered political will deployed by governments and alternatively assisted and resisted by the governed. For example, in reaction to FBI surveillance of Internet searches and book borrowing at libraries under the Patriot Act: “Librarians have taken a lead in speaking out on the issue . . . [and] in January [2003] the American Library Association passed a resolution calling sections of the law ‘a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users’ and asking Congress to step up oversight of its implementation.”3 To appreciate the fi nite historical forces at work within the present intensification of surveillance and the technological and political contexts within which that intensification is enacted, one needs to look at past instances against which the peculiarities of the present circumstances can be highlighted. Accordingly, I begin with one of the earliest recorded circumstances, reported by the scribes of the book of Judges, a highstakes moment of surveillance that involved oral conversations. In chapter 12, verses 4–6 of Judges, there is an encounter between Gileadites and Ephraimites. Shortly after Jephthah, “a mighty man of valor” (albeit an exiled son of Israel because he was the “son of a harlot”), was recruited as a captain of Israel in a war against the Ammonites, he and his army got into a quarrel with the Ephraimites. Angry about not having been called

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to serve in the war against the Ammonites, the Ephraimites attacked Jephthah and his Gileadite army, only to be soundly defeated and thence to be regarded as enemies of Israel. After the battle the Ephraimite survivors tried to cross the Jordan and blend in with the rest of the people of Israel. Although they were apparently visually undistinguishable, they had a distinctive style of speech, which gave them away. As is noted in verses 5 and 6, “When those Ephraimites which were escaped said, let me go over; . . . the men of Gilead said unto him, art thou an Ephraimite? If he say Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.” Ever since, shibboleth has been a term applied to passwords, especially to words used for voice-based surveillance. For example, during World War II, the Dutch underground resistance made suspected German spies pronounce the name of Sceveningen, a coastal city near Den Hague. This was a shibboleth that even the most Dutch-fluent Germans could not say correctly. Like the unfortunate Ephraimites, they could not “frame to pronounce it right.” The “frame” expression can be given a more abstract and technical specification in order to locate the pronunciation difficulty within a historical trajectory of relationships between surveillance technology and bodies. The Ephraimites who engaged in the unsuccessful phonatory acts were trying to manage what the linguist Roman Jakobson refers to as the “two sides” of the sign: the sound, which is “the material side,” and the meaning, which is “the intelligible side.”4 It was the fi rst side that proved fatal. While the Ephraimite participation in the conversations worked as mutual intelligibility, their inability to make the precisely correct sounds doomed them. Anatomically speaking, in shaping the acoustics of the word, their tongues failed to divide “the resonator . . . of the mouth cavity” correctly. To locate this fi nite historical episode within a general conceptual frame, we see an encounter between two levels of the social order—bodies, which are materially specified in terms of the phonatory capacities, and a politically evinced and administratively coordinated model of identitydifference. With this initial framing of the politics of surveillance in view, we can turn to a much later historical episode of militarization and surveillance to move toward a more historically acute elaboration, one sensitive to a genealogy of surveillance technologies.

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The Case of Elizabethan England In the sixteenth century, Elizabethan England experienced a reign of state terror provoked in part by its “decisive break from Roman Catholicism” and implemented by a Cecilian regime. Sir William Cecil (aka Lord Burghley) and his progeny were involved in the “construction of a Protestant State Church as a precondition for both domestic repression and external aggression.”5 In creating a tightly controlled, surveillant, and militarized Protestant state, the Cecilian regime established an early modern version of the national security state both by expanding its military adventures and by developing an internal security network of clients and informants. England’s external militance under the Cecilian regime was directed primarily against Spain and Portugal, a project that involved episodes of plunder at sea, primarily by government-approved merchant privateers, rather than full-scale clashes of fleets or land armies. Although the Cecilian regime’s reliance on privateering merchant adventurers would seem to distance its militarization from the contemporary case, a version of privateering is being entertained as a contemporary option. For example, two writers (one a “think tank” security analyst and the other a journalist), pondering the ways to prosecute the “war on terrorism,” have advocated a return to privateering.6 They recognize that (as was the case with powerful merchants in earlier historical periods) large corporations have the requisite power to, and interest in, lending considerable resources to the pursuit of the state’s enemies. For example, although they are not directly involved in hot-war privateering, Halliburton, a large oil-service company, “bedeviled lately by an array of accounting and business issues,” is profiting significantly from the “war on terrorism.” Their participation has included building cells for detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, feeding troops in Uzbekistan, and serving as a logistics supplier for the U.S. Navy.7 The relevance of the Elizabethan case to the present is also evident at the level of domestic oppression. Given the religious cleavage involved in its battle for European hegemony, the Cecilian regime regarded Protestantism as synonymous with patriotism. 8 Although there was no significant standing army, the militias, formed through levies and used primarily for service abroad, were also employed for domestic pacification.9 At the same time a growing intelligence system had developed, using “human resources.” A vast network of informants was employed to identify those involved in subversive acts. And laws were in place to provide the required judicial leverage: “The scope of treason was extended by Acts of 1534 and 1536, principally to encompass treason by word as well as overt deed.”10 Because of what was increasingly seen as a Catholic threat, anyone asso-

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ciated with that threat was surveilled by the network of spies recruited to curtail domestic subversion. Many English Catholics and many associated with Spain were turned into traitors. As is the case with the contemporary intensification of military adventurism and domestic surveillance, the Cecilian regime was concerned with legitimating its imperial sovereignty. The primary genres used to evince ideological support for the extensive militarization taking place were the book and the pamphlet, carrying “military treatises” and “pro-military propaganda,” respectively.11 But on the side of a generalized encouragement for England’s imperial expansion, arguably no genre or set of texts was more influential than Richard Hakluyt’s treatises: Discourse on Western Planting (1584) and Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). In Discourse on Western Planting, Hakluyt juxtaposes England’s global role with that of Spain, inveighing against Spanish tyranny in “the New World” and suggesting a more effective commercial English version of global hegemony.12 Hakluyt also saw global economic and military expansion as a way to manage the domestic population. The colonies, he said, would be a place where England’s “waste people” and “idle people” could be employed to avoid the damage they would otherwise do at home.13 Hakluyt’s travel narratives helped articulate the cartographic change of the new, expansive England. He was among those involved in “the articulation of England itself,” celebrating English navigation, on the one hand, and promoting its expansion, on the other.14 And because Hakluyt’s views of the nation’s domestic issues and its imperial aspirations were congenial to those of the ruling elite, he was sponsored by that elite.15 However, Hakluyt’s nation- and empire-building texts (and the other complicit books and pamphlets), which were absorbed into the Cecilian regime’s cultural governance strategies, were not the only genres addressing the newly militarized and surveillant state. Elizabethan drama was signifi cantly implicated in both affi rming and criticizing the Cecilian regime’s domestic terrorizing of the population as well as its foreign adventures. The dramatist most famously involved in the regime’s terror and militarization was Christopher Marlowe. On the basis of equivocal evidence, it has often been assumed that Marlowe, who was patronized by Francis Walsingham’s cousin Thomas, participated in the regime’s covert spying activities.16 Moreover, the traditional reading of his play The Massacre at Paris (1592) sees it as an unequivocal and passionate expression of horror about the slaughter of Huguenots by French Catholics. But others see a subversive element in the play, for example, Curtis Breight’s point that it “deploys Catholic propaganda written not by the French Catholic league but by English Catholic exiles [in a] direct and powerful attack on the

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Cecilian regime.” Breight regards Marlowe’s violent death as a political assassination by agents of a Protestant-dominated regime that read such nuances in the play as subversive to a Protestant hegemony (116). The case with respect to the position on the regime’s surveillance and militarization in Shakespeare’s historical plays is also ambiguous. Although some see Shakespeare as a promonarchy patriot, on one view Shakespeare’s historical dramas, particularly his Henriad and his Richards, are allegorical; the plays are read as treatments of contemporary Elizabethan politics and as implicitly critical commentaries on the effects of state terror and military adventurism on commoners. In the case of the Henriad, the dire effects of military recruitment are shown; for example, “Falstaff’s recruiting practices and the ultimate destruction of his men” are represented, reflecting the fact that many commoners died not in battles but as a result of the hardships of service (210). And Coriolanus “boldly exposes what the Henriad could only imply by accretion—that war functioned to dispose of commoners” (237). In addition, Shakespeare’s historical plays reflect on the abuses of the security apparatus. “Under the guise of historical remoteness,” they map aspects of the Elizabethan culture of surveillance and manifest a concern with the “lower-class victims of upper-class confl ict” (172–73). In a close reading of the histories, Breight argues that rather than siding with the monarchy and its aristocratic henchmen, Shakespeare effectively “delineate[s] how the medieval modern state helps to manufacture itself by destroying alternative conceptions and practices of power,” in this case regional communities with inconvenient religious affi liations led by traditional elites.17 The contemporary policies of militarization and surveillance are also supported and contested within media genres, but rather than the stage, the primary venues are fi lm and television. In what follows, I locate the contemporary politics of surveillance in space, in technologies, in bodies, and, fi nally, in the media.

The Contemporary Scene: Expanded and Resistant Bodies One of the more familiar approaches to history of states is Anthony Giddens’s sociological gloss. His widely accepted treatment of the modern state’s history of violence is one of a successful process of the “pacification” of state populations and a subsequent “withdrawal of the military from direct participation in the internal affairs of the state.”18 However appropriate to the history of European states Giddens’s linear narrative may be—certainly episodes of militarization in a wide variety of global venues suggests that “military withdrawal from domestic affairs” has not been continuous—trends in post–Cold War sovereignty and secu-

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rity practices present a new challenge to the narrative. In addition to a growing use of military technologies for crime fi ghting, domestically and abroad (for example, in U.S. antinarcotic assaults in Colombia), the post-9/11 developments in “homeland security” and the elaboration of a domestic intelligence network, which reconfigures CIA and FBI investigatory functions, permits unprecedented levels of domestic surveillance (under the Patriot Act of October 2001) and insinuates military tribunals into the domestic juridical network in the United States. Ultimately, the current security and intelligence policies dissolve many of the former distinctions between domestic crime fi ghting and global warfare.19 Along with the territorial ambiguities that the new warfare-as-crimefi ghting entails, a new biopolitics is emerging. The criminalization of military adversaries has been accompanied by a biometric approach to intelligence and surveillance. The significance of this change becomes evident if one contrasts Giddens’s treatment of the surveillance technologies that paralleled the modern state’s monopolization of violence with the current ones. Throughout his discussion Giddens refers primarily to the use of paper trails. He begins with a treatment of the state’s use of writing, proceeds to the state’s “coding of information,” and concludes with some observations about cultural governance, the sponsoring of printed materials, not only for surveillance but also for enlarging the scope of the public sphere. 20 Certainly, the paper trail and its electronic realization in the form of computer fi les remain significant, but the new modes of warfare-as-crime-fi ghting involve the development of a biological rather than merely a paper trail, as new genetic tracing discoveries are being recruited into intelligence gathering. Is the biometric, designer weapon far behind? Anticipating the role of biometric coding in futuristic forms of warfare, the science fiction writer William Gibson began his novel Count Zero with this passage: “They set a SLAMHOUND on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and fl aked TNT.”21 Thanks to advanced cloning technology in Gibson’s futuristic war world, “Turner” is reassembled from some of his own parts and some others (eyes and genitals bought on the open market). He lives on as the novel’s main character, a commando, operating in a war over research and development products. Whether or not the military logistics of biometric warfare is now underway, the surveillance dimension is being rapidly developed. And the use of pheromones in the Gibson account is technologically anachronistic. The technology of DNA tracing, now well developed, is complementing

Every Move You Make

Certainly, the paper trail and its electronic realization in the form of computer files remain significant, but the new modes of warfare-as-crimefighting involve the development of a biological rather than merely a paper trail, as new genetic tracing discoveries are being recruited into intelligence gathering.

27

the photograph and paper trial to surveil and intercept dangerous bodies. 22 Shortly after the destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, then–U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft sought changes in federal law “to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to maintain a DNA databank of profi les taken from al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters detained in Afghanistan and Cuba.”23 Subsequently, “forensic experts” were dispatched to Afghanistan to test the human tissue found in one battlefield to see if any of the dead included bin Laden or his senior associates. Of course, policy makers face legitimation issues when introducing new modes of surveillance and criminalization. When those operating the “reasons of state” are involved in implementing a historically unorthodox “governmentality”—in this case an extraordinary mode of surveillance, and management of the global order and the domestic population—they have to produce warrants for the new policy initiatives. Accordingly, after the 9/11 episode, the Bush administration began operating on two fronts to solicit acquiescence to its simultaneous intensification of domestic surveillance and preparation for global military incursions (a strategy of “preemptive defense”). 24 On the one hand, there was a feverish search for legal precedents, hence the designation of an American citizen as an “enemy combatant” to apply a law of war that was earlier applied only to foreign nationals; on the other hand, the administration approached fi lm and television producers to encourage them to create patriotic feature fi lms and TV dramas designed to elicit public support for the new policies. For example, in early November 2002, the media carried a story about a meeting between White House adviser Karl Rove and several dozen top television and fi lm executives. Aware of the fi lm industry’s role in World War II, the Bush administration wanted to encourage “patriotic war movies that characterized the early years of that war.”25 After that meeting, “nearly a dozen” patriotic war movies were under production and television dramas followed suit. Among the most notable of the TV genre was an episode of JAG (a CBS drama about military lawyers). The 30 April 2002 episode, produced with the Pentagon’s help, featured a trial of a defi ant al-Qaeda terrorist (undoubtedly modeled after Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged twentieth 9/11 hijacker) by a military tribunal at which he received a “fair trial” (a promise by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to the media after the tribunal plan was floated). As one commentary notes: “The strategy behind the ‘Tribunal’ episode is more transparent than ever: the show creates the wish-fulfi llment fantasy of capturing a terrorist responsible for the attacks, depicts an idealized military, yet ends with an ominous threat of more terror in the works, affi rming the government’s real-life message that America must remain vigilant.”26

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Minority Report Everybody runs; everybody runs. —John Anderton (Tom Cruise)

The government’s attempts at suborning the media and, in particular, the Hollywood fi lm industry, and enlist its feature fi lms in support of militarization and surveillance, face significant resistance. By virtue of their form as well as content, feature fi lms often challenge the government’s attempts at achieving public acceptance of its policies. Given the recent tendency of the official discourse on terrorism to criminalize “the enemy” and to employ biometric surveillance technologies, Steven Spielberg’s fi lm Minority Report (2002) provides the most notable ideational challenge to the state’s surveillance practices. To place the fi lm within the contemporary politics of surveillance, we must recognize what Gilles Deleuze has characterized as “societies of control.” He suggests that the disciplinary societies, which Foucault saw as supplanting the old societies of sovereignty based on enclosures—the school, the factory, the prison—have been displaced by the societies of control. Rather than walls, this system of domination is based on modulations and coding procedures. “In the control societies what are important are no longer numbers and names but codes, a password instead of a watchword,” codes that control movements from one function and setting to another and which, above all, control access to information. 27 While much of Deleuze’s emphasis is on the control measures of corporations, his model of the control society also pertains to the control measures of the state. Referring to the mode of security imposed by the state, Deleuze and Guattari put it this way: “The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of petty fears [amounting to] . . . a macropolitics of society by and for a micropolitics of insecurity.”28 Within such a process of securitization, the social order has two significant modes: machines of capture in which bodies and spaces are coded, and lines of fl ight, which are the mechanisms and routes through which people elude the machines of capture. The geometry of control is never complete; the pursuit of lines of fl ight constitute a micropolitical reaction to the macropolitics of capture, a departure from “normalizing individualization.”29 Spielberg’s Minority Report plays out the tension between the machines of capture and the micropolitics of escape. Set in 2054 (and based on a Philip Dick short story by the same title) the venue is Washington, DC, where a “precrime unit,” with aspirations to become a national program, deploys a policing function to arrest and incarcerate individuals who

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will commit a future crime. They are identified by three “precogs” with predictive powers, suborned bodies held in a drugged state of suspended animation. While the eventual escape and return to normal life of one of the precogs is part of the fi lm’s drama, the most significant body in the fi lm is that of John Anderton, the chief arresting officer of the precrime unit. Throughout the fi lm, his body is in motion, fi rst as a wholly committed operative of the unit and then as a fugitive who has been marked as a future criminal. During his fl ight from the “justice” of the precrime program, he learns that the three precogs do not always agree. Some of those marked as future perpetrators have been identified as such by a majority report (of two precogs). As Philip Dick’s version of the story puts it: “The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.”30 In the fi lm version, Anderton learns that the minority reports have been suppressed (because the overall head of the program, eager to have it implemented nationally, has suppressed the minority reports in order to represent future criminal acts as certainties rather than probabilities). Anderton is told that his only hope is to fi nd the one in his case, if it exists. As in the current situation—former Attorney General Ashcroft’s “preventive detention” in which aliens and Muslims have been arrested, incarcerated, and denied legal representation because they are “of interest” to those seeking to end the threat of terrorist attack in the United States31— the future perpetrators in Minority Report are given no legal redress. While the narrative has a positive ending (ultimately Anderton is exonerated, the head of the program is discredited, and the precrime program is eliminated), the fi lm’s most significant aspects are nonnarrative and micropolitical. In the opening scenes, Anderton’s body functions as a physical extension of the precrime surveillance and arrest functions; his movements are wholly modulated and choreographed by the system as, at fi rst, his swinging arms are shown pulling up the relevant images on a large screen, and subsequently his moving body is shown closing in on the alleged perpetrator. But while Cruise displays a wholly suborned body controlled by the state’s apparatus of capture at the outset, after he is set up and becomes another victim, he becomes a subversive body, one whose movements and gestures are no longer orchestrated by official policing policy. He manifests a counterenergy and goes so far as to modify his body to subvert the surveillance system, having his eyes replaced to subvert the coding system, which reads retinal patterns. Anderton is therefore a Deleuzian fugitive; “Everybody runs,” he says when the police fi rst try to apprehend him, and thereafter his running requires him to move in ways that allow him to escape from the coding apparatuses and exemplify the Deleuzian suggestion that there are always forms of flow that elude the capturing, binary organizations. But apart from his manifestation of Deleuzian lines of fl ight by

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exploiting the gaps in the apparatuses of capture, the subversiveness of Anderton’s body is also a function of a fi lm form that opposes the body to the narrative. As Vincent Amiel notes, the tendency of classical cinema was to give in to the economy of narrativizing, to use bodies as vehicles for a story and thereby to abandon the body’s density for the exclusive profit of functionality, that is, leaving the body “at the service of narrative articulations, precisely disencarnate.”32 But in much of contemporary cinema (and Spielberg’s Minority Report is an exemplar), “the idea is for cinema to dis-organ-ize the body, by means of revealing the notion/ destiny of a coherent and unitary organism imposed into the body, by means of revealing its fragmented nature, by extracting it from the ‘yoke of unity and consciousness, by giving it back the complexity of its own determinations.’”33 The Deleuzian political inspiration to resist the apparatuses of capture is therefore enacted in Minority Report. But even those Hollywood fi lms that appear to support the politics of surveillance and capture contain subversive elements. For example, although the Jerry Bruckheimer/Ridley Scott treatment of the U.S. intervention in Somalia, Black Hawk Down (2001), drew optimistic administration support (the Washington premiere was attended by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney), the fi lm does not unambiguously provide the romantic soldatesque that the administration expected. 34 Although the fi lm portrays an (unsuccessful) attempt to eliminate a political leader involved in violence unfavorable to American interests (now part of the administration’s war agenda), it does not clearly valorize the policy or the attempt. Certainly, its version of good guys (American soldiers engaged in resolute duty, and often heroic mutual support), and bad guys (murderous Somali mercenaries) plays into the administration’s hands, but, at the same time, no clear point of view on the policy or its failed implementation strikes the viewer. An even earlier movie with a clearer stance on imperial overreach has attracted the attention of the U.S. military apparatus. As Michael Kaufman reports: “Challenged by terrorist tactics and guerrilla warfare in Iraq, the Pentagon recently held a screening of The Battle of Algiers [1965], which, ironically, was popular among anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s.”35 The fi lm’s historical gloss on the war between the colonial French military and Algerian nationalists moved many viewers to identify with Ali La Pointe, the leader of the urban part of the struggle, the network of resistance in the Casbah in the city’s Muslim section. In contrast, the Pentagon viewers were fi xated on the instruments of repression—torture, among others—used by the French military to extract information about enemy operations. However, as was the case with Black Hawk Down, the recent rerelease of The Battle of Algiers is open to other ways of seeing.

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Moreover, the fi lm, unlike Black Hawk Down, delivers a more heroic and idealistic set of images of the “terrorist resistance.” What is the place of cinema in an era of hypermilitarization? As Kaja Silverman has suggested, such “aesthetic work is a privileged domain for displacing us from the geometrical point, for encouraging us to see in ways not dictated in advance by the dominant fiction.”36 Moreover, in the case of fi lm, unlike painting, for example, that “us” is a mass audience involved in “collective reception.”37 Minimally, at a historical moment when a government is seeking support from the arts to extend its sphere of imperial violence while surveilling and closing what has been one of history’s most open societies, fi lm can be seen as a site of challenge and resistance. In addition to the feature fi lms to which I have referred, Errol Morris’s documentary of Robert MacNamara’s decision-making role during the Vietnam War (The Fog of War, 2004) and Michael Moore’s documentary response to the Bush administration’s Iraq war (Fahrenheit 9/11, 2004) counter the weapons of war with critical thinking, which, in its philosophical mode, Immanuel Kant figured as a permanently armed state, and in its cinematic mode, Gilles Deleuze figured as a life-creating weapon.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 139, 143. 2. Giorgio Agamben, “Security and Terror,” trans. Carolin Emcke, Theory and Event 5 (2000) at micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu:2146/journals/theory_and_event/ v005/5.4agamben.html. 3. Judith Graham, “Library Users Warned of FBI Spying,” Honolulu Advertiser, 6 April 2003. 4. Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, trans. John Mepham (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 1. 5. Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism, and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 50. I do an extended analysis of the Elizabethan case in Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New York: Routledge, 2004). 6. Nikolas K. Gvosdev and Anthony A. Cipriano, “Patriotism and Profit Are Powerful Weapons,” Honolulu Advertiser, 21 July 2002. 7. Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., “In Tough Times a Company Finds Profits in Terror War,” New York Times, 13 July 2002. 8. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism, and Drama in the Elizabethan Era, 31. 9. Ibid., 57. 10. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch (New York: Blackwell, 1985), 49. 11. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism, and Drama in the Elizabethan Era, 59. 12. See Richard Helgerson’s treatment of Hakluyt in Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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13. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism, and Drama in the Elizabethan Era, 33. 14. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 152. 15. Rewarding his complicity with the cultural governance of the Cecilian regime, Walsingham, the head of the state spy network (to whom Hakluyt dedicated the initial edition of Principal Navigations), “bore or at least arranged part of the expense of the publication.” Sir Robert Cecil was one of Hakluyt’s patrons to whom subsequent editions of Principal Navigations were dedicated. The historical details and quotations are from “Hakluyt, Richard,” in Catalog of the Scientific Community at es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Catalog/Files/hakluyt.html, accessed 16 December 2004. 16. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism, and Drama in the Elizabethan Era, 127. 17. Some see Shakespeare’s play differently, however. For example, Richard Helgerson reads Shakespeare as a loyal monarchist, arguing that the plays manifest a doubleness. They show “kingship in a narrative and dramatic medium that not only displayed power but revealed the sometimes brutal and duplicitous strategies by which power maintained itself.” They both celebrate authority and “bear a subversive potential” while playing to audiences that included everyone from commoners to kings. But for the “discursive community” of the theater, which, Helgerson states, was “far removed from the councils of power,” the plays (especially in Shakespeare’s case) were not subversive but rather “contributed at once to the consolidation of central power, [and] . . . to the cultural division of class from class” (Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 244–45). 18. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 192. 19. For example, on 10 June 2002, the New York Times reported the arrest of an American citizen, whom the U.S. attorney general alleged to be an al-Qaeda operative (James Risen and Philip Shenon, “U.S. Says It Halted Qaeda Plot to Use Radioactive Bomb”). Commenting on this citizen’s legal status, Ashcroft said, “[He is an] enemy combatant. . . . We have acted with legal authority both under the laws of war and clear Supreme Court precedent, which establishes that the military may detain a United States citizen who has joined the enemy and has entered our country to carry out hostile acts” (“Ashcroft’s Announcement,” Associated Press, 10 June 2002). Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul F. Wolfowitz said in a press conference at the Justice Department that the suspect, Mr. AlMujahir, was being held by the Department of Defense “under the laws of war” (U.S. Department of Defense News Transcript, 10 June 2002, www.defenselink .mil/transcripts/2002/t06102002_t0610dsd.html). 20. Giddens, Nation-State and Violence, 47, 179. 21. William Gibson, Count Zero (New York: Ace, 1987), 1. 22. Dexter Filkins, “U.S. Is Studying DNA of Dead Al Qaeda and Taliban Combatants,” New York Times, 15 March 2002. 23. David Johnson, “Law Change Sought to Set up DNA Databank for Captured Qaida Fighters,” New York Times, 2 March 2002. 24. David E. Sanger, “Bush to Formalize a Defense Policy of Hitting First,” New York Times, 17 June 2002. 25. Rick Lyman, “White House Sets Meeting with Film Executives to Discuss War on Terrorism,” New York Times, 8 November 2001. 26. Caryn James, “TV’s Take on Government in a Terror-Filled World,” New York Times, 30 April 2002.

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27. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” October 59 (1993): 5. 28. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 215–16. 29. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 208–31, section titled “Micropolitics of Segmentarity.” 30. Philip Dick, Minority Report (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 45. 31. David Cole, “ ‘Preventive Detention’ Was a Legal End Run,” Honolulu Advertiser, 15 June 2003. 32. Vincent Amiel, Le corps au cinema: Keaton, Bresson, Cassavetes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 2. The translations of the Amiel quotations are mine. 33. Ibid., 7. 34. Geoffrey Gray, “ ‘Black Hawk’ Damned,” Village Voice, 12 February 2002, 26. 35. Michael T. Kaufman, “What Does the Pentagon See in Battle of Algiers?” New York Times, 7 September 2003. 36. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 184. 37. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1985), sec. 12.

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Michael J. Shapiro

Biometrics and Post-9/11 Technostalgia

Of all the dramatic images to emerge in the hours and days following the September 11 attacks, one of the most haunting was a frame from a surveillance-camera video capturing the face of suspected hijacker Mohamed Atta as he passed through an airport metal detector in Portland, ME. Even more chilling to many security experts is the fact that, had the right technology been in place, an image like that might have helped avert the attacks. According to experts, face recognition technology that’s already commercially available could have instantly checked the image against photos of suspected terrorists on fi le with the FBI and other authorities. If a match had been made, the system could have sounded the alarm before the suspect boarded his fl ight. —Alexandra Stikeman, Technology Review

The idea that computerized face recognition may have helped avert the alQaeda terrorist attacks was perhaps the most ambitious claim circulating about biometric identification technologies in the aftermath of September 11. Along with the enormous flood of imagery of the day relayed in the news media were the out-of-focus surveillance-camera images of two of the alleged attackers. The recorded video image from the airport in Portland that appears to show Mohammad Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari passing through airport security is a familiar part of 9/11 iconography. It is virtually impossible to reference this image without also invoking the claim that facial recognition technology could have identified the men in the image as wanted terrorist suspects. Already existing commercially available technology, according to this regretful yet strangely hopeful assertion, “could have instantly checked the image against photos of suspected terrorists.” Technologies that use digital readings of the face to identify individuals could have saved the United States from the worst terrorist attack in its history. The precise origin of the claim is hard to identify; it seemed to spring forth simultaneously from multiple sources. If it fi rst came from a biometrics industry representative, like oft-quoted Visionics CEO Joseph Atick, it was quickly embraced and repeated by other public voices who felt sure it was true.1 This possibility was the basis for hearings held on Capitol Hill following 9/11. On 14 November 2001, the Technology, Terrorism and

Social Text 83, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.

Kelly A. Gates

Government Information Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing, “Biometric Identifiers and the Modern Face of Terror: New Technologies in the Global War on Terrorism.” In her opening remarks, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) asked, “How could a large group of coordinated terrorists operate for more than a year in the United States without being detected, and then get on four different airliners in a single morning without being stopped?” The answer, she noted, “is that we could not identify them.” Voicing again the assertion that had become part of the repertoire of public responses to the 9/11 events, she said, “In the case of at least two of the hijackers authorities had pictures of them as suspects prior to the attack, and airport cameras actually photographed them. But because these cameras didn’t use facial biometric systems, security was not alerted and the hijackers remained free to carry out their bloody plans.” The idea that the events of 9/11 could have been prevented with the sophisticated technological products of modernity is laden with what Pat Gill has called “technostalgia”: the desire to revise the past to redetermine the present, at the same time admitting the impossibility of this endeavor. 2 The claim might be said to embody a collective psychological need to believe that the nation was not as vulnerable as it appeared, that our technological sophistication remains unscathed and in fact would have stopped the men had it been in place. This technostalgic longing to revise the past provides a paradoxical sort of origin myth for facial recognition technology. In the post-9/11 context, the technology emerges as an already existing, reliable, and high-tech solution to the newest, most pressing problem facing the nation. This move effectively erases the history of these technologies, even as it inserts them fully formed into the past. What is effectively erased is the fact that well before 9/11, a whole set of social actors was engaged in ongoing struggles and negotiations over the development and deployment of this technology. While it was not already fully formed and ready to identify the nation’s post–Cold War enemy Other, it was already “embedded in and shaped by a rich web of cultural practices and ideas.”3 I explore this web, unpacking the black box of facial recognition technology.4 The analysis is informed by scholarship that examines the emergence of new media technologies in both contemporary and historical contexts.5 Facial recognition technology is itself a form of new media, relying as it does on media technologies like photography, video, and computer hardware and software. It is also being bundled or integrated with other new media, including the Internet and computer networks. In other words, facial recognition and other biometrics are literally becoming components or actors in new media assemblages. The central questions that guide this analysis come from studies of new media, namely, why

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facial recognition, why now, and what is “new” about this technology? In his study of television as both a technology and a cultural form, Raymond Williams advocated an analysis that “would restore intention to the process of research and development. The technology would be seen . . . as being [envisioned] and developed with certain purposes and practices already in mind. At the same time the interpretation would differ from symptomatic technology [i.e., studies that view technology as in essence an effect of a particular social order] in that these purposes and practices would be seen as direct: as known social needs, purposes and practices to which the technology is not marginal but central.”6 My aim here is to restore intention to the process of research and development of facial recognition technology. This effort requires rescuing it from post-9/11 technostalgic narratives and recapturing some of its history. I discuss late-nineteenth-century ancestors to biometrics, early research on machine recognition of faces in the 1960s, and the growing state and private interest in the technology during the 1990s. The early emergence of face recognition as part of the state surveillance apparatus and as marketed, commercially available products takes place in the post-Soviet/post–Cold War decade of the 1990s. Its arrival on the scene happens alongside and in relation to the spread of the Internet and computer networking, neoliberal economic policies like NAFTA and the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and the enormously publicized public-private competition to map the human genome, creating a universal digital representation of human essence. Biometrics embody a digital mode of representing the body, and techniques of digitalization are enlisted to lay a particular claim to truth about the relationship between the body and identity.7 By automating the process of connecting bodies to identities and, in some cases, distributing that identified body across computer networks for specific purposes, biometrics can control access to the benefits of citizenship, to the national territory, to information, to computer networks themselves, to transportation systems, and to specific spaces of consumption and safety. Facial recognition and biometrics must be located fi rmly within their historical and cultural context of emergence, with particular attention to the ways these technologies are being enlisted to control access to the spaces and information of value in the digital age.

Late-Nineteenth-Century Bodily Identification Systems To understand how and why computerized facial recognition has become both a possibility and perceived necessity, it helps to consider the problem of identification in historical perspective. In The Origins of Totalitarian-

Biometrics and Post-9/11 Technostalgia

37

ism, Hannah Arendt argued that the claim to authority for determining who belongs and who does not is a central component of sovereignty. 8 The identification of subjects residing within or attempting to enter state territories has been a particular preoccupation of modern states. Since their emergence out of traditional societies, modern states have necessarily invested considerable effort in defi ning their membership—those individuals entitled to state benefits and protections, and subject to state controls.9 The rise of a culture of identification, in which individuals are assigned official identities and routinely asked to verify those identities in social and economic exchanges, corresponds to the expansion of the modern state. Identifying citizens and distinguishing them from noncitizens became an essential function of the modern state, one that required the construction of “state memory” as a complex of archives, records, documents, administrative procedures, and human agents.10 The state and other institutions have faced and consistently attempted to address a complex of problems in their ongoing efforts to construct systems for accurately and reliably identifying individual constituents at key points of contact. One enduring problem has been that of articulating identity to the body in a consistent way. The seemingly natural connection between the body and identity of the person reveals itself to be in perpetual slippage, a never-ending mirror stage of development where identity never precisely occupies the body or vice versa. The hybridity of both identity and the body, and their instability over time, makes their accurate, reliable articulation that much more difficult, even with the most cooperative subjects and precise renderings. A second problem—and one that has been clearly and consistently targeted in the effort to improve and perfect identification systems—has been the fallibility of the human agents or workers operating within identification systems, both in terms of their cultural prejudices and lack of objectivity, as well as their inability to manage the amount of information required to individuate bodies and identities. Human agents of identification, such as police and immigration officers, necessarily draw on their own subjective perceptions and preconceived notions about individual types to identify or verify identities, a process seen as fraught with error and inefficiency. The proposed solutions to this so-called problem of human fallibility have frequently involved delegation of responsibility for identification to technologies, including letters, printed documents, bodily measurements, photographic portraiture, archival systems, and administrative procedures—a leap of faith based on the problematic assumption that technologies are neutral and separable from the messiness of human social agents. Each successive technology of identification is constructed as more scientific, and hence more neutral, than those that preceded it. A third enduring problem has

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been the immensity of the archival and administrative effort necessary to achieve universal identification, especially given the hybridity of populations and their perpetually changing compositions. The task of identifying each individual consistently and reliably across time and space has been difficult even with the most static of populations, and as subject populations grow in size they inevitably complicate systems of identification such that controlling individual identities becomes an enormous bureaucratic challenge for even the most organized and informationalized apparatus. Biometrics are not the fi rst technical effort to connect bodies to identities. Several key nineteenth-century developments in identification systems evidence a perceived need to use the body itself as a marker of identity at that time of modern state expansion. These included the application of photography for identification purposes, the relatively short-lived and sporadically applied method of anthropometry, and the much more successful and enduring scientific method of dactyloscopy, or fi ngerprinting. While these efforts to devise identification systems were motivated by the problem of identifying criminals and criminal recidivists, the imperative to identify criminals, and the systems elaborated to do so, overlapped with systematic state efforts to identify and distinguish between citizens and noncitizens. In the United States, as elsewhere, fear of criminals and fear of foreigners blended into one another, particularly as “nativists” stereotyped immigrants as inherently criminal.11 According to Jane Caplan and John Torpey, “Police practices in the [late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] asserted a more specialized domain of authority over criminal identification and detection, which became a crucial site for further identificatory and supervisory developments that were then reappropriated into universal systems of civil identification.”12 This is not to say that identification systems were deployed universally for the identification of all citizens; while such projects were certainly conceived, such a massive undertaking probably would have exceeded the administrative capacities (and interests) of the state. Still, systems devised for criminal identification, including photography, anthropometry, and dactyloscopy, were employed in various contexts for identifying entrants to state territory; such systems lent themselves to targeted procedures for identification outside the realm of criminal identification, strictly defi ned. The invention of photographic portraiture was enlisted to enhance or “modernize” identification systems virtually from its very inception, and this use of photography shaped both the development of the medium and its cultural significance. Photographic portraiture carried with it utopian visions about the possibilities of photography’s realist representational capacity. Its emergence coincided and interacted with the growing professionalization of policing and the introduction of “expert” sciences

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Individuation involved turning real lives not only “into writing,” as Michel Foucault elaborated,16 but also into images that could be meticulously examined one by one and accumulated into filing systems, amounting to a new representation of society.

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into the work of law enforcement. Authorities clearly saw it as a potential solution to the problem of binding identities to bodies and compensating for the fallibility of human agents of identification systems. The value of photographs for identification was realized early by the British police, who began employing photographers for such purposes in the 1840s.13 Although “the photograph’s status as evidence and record (like its status as Art) had to be produced and negotiated,”14 the leap of realism (not to mention speed) that it achieved over artists’ portraits surely was difficult to contest. It was a medium uniquely suited to truth-production. According to John Tagg, photography’s power to evoke truth resulted not only from the privilege that industrial societies attached to mechanical means but also from the way that a new and more penetrating form of the state mobilized photography as part of a complex of emerging state apparatuses.15 The emerging disciplinary institutions incorporated photography into sophisticated new surveillance techniques that generated a new kind of detailed and productive knowledge about the subjects being observed. Tagg inserts photography into the Foucauldian historical analysis of discipline and outlines the “striking rendezvous” that occurred between the growth of photographic records and the growth of the state, especially the formalized police apparatus. The disciplinary method relied on both the individual portrait of the criminal—the body made object—and the accumulated images organized into fi ling systems. Individuation involved turning real lives not only “into writing,” as Michel Foucault elaborated,16 but also into images that could be meticulously examined one by one and accumulated into fi ling systems, amounting to a new representation of society. Despite their realist representational mode, photographs alone could not completely solve the problem of identification. Photography represented a promising new technique of identification but could not fully compensate for the inadequacies of human perception in terms of its capacity to connect bodies defi nitively to identities. There were added problems of using photographs for bodily measurement and other classification schemes. Moreover, amassing photographs created new administrative and archival problems, necessitating new procedures and areas of expertise. Not only did this require some mode of archival organization, but it was soon learned that photographs were subject to deterioration and misinterpretation. Individuals had ways of looking drastically different over time and strikingly similar to one another, especially in photographs. To accurately and reliably bind identities to bodies, new methods were needed. The French police official Alphonse Bertillon answered the call, developing the system of anthropometry in the 1880s, an elaborate scheme that resembles modern-day biometrics in that it involved both standardized bodily measurements and a sophisticated archival and retrieval system. As

Kelly A. Gates

examined extensively by such scholars as Alan Sekula, Martine Kaluszyski, and Anne Joseph, the science and system of anthropometry were used sporadically by emerging police and state programs to identify criminals and other “undesirables.”17 Bertillon’s anthropometry involved the meticulous measurement and description of individual bodies, records that were then stored in archives according to a highly organized system that allowed for easy retrieval. According to Sekula, the central artifact of Bertillon’s system was not the camera but the fi ling cabinet, a “bureaucratic-clericalstatistical system of ‘intelligence.’”18 Bertillon’s anthropometry involved not just measuring and documenting faces and bodies but also classifying those measurements and documents according to an intricate scheme that allowed for more efficient retrieval, a necessity for effective identification and a precursor to the computerized and networked database. The archive promised to provide “a standard physiognomic gauge of the criminal” and to “assign each criminal body a relative and quantitative position with a larger ensemble.”19 Proponents made a considerable effort to invest anthropometry with legitimacy and to position it as a credible, scientific solution to criminal recidivism and other problems of identification—problems that the expanding modern state was beginning to address systematically. According to Sekula, Bertillon’s was the fi rst rigorous system for archiving and retrieving identity, projects that became central to the state’s administrative apparatus. Other innovative actors conceptualized systems for coding and distributing the identified body across existing information networks in order to extend the state’s authority to defi ne its citizens and territorial control. Matt Matsuda describes two systems developed by early-twentieth-century doctors in France for transforming bodies into coded numerical references and circulating those references as a system of signals via telegraph. 20 One was Dr. A. Motet’s method, which involved “attributing to each individual physical feature . . . a classifying number based on the recognized elements most characteristic of their physical person, and inscribed in some ways upon their organ.”21 Anthropometric measurements, physical descriptions, and photographic portraiture would be translated into reference codes for easy distribution across telegraph networks to identify vagabonds and other problematic bodies. While such a system was never fully institutionalized, it was clearly conceptualized well before computerization, digitization, and electronic information networks provided new possibilities and new areas of need for storing and distributing representational forms of bodies and their corresponding identities. Computerized forms of bodily identification are in many ways consistent with these earlier state efforts and similarly tied to cultural preoccupations with constructing the limits and possibilities of the state and other governing institutions.

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Automated Facial Recognition Teaching the computer how to “see” a face has been no simple accomplishment. As two MIT computer scientists noted in the early nineties, “developing a computational model of face recognition is quite difficult, because faces are complex, multidimensional, and meaningful visual stimuli.” 22 Faces change considerably with aging, emotions, fatigue, trauma, and surgery. The dynamic states of the person and the range of images that can be rendered of that person make automated or computerassisted facial recognition a difficult technical problem. The simple matter of looking at and recognizing a person turns out to be an exceedingly complex process when it comes to teaching machines how to do it, and doing so means devising systems that, underneath the surface, have little resemblance to how humans recognize each other. The effort to produce automated facial recognition has involved research in a number of scientific areas, including computer vision, image processing and analysis, pattern recognition, and statistics. 23 Some of the earliest research on machine recognition of faces can be traced back to the 1960s at a company called Panoramic Research, Inc., in Palo Alto, California, one of many companies springing up in California at the time to conduct research in what was later termed artificial intelligence (AI). The work at Panoramic Research was funded largely by the U.S. Department of Defense and various intelligence agencies, and thus was unavoidably entrenched in the U.S. fight for Cold War technological dominance. 24 As Manuel de Landa has noted, in the early 1960s the military was sponsoring research in pattern recognition aimed at getting humans “out of the loop” of mechanized surveillance and intelligence efforts, while independent researchers were working in the opposite direction to develop “an interface between humans and machines capable of assembling them into a synergistic whole.”25 Research on machine recognition of faces at Panoramic was conducted by a man named Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Bledsoe, one of the company’s cofounders. Bledsoe is now widely recognized as one of the early researchers of AI and a pioneer in the field of automated reasoning. A member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II and a devout Mormon, he was a fi rm believer in incremental scientific advances as opposed to major leaps or paradigm shifts. The technique Bledsoe developed was dubbed “manmachine facial recognition” and drew on his earlier work on computer recognition of letters. It involved manually entering into a computer the positions of facial feature points in an image, a process known as “feature extraction.” A human operator would use a “rand tablet” to extract the coordinates of features such as the corners of the eyes and mouth, the top

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of the nose, and the hairline or point of a widow’s peak. The name of the person in an image was stored in a database along with facial coordinates, and records were classified based on those measurements. The computer was then prompted to identify the name of the closest test image, given a set of distances between facial feature points. Bledsoe was apparently proud of this painstaking research on machine recognition of faces; however, very little of it was published because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency that did not allow much publicity. 26 This early stage in the development of computerized techniques for identifying faces involved a great deal of manual work, and it took place during a decade when the computer still had the aura of a Cold War machine. In the early 1960s, institutions compiled decidedly less information about individuals, and records were stored by and large in hard-copy fi ling systems. Individuals were officially identified with recourse to signatures, ink fi ngerprints (for criminal identification), photographs, and identification documents. In addition, sharing information among different systems often involved the labor-intensive process of physically locating fi les and distributing records through the postal service or some other form of hard-copy transmission. For example, the decentralized, regionally based credit reporting industry, perhaps the most intensive site for compiling and distributing information about individuals, did not incorporate computers until 1965, when TRW Credit Data Corporation began computerized operations in Los Angeles. 27 TRW, and the credit reporting industry in general, faced considerable struggle and expense in creating a comprehensive, centralized computer system. In law enforcement, state and local agencies had initiated efforts by the mid-1960s to create centralized state databases for criminal history and wanted warrant information, using high-speed telecommunications networks to connect different agencies, 28 but again, nothing resembling a universal integrated network materialized, as the practical effort proved more daunting than planners envisioned. The FBI began to use computers to process criminal histories in 1963, but it did not initiate serious efforts to develop a nationwide computerized system until 1970. 29 In addition, defense strategists at RAND Corporation were already beginning to conceptualize a nuclear blast-proof decentralized computer network, but the idea would not be born as ARPANET until the end of the decade, and then with only four nodes in the network by December 1969. Thus scientists working on rudimentary, programming-intensive projects to simulate machine face perception were not doing so in response to an immediate need for the identification of individuals via computer networks. What computerized face recognition research clearly participated in was a more general effort at programming computers to do what

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Bledsoe was apparently proud of this painstaking research on machine recognition of faces; however, very little of it was published because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency that did not allow much publicity.

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humans could do or, better, what humans were incapable of doing. For some researchers conducting work in pattern recognition, as de Landa notes, “the idea was not to transfer human skills to a machine, but to integrate humans and machines so that the intellectual skills of the former could be amplified by the latter.”30 In a study titled “Man-Machine Interaction in Human-Face Identification,” scientists at Bell Labs aimed to optimize “the man-machine system so that we can take advantage of both the human’s superiority in detecting noteworthy features and the machine’s superiority in making decisions based on accurate knowledge of population statistics.”31 In addition, there can be little doubt that efforts to develop computerized face recognition techniques were motivated in part by processing problems posed by the vast quantities of photographs compiled by the criminal justice system. The computer promised to offer new methods for organizing and sorting archives of photographic identities, and especially for reducing them to a manageable quantity so that they could be used for identification purposes. The archival problem that Sekula and others identified as characteristic of early police uses of photography—in simplest terms, the tendency of photographs to accumulate in disorderly piles—persisted into the twentieth century. Insulated to some extent from public sentiment, and well funded by the federal government in the post–Vannevar Bush context, 32 researchers at places like Panoramic Research chipped away at the process of programming computers to see objects, including human faces. The earliest work to successfully program a computer to confi rm the existence or absence of a face in an image, without human operator intervention, was published in Pattern Recognition in 1969. 33 Then in 1970, M. D. Kelly produced a landmark dissertation project on face recognition at Stanford. 34 His technique enabled the computer to automatically extract the head and body outlines from an image and then locate the eyes, nose, and mouth, using three images of each individual: the body, the background without the body, and a close-up of the head. In 1973 Takeo Kanade’s dissertation research at Kyoto University in Japan reported the same results using only a photograph of the face and a new “flexible picture analysis scheme” that consisted of a collection of simple “subroutines,” each of which worked on a specific part of the picture. 35 Kanade’s project correctly identified fi fteen out of twenty people. In a manuscript of the dissertation published in 1977, Kanade noted that the techniques of “picture processing” to which his research contributed lent themselves to “sophisticated applications such as interpretation of biomedical images and X-ray fi lms, measurement of images in nuclear physics, processing of a large volume of pictorial data sent from satellites, etc.”36 Computer recognition of faces was one solution

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to a set of problems on how to automatically interpret images and handle an overproduction of visual information in medicine, science, law enforcement, and military intelligence. The effort to automate the process of human face recognition made incremental advances in the early 1970s, but it clearly had far to go before machines could achieve the same capacity as human beings for recognizing faces and connecting them to identities. The personal computer itself had yet to become a staple in middle-class American homes, and networked computers were the exclusive domain of scientists, the state, and big business when researchers were envisioning and working on the automated identification of people by machines. The computer would need the capacity to see, and especially to see and discern individual human beings, if it could ever achieve “intelligent” status. Whether early developers precisely envisioned institutional applications for automated identification, and for connecting bodies to identities in networked environments, is difficult to determine, but research articles suggest that at times they did have surveillance applications in mind. Research on computer face recognition conducted throughout the 1970s focused by and large on “typical pattern classification techniques” or “measured attributes between features in faces or face profi les.”37 In short, much of the work was done manually. According to a 1995 survey of the field, research in computer face recognition remained largely dormant during the 1980s. The reason for this dearth of research interest during the Reagan era is unclear, but the lack of attention did not extend to all types of biometrics, as patents were being awarded on optical fi ngerprint technology, for example, and entrepreneurs were moving to commercialize and capitalize on the transformation from ink to digital fi ngerprinting in law enforcement. The lack of research on automated facial recognition may have resulted in part as a residual effect of the much-publicized critique of artificial neural networks, or “perceptrons,” published in 1969 by two scientists at MIT. 38 This disciplinary attack effectively defunded neural network research for about fi fteen years, most significantly drying up the monies distributed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The field of neural networks recovered in the early 1980s and experienced a major resurgence by the end of the decade, at about the same time that scientists at places like MIT and Rockefeller University were developing techniques of computer face recognition that would eventually move out of the lab and into the real world of “security.”

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Biometrics and Informationalized Capitalism It is necessary to put the emergence of facial recognition technology and other biometrics in the context of the information revolution taking place during the latter half of the twentieth and into the twenty-fi rst century. As Dan Schiller has elaborated, we are living through a transition to an informationalized capitalism, a historical phase-change that commenced during the 1960s and arose out of a systemic economic, social, and political crisis. 39 Profit slowdown and industrial stagnation, along with the legitimation crisis posed by the Vietnam War and domestic civil rights issues, were among the major problems leading to a recognized need on the part of corporate executives and national politicians in the United States to create new sites of profit and to mollify social unrest. According to Schiller, “the central role accorded to information and communications as an economic stimulant was unprecedented,” as corporate capital invested in the development of information and communication technology (ICT) and integrated ICT into business processes, especially to coordinate dispersed locations.40 As an integral part of the process, telecommunications infrastructure worldwide experienced a topdown overhaul during the 1980s and 1990s to bring it in line with the needs of transnational capital.41 For diversified businesses with dispersed operations, telecommunications provided “an indispensable coordinating mechanism.”42 Widespread decisions to interoperate computer systems were motivated by the interests of corporate capital to spread their reach across the globe and deep into economic, social, and cultural life. Corporate reconstruction around networks has occurred economywide, with the installed base of computers in the United States rising from 5,000 in 1960 to 180 million by 1997.43 The fi nancial sector took a leading role in this process, significantly increasing its telecommunications operating expenses, linking up its offices transnationally, and installing 165,000 networked automated teller machines in the United States by 1998. Banks were not alone, as companies in other sectors “sought to integrate networks into core activities of production, distribution, marketing, and administration” (14). U.S. corporate capital spending on information processing and related equipment outpaced factory machinery and mobile equipment by the mid-1980s (16). U.S. legislators were necessarily onboard; “the U.S. policymaking establishment was determined to grant business users the maximum freedom to explore information technology networks as a private matter” (7). Along with these sweeping changes in the structure and policy of existing telecommunications infrastructure came proliferating forms of corporate surveillance, including a growing need for automated forms

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of identification in order to control access to information networks and to identify the millions of individuals whose personal data circulated through those networks. Computerization and the spread of information networks provided both the possibility and the areas of need for new identification technologies. Identification documents, like passports and driver’s licenses, which had always had their shortcomings (especially in terms of their inability to accurately and reliably connect bodies to identities) were seen as increasingly inadequate to the task of identification across networks. The banking, credit card, and telecommunications industries were among those social actors expressing an ongoing interest in technologies that could give them greater control over transactions and information. Not only was identity verification needed at the point of transaction, but the intensive private-sector drive to know the consumer meant that each transaction became part of individual records that could be mined and compiled to develop consumer profi les. In addition, employers of all sorts saw the need to monitor and control their employees’ access to both computer networks and the physical space of the workplace. These institutional users, along with state and law enforcement actors, represented the primary markets for emerging commercial biometric systems. As Kevin Robins and Frank Webster have argued, new ICTs have been enlisted in the extension and reconfi guration of Fordist principles of scientific management, so that such principles can be applied well beyond the workplace. “Cybernetic capitalism” involves the application of new ICTs toward a new regime of social mobilization, characterized in part by “a heightened capability to routinely monitor labor processes by virtue of access to and control over ICT networks.”44 The individualization of labor, and the increased capacity to monitor work and productivity rates in “real time,” creates an increasingly “flexible” and “disposable” workforce.45 In addition, with the penetration of the home by ICTs, leisure time similarly becomes “increasingly subordinated to the ‘labor’ of consumption.”46 It would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve this new regime of social mobilization without technologies for automatically fi xing identities to bodies across information networks. During the 1980s and especially 1990s, fi nger imaging, iris and retina scanning, voice recognition, and other types of biometrics made their way into real-world applications, along with advances in the research and development of facial recognition technology. Driven in part by the profit potential in serving the needs of state security and law enforcement, not to mention the interests of corporate actors to control information networks, the 1990s saw an increase in research interest in facial recognition technology, as well as the commercialization and the integration of prototypes into existing real-world identification systems. Scientists made advances in programming com-

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Employers of all sorts saw the need to monitor and control their employees’ access to both computer networks and the physical space of the workplace. These institutional users, along with state and law enforcement actors, represented the primary markets for emerging commercial biometric systems.

47

puters to locate a face in an image, to segment the face from background clutter, and to extract facial features. Increasing amounts of computing power facilitated faster techniques and accommodated larger, higherquality images, in greater quantities. The transition of computerized face recognition from the lab to the marketplace followed the development of the “eigenface” technique at the MIT Media Lab, a technique called “local feature analysis” developed at Joseph Atick’s Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience at Rockefeller University, and the resurgence of research in artificial neural network technologies that mimicked brain function. By the mid-1990s, a number of scientists studying such techniques in academic research labs had remade themselves as entrepreneurs, hoping to ride the IT economic boom and capitalize on the needs of institutional users to monitor and control individual constituents, be they customers, employees, citizens, or criminal suspects. Thanks in part to the technology transfer provisions of the Bayh-Dole Act, which widely opened up federally funded research to industry, scientists took their academic research to the private sector to form new companies, dedicated to designing and marketing facial recognition products to potential users in need of and lured by the promise of new automated identification systems.47 In the United States, Miros Inc., Viisage Technology, and Visionics Corporation emerged as among the most promising and visible vendors, attracting venture capital and grants from federal government agencies, if not an immediate customer base. Scientists forming these companies joined legions of others in a variety of fields who hoped to capitalize on their academic research and make millions in the so-called growth economy of the nineties. By the turn of the millennium, the small biometrics industry was taking off, and biometric technologies, including automated facial recognition, were being integrated into a wide range of private-sector identification systems, namely for controlling access to physical spaces and computer networks. According to Biometric Technology Today, total biometric industry revenues jumped from $120 million in 2000 to an estimated $424 million in 2003, with revenues expected to reach $1.86 billion by 2006, as “large-scale projects move from the drawing board to the real world.”48 Facial recognition technology’s share of the market rose from 3.9 percent in 1998 to 14 percent in 2003, still eclipsed by fi ngerprint technology, with 46 percent of the market in 2003. As was noted in Biometric Technology Today, “the government sector . . . has become the primary source of revenue for the industry’s technology providers—although in most cases this revenue is fi ltering through large systems integrators.”49 As the global reach of information networks expands, automated forms of identification have become critical to the interests of corporate capital. They are also increasingly useful to state and law enforcement actors in their responsibilities for

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security provision, responsibilities that often coincide intimately with the interests of capital. These institutional users have shaped the form that biometric systems have taken, and the technologies have become pivotal in the transition to informationalized capitalism.

Conclusion As David Lyon has argued, the “deeper shifts” toward intensified surveillance practices were already in process before 9/11; the attacks “served simply to accelerate their arrival in a more public way.”50 The state and private sectors envisioned uses for biometrics well before 9/11, and the biometrics industry began marketing its technologies to serve the institutional needs of the digital age. The erasure of the early development and investment in facial recognition technology in post-9/11 claims about its “homeland security” potential has accommodated the young biometric industry’s rhetoric of scientific neutrality and its effort to secure the authority and desirability of its product. The high-tech, scientific image so critical to the industry’s efforts to sell its technologies relies in part on the dissociation of the biometrics from the investments, struggles, and negotiations involved in their early development, as well as the ongoing social and technical challenges that they face. These challenges detract from the image of the technology as scientific and “state of the art,” revealing the extent to which these new bodily identification systems are enmeshed in the politics and preoccupations of interested actors. The very notion of “high-tech” or “state of the art” necessarily involves the reification of that which is labeled high-tech; a faith or belief in the hightech inescapably involves committing the error of mistaking an abstraction for a material thing. A technocratic rationality clearly framed the policy response to 9/11, and the biometrics industry was among those sectors mined for “security” expertise, in turn taking the opportunity to posit its technological systems as solutions to the newly salient problem of securing the nation from terrorism. Thus an examination of the historical emergence of facial recognition technology provides an opportunity to consider whether the post-9/11 moment represents a decisive transformation in the configuration of state power. Are the U.S. “homeland security” policies ushering in a new era of state sovereignty with potential authoritarian tendencies? The significant pre-9/11 investment in biometrics suggests that while the fullscale moral panic resulting from the 9/11 terrorist attacks helped greatly intensify “security” consciousness, this security consciousness and its corresponding surveillance techniques were already on the rise along with

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Post-9/11 homeland security consciousness has helped fuel the newly fortified network security regime that the full-scale commodification of information requires.

the postindustrial transformation of cities and the enclosure of all forms of information into the market system. In addition, while the national security state may be empowered by a resurgence of funds and priorities, private sector interests in fact remain at the forefront of the new homeland security regime. More precisely, the post-9/11 homeland security consciousness has helped fuel the newly fortified network security regime that the full-scale commodification of information requires. Identification is at once an individualizing and a classifying process, a paradox that underlies all identification schemes, from their earliest forms to their present incarnations. Biometrics are designed to transfer some of the responsibility for the culturally confl icted process of identification from humans to computer systems. The actual contribution of facial recognition and biometrics to technological surveillance systems—to automated identification—certainly should not be equated with the infl ated claims of the biometrics industry or other proponents. Just as Katherine Hayles argues that we have always been posthuman, 51 and Bruno Latour argues that we have never been modern, 52 we have always relied on technologies in the effort to fi x identities and bind them to bodies, and we have never achieved technically perfect identification systems. However, facial recognition and biometrics are already unmistakably important developments in techniques of visual and bureaucratic surveillance, and they require both critical attention and political intervention.

Notes 1. Visionics Corporation is now Identix, Inc. Visionics and Identix merged in 2002. 2. Pat Gill, “Technostalgia: Making the Future Past Perfect,” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 40 (1997): 163–79. 3. Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting: 1899–1922 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), xv. 4. There are a variety of commercially available technologies designed to “digitize” the body in order to read it as an identification document, store it in a database, and distribute it across information networks. The now-familiar list of biometric technologies includes not only facial recognition but also digital fi ngerprinting, hand geometry, iris and retina scanning, and voice recognition. Here I focus on facial recognition technology precisely because the “content” of the medium—the image of the human face—carries such social and cultural significance, and because of the considerable sway this particular biometric technology has come to have in the public imagination. However, to understand the historical emergence of facial recognition technology, it is necessary to consider it in isolation from other biometric technologies. When I use the term biometrics, I mean to generalize across the range of identification technologies that use digitized readings of the body to identify individuals. Conversely, when I use the term facial

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recognition I mean to specify this unique type of biometric that aims to mimic one of the primary, visual ways that humans recognize each other, and a technique that promises to identify humans in their direct interface with an identification system. 5. See, for example, Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form of News: A History (New York: Guilford, 2001); Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting; Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken, 1975). 6. Williams, Television, 8. 7. According to Irma van der Ploeg, it is important to consider “how the translation of (aspects of) our physical existence into digital code and ‘information,’ and the new uses of bodies this subsequently allows, amounts to a change on the level of ontology, instead of merely that of representation.” She argues that biometrics, genetics, and other technologies for digitizing the body signal the emergence of a new ontology of the body rather than merely new ways of representing or defi ning the body. This new ontology of the body redefi nes and reworks it as information flows and communication patterns and is quite distinct from the familiar anatomical-physiological ontology of the body, itself a late-eighteenthcentury historical construction that altered the meaning and experience of embodiment through its gradual incorporation into the institutional practices of medicine, law, education, public policy, etc. The informatization and digitization of the body through biometrics, genetics, biomedical, visualization, and other technologies are not merely defi ning the same body with new language. They may substantively reconfi gure bodies and have real effects at the level of embodiment. “The notion of body ontology enables us to describe the way the human body is implicated in a process of co-evolution with technology—information technologies, but also surgical, chemical and genetic, and visualization techniques, and combinations of these” (Irma van der Ploeg, “Biometrics and the Body as Information: Normative Issues of the Socio-technical Coding of the Body,” in Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination, ed. David Lyon [New York: Routledge, 2003], 59, 64). 8. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 248. 9. Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. 2, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 10. Matt K. Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 11. Simon Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 12. Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 9. 13. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (London: Macmillan, 1988), 75. 14. Ibid., 6. 15. Ibid. 16. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 191.

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17. Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3–64; Martine Kaluszyski, “Republican Identity: Bertillonage as Government Technique,” in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity, 164–83; Anne M. Joseph, “Anthropometry, the Police Expert, and the Deptford Murders: The Contested Introduction of Fingerprinting for the Identification of Criminals in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity, 123–38. 18. Sekula, “Body and the Archive,” 16. 19. Ibid., 17. 20. Matsuda, Memory of the Modern. 21. Ibid., 138. 22. Matthew Turk and Alex Pentland, “Eigenfaces for Recognition,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 3 (1991): 71. 23. Rama Chellappa, Charles L. Wilson, and Saad Sirohey, “Human and Machine Recognition of Faces: A Survey,” Proceedings of the IEEE, no. 5 (1995): 705–40. 24. As Manuel de Landa has noted, “Artificial Intelligence has been a product of post-Sputnik American military research. . . . The specific balance of power between DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and other Cold War think tanks (e.g., ONR, RAND, etc.), the paramilitary agencies trying to monopolize cutting-edge computer research (the NSA, for instance) and centers for corporate research (IBM, DEC, etc.) formed the environment wherein modern computers evolved” (Manuel de Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines [New York: Zone, 1991], 176–77). 25. Ibid., 193. 26. Michael Ballantyne, Robert Boyer, and Larry Hines, “Woody Bledsoe: His Life and Legacy,” AI Magazine, no. 1 (1996): 7–20. 27. James Rule, Private Lives and Public Surveillance (New York: Lane, 1973), 206. 28. Kenneth C. Laudon, Dossier Society: Value Choices in the Design of National Information Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 40. 29. Ibid., 43. 30. De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, 193. 31. A. Jay Goldstein, Leon D. Harmon, and Ann B. Lesk, “Man-Machine Interaction in Human-Face Identification,” Bell System Technical Journal 51 (1972): 399–427. 32. See Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fl ashbks/computer/bushf.htm (accessed 12 October 2002). During World War II and the postwar period Bush famously championed the institutionalization of military-government-industrial support of scientific research. He is also considered the forebear of hypertext research for having envisioned an automatic memory machine, the “memex,” which stored vast amounts of data that were linked and accessible via thematic association. 33. T. Sakai, M. Nagao, and S. Fujibayashi, “Line Extraction and Pattern Detection in a Photograph,” Pattern Recognition 1 (1969): 233–36. 34. M. D. Kelly’s work is summarized in Chellappa, Wilson, and Sirohey, “Human and Machine Recognition of Faces,” 712. 35. Takeo Kanade, Computer Recognition of Human Faces (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1977), 1.

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36. Ibid., 1. 37. Chellappa, Wilson, and Sirohey, “Human and Machine Recognition of Faces,” 706. 38. For an accounting of this episode in the history of artificial neural network research and development, see “Robert Hecht-Nielson,” in Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks, ed. James A. Anderson and Edward Rosenfeld (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 293–314. 39. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Schiller, “Informationalized Capitalism: Retrospect and Prospect” (unpublished manuscript, 2004). 40. Schiller, “Informationalized Capitalism,” 2. 41. Schiller, Digital Capitalism. 42. Dan Schiller, “Business Users and the Telecommunications Network,” Journal of Communication, no. 4 (1982): 86. 43. Schiller, Digital Capitalism, 13. 44. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (New York: Routledge, 1999), 115. 45. By “individualization of labor,” Castells means “the process by which labor contribution to production is defi ned specifically for each worker, and for each of his/her contributions, either under the form of self-employment or under individually contracted, largely unregulated, salaried labor. . . . Individualization of labor is the overwhelming practice in the urban informal economy that has become the predominant form of employment in most developing countries, as well as in certain labor markets in advanced economies” (Manuel Castells, End of the Millennium [Malden: Blackwell, 1998], 72). 46. Robins and Webster, Times of the Technoculture, 116. 47. As a result of the Bayh-Dole Act, over 2,200 new companies were formed between 1980 and 1999 based on the licensing of an invention from an academic institution. See Council on Governmental Relations, “The Bayh-Dole Act: A Guide to the Law and Implementing Regulations,” www.ucop.edu/ott/bayh.html (accessed 5 March 2004). 48. “2003 Market Review,” Biometric Technology Today, January 2004, 7. 49. Ibid. 50. David Lyon, Surveillance after September 11 (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 4. 51. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 52. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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Surveillance in Decolonized Social Space T H E C A SE O F SE X WO R K ER S I N B EN G A L

In depicting contemporary panopticism, Roy Boyne has identified danger as the single most effective cause of surveillance, where “danger from our enemies, danger from those who might grow into our enemies, [and] danger from those who could not look after themselves” were different categories.1 The dangers posed by the vulnerable and the criminal are linked within the regime of surveillance that has been imposed on the sexually marginalized female prostitutes of Bengal, who are neither criminals nor victims and yet have been both criminalized and victimized by the medico-moral-legal code of surveillance that defi nes them. The prostitute as the site of work, sex, disease, power, desire, and pleasure has recently emerged from these contested constructions as a new political subject. The global epidemic of AIDS has forced a radical remapping of sexual boundaries, with prostitutes as the most likely group to contract and spread the disease. The concern for sexual health has given the prostitutes new visibility: from the familiar status of a marginal group of sexually aberrant women, they are now being considered a significant target for public health policy. In the post-1990 phase of modernization, the Indian state has been keen to include them in the welfare agenda and regulate their behavior through surveillance that marks their bodies as domains of sexual health and social discipline. The prostitutes themselves have responded by asserting their rights as workers. The emergence of a prostitutes’ forum and their demand for workers’ rights has engendered a new political identity that gives voice and agency to prostitute women. The worker status of the prostitute is the crux of an ongoing debate that has generated an enormous volume of literature and increased involvement of NGOs and liberal and radical feminists. Still, it remains to be seen whether this new cultural inscription on the body of the contemporary prostitute will create a subject position with emancipatory potential. The form of surveillance operating on the sex worker follows designs of the welfare state and acquires a liberal code that speaks about sexual well-being of the marginalized group. This creates what I call a watch-care system, whereby the prostitute is subordinated at once to supervision, careful concern, regulation, and control. This system enables the prostitute body to become an object of knowledge, linking sexual plea-

Social Text 83, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.

Swati Ghosh

sure to the normalizing aims of power. While the heterosexual, normative structure of this extrafamilial, nonreproductive domain remains intact, the prostitutes are being included within the purview of the paternalistic state, an entry that was previously denied. The change in the process of objectification and surveillance can be understood by examining the genealogy of postcolonial prostitution. The prostitute’s criminalized body of the colonial past, confi ned to red-light zones removed from public sight, takes visible form as a vulnerable or victimized body during postcolonial modernization, becoming conspicuous through the present endeavor to gain the status of a subject-citizen through claims of workers’ rights. The patterns of surveillance that befall the body of the contemporary prostitute reveal powerful disciplinary mechanisms that regulate the decolonized social space of Bengal, India.

The Colonial Past The colonial phase was a defi ning moment for Indian prostitutes after prostitution became an important socio-legal context for reformation under the British regime, which, on the pretext that their work was morally degrading, initiated legal measures to segregate and criminalize the prostitutes. The once independent prostitutes who had lived scattered throughout the city were clustered in urban pockets where surveillance could be initiated. The colonial government then sponsored the institutionalization of prostitution through government-run brothels that came to be known as chaklas. The closely guarded chaklas were set up under strict vigil of brothel keepers and the police in cantonment areas where European troops were stationed. Every such brothel had high walls and small carefully barred windows so that the women could not escape. The mahaldarni, or brothel keeper, was careful to ensure that women did not escape or associate with any of the native men. In addition to being held in captivity, the women were also physically and sexually abused by the soldiers and fi ned, imprisoned, and starved by the officialdom without reason. Each chakla also had its own prison hospital where women were confi ned against their will.2 While recognizing the need for British troops to have command over Indian women’s bodies, the colonial project was to manage the issue of public health through control over the sexuality of the “public” women. To avoid infecting young European soldiers with syphilis from the native prostitutes of the regimental bazaars, the movement of the prostitutes was legally restricted within these specific clusters. Thus red-light areas were created in the city to confi ne and regulate the prostitutes. To the colonizers, the native prostitute by her very origin was perceived

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as an “amalgam of fi lth, vice, and disease.”3 The British administrative authority in its official discourse always addressed the local prostitutes as a collective of “notoriously unchaste women” in need of control.4 The Indian prostitutes were further defi ned as criminals by the Cantonments Act XXII of 1864, the Contagious Diseases Act XIV of 1868, and by the various amendments to these acts and the Indian penal code. This legislation was passed during the same period that the Contagious Diseases Acts were undertaken in England in the 1860s. The colonial regime introduced compulsory registration for periodic medical examination where the prostitutes were bodily subjected to medical checkups and treated in “lock hospitals,” legal confi nements popularly known as the lal-bazaars. The enumeration of the prostitutes by religion and caste was taken up in the census of colonial India as early as 1872.5 The fuzziness of the community that lived by sexual activity was fi nally erased as the prostitutes were reduced to a defi nable, enumerable category. The “sexual myths of the Oriental woman were now eclipsed” as diseased bodies became disciplined through legal and social measures.6 How did the resolution of the women’s question in the late nineteenth century accommodate the prostitute, the woman-of-the-home’s other? To the colonized, the modernity of Indian women had been resolved without making it a matter of political agitation. The “new woman” emerged as the educated and refi ned companion of modern man upholding traditional purity.7 As an impure entity, prostitutes could not be accommodated in the nationalist discourse shaping “our own modernity,” which was unique in preserving tradition along with liberal notions, a non-Western model of achieving modernity. 8 The Indian elite therefore did not contest the legal territorialization of prostitutes, but rather dovetailed with the British in pushing the prostitutes within the socially demarcated areas of the red-light zones, far apart from home and the woman-of-the-home. Prostitution became one of the fi rst women’s issues discussed in annual Congress meetings when, in an 1888 session, Congress passed a resolution to cooperate with English “well wishers” of India in “regulating the prostitutes by the State of India” as long as they discriminated against the “mistresses and courtesans of high caste/class male clients.” 9 The interest of the local patriarchy was in accord with that of the colonizer and thus helped criminalize prostitutes. The differential construct of the public sphere was supported both by the social reformers and by the nationalist political leaders. Opposition came only on occasions when Indians were not included within the law-enforcing authority or when the autonomy of the male client was hurt. In 1923 the Calcutta Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act (SITA) was passed and eventually replaced by the Bengal Suppression of Immoral

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Traffic Act in 1930. The SITA embodied a mix of policies that would reduce trafficking of women and legalize prostitution at the same time. Legal enforcement helped enhance state domination through police harassment of prostitutes and raids on brothels. Interestingly, the nonsexual performance of prostitutes did not unsettle the indigenous elite. Actors and playwrights of the Bengali stage were keen to accommodate prostitute women in public performance, which was considered an act of moral degradation for “respectable” women. During late-nineteenth-century Calcutta, conservative reformers resisted prostitutes’ participation in the cultural realm while liberal bhadraloks encouraged it.10 In the early twentieth century, prostitutes’ social participation became a symbol of liberal nationalism, on occasions when prostitutes became involved in fund-raising and brothels were used to provide shelter to nationalist revolutionaries.11

The Postcolonial Present The issue of prostitution was relatively settled and undisturbed during the post-Independence period. As a signatory to the International Convention for the Suppression of Immoral Traffic in Women and Girls Act, the Indian government passed the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA) in 1956. Under this act the commercial organization of prostitution was made punishable in legal terms, but the sexual act per se was not considered an offense.12 But in the early nineties the situation changed dramatically. With the advent of AIDS, “a sexual panic pervaded the political and cultural life of the developed nations” and permeated the developing countries.13 Efforts to erase the profane and diseased image of the prostitutes became a social priority. Bengal achieved a unique position in this respect. In 1992 local organizations assisted by NGOs and funded by international donors soon formulated a common platform to serve the interests of prostitutes. With direct support and assistance from the Indian government, an STD/HIV intervention program at Sonagachhi, one of the largest red-light districts in India, was launched. In just five years, the program successfully extended its approach from medical intervention to social and moral issues associated with the AIDS question. The prostitutes since then earned a new name: sex workers. The different connotations of the various indigenous terms were erased from the new label that immediately gained currency.14 The social hierarchy of the prostitutes based on class, experience, cultural accomplishments, and so on was also smoothed out in the naming. The term jouna karmi, or sex worker, brought the prostitute’s work into the limelight—she became a worker earning her living from sexual labor.

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The worker status was important from the point of intervention so as to ensure safe sex. As long as prostitution was identified with disease, sin, and crime, it was difficult to normalize the activity within the scheme of work. The attempt to erase the image of a diseased body and include prostitutes as a category of workers was part of a liberal agenda for the decolonized nation. The prostitutes responded to the initiative toward health awareness and wanted to be included within organized labor as workers having a right to work, choice, and collective bargaining. They organized a forum demanding workers’ rights and claimed legalization of the profession. The logic of this intervention was for prostitutes to seek social countenance through productive labor and the wage-labor status previously denied to them.

A 1997 World Bank report noted that donor funding was “critical in gathering surveillance data” on patterns

Welfare and Well-Being of “sexual AIDS prevention initiatives transformed the prostitutes into a target of welfare through knowledge formation and surveillance. To provoke reluctant governments to action, global organizations helped formulate policy by providing leadership and funding for AIDS prevention programs. Of the three types of development agencies that took the initiative, global donors assumed the major fi nancing burden, NGOs displayed their skills by generating information previously not in hand, and government attended to the formulation and implementation of cost-effective intervention strategies. A 1997 World Bank report noted that donor funding was “critical in gathering surveillance data” on patterns of “sexual behavior . . . of those most likely to contract and spread HIV,” and donors could impose “conditionality for the receipt of an aid package upon the national government.” Information about AIDS control was projected as a “public good” with positive externalities for citizens across the globe, as intervention in health policies supposedly produced a “positive spillover effect through creation of knowledge” often beyond state initiative.15 With the detection of the fi rst Indian case of HIV infection among prostitutes, they became the most important target for national AIDS policy. The rate of progression of the AIDS epidemic was noted, and elaborate prevention and control programs were set in motion. Soon the issue of prostitution caught the imagination of several agencies such as the National Commission for Women (NCW), the National Human Rights Commission, and the Department of Women and Child Welfare. Trafficking, child prostitution, and risk from infection became primary concerns, although reworking the legal basis of the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act to criminalize abuse of prostitute women was not attempted. Among the

Surveillance in Decolonized Social Space

behavior . . . of those most likely to contract and spread HIV,” and donors could impose “conditionality for the receipt of an aid package upon the national government.”

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several feminist activist groups were the liberals seeking legalization and decriminalization and the radicals working to eradicate prostitution and rehabilitate prostitutes.16 Before the advent of AIDS, police raids and harassment were the only signs of a state presence in Sonagachhi. This changed with the government’s initiative of HIV/AIDS prevention. The number of prostitutes in each red-light zone suddenly became important as the stock of sexual bodies possessing the potential to infect the general population. The state’s welfare agenda started including prostitutes and their prospective clients as groups needing reorientation of their sexual behavior. The widely publicized prevention measures reflected the state’s concern for public health, though the question of morality was not addressed by state health departments, which preferred to depict the prostitutes as beneficiaries of a healthcare program. The prostitutes were projected as victims who fell into the profession as if by default and therefore needed to be educated about safe-sex measures and “scientific” forms of contraception. The classificatory criteria, however, used by the colonial government continued into the postcolonial era, and the official information collection system of the state such as the census continued to include the prostitutes as those engaged in “ungainful activity,” which included the categories of beggars and vagabonds. Although sexual health and well-being were important causes for intervention, improvement of the living and working conditions in the brothels never emerged as a developmental activity to be undertaken either by NGOs or by the state.

Surveillance Techniques NGOs acted as local agents with direct field access to make institutional power less visible in effecting desired changes. A strategy of deploying exprostitutes to collect base-level data was taken up as an important NGO activity. A small number of ex-prostitutes who had been active practitioners and continued to reside in the area were assigned to keep watch over young prostitutes. The ex-prostitutes were quick to identify the diseased and the infected, to furnish detailed information about individual workers, and to motivate prostitutes to adopt safe-sex practices. Having a command over the trade and contact with other agents within the network, they were efficient supervisors functioning as “peer educators” employed by the NGOs. The different NGOs involved in the information collection system were accountable to the funding authority that monitored the activity of the local agencies collaborating with the government. In the brothel the prostitutes were ranked into categories according

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to level of income and social status. Information gathered included the monthly, weekly, and daily work schedule of women in each category, the number of clients attended per day, the nature of sexual act performed, use of contraception, and frequency of visits to health clinics. The prostitutes were identified by name, age, and other personal specifications such as relation with the madam, tenancy structure, asset ownership, and economic status within the network. The rate of infection from syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases was regularly noted on health cards, and while the infected individuals were encouraged to get treatment, the defaulters were constantly counseled. Information on detailed sexual behavior was possible without coercion or legal compulsion, as was necessary in colonial times when prostitutes had to flee to avoid registration. Strategies of persuasion, counseling, and advice replaced the colonial rule of punishment for breach of law. Moreover, the disciplinary mechanism of “a few watching many” was not prevalent in the peer education system. The concern for the prostitutes’ well-being seemed to evolve from the urge to guarantee a regular flow of income from healthy, infection-free bodies. It was an open cameralist economy, where “seeing” and “being seen” were not counter confi gurations but ways to ensure sexual health as a prerequisite for a higher incomeearning potential. Observation occurred in a multilayered network, where the observer and the observed were closely known to each other and lived as neighbors or coworkers. A spatial mapping of the area divided the zone into several small units consisting of a number of prostitutes under different madams. Some of the madams were employed as peer educators and controlled several prostitute women; NGO personnel supervised the peer educators. A network of familiarity, trust, and hierarchical social order between the observer and the observed of the same community was put to use in implementing discipline. The information collection system through ex-prostitutes was cost-effective and efficient in utilizing an already existing network of supervision. In adopting the technologies of observation the community entered the “field of knowledge” about the present as well as the future sexual well-being of the population. In this system of welfare administration, the prostitutes watched over themselves and others. The objective of observation was projected as an act of assurance for each other’s health and earnings, while medical examination and treatment of diseases became a form of care. To watch was to care, and caring was a mode of watching. Efficient implementation produced an ambience where the watched felt obliged to respond to the initiative of the care provider and to modify their behavior. As a consequence, regular health checkups were undertaken almost as a voluntary response by the prostitutes. Apart from sexual health, the availability of medical service

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While claiming workers’ rights, the prostitutes did not ask for better work conditions or job security; their contention was assertion of agency, proclamation of human rights,

for children and the aged helped convince the prostitutes, over their clients’ objections, to insist on using contraceptives as safe-sex devices. This enhanced the opportunity for NGOs to organize meetings for promoting condom usage as well as health checkups for willing male partners. The site of intervention was no more the body alone; observation over sexual norms and regulation of conduct became the focus rather than mere physical examination of the body. Restrictions were imposed when sexual behavior conducive to infection was identified. Inclusion of prostitutes within AIDS prevention policy was extended to other aspects as well. State-run hospitals and clinics admitted women without asking them to disclose their identities, resulting in the replacement of clandestine clinics and unsafe abortion chambers. Strikingly, condom use—a male contraceptive—became a proxy to ensure safe-sex practice among prostitutes. This indicated the priority given to prevention of sexually transmitted infections rather than reproductive health or right to use contraceptives for prostitute women. The peer educators counted on the distribution of condoms (initially cost free) to raise awareness of STDs and contain the spread of HIV infection within the community. Thus the possession of a safe and disease-free body became crucial in achieving a worker-status for the prostitutes.

and equality with Response of the Prostitutes

other workers.

In the postcolonial era, prostitute women were no longer passive objects of inquiry. They used the campaign against the AIDS epidemic “creatively” by organizing themselves to fight daily oppression without the help of the government, the medical community, or the women’s movement. They pushed the state welfare agenda beyond health claims to resist unfair legal practices, regular police raids in brothels, and frequent arrests of prostitutes for nonpayment of protection money. They advocated for licensing of prostitution, repeal of the ITP Act, and formation of a self-regulatory board for controlling entry into the profession. In the charter of demands, in the public meetings, in the pamphlets issued, prostitutes formulated their right to self-determination through slogans that said: “Sex work is real work, we demand worker’s rights”; “We earn our bread from physical labor, and want to be recognized as wage labor”; and so on. While claiming workers’ rights, the prostitutes did not ask for better work conditions or job security; their contention was assertion of agency, proclamation of human rights, and equality with other workers. The prostitutes acted as a collective. The most common metaphor that they used while referring to their forum was family. They did not

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want to pursue individual interests of community members in terms of property or legal problems and relied on the intimate bonds of kinship while voicing their concerns through the forum. The forum organized collective action against police harassment and unjustified arrests in the red-light areas of the suburban pockets where prostitutes were yet to get organized. The forum announced its opposition to child prostitution and took the responsibility as the familial head to send minor girls back to their parents in the villages. The social welfare component of the forum’s activity proposed the inclusion of nonformal education centers, drop-in centers for children, and vocational training for the aged and the retired, apart from the regular activity of organizing sports, coaching classes, and cultural functions for children. The forum arranged for loans from their cooperative for the aged prostitutes, looked after HIV-infected members, and arranged for treatment as attempts toward better living. The forum was also a body through which the community negotiated with the outside world. The leaders of political parties, academicians, artists, and media celebrities sympathetic to the prostitutes’ cause were often invited to participate and express solidarity with the family of prostitutes. The forum organized rallies and peace meetings, inviting representatives of other associations of prostitutes and NGOs across the country, even if they were hostile to its stand. The forum organized processions and sit-in demonstrations in support of the brothel prostitutes against police atrocities in the neighboring country of Bangladesh. They supported and submitted memorandums on common agendas with leftist trade unions against the economic measures of the structural adjustment program of the central government. The forum invented strategies to interact with various state agencies such as the police, the labor commission, and the legal services cell that were instrumental for implementing welfare measures, and influenced them to sensitize their personnel through training programs. They proposed the formation of a self-regulatory board including representatives of the National Commission for Women, National Human Rights Commission, Social Welfare Ministry, and the local Councilor. In the process, the prostitutes emerged as a conspicuous community negotiating their claims with the state. In claiming workers’ rights, the prostitutes were seeking legal equality with other workers. While making their demands, the prostitutes did not stake their identities to sexuality but to work. In their pattern of negotiation, they demanded entry to civil society as nonstigmatized women workers. Their strategy of negotiation with the state included the modern rhetoric of autonomy and right to collective bargaining of a worker within organized labor. The demand for the right to work implied an erasure of the moral stigma associated with the profession and entry into civil society as

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universal worker. It was a democratic claim seeking a change of the conventional gender meanings and social relations of prostitution, to be achieved with state support and sanction. The state’s dubious stand on prostitution was exposed to a large extent in its mode of interaction.17 The strength of the collective was that the state could neither ignore the demands for inclusion nor accept the claim of the prostitutes, univocally. Outside the domain of civil society, the marginalized community of prostitutes acquired a political language to negotiate on its own terms with the state. The emergence of the sex worker as speaking subject seeking political identity was a novel turn in this period. The prostitutes came into the limelight and the elite cultural space lent a hearing to their stories. The prostitutes were invited to participate in seminars and conventions at academic institutions, while the media sympathized with the subservient position of the stigmatized, marginal sex worker. Within a short span of time, a number of literary works mushroomed with prostitute women as protagonists trying to voice their claims for entry into the mainstream. Public opinion began to favor replacing the profane and immoral image of the prostitute by that of a healthy, disease-free sex worker. The prostitutes were claiming to have achieved a new subject position by voicing their needs within their immediate public sphere, although they never questioned their social and moral quarantine.

Subject Formation The subject-formation process for the prostitute was complex. She remained a lesser citizen when it came to the state’s attempts at modernization. The everyday practice of citizenship already excluded the prostitute. Prostitutes were “citizens” with voting rights without the voters’ identity cards essential to exercise the right. They could not dwell anywhere in the city’s residential areas as independent, rent-paying tenants because they practiced “immoral activities on commercial terms.” Their freedom of movement was physically restricted within the red-light zones. Children of prostitutes were refused admission to both public and private schools. Often a fake name of the father of the child had to be stated in school admission forms. If the mother chose to disclose the nature of her occupation, the child was socially ostracized. Prostitutes were required to produce a certificate of “good moral character” when they participated in mainstream activities, such as opening a bank account or starting a cooperative for themselves. Prostitutes were citizens with rights denied and workers with moral stigmas. Yet in selecting the language of rights, the popular movement of prostitutes wanted to establish their claims for

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equality. In the assertion of collective rights the gendered group of workers was seeking an engagement with the state and law. The struggle was for erasure of the moral stigma associated with the profession and for sharing the universal status of labor with others in the workforce. While the prostitute longed for the position of the subject-citizen in civil society, she belonged to a world of subjection through economic, political, and cultural processes. The fact that she could be brought under governmental health schemes and approached by NGOs indicated that she did not belong to the unreachable domain of the subaltern. The liberal, paternalist state included her in the welfare agenda, and she was not barred from participating in rights movements, if not as part of organized labor, then as individual subjects. But despite being able to name her price in the market and voice her demands, she did not enjoy the kind of autonomy typically bestowed on the bearers of productive labor. Although being able to act collectively and having gained a presence as a political agent, the prostitute did not have the power to assert her claim either as a worker or as a citizen. The prostitute was produced and constituted through a process of exclusion that operated at a different plane. Inclusion into state welfare schemes evidently wiped away the social rejections, while the nature of her work posited her as nonproductive, social refuse. The prostitute was not a sexual minority at work having a clear “erotic preference”18 but rather a sexual worker, her livelihood evolving from sexual performance with a partner in exchange for money—a sex worker with work underlined. She was the complex of an outcast worker offering nonreproductive, heterosexual service (pleasure) to be consumed on the site of her body through the market. The body as the site of work and consumption was a significant marker of difference in the prostitute’s case. She had to deliver pleasure in compliance with the desire of another. She lived at the cost of letting others use her body in consensual sexual activity as the only option available to her. Her work violated her self and impinged on a personal zone of her being mediated through the body. The oppression resulting from the instrumentality of body and sexuality in work is distinct from the subjugation to capital shared by a worker. The surplus meaning of her body over and above that of labor power discerns her. The prostitute is thus different from other workers even without the moral implications of her work. Remaining tied to her body was specific to the work she performed, and this bodilyness led to abjection and subservience not found in any other labor form. Involvement in collective bargaining, therefore, could not empower her at work or salvage an impersonal self of a citizen. The postcolonial prostitute identity was thus constituted by the aspirations for a subject-citizen and the actuality of an overtly sexual entity.

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In effect she was part political subject aspiring for subject-citizen status through workers’ rights and part empirical subject with the concreteness of her bodily existence. While the former would grant her universal worker status, her particularity barred her from being “dis-incorporated” as required by the protocols of citizenship.19 Her position may best be described as that of the subaltern-citizen. The bodilyness of her being that could not be represented as individualized entity excluded her as a citizen. The “politics of citizenship” are uneven and do not allow for the incorporation of her body’s positivity as a subject-citizen. The prostitute was always already excluded. Thus she remained within and beyond the reach of liberation; beyond the efforts of modernity and yet constituted by it. 20 She was a metropolitan subaltern in partiality, “outside the reach of organized labor, below the attempted reversal of capital logic,” and yet being constituted by them. 21 This is where she shared the traits of the unique position of a subaltern-citizen.

Conclusion The colonial state attempted to transform the traditional lifestyles of the community of women who lived by sexual activity into substantive entities in themselves through application of medical science and statistics. The postcolonial perspective projected a homogeneous category of healthy sex workers. The prostitutes were eager participants of health programs and responded further by demanding workers’ rights. Such attempts at negotiation with the welfare state and demands for inclusion as subjectcitizen could be achieved without coercive regulation, not conceivable during the colonial period. An elaborate system of surveillance operated over the prostitutes with the obvious aim to promote their sexual wellbeing. Extending beyond enumeration of the regular prostitutes, changes in the behavioral pattern and regulation over sexual norms were achieved through counseling, caring, and watching. The most significant aspect of monitoring was to create a spontaneous response toward watching. Watching as a form of care was initiated, where to watch was to care, to provide care and extend a helping hand to those wanting to be cared for. While caring was a means of effecting well-being, the watch-care system became a novel mechanism for enhanced monitoring of bodies and behavior. Thus the prostitute’s body was rendered as the target, object, and instrument of power and knowledge, acted on by health care systems generating and collating information. The precondition for her subject position as sex worker was the disease-free, laboring body, which made her susceptible to refi ned and improved techniques of

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surveillance and control of bodies. Power did not confront sexuality from outside but was able to gain a hold on bodies by regulating sexual behavior and standardizing sexual norms through the watch-care system. In this way power was productive of the subaltern-citizen under surveillance, a process that subjected the prostitute’s body to power and delimited her subject formation. The prostitute remained an internal other of the heterosexual domain and even promised to serve better with a healthy, robust body. But her embeddedness in her body denied her a role in liberal democracy. This aspirant to the world of rights was subjected to constant othering, deprived of the disincorporated, individualized presence with the right of entry into civil society. The extension of universal rights for the female prostitute could not, therefore, erase the marks of exclusion despite an apparently shared equality with other workers. She remained within and beyond the reach of modernity in this decolonized space.

Notes I wish to thank Richard Maxwell for his encouragement and suggestions. I would also like to thank Anirban Das and Brati Sankar Chakraborty for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article. 1. Roy Boyne, “Post-Panopticism,” Economy and Society 29 (2000): 285–307. 2. Ratnabali Chatterjee, The Queen’s Daughters: Prostitutes as an Outcast Group in Colonial India (Bergen, Fantoft, Norway: Chr. Michelsen Institute, Department of Social Science and Development, 1992), 15; Sumanta Banerjee, Dangerous Outcasts: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Calcutta: Seagull, 1998), 61; Prabha Koteswaran, “Preparing for Civil Disobedience: Indian Sex Workers and the Law,” Boston College Third World Law Journal 21 (2001): 205–6. 3. Chatterjee, Queen’s Daughters, 11. 4. Elizabeth Andrew and Kate Bushnell, The Queen’s Daughters in India (London: Morgan and Scott, 1899), cited in Chatterjee, Queen’s Daughters, 15. 5. Biswanath Joardar, Prostitution in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Calcutta (New Delhi: Inter-India, 1985), 25–37; Banerjee, Dangerous Outcasts, 93. 6. Chatterjee, Queen’s Daughters, 9. 7. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 8. Swati Ghosh, “White Nights in Bengal,” from the margins (August 2000): 92–112. 9. Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993), 34–37; Janaki Nair, “Nationalist Patriarchy and the Regulation of Sexuality,” Women Law and Colonial India: A Social History (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992), 171.

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10. Banerjee, Dangerous Outcasts, 126–37. 11. Sandip Bandopadhyay, “Swadhinatar Andolone Barbonitara,” Bratya Jibaner Barnamala (Calcutta: Seriban, 1999), 76–79. 12. The aim of the legislation was “to inhibit or abolish commercialized vice namely, the traffic in women and girls for the purpose of prostitution as an organized means of living” (preamble to the 1956 version of the act). Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, No. 104, of 1956 is commonly known as PITA since its amendment in 1986. The ITPA merely extended the SITA’s application to both women and men and increased the punishment for certain offenses. There was no reformulation of policy under the amendment, fi rst in 1978 and later in 1986. However, the act punished anyone maintaining a brothel (section 3), living off the earnings of a prostitute (section 4), procuring a woman for prostitution (section 5 and 6), practicing prostitution in the vicinity, 200 meters, of public place (section 7), or soliciting (section 8). A woman could, however, carry on prostitution on her own within her premise without it being considered a criminal act. 13. Linda Singer, Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic (New York: Routledge, 1993), 6. 14. The different terms used to describe a sex worker such as the beshya (the prostitute), barbonita (the public woman), patita (the fallen), baaiji (the royal court musician and dancer), ganika (the courtesan), barangana (the accomplished courtesan), randi (the low-class woman of the bazaar), khanki (the scandalized woman), or even the more recent liner-meye (the line-girl) were homogenized under the umbrella term sex worker. 15. World Bank, Confronting AIDS: Public Priorities in a Global Epidemic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 259–65. 16. Among the city-based local NGOs in Kolkata involved with the prostitutes, initially Mahila Samanwaya Committee and later Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), supported by the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, were liberal in their stand and were proponents of decriminalization. They concentrated on the rights denied to prostitutes and aimed at decriminalization through legalization as the fi rst step. Soon the DMSC started proclaiming prostitutes’ autonomy and, in a fashion similar to the postmodern sex-radical position, called for the empowerment of prostitutes in the workplace, something that was lacking even for an Indian housewife. (See Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994]). DMSC considered prostitutes to be entertainment artists and formed solidarity with male sex workers. NGOs such as Sanlaap, Jabala, and a few other women’s organizations shared the radical feminist stand that defi ned prostitution as “law of male sex right” and female sexuality to be a construct of male desire. They thought that there were already enough laws and that legalization would lead to further commodification of women. 17. The DMSC wanted to repeal the ITP Act. ITPA allowed for oppression of all prostitutes subject to police regulation and harassment for soliciting. Section 15 allowed the police to conduct raids on brothels without a warrant based on the mere belief that an offense under ITPA was being committed. Amending ITPA to achieve partial decriminalization was still far away, as suggested by Jean D’Cunha and Ratna Kapur, pioneers in the field of policy research on prostitutes (Koteswaran, “Preparing for Civil Disobedience,” 192–93). The response of the government was to commission studies by the National Commission for Women,

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to organize workshops, and to initiate networking with the member nations of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC) on the trafficking of women across the border. Child prostitution was being banned and legally enforced. However, recommendations of the National Law School, Bangalore, about reform of ITPA were not consulted. In 1989 the law reform initiatives undertaken by the central government formulated and “nearly passed a loathsome and potentially discriminative” AIDS Prevention Bill (233). The National AIDS Control Organization later drafted a national AIDS policy that was “more progressive” (234) and characterized the issue as more than a simple public health measure during its HIV prevention efforts. 18. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 286. 19. Vivek Dhareshwar and R. Srivatsan, “Rowdy Sheeters: An Essay on Subalternity and Politics,” Subaltern Studies 9 (1996): 201–31. Dhareshwar and Srivatsan use the concept of dis-incorporation to explain the “politics of citizenship” operating in the context of the “rowdy sheeter” (one with multiple convictions—or a long rap sheet—for public rowdiness) who was excluded because of the largerthan-life image that he created about himself to maintain the positivity of his body. His attachment to body was high and not disentangling, and therefore did not possess the privilege of being “dis-incorporated” for the norms of citizenship. 20. For the prostitute it created confl icts and ambiguities. The strain was contained in presenting a confused version of an abused/empowered self while relating her lived experiences that were far-off from the official proclamations of empowerment. The narrative relating to personal histories of the prostitutes at Sonagachhi depicts her fallen and victim status (interview-based survey undertaken by author, 2002), while newsletters and bulletins emphasize the prostitute’s role as an entertainer and comfort-giver (see Sohagnama, the monthly bulletin of the DMSC, January–February 1999; and the DMSC report, Namaskar, 1998). 21. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Woman in Difference: Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Douloti the Bountiful,’ ” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 96–117.

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Resisting Surveillance

If you ever visit the remote hills and hollows that make up the far southeastern corner of Appalachian Ohio, you will fi nd the poorest counties in the state. There will be roads you can barely drive on, schools that are chronically underfunded, and legions of people who are unemployed or consigned to jobs that lack the income and benefits needed for a secure life. Because of the structural poverty of the region, many families receive help from the state’s Department of Job and Family Services, formally called the Department of Human Services and known by everyone but the bureaucrats as “the welfare office.” When people turn to the welfare office in Ohio, they meet CRIS-E— the Client Registry Information System—Enhanced. A computerized information management system of awesome reach and power, CRIS-E runs the show. It leads frontline agency workers through an intake and assessment interview as it prompts all questions and demands answers about household makeup, living patterns, sexual relations, fi nances, employment, schooling, and so on. CRIS-E then combines and assesses all of this information and makes decisions about program eligibility. CRIS-E goes on to manage the many fraud control measures undertaken by state and federal authorities—number matches with IRS and Social Security data, with workers’ compensation and unemployment programs, with the various pension funds, and others. If any concerns turn up, or a scheduled meeting is due, CRIS-E sends a letter to agency clients instructing them when and where to report. If CRIS-E fi nds a problem or discovers a crime, the sanctions can result in a warning, termination, or a jail cell. CRIS-E is a surveillance system that matters. As a statewide matrix that unites virtually all programs dealing with lower-income families into one system of assessment, monitoring, enforcement, and sanction, CRIS-E mobilizes and solidifies an official framework for managing the poor in Ohio. Under its reign, the poor face a level and intensity of directly targeted surveillance that relatively few of us may currently experience but that we can expect to see more of in the coming years. Our research project exploring life under CRIS-E grew out of a conviction that we actually know very little about the experiences and understandings of the surveilled.1 Until quite recently, almost all research

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on how people perceive and respond to surveillance has been limited to mechanistic opinion surveys and by the assumption that the issue in the politics of surveillance was the venerable right to privacy. Instead, this project sought to assess the life of a surveillance subject that in a way did not presume what the languages, concerns, and responses would be but, rather, set out to explore these very questions in a manner as unstructured and unlimiting as possible. The essay at hand draws on those fi ndings to focus on the questions surrounding opposition and resistance: How, if at all, do people struggle with, evade, combat, trick, criticize, undermine, or otherwise speak and act out the confl ict that they must inevitably have with a system that enacts such manifest and consequential control over their lives? The answers we found suggest that if you ever do visit Appalachian Ohio, you will not encounter picketers with signs reading “Welfare Moms against Big Brother.” You will not fi nd a staff of activist attorneys preparing litigation strategies. You will not fi nd a field office for any of the national privacy rights groups. But you will fi nd, I argue, a widespread pattern of unorganized resistance to surveillance in which several important things are happening: • The welfare mothers we spoke with engage in an array of tactics to evade and thwart the detection and control of the surveillance system. • They voice a widely shared critique of the goals and practices of the surveillance program. Their critique breaks with the conventional grounds of the right-to-privacy arguments to advance tangible concerns about food, shelter, and the welfare of their children. • Their tactical efforts strengthen the values of the critique, challenge the powers of the surveillance system, and produce tangible improvements in their families’ lives.

In short, what we found was a dense pattern of unconventional and seldom-noticed politics through which an internally coherent combination of ideology and action advanced the interests of these families and thwarted the mission of the surveillance regime.

The Unorganized Opposition The fi ndings reported here are not based on a comprehensive survey or national analysis of opinions on surveillance policy. To the contrary, our exploration of the issues was motivated by a concern that such surveys—which are so limited and limiting in their options—were failing to

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get anything close to a meaningful picture of how everyday people think and speak about surveillance in their lives. The path chosen here was one that leads through the local community and emphasizes approaching a conversation about surveillance in the most informal and everyday terms that can be achieved while still undertaking research. Field interviews with fi fty welfare mothers were undertaken by local women who were themselves long-standing clients of the system until shortly before the project began. In open-ended one- to two-hour conversations under conditions of anonymity, the women told us about their lives under CRIS-E and the welfare bureaucracy. Although the system got some credit for speeding up the processing of forms, the complaints came fast and hard. “Too nosy.” “Degrading.” “I feel like a number.” “They make you feel like a dog.” “It drives you crazy.” “It seems like they want to know too much.” A mother of two, who chose the pseudonym “Moonstar,” had been on assistance for the twelve years since the closing of a major governmental facility ended her career. Here, she echoes many women as she voices her feelings about the information demands of the welfare system: Moonstar: Well, they want to know everything. I mean everything. How many people you got living with you—and that’s nobody’s business. How much rent you pay. How much utilities you pay and if you can’t pay it, then that’s tough luck. They put everything on this big screen and anybody and everybody can look right there on that big screen and say, “Oh look at this.” Cindy (interviewer): Can anybody fi nd out this information on you? M: I think they could, I think they really could. C: How does that make you feel? M: Well, I feel cheap when I walk in there. I feel that everybody’s looking at me and like she ain’t got no job, she’s dirty and I just feel worse when I go in there and come out than I did going there. I don’t like asking for help but I had to. And I just don’t like it and I should have got off it a long time ago because I don’t like everybody knowing me too good.

The complaints were clear, pervasive, and multifaceted. But it is important to stress that Moonstar and the other women went well beyond talk. Along with the complaining, these women and many of the others took action against the surveillance in their lives. They did not sue, they did not march, they did not boycott, and they did not join the ACLU. What they did was to become artful managers of their fi nancial lives—creating ways to come up with necessary (and forbidden) extra income without triggering the surveillance system. Some babysat for cash, others mowed lawns, cut hair, sold crafts, or cleaned houses. Still others took unreported

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support from relatives, lovers, or the fathers of their children. Some had living arrangements in which homes or apartments were secretly shared. The list goes on. As Moonstar explains: The only way that you can make it, if you make it, is by working under the table. Welfare don’t give you enough money to barely make it and you have to do little things just to keep your head afloat. I have no money in the end because I pay all the money. I have no money at the end. And the ADC is supposed to be for dependent children. How can I take care of my kids when I have got to pay everything in the household and not have no money to take care of my children? I have to go out and make a little extra money because I don’t get enough to support my family, pay the bills, and be able to buy my kids shoes. If I have to go out and mow a yard for $10 that will get my kids extra shoes. Because my bills takes all of my money, every bit of it.

From what Moonstar and other women told us, getting a family of four through the month on the state’s allowance of, at that time, a little over four hundred dollars was next to impossible. 2 Making things worse was the fact that state regulations at the time either forbade any extra income or made the reporting and surveillance system about allowable income prohibitively risky and cumbersome. So when the mothers did what they had to do—fi nd extra cash and keep it secret—they placed themselves at odds with the law and at odds with one of the most advanced fi nancial surveillance systems of its time. The mothers’ defi ance of the rules and besting of the system through petty fraud, subterfuge, and other tactics manifests a pattern of “everyday resistance” to the surveillance regime. 3 As James Scott explains in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, everyday resistance encompasses “the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth.”4 He continues, “When a peasant hides part of his crop to avoid paying taxes, he is both fi lling his stomach and depriving the state of gain. . . . When such acts are rare and isolated, they are of little interest; but when they become a consistent pattern (even though uncoordinated, let alone organized) we are dealing with resistance. The intrinsic nature and, in one sense, the ‘beauty’ of much peasant resistance is that it often confers immediate and concrete advantages, while at the same time denying resources to the appropriating classes, and that it requires little or no manifest organization.”5 Here we hit on a new way of thinking about age-old practices of noncompliance, masking, misrepresentation, and other ways to beat the system. In situations where these activities work to defy the goals of the surveillance program by evading detection and engaging in forbidden or

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regulated behaviors, they have to be understood as a form of antisurveillance politics. Moving beyond the welfare context, we emphasize that these are not necessarily laudable politics, for many nasty things are done in hiding. Nor is it to argue that any instance of noncompliance is necessarily a significant political phenomenon. Rather, it is to argue that in a society in which surveillance increasingly becomes the defi ning face of government and corporate influence and domination, resisting surveillance programs becomes one key way for citizens to express and act on their disagreement with the norms and rules of the state. And when that resistance becomes sufficiently widespread to be recognized as a pattern in the lives of large numbers of people, it becomes hard not to recognize it as a significant movement on the political landscape. Welfare mothers lack the political influence to raise their allowance through legislative change—but they have the personal resources to do it on their own. Middle-class families cannot rewrite the laws of Medicare eligibility, but they can learn to shift assets to achieve what are effectively the same ends. All around us, the demands of various systems of regulation and enforcement create webs of control and power. These systems seek to monitor, channel, identify, sanction, and reward according to established norms and goals. When we see that individuals are able to assert their autonomy and opposition through these millions of small skirmishes, we must conclude that a massive, underground, uncoordinated, antisurveillance movement is underway.

The Politics of Everyday Resistance But just how widespread are the patterns of everyday resistance to surveillance programs? When employee drug-testing programs came online in the mid-1980s, small companies emerged selling “clean urine” through magazines and newspapers. When police began using radar to catch speeders, drivers began installing radar detectors. When the Internal Revenue Service develops profi les used to identify those who will be audited, tax advisers, newspapers, and Web sites broadcast the parameters of those profi les in a very public manner. Herds of tax attorneys and preparers assist middle-class and wealthy families as well as businesses in shirking, as much as possible, the obligations of taxation and besting the surveillance systems designed to implement those obligations. Thus, in these ongoing battles to prepare and divide the pie of national fi nance, the welfare mothers do nothing different from what many typical families would do, and they do it from a position of greater need and risk and with less advice and support.

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When viewed from this perspective, there are millions upon millions of people throughout the industrialized world engaged in widespread and diverse types of opposition and resistance to surveillance regimes. Depending on class, context, and circumstance, some get more formal, public, and organized while others must necessarily remain personal, private, and solitary. Some types of resistance—like the upper-middle-class tax shirker—are tolerated, even smiled on, by political leaders. Others, like the poor women here, are vilified and hunted. In all these different contexts and manners, the politics of surveillance are played out daily. It is here, rather than in the official arenas of the courts, legislatures, and blue-ribbon commissions, that the most important and dynamic politics of surveillance may be taking place. These recognitions and possibilities mean that we should take particular interest in how practices of everyday resistance work as forms of politics. There is a danger that depicting something like petty fraud as a vital form of politics may well mistakenly amplify insignificant gestures, place false hope in tiny acts of individual defi ance, and give inappropriate, if implicit, approval to what are often selfi sh and destructive acts.6 In his 1992 presidential address to the Law and Society Association and his subsequent article “Postmodernism, Protest, and the New Social Movements,” Joel Handler distinguished between different generations of scholarly studies about these “protests from below”—the struggles of relatively powerless groups such as American slaves, welfare families, and impoverished individuals. The fi rst generation consists of such authors as Eugene Genovese, Carol Stack, Frances Fox Piven, and Richard Cloward; the second, authors like Susan Silbey, Patricia Ewick, Austin Sarat, and Lucie White.7 All of them share an interest in everyday resistance as a form of politics. But where the fi rst generation centered on how the politics of everyday resistance lead to the building of bonds, solidarity, and new terms and languages that could, in turn, lead to new forms of empowerment and mobilization, the second generation, charged Handler, was bent on deconstructionism and symbolic action and kept its attention on individualistic acts of defiance and opposition with little concern or attention paid to what Handler saw as pivotal questions of solidarity, organized politics, material outcomes, and new opportunities. 8 Handler’s critique urged scholars to undertake a more complete critical examination of everyday resistance as a form of political struggle. This essay does this by considering the following questions. • Do acts of everyday resistance produce any tangible improvements in the lot of the resister or of others? • Are acts of everyday resistance purely the isolated tactics of self-interested, even antisocial, individuals?

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• Is there any sort of sharing or collaboration that could be laying the groundwork for new forms of communities or politics? • Is there an ethical grounding or ideology within which to frame resistant practices?

Assessing Everyday Resistance In the end, the everyday resistance seen among the Appalachian welfare poor formed a pattern of widespread behavior that produced or supported an array of important material and symbolic results, including cash and other necessities of survival, a status of autonomy, a potentially powerful collective consciousness of the struggle of welfare mothering, and a strategic opposition to and undermining of surveillance mechanisms. The fi rst payoff is the most straightforward; the women studied here get immediate and crucial cash or material relief through their efforts. While we have no specific fi ndings on exactly how much that is, it is, for many of these families, what makes it possible to get by. Kathryn Edin’s 1993 study of welfare family budgets in Chicago found that women roughly doubled their resources in these ways. Obviously, this is a massive and critical source of material improvement for the poor. Indeed, one could argue that while these women are powerless to change formal government policy about levels of income maintenance on welfare programs, they have effected a local and personalized change in the policy by taking charge of their own conditions. For them, their subterfuge means that allowable levels of income have been effectively raised. Through their necessarily quiet actions, they have achieved what would be one of the central goals of a more organized social movement for welfare justice: more income. This may call to question some of our fi xation on the questions of whether everyday resistance can lead to more formal collective action, which could then lead to “real” change. With neither picket signs nor a head office, real change is taking place in the lives of these individuals. It is not “permanent”; it is not, at least in the traditional sense, “collective”; it is not centralized reform of the state apparatus. But out at the margins, in the lives of these people, it is a change that makes a crucial difference. The struggle for material subsistence also produces less tangible but nonetheless important results. For one, resistance marks and maintains a zone of autonomy and self-determination that denies the clients’ status as dependent. The poor are neither “wards” of the state nor the “welfare dependent” when they are out hustling to pull together enough money to get through the month. They are partially freed from the oversight of CRIS-E and their caseworker as they enact a strategy that, whatever else

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In that the welfare administration demands that a client open her life to them in the form of income verification, computer matches, and other tactics in what can only be called a fullscale surveillance assault, her secret actions are an act of resistance to the very structure of the surveillance society.

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may be said about it, makes them the initiators of an array of entrepreneurial pursuits. As Sarat has argued, this is a critical aspect of resistance by the welfare poor; those moments “in which welfare recipients . . . demand recognition of their personal identities and their human needs” or “establish unreachable spaces of personal identity and integrity.” 9 Their struggles also, importantly, put the lie to assumptions and claims that they are bad parents, are lazy or incompetent, or lack initiative—through their works they care for their children with creative and risky labor in a hidden low-wage market. There is another important sense in which the ongoing pattern of income enhancement works as an important front and form of political resistance—this has to do with the relationship of the surveilled subject to the surveillance state. In that the welfare administration demands that a client open her life to them in the form of income verification, computer matches, and other tactics in what can only be called a full-scale surveillance assault, her secret actions are an act of resistance to the very structure of the surveillance society. The welfare system works as hard as it can to force that secret out of her. It will solicit “rat calls” in an attempt to get neighbors and relatives to expose the situation. It will use computer matching searches to check bank accounts, social security payments, and other searchable databases disclosing records. This is, in short, a power struggle over the compulsory visibility of the welfare poor. The surveillance mechanisms of the state are mechanisms of domination that seek to force the poor into the open, prevent them from augmenting their meager allowance with entrepreneurial pursuits, and, as a result, disempower them by closing off more and more of the secret places in which to hide, at least temporarily, from the power of the state. To the extent that the poor can maintain those spaces, augment their income, and assert the needs and values of their own identities, they have won a temporary but not so small victory in the broader struggle. These are all important political effects. But taking stock of the promising dimensions of a politics of everyday resistance does not imply that more formal and public politics would not be a more preferential and heartening course (and one that might even be more effective at achieving some of these ends). It is also not meant to imply that there are no costs. There are, of course, potential costs, risks, and drawbacks in all political choices. Many of the actions taken by these women are crimes, and they may be caught and punished. More broadly, politicians may use evidence of “welfare fraud” to reduce support and advance even more draconian measures of surveillance. All of this may happen. But the tactical comparisons of such cost-benefit analyses overstate the extent to which relatively powerless people can pick and choose from a menu of political options. For

John Gilliom

these poor women, the pressure is on and the resources are slim. Most of their choices are shaped by social, legal, economic, and political contexts over which they have little control—these contexts, after all, are far more affected by the interests and desires of the powerful than they are by those of the sorts of people who turn to the “weapons of the weak.”

The Lonely Struggle? The idea of everyday resistance centers on what is apparently the opposite of a traditional picture of collective action—an isolated, often secret act in pursuit of personal, even selfi sh, goals. But the contrasts may not be so clear. The practices of everyday resistance may not amount to a classic social movement, but what we have seen here is a form of politics that, while fragmented and dispersed, is by no means individualistic or selfi sh. First, I want to suggest three ways in which the resistance seen here is not “individualistic.” Surely, these women have not locked arms in a collective march to the state capital, but there are alternatives to traditional collective action other than a full retreat into the self. Because structural and institutional arrays of power help shape the opportunities for resistance, the resistance of those who, like these women, face a largely uniform pattern of law, surveillance, domination, and need, is, if not collective, widely shared. They may, in other words, seem to be “individualistic,” but they are not alone, as there are legions of others experiencing the same pressures and engaging in the same actions. If we can momentarily ignore the organizer’s cry to “get these people united,” we can see that there are already tacit collectivities in place. Second, although public cooperation is limited because of the need for secrecy regarding these often illegal activities, we found clear evidence of mutual support and cooperation among the mothers.10 Most apparent is the amount of conversation and advising that goes on among clients about how to “work the system” or “play the game.” Of the thirty-one interviews that had discussions of this issue, twenty-six women reported that they talked with other welfare clients about how the system works, who the good caseworkers were, and what programs were available. Eleven of those reported getting or giving advice on how to generate extra income or get away with it without getting caught. One woman spoke of a group of neighbors who would use each other as references in required verification forms. In the face of conditions that seem to compel distrust and secrecy, we still see important signs of solidarity. Finally, but perhaps most important, these women—like most of

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These stories are replete with references to mothering, child

us—are far from alone in that their actions are designed to meet the needs and interests of their families. Importantly, as discussed below, the mothers explain their actions in terms of supporting their families. Collective action? Not in the traditional sense. But as they struggle to care for their families, they are surrounded by millions of other low-income mothers, by the occasional helping hand from a sympathetic caseworker, neighbor, or family member, and by the very needy hands of their children.

care, the need Beyond Privacy—The Principles of Resistance

to provide for children, and the widely shared conviction that any actions taken in the interest of children are legitimate— including, for many, patently illegal actions.

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“Delilah” is forty-one. She has two children and two grandchildren living in a rural home that she owns. In her sixteen years using various assistance programs, she has tried many ways to make ends meet—once trying to sell Tupperware until her ex-husband turned her in. These days, she cuts hair and says that her friends sell food stamps, fi rewood, and scrap metal. She explains: “I think as long as someone is using what they are doing for their home, or they are buying something that their kids need, I don’t see anything wrong with it. If they are going out and they are doing it and they are boozing it up and they are using drugs, I think that’s a shame.” As another mother said: “If you have kids, you will do anything for your kids. I mean, I do. So it’s not really illegal.” These stories are replete with references to mothering, child care, the need to provide for children, and the widely shared conviction that any actions taken in the interest of children are legitimate—including, for many, patently illegal actions.11 One of the most interesting things we noticed in our interviews was the near absence of claims to privacy rights in the women’s complaints about surveillance. Given the failures and limits of the predominant privacy rights discourse, the identification of alternative ways of complaining about surveillance suggested new possibilities for critique and action. That we were able to identify new framings and ethical positions from which to criticize surveillance indicates that the privacy rights paradigm is both too limited—because it fails to address these concerns—and not the only show in town.12 But these alternative ways of complaining about surveillance are also important to a discussion of everyday resistance, because they show that the women’s actions are framed within a sensible and compelling moral argument. Skeptical readers of works on everyday resistance have noted the frequent absence of something that we might hope to see in political struggles—principles: some form of broader argument or ethic that positions and explains the actions of the oppressed and the wrongs of the

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oppressors while building the possibility of shared consciousness. Isolated acts of opportunistic self-expression or petty thievery that make no contribution to building a vision of a more promising world, they argue, should not get more attention or significance than they deserve.13 But here we see patterns of everyday resistance that are neither unprincipled nor unrelated to broader political critiques. While the mothers studied here do not regularly quote the Bill of Rights or make speeches about the right to privacy, many of them do make consistently principled arguments about need, duty, and obligation and explain their actions and their critique of the state in terms of those principles. Similar complaints about the welfare surveillance regime and explanations for resistance mark many of these interviews. This fi nding shows that there is a shared frame of reference—an ideology of caring or parenting within a context of need—behind the seemingly discrete and apolitical actions of women in the welfare system. Although they are not united spatially, politically, or socially, the women interviewed here do share economic, institutional, and familial identities, and we can see that they also share a unified framework of language and values with which to mobilize their critiques and actions.14 In the conditions and contexts in which they live—united by abusive practices in welfare administration, family obligations, poverty, and rural life—it is not hard to understand how an individualistic privacy claim based in the nobility of a law would fail to make sense. In lives surrounded by the obligations of meeting both the needs of families and the commands of the surveillance system, the ideal of the autonomous and rights-bearing individual must be rather far from the tip of tongue. In many critical dimensions, then, these women’s lives, roles, experiences, and values appear to gravitate away from the assertion of individualistic rights and toward the focus on responsibility and care. The sense of disempowerment tied to their fear, distrust, and alienation from “the law” struggles with the reality of their situations in which something is wrong and something must be done about it. Rather than publicly objecting to the infringement of their rights as citizens, they quietly meet the needs of their dependents through daily actions that defy the commands of the state while advancing the needs of the family.

Conclusion These stories show that in welfare administration and numerous other settings there are widespread uprisings against surveillance. They are often (and sometimes necessarily) out of sight; they are not always expressed

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Several women spoke of the horrible stress of keeping their secrets and fearing apprehension; beyond the stress lies the real possibility of apprehension

in the expected language of privacy; they do not look like social movements are “supposed” to look. But they are, nonetheless, important and frequently productive expressions of frustration, opposition, and political energy. This accounting of the senses in which everyday resistance advances the interests of these women is not meant to gainsay the power of the surveillance program with which the poor must live—our interviews made it clear that ongoing record keeping, observation, and verification manifest a considerable and fearsome presence in their lives. Several women spoke of the horrible stress of keeping their secrets and fearing apprehension; beyond the stress lies the real possibility of apprehension and sanction. Further, the subterfuge and deception necessitated by the comprehensive enforcement system means that many of the subjects here must “live a lie” and deny real aspects of their lives that are of great importance to personal dignity. The truth may be that they are not lazy, not helpless, and not involved in a pattern of broken relationships, but that they must hide that truth as part of their struggle against the state. As research into the politics of surveillance continues, one of the most interesting challenges will be the exhumation and exploration of the many truths suppressed as powerful institutions assert and enforce their own particular order.

and sanction. Notes 1. The project, which was undertaken in the mid-1990s, is most fully explored in my book, Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), from which portions of this essay have been adapted. 2. These fi ndings are affi rmed by Kathryn Edin’s research on the budgets of Chicago’s welfare poor. See Kathryn Edin, There’s a Lot of Month Left at the End of the Money: How Welfare Recipients Make Ends Meet in Chicago (New York: Garland, 1993); and Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997). 3. See also Gary Marx, “A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance,” Journal of Social Issues 59 (May 2003): 369–90. 4. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 29. 5. Ibid., 296. 6. Joel F. Handler, “Postmodernism, Protest, and the New Social Movements,” Law and Society Review 26 (1992): 697–732; Michael McCann and Tracey March, “Law and Everyday Forms of Resistance,” in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, vol. 15, ed. Austin Sarat and Susan Silbey (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1995), 201–36.

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7. Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1972); Lucie White, “Subordination, Rhetorical Survival Skills, and Sunday Shoes: Notes on the Hearing of Mrs. G.,” Buffalo Law Review 38 (1990): 1–58; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage, 1972); Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1977); Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey, The Common Place of Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Austin Sarat, “The Law Is All Over: Power, Resistance, and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 2 (1990): 343–79. 8. Handler, “Postmodernism, Protest, and the New Social Movements,” 710–16. 9. Sarat, “Law Is All Over,” 344, 347. 10. See also Stack, All Our Kin. 11. “It is no coincidence that the cries of ‘bread,’ ‘land,’ and ‘no taxes’ that so often lie at the core of peasant rebellion are all joined to the basic material survival needs of the peasant household. Nor should it be anything more than a commonplace that everyday peasant politics and everyday peasant resistance (and also, of course, everyday compliance) flows from these same fundamental material needs” (Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 295). 12. Gilliom, Overseers of the Poor, 93–114. 13. McCann and March, “Law and Everyday Forms of Resistance,” 218–19; Handler, “Postmodernism, Protest, and the New Social Movements.” 14. Many authors have now advanced the idea that an ethic or discourse of “care” emphasizing needs and interdependency stands as an alternative to the traditional discourse of “rights” or “justice” that emphasizes individual rights and autonomy. Where the latter posits an individualistic realm of legalist and rationalist calculations based on universal principles, the ethic of care emphasizes responsibilities, particular needs and differences, and compassion. See Julie Anne White, Democracy, Justice, and the Welfare State: Reconstructing Public Care (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (London: Routledge, 1993); Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, eds., Women and Moral Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987).

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Global Citizens and Local Powers SU R V EI L L A N CE I N T U R K E Y

The Basic Characteristics of MERNI˙S Turkey’s Central Population Administrative System—Merkezi Nüfus Ídaresi Sistemi (MERNI˙S)—is at the center of the Turkish state’s efforts to establish a database of information about its population. MERNI˙S increases the state’s powers to (re)produce individuals for hegemonic purposes by adapting the state’s administrative practices to the dynamics of contemporary processes of global production. By assigning individuals a unique number that identifies them as citizens, MERNI˙S generates the necessary local conditions to align Turkey with the emerging global control society. MERNI˙S was designed to eliminate repetition and inconsistencies in the state’s information systems and to consolidate various kinds of information on its citizens. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, this one-numbered system supplies perfect, rapid, and reliable services, making life easy for citizens.1 One number also indicates the centralization of power and helps solidify Turkish state authority. This is centralization not only of power but also of identification of the individual. Yet, while MERNI˙S centralizes power in the sense that it can direct, manipulate, and share personal information among different state bodies, thus reinforcing the state’s monopoly over the use of information, this power is also paradoxically decentralized, since it exists in its effects, that is, in the subjects of its surveillance. In this system, individuals become bearers of state power as MERNI˙S catalogs and redefi nes them as effects of system-serving surveillance. Of course, this does not mean that individuals have the sufficient capacity to influence the functioning of MERNI˙S. MERNI˙S is fundamentally governed by the state, which controls the system’s operations for its own interests. Moreover, when MERNI˙S decentralizes power’s effect in the visible bodies of individuals, it also defi nes the individual as an embodiment of society’s risks. And when the source of risks and social problems appears to be the individual, the source of the solution becomes the state. Without acknowledging its or MERNI˙S’s role in the construction of this risk, the state can thus present itself as the remedy of social problems and MERNI˙S as the technological fi x.

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By design, MERNI˙S can produce moment-by-moment information on the registered Turkish population. The goal is to obtain this information at the national and local levels. Consequently, it is hoped that MERNI˙S will observe changes immediately and through its capillary power obtain information about the social and economic characteristics of citizens. Its technology was meant to offer efficient control mechanisms to the state and to guarantee the permanence of a reshaping process of the individual as an object of constant control—as something posing imminent risk to society—watching all citizens to determine who is “abnormal,” “dangerous,” “sick,” or “criminal.” These tasks entail the constitution of a prevalent surveillance system endowed with the authority to decide who will be more productive in which sites of production and thus who will contribute to a “healthy” society—a society that is necessary for the continuation of production activities. In effect, a “healthy” society means a “productive” society. MERNI˙S thus functions to locate the broken parts of the production process. Because both local and national forces have significantly shaped its operation, MERNI˙S must not be regarded as merely a national system. The local dynamics that influence the relation between the individual and power center on the significance of MERNI˙S for the state and corporations in Turkey that use MERNI˙S to supply actual, fresh, and revised information about the forces of production. However, this is not executed in a local sense only. Its rationale is shaped within a global context where information and communication technologies have become integral to the sphere of production. MERNI˙S is thus an outcome of global necessities that have superseded national requirements. The state and corporations in Turkey can exploit MERNI˙S to produce a suitable labor force for contemporary capitalism. In this context, MERNI˙S could function as a bridge between the labor force of Turkey and global production sites. The MERNI˙S number of each individual is his or her registration number for global systems of production. These are its design goals. In reality, as I show, MERNI˙S is not a well-functioning residence-based system and currently produces and gathers only aggregate information of the population as a whole. This is not necessarily good news for the Turkish people.

The Significance of MERNI˙S MERNI˙S’s rationale is completely compatible with the ideology of effi ciency. An efficient MERNI˙S would mean that the state in Turkey produces life with its own resources, a significant advance for Turkey in the global dynamics of today’s communication and information revolutions.

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MERNI˙S’s failure to achieve this efficiency is in part a mark of the state’s ambivalence toward modernization. The state distrusts some technological developments while it paradoxically constructs a whole system on them. In the opinion of most state officials, technology appears to solve every problem. Yet technology also signifies change, and with change comes a challenge to the existing order. This ambivalence is reflected in the low proportion of public institutions using information and communication technology: only 11 percent. The degree of standardization between the institutions that share information is also weak. Only 17 percent of the upper-level managers see information technology as essential. In 86 percent of these institutions there exists no administrative information system and no decision support system. 2 It is not reasonable then to expect that an electronic state based on administrative efficiency will be realized soon. Self-assessment of this problem is generally difficult for inflexible states and adds to Turkey’s particular problems of inefficiency in systems like MERNI˙S; a self-critique would force the state to admit error, impotence, or weakness within its own mechanisms. Such a situation would mean questioning the state’s legitimacy. University researchers and, to some extent, government researchers and officials have shown how this ambivalence contributes directly to MERNI˙S’s inefficiency. According to a social scientist in the Institute of Population Studies, for example, the state is not able to comprehend the significance of MERNI˙S at the macro level and therefore has no proper vision of the usage of information collected in the MERNI˙S database. This researcher claims that the state has attempted to build up MERNI˙S with a highly centralized view but has “lacked” the foresight of a global-minded administration. He underlines that there is very little commitment to MERNI˙S, especially in the political arena, since it does not provide shortterm political rent for politicians and bureaucrats. 3 Because MERNI˙S’s “vitality” has not yet been understood by the project operators, the full application of the MERNI˙S system seems to lie in the future. Yilmaz Atasoy, a director in the Department of Information and Processing in the Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs, counters that MERNI˙S has taken a long time to become operational because of technological insufficiency, a large population to work on, and lack of personnel. He says that data entry took a lot of time, adding that Turkey is a very crowded country compared to European countries, a condition that slowed MERNI˙S’s construction.4 But this argument does not account for the crowded countries in Europe and elsewhere in the world—like Germany, England, and the United States—that have successfully implemented MERNI˙S-like systems. Moreover, as Seref Hosgör of the Institute of State Statistics argued, it would have taken only one person to enter the

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entire record of Turkey’s population over the last twenty-eight years into the MERNI˙S database.5 One reason that MERNI˙S developed slowly was the untimely start of the system.6 The necessary substructure for MERNI˙S was not and had not been mature enough for a considerable time (at least until 1995) while MERNI˙S was being set up. In other words, despite the fact that MERNI˙S’s technical infrastructure had been constructed to a great extent, the mental infrastructure had yet to be established. When the state began the project, it did not have adequate technological knowledge and capacity, though today it seems that this problem has been largely resolved. Still, questions about MERNI˙S’s administrative efficiency remain. The chief mistake is that while MERNI˙S is legally mandated to operate on the basis of residence, it has failed to do so.7 There are a number of people who appear registered where they do not reside—places of residence and places of registration are in most cases different. 8 Because of this feature, the system cannot provide the social and economic information of a particular district or province.9 There is thus only partial local information of the population.10 Hosgör has claimed that given this existing situation, MERNI˙S will not be completed until 2012. He emphasizes that there is a considerable lack of human capital, experience, and infrastructure. This is because of ignorance of the state and citizens, according to Hosgör, who argued that the state should become more active and coercive to implement the mandate to make MERNI˙S functional and effective.11 Ünal Yarimagan, a professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Hacettepe University, added that institutions that are keeping or will keep the records of citizens’ residences have to be better organized, and he suggested that one valid address could be held by one institution: the police.12 Most state officials presume that MERNI˙S can solve the existing problems of population registration. For instance, Atasoy claims that it is not so difficult to form a residence-based system, since the infrastructure is almost ready.13 This is clearly not the case. As can be seen in this statement, state officials conceive of technology as the predominant factor in the operation of MERNI˙S. They neither question the rationality of the technology nor introduce new kinds of rationality. Technological rationality is not enough to continue a nationwide organization without also applying logics of efficiency, flexibility, and globalization. The crucial problem for the conception and the application of MERNI˙S, then, is a deficient comprehension of the rationale behind the whole system. MERNI˙S necessitates a different kind of standpoint, which surpasses the current perspective of state officials, politicians, and bureaucrats. This standpoint places MERNI˙S in a global world order rather than within the borders of a nation-state.

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Power in the Contemporary Era

The lifetime

For a global system of production, comparison is crucial. Comparability means observation, identification, and assessment. These are naturally significant characteristics of a surveillance system. Since production is carried out on a global scale, power requires global regulations and normalization practices. Almost every country today supplies a labor force for global production. Electronic registration systems gain importance in local and global economies for their capacity to coordinate and direct the activities of labor. The contemporary production system thus forces nations to construct an electronic state, which is rooted in information and communication technologies. In Singapore, for example, the electronic state provides a lifetime of public services to citizens, who do not have the option to refuse or ignore these services, which include education, military service, settlement, family, transportation, work, health, law, legal regulations, and employment.14 The lifetime services given by the Singaporean (electronic) state can be regarded as an attempt to hold personal information about the citizens’ productive capacity. MERNI˙S has been designed to fulfi ll the same functions as Singapore’s system. As such, it can be seen as the endeavor of the Turkish state to regulate the productive capacities of the Turkish population from birth to death. Essential shifts in today’s production dynamics and technological changes emerge together, constituting the new peculiarity of capitalism. In the contemporary era, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, the nation-state controls the flow of wealth to and from imperial powers and formulates the division of wealth as it disciplines its own population. That is, the nation-state realizes the biopolitical organization of its people.15 But to do this, an electronic nation-state must develop systems like MERNI˙S, which can “train” individuals with reference not only to national priorities but also to global imperatives. MERNI˙S has the potential to integrate different surveillance techniques and administer all kinds of data drawn from different spaces through differentiated power practices. The decentralized and autonomous operation of surveillance machines gives MERNI˙S the potential to become what Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson have called a “surveillant assemblage,” which brings different technologies together to increase the capacity of surveillance and transforms the abstracted bodies of surveilled subjects into discrete flows of information.16 By integrating networks through continuous information transfers MERNI˙S also enhances its ability to support the global reproduction system. Importantly, the materiality of this political economy is buttressed by a discourse sustaining the idea that technology enlarges the space of freedom. Freedom, here, is determined within the limits of the political

services given by

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economy of global capitalism and its politics of neoliberalism. MERNI˙S is an information network that subsists as a part of neoliberal discourse that depicts such networks as ideology-free carriers of information and truths. From such a perspective, MERNI˙S can be regarded as a legitimate complex because it provides individuals with basic survival tools and social protections. MERNI˙SS seemingly creates new benefits and increases opportunities for people to take advantage of these. As Roger Whitaker argues, however, there arises in this scenario a seductive and insidious participatory panopticon as power operates by appearing to serve the desires and needs of the individual.17 Moreover, as Castells implies, networks like MERNI˙S carry cultural—that is, ideological—codes that defi ne exploitation procedures and frame an ideological infrastructure for global capitalism.18 The power of the electronic state is not just a forceful one but operates on a consensual basis. Power’s new “mobile police forces” are, as Christopher Dandecker points out, the individuals themselves.19

The Tragicomedy of MERNI˙S Information and communication technologies provide efficiency and flexibility for the exercise of power. An efficient administrative system is useful for citizens, but it is more so for capital and the state. Despite the fact that people can develop different identities at a given time, hegemonic power has the capacity to differentiate these identities and to use the suitable ones in its production activities. MERNI˙S provides spaces for individuals to claim multiple identities for various different social interactions, but it also defi nes this multiplicity within the limits of a fi xed, system-serving singularity. When MERNI˙S stores information about the different identities of the individual—who, say, is a worker and a member of an organization, was born in Istanbul, and is married—MERNI˙S also displays its ability to re/deterritorialize identities. These different identities are defi ned within one number that facilitates state governance of individual complexity. By this logic, MERNI˙S can be turned into a totalitarian tool as a kind of democratic mask of domination. On the surface, MERNI˙S offers a secure, easier, and more comfortable life for citizens. But in exchange for MERNI˙S’s apparent protections, citizens may forgo aspects of their freedom. In this context, it is extremely difficult for individuals to constitute an autonomous complex of identities without MERNI˙S intervening to recode these identities as the little production machines of Turkey. MERNI˙S may produce useful outcomes for citizens and make an individual’s life easier in many respects, but its primary function is to make

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the life of the Turkish state easier. The foremost benefit of MERNI˙S for the state is inclusion of the individual into the production system through a legitimate governance process. Once an individual is registered, his or her information is kept within the MERNI˙S database during his or her lifetime and even after. The state holds this information as an object that, in principle, it can exploit at any time to manipulate aspects of an individual’s life chances. However, as I have shown, MERNI˙S does not operate as planned. This situation derives from the ambivalence toward the transition Turkey has attempted to make to become a modern electronic state. As a result, Turkey has not yet entered the mode of control societies. For the time being, this means that MERNI˙S will simply function as a registration system. The tragicomedy of MERNI˙S in particular and the state system in general comes into view at this point. Since the Turkish state has an insufficient global outlook and lacks the necessary technological, political, and economic resources, the relation between the individual and the state in Turkey does not resemble the countries where the MERNI˙S-like systems function more efficiently. The state is unable to construct a strong control mechanism and to apply normalization practices to the extent that would allow Turkish authorities to control citizens “properly” for a global production system. Although MERNI˙S can produce and keep a huge amount of population information, it is uncertain that the state is able to use this information to form effective surveillance procedures. Consequently, citizens cannot take advantage of the benefits and facilities that MERNI˙S offers; but neither are they exposed to continuous surveillance. Unless the state pays greater attention to the citizenship-production function of a global control society, it will continue to operate surveillance systems like MERNI˙S from a sense of fear rather than administrative efficiency—the fear of losing its traditional authority to the dynamics of the global system. This fear prevents the state from comprehending the significance of MERNI˙S and actually works against its own interests and the interests of capital. Ironically, citizens of Turkey seem freer in this regard than those of other countries where there is an effective registration system. The lack of necessary rationality in state mechanisms appears to be to the advantage of the people. Nevertheless, the citizens of Turkey may have to face more dangerous effects than citizens in the advanced countries where an effective control has been established. The state’s lack of rationality indicates also the lack in the stability, certainty, and legality of the system—derivative perhaps of the state’s ambivalence toward modernization. This internal contradiction has deprived the Turkish state of some of the properties possessed by states in societies of control. Gilles Deleuze suggests that in societies

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of control individuals are included in continuous spaces of reformation within a complex of military, educational, and corporate practices that work together to encode identity. 20 In a disciplinary society, by contrast, individuals pass through discontinuous institutional enclosures in which they are surveilled and marked by distinct institutional identities. The individual in a control society is coded by continuous surveillance to become a production machine, and capitalism cannot survive without its precoded production machines. The question is how states will constitute governance based on the rationale of control suitable for capitalism’s global de/recodification strategy. In the case of Turkey, the state has resisted the control rationale of the contemporary age, fi nding it a threat to the traditional bureaucratic power of the state. (Significant agents of control do appear among powers other than the state, including some nongovernmental organizations). Turkish citizens, in this context, may be subject to a more dangerous type of surveillance, which is a hybrid between societies of discipline and societies of control. Because the structures and agents of power in Turkey are compatible with neither disciplinary nor control practices, citizens are fated to live somewhere between these two types of societies in the same way as Deleuze describes the position of Kafka’s protagonists. 21 Citizens cannot conceive the implications of this in-between position. They are unaware, to a considerable extent, that MERNI˙S can be turned into a dangerous, if inefficient, surveillance tool. For the time being, then, MERNI˙S cannot fulfi ll its design function. The situation may change, and to prepare for altered circumstances it is important to be mindful of MERNI˙S’s potential effects as it grows to serve the parallel imperatives of the imperial political economy and the society of control.

Notes This article is a condensed version of my master’s thesis, “Cybercodification and Invisible Documentation of the Population.” I would like to thank my supervisor, Kenneth Barr, for his many contributions to my research. I also thank John Frauley for his comments. And fi nally, I thank my PhD supervisor, David Lyon; without his help, I could not have produced this piece. 1. T. C. Íçisleri Bakanligi Nüfus ve Vatandaslık Ísleri Genel Müdürlügü, MERNI˙S Projesi (Ankara: Republic of Turkey Ministry of Internal Affairs, Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs, 1998), 40. 2. “E-Devletin ‘altı’ dökülüyor,” Radikal Daily, 5 November 2002. 3. Interview by the author, Institute of Population Studies, Hacettepe University, March 2002. The name of this informant has been withheld on request. 4. Yilmaz Atasoy, interview by the author, Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs, March 2002.

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5. Seref Hosgör, interview by the author, Institute of State Statistics, March 2002. 6. This was the position of Ünal Yarimagan, a research professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Hacettepe University, whom I interviewed in March 2002. This rush to construct MERNI˙S might suggest a lack of desire to wait to adapt to global developments, but it could very well have been an (obviously unsuccessful) attempt of the Turkish state to shorten the transition period from a society of discipline to one of control. 7. In the MERNI˙S booklet published by the Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs, it says that although the residence-based registration is a legal obligation, it has not been effectively applied. 8. Hosgör, interview by the author. 9. Kemal Madenoglu (then director general for social sectors and coordination), interview by the author, Organization of State Planning, March 2002. 10. Interview by the author, Institute of Population Studies. 11. Hosgör, interview by the author. 12. Ünal Yarimagan, interview by the author, Department of Computer Engineering, Hacettepe University, March 2002. 13. Atasoy, interview by the author. 14. N. Murat Ínce, Elektronik Devlet: Kamu Hizmetlerinin Sunulmasında Yeni Ímkanlar (Electronic State: New Opportunities for the Provision of Public Services) (Ankara: Devlet Planlama Teskilati, 2001), 56–57. 15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 310. 16. Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology, no. 4 (2000): 610. 17. Roger Whitaker, The End of Privacy (New York: New Press, 1999). 18. Manuel Castells, “Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society,” British Journal of Sociology, no. 1 (2000): 23. 19. Christopher Dandeker, Surveillance, Power, and Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 129. 20. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 5. 21. Ibid., 3–7.

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From Privacy to Visibility CO N T E X T, I D EN T I T Y, A N D P OW ER I N U B I Q U I TO U S CO M P U T I N G EN V I R O N M EN T S

Identity in Ubiquitous Computing Everywhere in our daily lives, we are identified, tracked, profi led, and known. Infrastructures of surveillance—everyday, taken-for-granted, institutionalized, and technically mediated practices that identify individuals and observe and analyze their actions—permeate society. These infrastructures determine who is able to view whom, at what expense, and for what purpose. They mediate the production of social knowledge and social power. The popular press decries these developments for the loss of privacy they entail. Scholars warn that these surveillance practices group individuals into classes, then treat those classes in a discriminatory fashion. But visibility is not always detrimental to individuals or social groups. The construction of identity, the naming of a group, the claiming of membership in that group, the representation and dissemination of knowledge of the group, is a strategy of political power. The political (and epistemological) question is not whether individuals are known and typified. We always are. Rather, it is a question of how individuals are known and typified—by whom, to whom, as what, and toward what end we are made visible. This article moves the arguments over information environments away from issues of privacy, probing instead the ethical allocation of the resources of visibility and knowledge production. I start from the position that there is no preexisting “self” that privacy protects. Social roles, social situations, and social relations are created in their performance. According to Erving Goffman, social identities are the enactments of social relations. “To be a given kind of person, [is] to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto. A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well-articulated. . . . It is something that must be enacted and portrayed, something that must be realized.”1 The ability to present the self, and to make moral claims about how one is to be perceived and acted toward, is a fundamental mechanism for structuring social relations and for asserting social power.

Social Text 83, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.

David J. Phillips

But these roles and relations are not created anew with each performance. The performances themselves occur within, and are structured by, institutionalized settings and culturally specific “common sense.” Nor do these contexts exist apart from the performances within them. Places are constituted through social action. The experience of an urban park is the physicality not merely of trees, fountains, and playgrounds but of the interactions that are tacitly permitted and encouraged in the locale understood as “urban park.” There is thus a recursive relation between performance in the here and now and enduring social structures. To paraphrase Anthony Giddens, social structures are always the product of the activity they recursively organize. 2 Therefore research into the social construction of identities necessarily looks simultaneously to the agency of performance and the structure of context. Understanding the mediation of activities that sustain identity, subcultural knowledge, and regenerative places becomes even more important as physical spaces—our offices, our homes, our shopping districts—become more and more shot through with “pervasive” or “ubiquitous” or “context-aware” computing and information systems. Research and development of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) focus on the coordination of sensors, software agents, and databases to serve appropriate information to appropriate individuals in appropriate contexts. Ubiquitous computing environments, then, form part of an infrastructure of identity, social relations, and place making. A ubicomp environment is part of the setting in which the performance of social identity occurs. It does not monitor an objective context or situation; it is always implicated in the construction of those contexts and situations. Consider, for example, this description of an ubicomp environment developed by GeePS, a location-based marketing service: “Think of GeePS as a local market, a one-mile circle of energy around a potential customer, which moves with him or her, providing local information that fits individual needs. This information is dynamic and controlled by the merchants, communities and establishments in that radius.”3 Designers of such ubicomp environments aim not only to construct the place the individual inhabits but to manage the flow of informational resources within that space: they control which “local market” to present to the individual; they impose both a predetermined set of “needs” and the social ontology on which those needs are predicated; and, in the case of GeePS at least, they insert commercial criteria for determining social goals. The intent of this article is to take some lessons from the “real-world” negotiation of identity and apply them to rethinking the design of ubiquitous computing systems. I analyze how gay identity is managed in personal and political terms and map the prerequisites of successful identity

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management onto ubiquitous computing environments. Though the same processes are involved as any individual embraces identity and community and negotiates social position, the gay rights movement, gay politics, and the everyday praxis of gay men and lesbian women demand that these management activities be acute, conscious, and theoretically informed. Drawing on this experience, I suggest ways that ubicomp environments can be structured to ensure the ethical allocation of the resources of visibility necessary for the construction of identity, context, and social relations.

Processes and Resources of Identity Politics “Coming out”—self-identifying as gay and presenting that identity to the larger world—serves at least three political functions. First, it enables the individual to acknowledge, engage, and counteract the fear and shame of social stigma. Second, it enables the formation of a community within which to create a social identity, a culture, and a political power base. Finally, by coming out, gay men and lesbians are able to present publicly, interpret, and argue for the social value of a gay identity, offering an alternative to the received hegemony of the heterosexual, patriarchal ideal.4 None of these stages are isolated; each relates to the others. A public identity must be available before an individual can claim it. In-group codes preexist individual interactions, yet it is exactly those interactions that generate, reinforce, and modify those codes. Individuals may themselves come to represent public identities; celebrities may typify the group. Identity categories and their representations are contested at every level. They are never monolithic. One may claim the identity while adamantly contesting its meaning, and that contest differs depending on whether one is arguing with self-proclaimed members of the identity group or with outside individuals or institutions. “Coming out” is, then, an act both of personal empowerment and of political claim staking. Self-identification, in-group cohesion, and social representation and articulation are all tactics, and tactics that occur in contexts of power. The following section probes the nature of the power dynamics and the social resources involved in each mode of coming out. It then makes theoretical and normative links between these social processes and the institutionalization of visibility through the design of information infrastructures. These normative links are not to justify any particular type of identity or any particular type of context. Instead, they are meant to guide the design of ubicomp environments to support vital contestation over the propriety of any particular identity or contest.

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Claiming Identity By this act of self-identification, by saying “I am a gay man,” the individual places himself within a social category and within a social order.5 In doing so, he affi rms, to some degree, the validity of the category. This identity claiming is not merely the acceptance of a label—it is the acceptance, to some degree, of the resources and constraints that the label entails. It is an acceptance of the self as a social self, and a particular kind of social self. It not only places one, it also gives one a sense of how to go on. However, our identities are always multiple. We stand in different social relationships, we perform different roles, vis-à-vis our clients, our coworkers, our neighbors, our families. Successful social life involves not only the appropriate performance of a particular identity in a particular situation, but the graceful passage between roles and situations. This usually unconscious negotiation can become quite salient when one’s identity is itself stigmatized, or when the appropriate venue for identity performance is not well established (as in, for example, new online social environments), or when one is deploying one’s identity as a specifi cally political tactic. Despite recent, remarkable, and welcome changes in the legal and cultural position of some sexual minorities, coming out still entails risk—the risks of loss of income, of personal assault, of social stigma. These risks vary according to the circumstances of the actor. Popular chanteuses face a very different cost-benefit analysis in coming out than do tenured professors or truck-stop waitresses. The risks and benefits of coming out are also historically specific. In certain moments it may be politically and personally expedient to proclaim one’s sexuality at a public rally but not at work. In other moments, the opposite might be true. The anonymous declaration in a crowd would be meaningless, whereas coming out in the workplace would catalyze powerful economic and political forces. Finally, each individual will maintain differing sexual identities depending on social context. One might be entirely “out” to one’s friends and coworkers but still maintain a formal indeterminacy at family reunions. The ability to segregate these contexts is a measure of social power. Therefore, in strategically claiming identity, one needs three resources of visibility: the availability of a recognized and acceptable identity category, the awareness of the context in which one acts, and the ability to limit one’s proclaimed identity to particular social contexts. The distribution of these capabilities within an information environment will be a determining factor in the distribution of social power within that environment. Socially informed design of those environments will then address issues such as the degree to which individuals control the scope of their

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identifiers and the models representing their activities. Socially informed design would also address the extent to which those identifiers and those models, indeed the operation of the information environment as a whole, are visible to its inhabitants. In evaluating the degree to which an information environment makes available a recognized and acceptable identity category, ubicomp designers might ask whether and to what extent users are aware of the data records used to represent them. Are those data records malleable? Do they permit novel structures and novel values? For example, do census forms permit subjects to occupy multiple racial categories, or none? Can one assume trans, or for that matter N/A, as a gender identity? Can one assert that one is “married” to several others? In designing for awareness of the context in which one acts, and one’s performance in that context, ubicomp environments need to provide feedback. This could take the form of what David Nguyen and Elizabeth Mynatt have called “privacy mirrors”—interfaces that enable users to monitor the data impression they are exhibiting to others.6 Performances are self-reflexive—dancers rehearse before a mirror, actors rely on the director to let them know what “plays.” To facilitate the ability to limit one’s proclaimed identity to particular social contexts, designers might consider strong pseudonymity as an appropriate solution. Strong pseudonymity would allow any actor in an informational environment to “try on” a persona, to take advantage of the attributes of that environment without fear that the persona will be linked to other identity performances in other social contexts. This is similar to going to an unfamiliar neighborhood to buy pornography or going to gay bars only when on business trips. For example, the lamentably defunct Freedom service permitted users to establish several unlinkable pseudonyms, say a “WorkerJoe,” a “GoodTimeJoe,” and a “CitizenJoe.” Joe could choose among those pseudonyms for each Internet session, so that, though Web sites may be able to track his activities, his work activities could not be linked to his political activities.7 Ubicomp designers should incorporate such models of strong pseudonymity to protect separable performance contexts for these separable identities and install some form of privacy mirror to heighten the awareness and experience of each performance.

Ubicomp designers should incorporate such models of strong pseudonymity to protect separable performance contexts for these separable identities and install some form of privacy mirror to heighten the awareness and experience of each performance.

Construction of Community The second political function of coming out is the formation of community. By this I mean the formal or informal associations of people who are somehow “like-minded.” It is within community that one fi nds dates,

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acquires senses of humor and fashion, attains historical consciousness. Communities produce common meanings, common sense. Communities enforce insider-outsider distinctions and have codes and shibboleths for determining who belongs and who does not. Such distinctions are never concrete; they are susceptible to change. The cultural production of these consciousnesses, codes, and boundaries—of the identity category itself— is constant and contested (the very existence of a “gay community” is routinely questioned in the gay press, for example). We never live in a single, monolithic community of meaning. Instead, we each interpret our social contexts using various frames of meaning inherited from numerous sources, including shared generational experiences, the particular quirks of our parents, deeply ingrained religious or ideological orthodoxies. The extent to which these frames of meaning are shared is a measure of their dominance. This dominance can be enforced in various ways. Interpreting a stop sign as other than a directive to stop is very expensive. Significant stigma can result from misinterpreting social situations and acting “out of place.” Spaces, like public parks or corporate meeting rooms, are designed to avail themselves more easily to dominant notions of propriety within that space. The production of alternative spaces, meanings, and sensibilities protects members of subcultures and sustains those frames of meaning integral to subcultural identity. George Chauncey describes how, in early-twentieth-century New York City, gay people developed private, local knowledge, “developing tactics that allowed them to identify and communicate with each other without alerting hostile outsiders to what they were doing.” In part, this involved “constructing a gay map of the city,” which “had to consider the maps devised by other, sometimes hostile, groups.” 8 Yet the production of alternative cultures benefits more than the members of that subculture. It also acts as a public good, contributing to a diverse, vigorous, vibrant, and evolving civic life. The negotiation of social identity is not only about the construction and maintenance of boundaries, regions, and performances. It is also about negotiating the permeability of those boundaries: the wink, the grin, the appreciation of an “in” joke invite new participants to another region, another performance. The formation of community involves strategic revelation. To model this form of intimacy and community formation, designers of ubiquitous computing environments might provide means of contingently linking pseudonyms. This may involve development of technologies that permit knowledge of locality, rather than identity. That is, instead of inviolably separate personae, models might be developed for overlapping and permeable spatial contexts of identity—circles of knowledge built on degrees of trust.

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For ubicomp environments to facilitate the generation and sustenance of these circles of knowledge, they must follow two essential criteria. First, since this sort of symbolic exchange and meaning creation occurs within groups, individual actors should have some means of determining whether other participants are group members. This policing of the in-group/outgroup distinction is a fundamental process of group identity formation. Ubicomp environments can mediate such encounters and operationalize the surveillance that establishes trust relations through discretionary revelation of personal information. The ethical distribution of these resources of visibility would allow gay men and lesbians to share a useful categorical link and discover circumstances in which their interests and identities diverge. Management tools such as danah boyd’s SecureId allow users to segregate their personal information into “facets” of identity. Before a visitor can have access to a particular facet, the visitor must answer a question that proves in-group membership. In this way, SecureId mimics, in part, the social signaling work of fashion and speech codes and uses those cultural codes to limit or extend social visibility and interpersonal trust.9 The second criterion for subcultural knowledge production is the availability of a public environment from which, and within which, to make sense. The context of ubiquitous computing environments should be open and available for contestation and sense making by special purpose knowledge engines. To achieve this open system, it is important to understand that ubicomp environments, as well as human activities and other attributes of the environment in which they operate, become texts once they are stored in databases. They are the signs, the vocabulary, the utterances from which sense and meaning are made. Of course, how these texts are used will determine what they mean in a given context. When a ubiquitous computing system “perceives” the “context” of a situation and “decides” to take “appropriate” action, it is interpreting and constructing the meaning of the text. While the structure of the vocabulary and the decision to create certain textual entities and not others were made in response to a prior understanding of the context—a prior “common sense” and meaning—the meaning of the text-in-use can, generally speaking, be diverse and negotiated, informed by the cultural position of and the resources available to the reader. Just as Hamlet or the Fourth Amendment lend themselves to confl icting reinterpretations, so may different participants ascribe very different meanings, different “appropriate uses,” to the same space or set of activities. These multiple contested meanings of common spaces, common texts, and common resources are at the core of struggles for social power. However, a tendency toward interpretive closure is inevitable within

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institutional uses of texts. That’s what institutions do—they pattern and constrain possible actions/readings. That is one arc of the recursive relation between institutions and action. For example, the action a pervasive computing system takes (a change in lighting, perhaps, or the differential distribution of information to those present) influences the activities that the system itself is monitoring and responding to. In this way, it reinforces, extends, and projects its own interpretation of the text available to it. As such, the range of possible actions within ubicomp environments tends to be delimited by recursive closures around the meaning of the text-in-use. To counter this tendency toward closure, a ubicomp environment “needs to be able to support . . . repurposing, and needs to be able to support the communication of meaning through it, within a community of practice.”10 From a design perspective, this involves making the text and the means of interpreting that text available within ubicomp environments. Of these criteria, perhaps the most difficult to understand and implement is the availability of text. I referred above to a system’s data as if they were public and freely accessible to all. But of course the collection, storage, and dissemination of information is rife with political and ethical problems attendant to the contemporary political economy. At the very broadest level, what we need is good theoretical work on the ethics and the economics of commodifying behavior through “datafication.” We need more and better work on the processes by which public behavior is captured, stored, and analyzed privately. We must incorporate in the design process legal philosophies such as Helen Nissenbaum’s extension of privacy protection to public actions.11 Addressing these concerns would help establish not public or private activities or places per se, but some kind of equity in access to the raw material with which individuals and communities make sense and order out of the world. It should be noted that this attempt bucks the current trend in intellectual property law, which seeks ever to enclose and privatize the cultural commons. But access to a public text is not sufficient for subcultural knowledge production. Information environments must also facilitate communitybased generators of knowledge and meaning. Like the gay men of New York in Chauncey’s study, subcultures should be able to use public space to create their own maps, their own set of appropriate relations and places. In assessing ubicomp design, we should ask who, and in what circumstances, decides what are appropriate actions within, say, a corporate business meeting? Who decides that a street or region is to be approached as a marketplace rather than as a cruising ground or a site of political discourse? Malcolm McCollugh proposes that rather than designing for “anytime/anyplace universality,” context-aware computing designers should “design for recurrent situations of everyday life,” and that “[con-

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text-aware] design must include some layer of what is and is not appropriate by situational type.”12 I would argue instead that ubicomp designers should work to include the facility for accommodating multiple concepts of propriety rather than only those “appropriate by situational type.” The same “space” must be available for different meanings. The “text” of the environment must be available for interpretation within various communities of meaning. In design terms, this translates into a structure in which shared public space (i.e., data) is linkable with private “place-making” drivers. These drivers are the conceptual models and algorithms that interpret data according to the design goals of each user or community of users. To illustrate, consider two examples of information environments, one that serves centralized and system-serving interpretations of data and one that supports subcultural knowledge production. As an example of the fi rst, imagine a downtown shopping district. People walk through this district with wireless-enabled personal digital assistants (PDAs). The PDAs are constantly emitting identifying signals. Those signals are received by networked stationary sensors placed throughout the district. The network triangulates the received signals to calculate each individual’s location. The network then correlates each individual’s location with a database of that person’s preferences and histories and serves “appropriate” information to that person. As an example of the latter, more socially available system, consider Place Lab.13 In this design, stationary transmitters throughout the district constantly emit signals that are received and triangulated by each PDA. The PDA then calculates its own location. The PDA’s user can then refer to local information and guides previously downloaded to the PDA. These guides may have been produced within any number of communities or cultures, for any number of purposes. If information infrastructures can be assessed according to the degree to which they facilitate equity, the Place Lab model tips the balance in the distribution of informational resources toward the user. Not only is there access to the raw material with which individuals and communities make sense and order out of the world, but also in principle users decide which drivers will forge knowledge from that data.

The network then correlates each individual’s location with a database of that person’s preferences and histories and serves “appropriate” information to that person.

Claiming Social Power With the third political function of coming out, gay men and lesbians publicize, interpret, and argue over the social value of a gay identity. This includes the public recognition not merely of a gay identity but of gay icons, gay political districts, gay markets, the “queer eye.” This mode of coming out links in-group recognition with public representation.

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Public argument over the social position of gay individuals, identities, and communities is the core of the modern gay rights movement. Not only is this argument publicly visible, it is also about public visibility. It simultaneously addresses and reconfigures the social consciousness of sexual minorities and other cultural groups. It provides fodder for the public imagination, and it constitutes the public identity that is a prerequisite for personal identification and “coming out.” It also reconstitutes social relations through public moral demands to be treated at all (fi rst) and appropriately (second). These public identities will always be contested in a grand cycle of identity claiming, space claiming, co-optation, stabilization, and repression of the margins. For stable, globally recognized identity categories come at a cost. Identities classify and typify. They turn humans into knowable objects. This stabilization is necessary if the political goal is to bring an excluded group within the mechanisms of bureaucratic power and to begin to exercise that power on behalf of that group. These stable identity categories become both the tools for, and the outcome of, enduring social relations and interactions. So the decision to be “out” comes with the decision to be out as what? What does the proclaimed identity do? Arguments over the representation of gay men and lesbian women in the popular imagination have a long history in gay and lesbian politics. Activists have contested popular culture images where sexual minorities are depicted as sick, victimized, or criminal, and often all three simultaneously—essentially weak but still utterly dangerous.14 Should aficionados of sadomasochism be excluded from public events like pride parades? Are Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy steps toward liberation or throwbacks to pernicious stereotypes? These are important questions in part because the availability of public representations recursively refers to the fi rst aspect of coming out: the personal claiming of identity. Icons and imagery must be available before any individual can say “Look! I am that!” But they are also important because the public representations of identity form the ontological models that guide actions of individuals in that identity category. The understanding of what a gay man is, what a gay man does, informs political debate as questions of gay marriage and gay military service become public issues. It also informs the creation of demographics, “lifestyles,” brands, and marketing strategies. The social issue here is not so much that these descriptions are untrue or inaccurate but that they are useful, and they are used. They guide the decisions of marketers and policy makers. They thus reify the types they describe. After all, as Eliza Doolittle noted, “The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.”15 Differential treatment of social types, especially in the marketplace for

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essential goods, reentrenches pernicious discrimination and stereotyping.16 Therefore arguments over typification and representation have erupted as gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians have been configured, represented, and analyzed as a market segment. Marketers use market profi les for their own purposes. The interests of the subject, or of the demographic group to which the subject is assigned, are considered only insofar as they align with the interests of the profi ler. These interests may well be partially aligned. Public recognition of gay or lesbian markets—whether for Subaru cars or “I can’t even think straight” T-shirts—is certainly advantageous to some buyers and some sellers. But interests are often at odds, and it is quite possible that one would not be offered ads for health insurance or particular vacation packages because of a private analysis of one’s Web surfi ng habits.17 In a sense, these digital models may be more insidious than public representations, because the models and the algorithms that guide their use are privately owned and circulated, and so unavailable for public contestation.18 Ubiquitous computing has the capacity to feed the demographic process with almost limitless data. Since the representation of groups is a process of social structuring, it is a political contest. The issue that designers of ubicomp systems must address is not what the proper representations are, but rather how the system lends itself to claims and contests over those representations. In particular, designers should ask two questions. First, how far does the environment permit individuals to occupy it as public space? I mentioned earlier the necessity of an available public environment in which and with which to make subcultural sense. Another criterion for evaluating information infrastructures is the degree to which they facilitate making that subcultural sense visible, unavoidable, present. We must ask how widely queer readings of information resources can be disseminated and the extent to which it is feasible to institutionalize oppositional understandings of what is appropriate where, or how certain groups are to be treated. Second, to what degree does the environment make its workings known and avail itself for interpretation and contestation? Judith Butler and Donna Haraway both insist on the political necessity of seriously playing with the boundaries and meanings of constructed identities.19 In particular, Butler asks how to “use [an identity] in such a way that its futural significations are not foreclosed? How to use the sign and avow its temporal contingency at once?” 20 She answers that this may be possible through “drag,” through ironic performance, through the self-conscious signaling of identities. To use established identities ironically—to analyze, manipulate, mock, or change how identity categories are created and used—that creation and that use must be visible. To facilitate this cul-

To use established

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identities ironically—to analyze, manipulate, mock, or change how identity categories are created and used—that creation and that use must be visible.

tural play, information infrastructures must make themselves evident. They should be structured in such a way that individuals are aware of how their identities are constructed and used. This awareness has at least three components: the statistical construction of the category itself, the “personal” data used to categorize a particular individual, and the effect of that categorization. Not only should that construction be visible, it should be available for contest and for alternative use.

Conclusion Increasingly, ubiquitous computing environments structure our daily life. These systems scan regions for data and serve informational resources to individuals based on certain notions of what is appropriate for each individual in a particular context. Moreover, these are political systems. They mediate identity, social relations, public and private spaces, and social power. As such, they should be designed with a critical awareness of the politics of visibility and the political economy of information. In particular, as I have suggested, there are several criteria by which the viability and desirability of information environments might be assessed. First, to what degree do they permit individuals to claim a particular social identity in a particular social context? To facilitate the expansion of permissible claims, ubiquitous computing environments should multiply the number of separable contexts and separable identifiers. The environment should permit subjects to mirror and hone their own performances and to be aware of the reactions of the audience for whom they perform. Second, to what degree do environments enable the subcultural generation of knowledge and the strategic revelation (in the multiple senses of the phrase) attendant to community formation? They should permit the formation of in-groups who are able to share insights and produce knowledge with each other while excluding out-group members. They should provide a common context, a public space, from which to produce subcultural knowledge. That is, they should facilitate in some equitable way the production of culture that can also contribute as a public good to a diverse, vibrant, and evolving civic life. Finally, to what degree do environments permit the public claiming of their resources? They must make their own workings visible and facilitate the public visibility of the various knowledges produced by their members. But useful knowledge of the environment goes beyond mere awareness of information exchange. It involves a good working knowledge of the history and motives of the other participants in the region. On a personal level, this

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may come by listening to gossip or by learning from social errors. This kind of learning can be facilitated in the design of information environments. However, to understand institutions, actors need a theoretically informed understanding of the political economy of information.

Notes 1. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 75. 2. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 3. Ann M. Mack, “Unplugged,” Brandweek, no. 42 (2000): 50. 4. Patricia Boling, Privacy and the Politics of Intimate Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 132–36. 5. Here I should engage in self-identification. I am a gay man, and I feel myself, in this work, speaking as a gay man. The epistemological, ontological, and sociological implications of this type of identity claiming are, in large part, what this article is about. I mention this particular identity here, though, to explain my use of the masculine pronoun. I make no claims as to the universality of my perspective, but sincerely hope that others who do not share my social position can fi nd this perspective useful. 6. David H. Nguyen and Elizabeth D. Mynatt, “Privacy Mirrors: Understanding and Shaping Socio-technical Ubiquitous Computing Systems,” Georgia Institute of Technology Technical Report GIT-GVU-02–16, 2002, quixotic.cc.gt .atl.ga.us/~dnguyen/writings/PrivacyMirrors.pdf (accessed 21 September 2003). 7. Ian Goldberg and Adam Shostack, “Freedom 1.0 architecture and protocols,” www.freedom.net/info/freedompapers/Freedom_Architecture_protocols .pdf, 1999 (accessed 12 January 2000; site is no longer active). 8. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic, 1994), 187–89. 9. See danah boyd, “Faceted Id/entity: Managing Representation in a Digital World” (master’s thesis, MIT, 2002); see also smg.media.mit.edu/projects/SecureId/ writings/SecureIdOverview.pdf. 10. Paul Dourish, “Seeking a Foundation for Context-Aware Computing,” Human-Computer Interaction 16 (2001): 240. 11. Helen Nissenbaum, “Protecting Privacy in an Information Age: The Problem of Privacy in Public,” Law and Philosophy 17 (1998): 559–96. 12. Malcolm McCollugh, “On Typologies of Situated Interaction,” HumanComputer Interaction 16 (2001): 337, 346. 13. Jason Hong, Gaetano Boriello, James A. Landay, David W. McDonald, Bill N. Schilit, and J. D. Tygar, “Privacy and Security in the Location-Enhanced World Wide Web” (paper presented at the Workshop on Ubicomp Communities: Privacy as Boundary Negotiation, UBICOMP, Seattle, WA, October 2003). 14. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet (New York: Harper and Row, 1981). 15. Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1951), 99. 16. Oscar H. Gandy Jr., The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993).

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17. K. Chi-Wen Li, “The Private Insurance Industry’s Tactics against Suspected Homosexuals: Redlining Based on Occupation, Residence, and Marital Status,” American Journal of Law and Medicine 22 (1996): 477–502. 18. Gandy, Panoptic Sort. 19. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd ed., ed. D. H. Richter (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998); Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991). 20. Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 1518.

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Suppressing Grief T H E P O L I T I C S O F “ M CC A R T H Y ” - ER A T E S T I M O N I E S

The Chinese character [han] shows a heart and it shows a head that’s turned away. —Philip Gourevich, New Yorker, 8 September 2003

Margaret Morganroth Gullette

A sweeping movement toward acknowledging state crimes against citizens has been one of the most striking signs of recent political statesmanship and broad-based efforts for social justice after the innumerable civil devastations of the twentieth century. In Argentina, the unofficial story in all its harrowing detail became the official story. Elsewhere, “following Australia’s official apology to Aborigines delivered by Paul Keating, Clinton made amends to Native Hawaiians, ex-PM Murayama apologized for Japanese war crimes, [and] Tony Blair expiated on behalf of the Irish potato famine.”1 All these national stories have their own specificity, but one element is common to all. In any process of national reconciliation, fi rst-person testimonies from the victims are crucial. Testimonies usually appear early in the process. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission read seventeen thousand testimonies before issuing a report in August 2003 about the twenty-year-long genocide of tribal peoples. 2 To teach the ignorant and construct their new feelings may require that there be a body of testimony, continuously produced over time, and visible as a whole, internationally if possible. “Holocaust testimony” is one such grouping. That title unites Primo Levi and Shanghai Ghetto (2003), making a collective of Jewish victims in death and in exile, from the fi rst generation on. A body of testimony becomes visible, typically, through novels, plays, fi lms, and revisionist histories, sometimes produced by victims and sometimes by sympathetic nonvictims, who together recharacterize the collective, contextualize their stories, and enlarge the audience for them. Sometimes this becomes a political movement. Everything starts with a change of heart toward the victims and a change of vision—from seeing them as “enemies of the people” (or not seeing them at all) to believing that their sufferings were terrible and unjust, and thus that these victims are collectively innocent. The process leads to reintegrating those who had been othered (ANC members, black and white; other Left revolutionaries; Quiché Indians) back into the

Social Text 83, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © 2005 Margaret Morganroth Gullette.

A change in historical memory would provide an opportunity to teach the history of dissent, of the American Lefts, more evenhandedly.

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national family. The legendary Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa revised history by asking for oral testimonies of perpetrators willing to admit complicity. There and in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, testimonies have also been followed by some general, public change of judgment about the high-level perpetrators, from admiration to condemnation. Even without apologies from a complicit government, some degree of redress may occur: the label of “human rights violators,” social shame and loss of power (as with Chile’s Pinochet), attempted extradition, trials, convictions, prison sentences. Andrew Ross calls this “far-flung political style” apologitis because the symptoms are “empathy without mourning, and atonement without liability.”3 But the state apology, however pro forma, seems to be a sine qua non for other snowballing forms of ethical and political vindication. In the United States, only a few years after the Vietnam War ended, President Jimmy Carter amnestied the conscientious objectors who had shortly before been stigmatized as “draft dodgers.” President Bill Clinton, forty years after the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, apologized to them and offered some restitution. There are many absences in the short list of American apologies, including slavery and the extermination of native peoples. Another striking absence is any official acknowledgment of the damage done during the 1940s and 1950s by the “Red scare” to the innumerable people who suffered “McCarthy”-era repression. No president, even since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has striven to make amends to them. No government agency has been deputed to ask for their testimonies. There is no national archive hurriedly collecting statements while the aged primary informants are still alive and while their midlife offspring are eager to see justice done for them. Redress at this beleaguered site of memory would have significant political consequences for the nation as a whole. It would provide a chance to admit that our state, too, can misuse power, to affi rm the values central to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and to make sure violations do not shrink our freedoms—at a time when the foundations of liberty are once again under attack, now in a “war” against Islamic terrorism. An apology could be a springboard for the dominant media to revise their version of history—which is the fi rst stage of any new mainstream understandings. A change in historical memory would provide an opportunity to teach the history of dissent, of the American Lefts, more evenhandedly. There is another urgent issue, of healing psychic wounds before it is too late. In the United States, the elderly victims who are still alive have not been waiting for an apology because they do not expect it. Many who identified once as Communists refuse to say they were, out of fear of provoking the heavy opprobrium constructed a half century ago and still kept

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alive today.4 When Carl Bernstein started studying his parents’ political pasts, his mother said, “‘If you center on this I think it’s going to shatter my life again,’ ” and he “could see her face was trembling.”5 Or they think no one would be interested: Old Left, old hat. An apology would be welcome either way. It would ease the suppressed grief. A Korean acquaintance of mine calls this han: it is suffering that cannot speak fully because the atmosphere is not nearly receptive enough for it to be fully heard. Why can we in the United States not release this han and achieve whatever else might follow? Major historical investigations have concluded that red-baiting from Truman on was politically motivated, led by elites who exaggerated the risks of communism, and right-wingers who still do.6 The Supreme Court in Yates v. United States (1957) ruled that the government had failed to prove that either the Communist Party as an entity or the convicted individually had sought to incite any persons to engage in or prepare for overthrowing the government; this ruling fi nally ended prosecutions under the Smith Act of 1940.7 Even given the highest estimate, only a tiny percentage of the 50,000 wartime Communist Party members sought information for the USSR, an ally of the United States; over 49,700 did not. 8 In the postwar era, the number of party members was so reduced that even the FBI did not consider the Communist Party a threat. It is generally agreed that the era of the “witch hunts” and the FBI’s Security Index was a shameful period and compares with the Palmer Raids as the worst repression of the twentieth century in this country. In no democracy in Europe, says the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, did governments use the Cold War to turn against their own citizens.9 (“Who could imagine a House of Commons un-British Activities Committee?” asks the daughter of deportees.)10 Nor did other Western democracies drive their communist parties out of existence. One dictionary defi nition of McCarthyism is “indiscriminate allegations” and “unsubstantiated charges.”11 But it is still a long way from espousing anti-McCarthyism or antiMcCarranism to listening to the people who were attacked. In the 1950s, exoneration demanded recanting your “subversive” loyalty publicly. Some did it, to the government, to employers, or in print. But most did not think they were subversive. These are the still unforgiven. They are treated monolithically, as duplicitous, hostile, and powerful, with unaccountable activities, motives, aims. It’s as if HUAC—the House Un-American Activities Committee—still rules many American minds. Some later progressives—influenced by the civil rights, anti-Vietnam, and anti–Contra war movements, or by the many new historians of the Left—have softened toward the victims. But the population at large does

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not know how to defend them. A Communist writer who was on the blacklist for twelve years now says to college students, “‘I was part of it. . . . I lived through this.’ Well, it’s a revelation [to them].”12 Amnesia, hardheartedness, and defamation come from a refusal to look harder at the state apparatuses that fomented nationalist hysteria, mischaracterized the victims, violated their civil liberties, and constructed the widespread cowardice that allowed the purges to spread so far. Right-wing writers still heighten the myth of the internal menace out of Cold War triumphalism or to support current goals. But liberals wary of state power also turn their backs on this group of fellow Americans. Many who were young in the 1950s imbibed from anticommunist belligerency lifelong habits—passionate contempt for “Commies,” misinformation, and rhetorical twists from which they have not recovered. Some, harboring old resentments, do not wish to recover from their haunted close-mindedness about the victims. But when we want a civil truce and important educational and political benefits, not every “truth” needs to be rehashed without its context; not every grievance needs to be aired as if it were still fresh. What is still lacking in the United States to make national reconciliation possible? The easiest way to foreclose this inquiry is to say that this country needs a regime change before the evils of our version of the Cold War can really die. In Argentina, detentions for those who oversaw the killings were unthinkable until 2003, “when Argentina’s dark past seemed irretrievably buried under the amnesty laws and a host of presidential pardons.” But a new president, Nestor Kirchner, wanted to end the amnesty, and in August 2003 the Congress annulled those laws.13 A president of the United States could step out ahead of the mainstream and lead, if she or he were, say, a prolabor Democrat with a big majority, an internationalist with an ethical urge to right past wrongs, a reader of history and auto/biography. How would such a person use the testimonies? How would a kitchen cabinet of cultural critics and political and autobiography theorists present them to her, and to the American audience she would then address? I raise more new questions than I can answer here, but it is certainly useful, fi fty years after the events—with so much rich material in hand and perhaps, sadly, not much more to come—to pose them. An American would scarcely know from the mainstream press or the “God-that-failed” histories or network TV that a sizable body of testimonies by those on the American Left and their now-adult offspring who shared their experiences from 1947 to 1960 amounts to a considerable bibliography. We lack a single document with the international fame of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, which by itself constructed a native Guatemalan collective and revalorized its members. What we possess are fascinating and humanizing stories, in an enormous

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range of voices, and some sympathetic fictionalizations (from Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible to novels by E. L. Doctorow and Robert Coover to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America). The moral and political qualities of the victims, the tones of their narratives, and evidence from some of the hundreds of thousands who actually had a living relationship to the Communist Party of the United States may come as quite a shock to North American readers, even to progressives and cultural critics. The degree of one’s surprise can be used as a marker of how deeply anticommunist bias has burrowed into our associations and shaped our “knowledge.” The testimonies refer to countless victims who were innocent of anything we would now consider a crime. The purges of “the disloyal” radiated out from the government through two administrations, Harry Truman’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s, hitting all levels of the movements revolving around the Communist Party. This was a broad spectrum, as the cultural critic Michael E. Brown describes it, from “activists who formed the party, those of various backgrounds and persuasions who joined it in preference to other political options, those of varying degrees of commitment who worked within and around party organizations, [to] the greater number of people—whether officially members or not—whose experiences of agency, moral urgency, and politics were influenced by it.”14 Many labor leaders and noncommunist radicals were targeted. “Almost all New Dealers were attacked by the Right,” observed Alger Hiss, who died protesting his innocence of the charges.15 If you read Griffi n Fariello’s comprehensive collection, Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition, an Oral History, it is clear that the party’s passions—like the Scottsboro case, anti-lynching legislation, the Spanish Civil War—had once been nearly inevitable causes for moral agents and analytic minds across all class levels. Apolitical people all across the country were also caught up in what the historian David Caute called the Great Fear. Everyone was “suspect.” The government’s coercive loyalty oaths, unjust arrests, prison sentences, denaturalizations, deportations, suspension of passports, FBI or “Red Squad” harassment, job loss, and forced career change, led to dreadful consequences in civil life—employment related, psychological, and political. One and a half million union members were subjected to the loyalty-oath process, as were government employees at all levels down to the cities—as many as one in five working Americans.16 One small study suggests that working-class people suffered more job losses.17 Millions—73 percent: a sign of a desperately demoralized country—anticipated informing on their neighbors.18 People who protested fi rings were themselves fi red. The parents who stood beside their accused adult offspring, and the children who endured their parents’ fates, also need to be counted among the victims. Orthodox anticommunist writers still ignore such experiences. They

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The party’s passions—like the Scottsboro case, anti-lynching legislation, the Spanish Civil War—had once been nearly inevitable causes for moral agents and analytic minds across all class levels.

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ignore the testimonies of the government perpetrators who repented: lawyers, administrators, ex-FBI informants. They implicitly deny the innocence of the political prisoners and all the other radicals by restricting their focus to anticommunist recanters or to the few remaining controversial “cases”—like that of Julius Rosenberg—that bind the CPUSA to the external enemy selected by Truman and the Right after ending the Soviet-American alliance that won World War II. They still focus on spies. The right-wing’s “over-reliance on the experiences of the disaffected” as well as its terrorizing “Better dead than Red” rhetoric have led to neglect of the anguish of millions, delegitimized their voices, and distorted the record of the activists’ grassroots activities on their native soil.19 The 1970s saw a stream of testimonial literature, some of it published by mainstream presses. Resistant victims as varied as Dalton Trumbo, Al Richmond, and Cedric Belfrage (respectively, an inactive Communist Party member who had been the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood until being blacklisted, the editor of a Communist Party labor journal, and a British noncommunist radical writer and translator) wrote books in 1972 and 1973. By the late 1970s, with Nixon and the Republicans repudiated and Carter on the way in, it seemed safer to write aggressively about one’s experience. The best-known book was once Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time (1976), which attacked liberals for not fighting back hard enough as well as “Trumanism” for starting it all. 20 Now the best-known books are probably two daughters’ accounts—Vivian Gornick’s thematic weavings of oral histories, The Romance of American Communism (1977), and Kim Chernin’s In My Mother’s House (1983)—and one son’s memoir, Carl Bernstein’s Loyalties (1989). In 1976 Professor Paul Buhle found a home for the Oral History of the American Left (OHAL) at the Tamiment Library at New York University: it includes many accounts about the 1950s and 1960s. After 1989 the fall of the USSR made another, apparently even safer opening. A small spurt of life writings was published, mostly by adult offspring, as in the collection Red Diapers, or by better known victims, as in Fariello’s Red Scare. A man whom Gornick quoted pseudonymously in 1977 published four volumes of autobiography in his own name—Carl Marzani—in the 1990s. 21 The unexpurgated letters of the Rosenbergs were published in 1995 by Garland, a trade press.

Suffering “Only two” people were judicially executed by the U.S. government. 22 All the branches collaborated: the Supreme Court failed to intervene, Eisenhower failed to grant clemency; the executive branches provided

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a background of administrative persecutions; the legislative branch of government, through HUAC, fanned the hysterical publicity about dirty and godless Commies. Ethel Rosenberg was innocent even in the eyes of her prosecutors, who cynically held her life hostage to force her husband, Julius, to confess. 23 Her brother lied about her to save his own life. Tony Kushner in Angels in America gave Ethel a big purse and a big soul. She curses Roy Cohn, the red-baiting lawyer who indefatigably hounded so many people like her, but she fi nally says kaddish for him when he dies of AIDS in a hospital bed. In 1993–94, Kushner can imagine such a reconciliation, but only after a victim’s bitter grief and pain have been publically shouted out and the persecutor dies. Angels in America, the famous play that redeems both Commies and faggots, is widely produced. It makes Ethel older than in life—matronly, solid, squared off on her feet, an angelic exemplar visiting from the afterlife. She was in 1953 a young mother of boys aged five and nine, Robby and Michael. What the Rosenbergs’ letters indicate about their probity, even the CIA confi rmed. People “of the sort of the Rosenbergs can be swayed by duty where they cannot be swayed by considerations of self-interest.”24 Julius Rosenberg may or may not have been guilty of giving the Soviet Union (in 1944 still an ally) his brother-in-law’s worthless sketch of a lens mold for the bomb. 25 Civil libertarians now consider the evidence contaminated and fl imsy. With the Department of Justice currently preparing for treason trials, it is worth remembering the widening circles of legal abuse that accompanied the run-up to the executions: suborning perjury, paying informers, hiding evidence from defense lawyers, raising bail levels arbitrarily high, evading due process through administrative measures, expanding defi nitions of wrongdoing through guilt by association, guilt by membership, guilt by silence, guilt by Fifth Amendment use, guilt by teaching (or reading) Marxism, amid hectic screams of “disloyalty.”26 When people are exposed to heightened death anxiety, social psychologists show, they react by treating those constructed as enemies especially harshly. 27 The bomb-hype heightened American death anxiety. The electrocution of both Ethel and Julius in 1953, the culmination of reaction to the alleged Red scare, is recorded in many testimonies as an act of “state terror” and intimidation—“an American version of totalitarianism.”28 Yet ten thousand people came to their funeral, their granddaughter Ivy Meeropol told me. 29 One of the “Red Diaper babies” remembers sobbing for hours. “The next day the New York papers dwelt lovingly on every detail of the executions, including the fact that wisps of smoke came out of Ethel’s head after the switch was pulled.”30 It was not incidental that the two executed were Jewish. The CIA, crediting the same link of Jews to “Bolshevism” that had guided the Nazis, offered commutation, according

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to the historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, if the Rosenbergs would appeal to Jews in all countries to abandon socialist movements. 31 Jew-baiting and baiting of “nigger-lovers” were allied to red-baiting in the United States, and not just in mobs. In New York City in the 1940s, a board of education purge “resulted in the dismissal of hardly any but Jewish teachers”: “some five hundred,” says Sally Belfrage in Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties. 32 Jewish anticommunists had something extra to prove. Children felt, in the words of Dorothy Zellner, that “we could actually be charged with something fantastic that we never did and ‘fry in the electric chair.’ ”33 Rachel Fast Ben-Avi, daughter of the novelist Howard Fast, wrote that “there was no reason to believe that what was happening to [Robby and Michael’s] parents could not happen to mine.”34 Stephanie Allen, whose father was arrested under the Smith Act, was “frantic” that her “parents would be killed” but never spoke to them about it. 35 The children had their share of pain through their parents’ arrests, convictions, jailings, losses of jobs and savings, deportations, HUAC subpoenas, and the suicides and divorces that followed the stress. 36 The FBI or police “Red Squads” often arrested their targets in the middle of the night, waking the children and alerting the neighbors. Kim Chernin’s best friend chose the day after Kim’s mother was arrested to tell the kids at camp that “we weren’t really cousins.” Ilana Singer vomited on the floor of her classroom when one child said it was “The Reds. The Jews. The Commies” who “dropped Russian bombs.”37 Children were tormented simply because their families were denounced by the newspapers as commies. Chris Trumbo, son of the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, was thrown into the junior high school furnace by fellow students. 38 Even children whose parents were in no way active in the movement, but simply sympathized with its values, or knew families who had been scarred, were intimidated. If children were traumatized, adults were estimating how far legal repression would go. Even before 1953 some Communists rationally believed that “concentration camps” would be the next government step against the Left. In 1949, federal trials under the Smith Act had put many leaders of the party out of action, and their defense was absorbing funds that would otherwise have gone into activism and recruitment. The McCarran-Walter Act had a section about incarcerating masses of suspected “dangerous persons” in any national emergency. Seven camps from World War II were “dusted off,” and lists were started of those who might fi ll them. 39 The Security Index, like the other federal lists, was so arbitrary that Sally Belfrage found someone who said he could get her into a less unpleasant camp in Arizona instead of the one she was slated for—not for her own politics but because her parents had been deported.40 Diana Anhalt’s parents, like many who had watched Germany decay under

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Hitler, were “fi rmly convinced that it was simply a matter of time before the United States became another Nazi Germany”; they moved to Mexico in 1950.41 To Dalton Trumbo, even though he had served his prison time, it seemed prudent to leave the country—as it did to many others. Two thousand functionaries selected by the party went underground, which was an isolating, and terrible, experience.42 (Some people must have named names to HUAC out of fear of being sent to the camps: the writer Roy Huggins did.) 43 The Rosenbergs’ executions convinced more people that America was turning “fascist.” No one could tell how long the repression from the top would last. And even when it appeared to begin to end—with Supreme Court decisions undoing some of the most illegal government actions—the punishing losses dragged on for decades. People who lost jobs, income, status, community respect, their sense of security, not to mention their party, could never be made whole. The fi rst questions for cultural and political historians are, was there “enough” suffering, has it been adequately described, and is it well enough known? The second ones are, was the collective vision that inspired the victims a vision that Americans might once again appreciate? Are the victims’ voices convincing? In what ways does anticommunism still frame such questions, to delegitimate the experiences of the victims and prevent our hearing them?

Patriotism People in the movements “didn’t think we were traitors; we thought we were actually patriots,” making America a better place for the marginalized.44 As a group backed into a bitter corner, the victims come out of the 1950s looking better than the persecutors. As Lillian Hellman said, to a storm of abuse, they did less harm. The testimonies show how much harm the authorities did—those who invented the security oaths and expanded them (Truman and his attorney general, Eisenhower and his), and established the indexes and investigations (J. Edgar Hoover, McCarthy, Cohn, Nixon); those in the FBI who threatened to put people’s mothers and sons in concentration camps; those who ran the kangaroo courts and administrative hearings and set up speaker bans for Fifth Amendment pleaders; those who made laws delegitimating the party and those who had ever belonged to it years before, bankrupted the party’s adult-education schools, denied passports, and bloated an ideologized FBI so much that it had agents available to monitor Carl Bernstein’s mother’s poker game until 1968.45 Then, when the victims were vilified as a collective, their employers fi red them individually . . . but perhaps this list should stop

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Whatever the eclectic ideologies and rhetorics whose passions ignited the children’s dreams around those countless kitchen tables, in practice most adults were reformers.

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here, on the principle enunciated earlier, that to end bitterness not every truth needs to be retold. Not every perpetrator needs to be cited. The Left made vast substantive contributions, especially to racial integration and to the American labor movement. Communists, in Gornick’s words, “fought for the eight-hour day, the minimum wage, worker compensation, health and welfare insurance. And for one glorious moment—during the brief life of the CIO—they brought genuine worker politics to the American labor movement.”46 Robbie Bridges, son of a much-hounded labor leader, writes, “Probably the most important thing I remember my father talking about is to have the security of a job for life, and his goal was to see that people had that.”47 “Some of the most courageous attempts at interracial political activism in American history involved black and white Communists . . . particularly those who participated in the organization of unions in the Deep South,” Randall Kennedy has noted.48 The party had a good record in the African American community. After the novelist Julian Mayfield left the Communist Party, he recalled that “on the Left the young Negro writer found a haven and encouragement that existed nowhere else for him.”49 “Most black people seemed to have a greater suspicion of McCarthyism than did whites,” Steve Nelson recalls of his years in Pittsburgh.50 Reading enough interviews—especially Gornick’s in The Romance of American Communism, which begins with an homage to her family’s kitchen-table debates—we can see how fervently the party educated and inspired people, gave them ideas and “the idea of ideas,” access to collective experiences of high and popular culture, friendships, respect, solidarity, “wholeness,” passionate missions, and—as all political parties must do51—resources, coordination, and discipline for those missions, as well as explanations of current events, the analytic tools for understanding the systems they lived in. Carl Hirsch, asked in an OHAL interview about his twenty years in the party, responds as others did. “Yes, I feel pride in being a staunch and devoted person to a cause which I still believe was right.”52 Whatever the eclectic ideologies and rhetorics whose passions ignited the children’s dreams around those countless kitchen tables, in practice most adults were reformers: teachers in worker’s schools, public schools, or universities; labor organizers, union reps, journalists, librarians, antiracists, profeminists, antiracist and prolabor writers. Steve Nelson, a member of the party’s National Committee, called it “this little Communist movement that was in bread-and-butter kinds of issues.”53 “Just like the neighborhood Democratic Party would have operated—only we always got there fi rst,” Carl Marzani grinned, about his work on the Lower East Side.54 Even the socialist Irving Howe, “to be fair,” gives the Communist

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Party credit up to a point for being “a party like other parties.”55 If an army runs on its belly, an activist movement runs on its ditto machines. “The hard dirty work in the office is done by them,” Lillian Hellman said to Henry Wallace when he ran for president in the fateful election of 1948.56 An eighty-nine-year-old woman who still wishes to remain anonymous told me, “Comrade was a term of high respect. ‘He’s a comrade’ told the whole story. You didn’t have to say, ‘He believes in what we believe in.’” Marge Frantz spoke for many when she recalled, “There’s nothing like being actively engaged in the life of what’s happening in your time. . . . it wasn’t a trivial life, you know. . . . It did feel like a very useful worthwhile life.”57 It is now possible on the basis of the testimonies to evaluate the goals, rhetoric, and activities of American Communist Party members without having foreign gulags dragged in to stop discussion. If the rank and fi le had known about the show trials and been critical of the show trials, they could have had no more influence on the USSR than dissident Democrats had on the Truman Doctrine. There were “premature” anti-Stalinists among Communist Party members. If they admired Stalin—and he is mentioned very rarely, although interviewers were not necessarily unsympathetic—it was as a symbol of what the Soviet Union had achieved since its revolution that America could emulate: raising the condition of the working class, valuing women, welcoming African Americans. But when ex-Communist professors testified that membership in the party did not require giving up intellectual life or lying, no one believed them.58 A section organizer who became a potter said in the seventies, “I never felt myself a tool of the CP. On the contrary, the CP was my tool, I was the living purpose to which the joining of form and content was put.”59 A woman interviewed in 1979 for the fi lm Seeing Red observed that after Khrushchev’s disclosures “we were thinking as adults, we just didn’t say yes to everything or deny everything.” Of people who left then, when a less dogmatic party might have been resurgent, Rose Krysak said, “They took this sad incident in the history [of international communism] and forgot one thing, even Stalin built the revolution. . . . if you use this as a basis for being in or out you are really losing sight of the main objective of the Communist movement,” by which she meant, the American scene.60 “A revolutionary tradition may be politically moderate,” Eric Hobsbawm observes. A willingness to idealize “revolution” does not necessarily indicate an extremist program.61 Junius Scales, a party leader, said he had never heard anyone advocating violence, adding wryly, “That shows what great theoreticians we were—nobody had even thought about the road to socialism.”62 No one collected guns. So scant was evidence of illegality that laws had to be changed or bent to get convictions. Even those who

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haven’t read Hobsbawm, Caute, Michael E. Brown, Ellen Schrecker, and the other new historians may fi nd the charge of “advocacy to overthrow” sinister. David Freidman, a “proud” member of the NYC Teachers Union, laughs when asked about “subversion.” “Well, there wasn’t talk about overthrowing the government. There was talk chiefly about changing the Board of Education. [Laughter.] Overthrowing the Board of Education.”63 One FBI special agent who had broken into homes to steal lists of names later declared, “I can’t think of anything we uncovered during those ten years that was worthwhile in terms of national security.”64 Many would have liked to admit that they were or had once been Communists. This is what some people say they should all have done, as if Americans in the 1950s could have acted like the rebels in Spartacus, who one after another bravely rose up in front of the military authorities to declare, “I am Spartacus!” The fi lm was a fantasy for an unheroic time, written under a pseudonym by Dalton Trumbo. By a catch-22, if you answered the accusers about your own past you waived your right to privacy and “could not refuse to name other people, thus subjecting them in turn to the same public exposure and penalties.”65 If you did say you were a Communist, you could be convicted of perjury for not naming every other one you knew. It is striking how many middle-aged children of the affl icted radicals still admire both their parents and their political legacies. It is even surprising. Given the misery infl icted on their childhoods or adolescences, the adult offspring could have turned on their parents rather than the state apparatus. Ethel was portrayed as a bad mother, to murderous effect. J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, who knew she was innocent, decided to support the death sentence only because an FBI report represented her as a cold-hearted mother.66 In 2003 when one of the Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael Meeropol, published a book about his childhood, a reviewer in the Nation niggled away: why didn’t “the couple” save Ethel, after the Eisenhower Justice Department demanded she choose between her life and turning on her husband? 67 Ethel had answered long before: “These unctuous saviors, these odious swine, are actually proposing to erect a terrifying sepulchre in which I shall live without living and die without dying!”68 Some Red-Diaper babies whose childhoods were unhappy remain angry at their parents—a few because they forget that neglectful or hostile parenting is not a Left monopoly. Some are upset that their parents did not tell them they were Communists, forgetting that the terror was not created by their parents. Others learned lessons about political resistance that every generation needs. Stephanie Allen, who had been so frightened she became “a quintessential conformist” in her teens, concluded, “I was lucky to be a red diaper baby.”69 Anna Kaplan wrote, “I am exceptionally

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proud of my parents. I wish everyone could understand what people like them have done for our country. . . . I could never have their courage, commitment, strength and belief, which keep them fighting to make things at least a little better.” 70 Al Lannon loved his father’s “tales of revolutionary heroism” on the waterfront and in racially mixed union meetings in the South.71 Dick Levins said, “Some principles had long been a part of my being, such as not crossing a picket line, not telling racist jokes, and not giving names to the enemy.” 72 Rachel Fast Ben-Avi concludes,“But I believe still—and I am glad I do—that the ideal of an integrated community, of common aims, shared wealth, of a socialist society, continues to be valid. Had I, by magic, the option to relive my life in a family of which the government of those days would have approved, I would refuse it.” 73

Freed Speech Letters written at the time, and life stories told twenty or forty years later, often use a rhetoric shared by members of the party and the movements. It was a mixture of humanistic universalism; religion (the Bible, especially Exodus); patriotic and Marxist metaphors; pulp fiction; folk, black, and popular music; journalese and “high” style, as nurtured in Popular Front circles. The cultural critic David Thorburn described the rhetoric of the Rosenbergs’ letters as mingling some of these strands.74 Paul Robeson’s line “This is America to me!” was to many their idealistic anthem. Insofar as they shared it, they sound now like members of an extended family. The language was not highly theoretical, but ordinary people used the concepts of class and race and gender in ways that were meaningful to them. Using such concepts, many thought proudly of themselves as “intellectuals.” The language was informed by a belief in self-improvement and progress for “the masses,” including themselves. The more one reads the philosophy of these activists in their own words, the more it looks like the American dream democratized. It was a comfortable, emotionally appealing rhetoric, and the victims did not forget it. Those who later felt free to speak claimed it again. Some of their adult offspring—like Levins and Ben-Avi—share it. Whenever we try to treat them as a collective verbally, however, we must warn ourselves that “Communists” were treated in the 1950s and after, and sometimes today, as uniformly brainwashed and congenital liars. Alfred Kazin, writing in 1978, mocked “souped-up patriotism” but sneered that “the Rosenbergs in the death house wrote the crudest Party slogans to each other in the form of personal letters.” 75 Taking the

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Fifth was considered tantamount to lying. One informer, who had lied to HUAC about the internal danger posed by the Communist Party, still said later about the Hollywood Ten that he was “appalled by their lack of candor because they all pretended to be Jeffersonian democrats, and they weren’t.” 76 If the testimonies are elegies to the comradely life, they are called lies; but if they are diatribes about the failures of the party, they are proofs. It was also or especially the “petty-bourgeois” nature of Left cultural tastes, Andrew Ross argues, that drove 1950s liberal “intellectuals” into contemptuous repudiation of Communists’ “corrupt” rhetoric.77 Atomized by 1950s formalism and individualism, some also (I suspect) envied the unifying, unironic, warm vernaculars of socialist ideals, idealist rhetorics that anticommunism put forever beyond their reach. No critic steeped in recent auto/biography theory, alert to historical contingency, wary of all truth claims, would be caught libeling an entire body of witnesses, or ignoring the degrees of stress to which the speech of the victims was originally subject, or the degrees of liberty they felt thereafter. In a postmodern era of sampling and fusion, mongrelization is no longer a priori distasteful, tasteless, or corrupt. These are historical advantages that make it possible actually to hear these testimonies, not exactly as spoken of course, but at least shorn of some Cold War distortions. Merely to treat these people as native informants with distinct points of view, and as no more than normally subject to rules of discourse—to let them be human again, as I do here—is to lift a weighty repression. One curious relevant fact about the published testimonies is that many were written by people who were children in the 1950s, speaking on behalf of their tainted parents. They wrote not to appropriate their parent’s voices but as witnesses to the suffering or to the legacy, and because the dwindling of fear took so long that often their parents had died. But the children are not an issue in this country. They were not Commies and Fifth Amendment pleaders. Their loyalty to their parents, although moderated occasionally by ambivalence or chilled by Cold War intensity, does not necessarily rehabilitate the members of the movements, or a fortiori, the members of the party. The children shared a reflex of their parent’s terror, but most were removed from the worst by the buffer their parents provided. They were too young. They remember other preoccupations suited to their years, like 1950s dating. Fine witnesses to the troubles and value of their political inheritance, they cannot convey the experiences of the generation that bore the brunt. There are not enough vital fi rsthand published testimonies by the adults. This is another catch-22 in this history of continual impediments to speech. Communist Party leaders wrote memoirs: Dorothy Healey, Gil

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Green, Steve Nelson. Trumbo’s career was made whole and he became a celebrity, like Arthur Miller or Lillian Hellman. They could write. But the rank and fi le did not produce enough life writing. When they did, their memoirs often went into quiet repositories like the Tamiment, where most are untranscribed. The reasons for this neglect are almost too obvious to bear stating. Who wanted early on to read the stories of the despised and condemned? Most continued to be afraid to announce they had been Communists. Their immediate need was to support their families, often in unfamiliar lines of work. Few had been writers beforehand, and some had scarcely been readers. Once they had been collectively represented as liars, who would fi nd them credible? By the time Paul Buhle, the fi lmmakers, and the other oral historians found them, history had been so cruel, and most were old enough or enough time had passed, that some energy had been spent. Gornick did fi nd people who were vehement about their cause as well as articulate. She herself had shrieked in 1956 that Stalin’s terrors were carried out “in the name of socialism!” 78 She looked hard for “passion”—it is her theme—and she surrounded their talk with her own highly charged prose. But many adults who told their stories decades later held back in ways that might act as dilutions for readers. In their prison letters, Ethel and Julius remind each other to be dignified and unmoved in public. Decades later, the resignation of those who lost jobs, life time, trust in the system, can be too calm, too matter-of-fact. Dredging up their victimization, or even their resistance, was too painful. They describe their daily work lives (which were often quite heroic even before the government shattered them) plainly and modestly. Undeceived about history, their calm might also derive from their knowledge that worse had happened elsewhere—in Spain, in the death camps. But their stoicism may also be related to their sense of being listened to without belief or kindness—not by their interviewers but by those beyond the brick wall of made-in-America bias. They were suffocated if not silenced, understanding too well that they had been lightning rods. It was not what they had done that brought down the bolts. Trumbo’s theory was “people really don’t like solemn arguments about ‘Gee, how you have injured me.’” 79 But Americans ought to know their collective injuries well enough to be able to recount them. Theirs are the unforgettable moments. They were closer to the events than the children; they suffered the painful emotions of responsibility for family survival; their sense of injustice was more complete; their political understandings were better attuned and more authoritative. About their children’s experiences they can be more compelling than the children. Few, reading Trumbo’s scathing 1956 letter to his daughter’s school, could stop themselves from turning their face toward him to share his indignation.

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I defy anyone

Ed Harris read this unforgettably in an off-Broadway production of the two-man show Trumbo, written by Chris Trumbo’s son in 2003.

to read Ethel’s sweet, strained eloquent voice in its context without the welling up of the heart that

At the beginning of the 1955–56 school term we entrusted to your care a happy, healthy, comparatively well-adjusted and demonstrably intelligent child [of ten] who loved school, adored her teachers, and enjoyed the friendship of her small circle of contemporaries. Eight months later you have returned to us a spiritually devastated human being. . . . Small childish conspiracies are directed against her—patterned in secret after the conspiracies of the parents—and she is quietly and incessantly persecuted and boycotted and shunned as long as the schoolday lasts. Her one remaining friend is called “traitor” by the other children. . . . This slow murder of the mind and heart and spirit of a young child is the proud outcome of those patriotic meetings among a few parents in the Annandale School under the sponsorship of the PTA and the Bluebirds [Girl Scouts]. 80

comes from the recognition of enormous careful love in the presence of profound injustice, the condition of Antigone before Creon.

Here is an excerpt from Ethel’s letter suggesting to Julius what words they might say to their sons about electrocution. Of course it’s not easy to know about the death penalty and not worry about it sometimes, but let’s look at it this way. We know that a car could strike us and kill us, but that doesn’t dispose us to spend every minute being fearful about cars. You see, we are the very same people we ever were, except that our physical selves are housed under a different roof from yours. Of course, we feel badly that we are separated from you but we also know that we are not guilty and that an injustice has been done to us by people who solved their own problems by lying about us. It’s all right to feel anyway you like about them, so long as your feelings don’t give you pain and make you unhappy.

She added, to her husband directly, “If we can face the thought of our intended execution without terror, then so will they.” 81 Ethel knew her letters were being read, and probably knew her mothering was being judged (although not how dreadfully much the verdict would matter). But no mother who was insensitive could have imagined her sons’ terror or worked so hard to invent a solution. I defy anyone to read Ethel’s sweet, strained eloquent voice in its context without the welling up of the heart that comes from the recognition of enormous careful love in the presence of profound injustice, the condition of Antigone before Creon. There has been no large-scale movement outside government toward awarding the victims vindication or apologies or reparations. (Is it residues of decades of knee-jerk red-baiting, strengthened in the 1990s after the USSR abandoned communism; shame, the weakness of the Lefts, or

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Figure 1. Paul Robeson stamp from the Black Heritage Series. © 2004, U.S. Postal Service.

their being distracted by so many other contemporary causes?) On the little scale, things happen only when a constituency forms and agitates. After a long campaign, a stamp of Paul Robeson, that great bass voice of Popular Front humanism and integration, recently appeared. Only in 1981 did some fi red teachers receive an apology from the City College board of trustees, and even in the apology their fi ring was blamed on their refusal to testify publicly. 82 The New York Times fi red a copy editor who had pleaded the Fifth Amendment, denied that this was their motive, and never offered restitution. 83 The demise of the Hollywood blacklist was “unwritten, unproclaimed”: some people waited decades. 84 The movie critic J. Hoberman notes that “ninety percent of those who had been driven from the movie industry never returned.” 85 In the 1990s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave a lifetime achievement award to Elia Kazan, whom many had never forgiven for having named names to HUAC. TV images of stars refusing to applaud him were greeted with puzzlement by a populace that does not know the old scores. Even tiny efforts at justice encounter opposition. When Ethel Rosenberg’s image—on a poster with those of other American women, commemorating National Women’s Month—was hung in the Department of Justice, in one office they took it down, in another someone covered it up. 86 The FBI kept its fi les on more than a million “un-Americans” for decades. 87

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Although

McCarthyism became a national byword for undemocratic politics, it is not widely enough accepted as a warning against current threats like the Patriot Act . . . We in the United States are the more endangered for this failure.

126

This is one culture war that did not get vocalized. It was not yelled out, and it is not being debated. Class issues are muted, even in academe, and the CPUSA is a charged nexus where class, the power of labor, peaceful internationalism before “globalization,” and political dissent met. This was once a heroic intersection. Now it’s nearly hush-hush. The purges restricted scholarly inquiry, as Ellen Schrecker demonstrates in No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Perhaps it is time to overthrow these repressions, too. Americans lost a great deal as citizens because by the late 1950s, progressives were broken and disunited by the purges, particularly in the labor movement and the school systems. Especially in an era where reform groups and labor unions can now be called “special interests,” we need the energy, the initiative, the organization, the hopeful utopian vision, and warm-spirited collectivism that communism and other cohesive Left parties at their best once provided. Finally, witnesses believe that the state terror that began in 1947 narrowed the entire spectrum of political liberty in America. 88 The tilt to the right limited the options of presidents: Kennedy said that if he had tried to pull out of Vietnam, “we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands.” 89 The country’s incomprehension and indifference toward the victims accompanies a continuous mainstream unwillingness and lack of preparation to criticize the Cold War, the right-wing backlash against the New Deal, the legal weakening of the labor unions and affi rmative action, and the reduction of civil liberties in the name of “security.” You have to read the testimonies to know in your nerve endings how effectively repression can operate within a “democratic” society. Although McCarthyism became a national byword for undemocratic politics, it is not widely enough accepted as a warning against current threats like the Patriot Act, the roundups and detentions of people “suspected” of terrorism without due process, the expansion of the death penalty. We in the United States are the more endangered for this failure. Our government’s current restrictions on due process harm the innocent and the not-guilty-as-charged in irreparable ways. The international human rights community watches in dismay as state power, escalating, takes its familiar tragic course.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Notes This essay is dedicated to Mike Brown; to Paul Buhle and others whose interviews made it possible; to historiographers like Ellen Schrecker who provided the missing record; to the brave progressives of earlier generations, especially the Communists; and to my son’s generation, which should have been taught national reconciliation in school. My thanks to Sara Gruen, my scholar-partner at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, in the fall of 2003, who helped with research and read this with a fi ne editor’s eye. Norah Chase and Alix Kates Shulman offered important comments. 1. Andrew Ross, Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 194. 2. Jude Webber, “Peru Doubles Estimate of Death Toll Stemming from Violent Decades,” Boston Globe, 29 August 2003. 3. Ross, Real Love, 194–95. 4. Telephone communication, 2003, from a woman of seventy-nine years who was a housewife during the era, but whose husband lost his job as a union leader. She wishes to remain anonymous. On still being penalized for “continuing to hold the same philosophical outlook,” see Ben Gray, Oral History of the American Left (OHAL), Tamiment Library, New York University, Series IV, 2-3. 5. Carl Bernstein, Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 69. 6. On the new historiography, see Michael E. Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker, eds., preface to New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 7–13. On the relations between the party and the much larger “dynamic social, cultural and political movement that challenged the status quo and served as the primary conduit for a socialist critique of U.S. society,” see Ellen Schrecker, “McCarthyism and the Decline of American Communism, 1945–1960,” in Brown et al., New Studies, 123–40. See page 125 for the “populist” versus “elite” interpretation of the origins of the red-baiting era. On current means of keeping red-baiting alive, see Ellen Schrecker, ed., Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism (New York: New Press, 2004). 7. Telford Taylor, foreword to Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers, by Junius Irving Scales and Richard Nickson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), xvi. 8. Maurice Isserman and Ellen Schrecker, “‘Papers of a Dangerous Tendency’: From Major Andre’s Boot to the VENONA Files,” in Schrecker, Cold War Triumphalism, 159. 9. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1994), 236. David Caute says that the Palmer raids and deportations of 1917–20 were worse, but “the second repression was the more profoundly corrupting, the more corrosive of habits of tolerance and fair play” (Caute, The Great Fear [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978], 20). Gary Wills contrasts Palmer’s “small force of federal marshals” to the vaster post–World War II FBI, in the introduction to Scoundrel Time, by Lillian Hellman (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), 17.

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10. Sally Belfrage, Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 247. 11. The dictionary that Griffi n Fariello cites in Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition, an Oral History (New York: Norton, 1995), 28, is MerriamWebster’s Collegiate. 12. Frank Tarloff, in Fariello, Red Scare, 326. 13. Reed Lindsay, “Taking on the Past, Argentina Repeals Amnesty,” Boston Globe, 22 August 2003. The laws had been in effect since 1986–87. 14. Michael E. Brown, “Introduction: The History of the History of U.S. Communism,” in Brown et al., New Studies, 17. 15. Alger Hiss, in Fariello, Red Scare, 146. 16. Fariello, Red Scare, 380. David Cole says that “as many of one in five working Americans were subjected to the loyalty review process in one way or another” (Cole, “The New McCarthyism: Repeating History in the War on Terrorism,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 38:1 [2003]: part D). 17. Seamus E. Kearney interviewed fourteen adults for Defensive Strategies of Red Diaper Babies during the McCarthy Era (MA thesis, Harvard University, 1990). 18. Fariello notes that the famous survey was done by Samuel Stouffer of Harvard (Red Scare, 41). 19. Brown, “Introduction,” 16; on the rhetoric of the orthodox historians, and the disservice they do to history, see pages 6–21. 20. Gary Wills said the era should have been named (“genetically”) “Trumanism,” since Truman instituted the loyalty oaths (Scoundrel Time, 21). 21. Carl Marzani, The Education of a Reluctant Radical, 4 vols. (New York: Topical, 1992–95). Gornick presumably offered everyone pseudonyms as late as the 1970s. 22. “Only two” satirizes the tendency of historians of Communism, even the “new” historians, to construct locutions or comparisons in which what readers are meant to be surprised by is not the high number of punishments successfully infl icted by the government during this period, but the lowness of the number. “Only 253 aliens were officially deported . . . between 1946 and 1966” and “only 28 of the 145 party leaders indicted under the Smith Act actually served prison sentences,” writes Schrecker (“McCarthyism,” 131). “Only 13 political denaturalization actions succeeded between 1945–56,” says Caute (Great Fear, 227). Even if the point is the weakness of the government’s case, or the effectiveness of the victims’ lawyers, there could be another way of phrasing it. 23. Ellen Schrecker is quoted in Irene Sege, “Bittersweet Remembrance,” saying, “She [Ethel] was killed because the government wanted to pressure her husband to confess” (Boston Globe, 19 June 2003). 24. Blanche Wiesen Cook, “The Rosenbergs and the Crime of the Century,” in Secret Agents, ed. Marjorie Garber and Judith L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 1995), 25. 25. On the uselessness of the sketch, the government agreed soon after the trial. The general in charge of Los Alamos said early on that the data “was of minor value. I would never say that publically” (Michael Meeropol, ed., The Rosenberg Letters: A Complete Edition of the Prison Correspondence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg [New York: Garland, 1994], lx–lxi, xxx).

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26. Cole, “New McCarthyism”; Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 27. In this experiment, judges reminded of their own death set an average bond [for an alleged prostitute] of $455, while other judges not so reminded set it at $50 (Jeff Greenberg, Jeff Schimel, and Andy Mertens, “Ageism: Denying the Face of the Future,” in Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice against Older Persons, ed. Todd D. Nelson [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002], 35). 28. David Wellman, “Mistaken Identities,” in Red Diapers, ed. Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 174–75. 29. Ivy Meeropol, conversation in Boston after a showing of her fi lm, Heir to an Execution: A Granddaughter’s Story, 6 June 2004. 30. Dorothy M. Zellner, “Proletaria and Me,” in Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 87. 31. Cook, “Rosenbergs and the Crime of the Century,” 25. 32. Belfrage, Un-American Activities, 175. 33. Zellner, “Proletaria and Me,” 86. 34. Rachel Fast Ben-Avi, “A Memoir,” in Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 131. 35. Stephanie Allen, “When Life Was a Party,” in Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 117–18. 36. Kearney, Defensive Strategies of Red Diaper Babies, especially 28, 40, 44, 45, 62. 37. Kim Chernin, “From In My Mother’s House,” in Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 164; Ilana Girard Singer, “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” in Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 196. 38. Dalton Trumbo, in Fariello, Red Scare, 66. 39. Fariello, Red Scare, 25. Cole gives the details of the Justice Department’s program and congressional action to fund the detention centers in “The New McCarthyism,” part C, “Emergency Administrative Detention.” 40. Belfrage, Un-American Activities. 41. Diana Anhalt, “Resuscitating Corpses: Memories of Political Exile in Mexico,” in Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 177. 42. The figure of two thousand comes from Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic, 1977), 96. She includes some painful testimonies of life underground. For others who went into hiding or left the country voluntarily, see Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 60, 132, 177. 43. Huggins, quoted in Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980), 260, 262. 44. Quoted in Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 120. 45. Dorothy Healey reports on these threats in Fariello, Red Scare, 94, 224. She was on the Security Index. On Bernstein’s mother’s poker game, see Loyalties, 32. Gary Wills calls the FBI “bloated and ideologized” (Scoundrel Time, 17). 46. Gornick, Romance of American Communism, 146. 47. Bridges, in Fariello, Red Scare, 61. 48. Randall Kennedy, “Contrasting Fates of Repression,” in Garber and Walkowitz, Secret Agents, 271. 49. Quoted in Alan Wald, “When Black Writers Were on the Left,” Socialism and Democracy 17 (2003): 246.

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50. Steve Nelson, James R. Barrett, Rob Ruck, Steve Nelson: American Radical (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 315. 51. The point about the roles of political parties in modern mass politics is from Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (New York: New American Library, 1973), 26–27. 52. Hirsch, OHAL Series 4, 24. 53. Nelson, in Fariello, Red Scare, 212. 54. Quoted in Gornick, Romance of American Communism, 120. Gornick gave all her people pseudonyms. “Eric Lanzetti” is probably Carl Marzani, who published his autobiographies in the 1990s. 55. Irving Howe, Socialism and America (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 95, 99. 56. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, 121. 57. Quoted in Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s, 1994), 104. 58. Jerry Frug, “McCarthyism and Critical Legal Studies,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 22 (1987): 675, citing Schrecker’s No Ivory Tower. 59. Quoted in Gornick, Romance of American Communism, 197. 60. Interview with Rose Krysak, OHAL, Series 4, transcripts of Seeing Red, 10. 61. Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (New York: Anchor, 1967), 440. 62. Junius Scales, in Fariello, Red Scare, 228. 63. Interview with David Freidman, OHAL, Series 4, transcripts of Seeing Red, 9. The spelling of his name may be a transcription error. 64. M. Wesley Swearinger, in Fariello, Red Scare, 97. 65. Belfrage, Un-American Activities, 130. 66. Joyce Antler, “A Bond of Sisterhood,” in Garber and Walkowitz, Secret Agents, 206n25, 203–7. See also in the same volume, Ashe, 217–18, and Meeropol, 240–43. 67. Philip Weiss, “Secrets and Lies,” Nation, 14 July 2003. Weiss even asks (page 30) why Meeropol does not forgive his uncle (who changed his testimony to incriminate his sister, Ethel). 68. Quoted in David Thorburn, “The Rosenberg Letters,” in Garber and Walkowitz, Secret Agents, 180. 69. Allen, “When Life Was a Party.” 70. Anna Kaplan, “Born Underground,” in Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 228. 71. Albert Vetere Lannon, “Commiebastid,” in Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 73. 72. Dick Levins, “Touch Red,” in Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 263. 73. Rachel Fast Ben-Avi, “A Memoir,” in Kaplan and Shapiro, Red Diapers, 134. 74. Thorburn, “Rosenberg Letters,” 179. 75. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Vintage, 1978), 285, 291. He was echoing the critic Robert Warshow, writing in the 1950s. Both were reading a corrupt text. Warshow suspected that it had been distorted by the fi rst editors. 76. Roy Huggins, quoted in Navasky, Naming Names, 262. 77. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 29, 30–37.

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78. Gornick, Romance of American Communism, 11. 79. Quoted or paraphrased by Chris Trumbo in Fariello, Red Scare, 65. 80. Dalton Trumbo, Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942–62 (New York: Evans, 1970), 338–39. 81. Meeropol, Rosenberg Letters, 174, 176. The reference to “people who solved their own problems by lying about us” is to Ethel’s brother David Greenberg and his wife. 82. Stephen Leberstein, “Purging the Profs: The Rapp Coudert Committee in New York, 1940–1942,” in Brown et al., New Studies, 119. 83. Barnet, in Fariello, Red Scare, 361. 84. Helen Manfull, preface to Trumbo, Additional Dialogue, 16. 85. J. Hoberman, “Hollywood Blacklist,” Lincoln Center Theater Review, spring/summer 2003, 335. 86. Antler, “Bond of Sisterhood,” 212. 87. Belfrage, Un-American Activities, 247. 88. See, for example, Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 412–13. 89. Quoted in Jonathan Mirksy, “Wartime Lies,” New York Review of Books, 9 October 2003, 46.

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Copying Kill Bill

Holding a pirated VCD copy of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2003) that he found on a Beijing street, U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans solemnly warned the Chinese government in his Beijing press conference: “We have been patient but our patience is wearing thin.”1 Evans was on the mission to coerce the Chinese government to further open its markets for American products and services; this economic mission was a crucial item in George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, and Evans chose to attract media’s attention and solicit the American people’s identification by picking up on a pirated Hollywood fi lm as the ultimate symbol of China’s disrespect of fair trade in general and the country’s robbery of American wealth specifically. The VCD copy, according to Evans, was found all over Beijing, yet the fi lm had begun its fi rst run in movie theaters in the United States just two weeks before and was not available in U.S. stores in video or DVD format. Evans told members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing that “it didn’t take long. In the last twenty-four hours, I was able to purchase a CD on the streets of Beijing.”2 As Evans had arrived in Beijing only the afternoon before, his assertion simply implies that hitting the streets of the capital to locate a bootlegged version of a recent big-hit Hollywood fi lm was the fi rst, and probably the most important, task for this high-profi le China visit. With a pirated fi lm in hand, Evans could praise American creativity, criticize protectionism, defend globalization, celebrate market liberalization, and curse political authoritarianism all at the same time. The bootlegged Kill Bill VCD effectively condensed a basket of capitalist ideology into one sublime object. Behind this sublime object is the American interest and power governing the current copyright discourse. As Ngai-Ling Sum demonstrates, “New narratives such as the ‘copyright story’ and new data such as ‘piracy statistics’ enable the self and the others [of the United States] to be redefi ned. Once classified as ‘copyright partners’ or ‘copyright enemies’ (i.e., pirates), countries then either join the ranks of ‘most-favored nations’ or are placed on the U.S. ‘Watch List.’”3 While Hollywood—as revealed in Kill Bill, which I discuss below—is itself a major pirate of global trends and tropes, it is always the accuser against other countries for violating

Social Text 83, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.

Laikwan Pang

Hollywood works, as it forges a national cinema through the construction of its enemies. Film scholars have repeatedly stressed the difficulties of conceptualizing the structure and practice of national cinema because of the transnational nature of today’s cinema—in terms of fi nancing, production, and reception.4 Although widely used, the concept of national cinema is often more a convenient hypothesis than a real practice of fi lmmaking and fi lm viewing.5 An uncritical use of national cinema is also often accused of being ignorant of “nation” as an illusive and oppressive concept.6 There is, however, still a legitimate academic use of national cinema: as a hypothetical model against Hollywood.7 Hollywood, therefore, is always the opposite of national cinema, both in terms of its own transnational nature and its hegemonic position condemned as the enemy of all national cinemas. But relatively few have discussed if Hollywood can be considered a “national” cinema. Focusing on Kill Bill, I want to complicate the national-transnational dynamics of Hollywood on two dimensions: its transnational textual appropriation and its global distribution, both of which are protected and complicated by the U.S-centric copyright discourse. To situate the global status of Hollywood textually and contextually, I am interested in exploring how Kill Bill is understood as “copy” on the levels of both representation and industrial product; I also want to analyze how the copyright discourse, although a handy and powerful tool for Hollywood to reinforce its global interests, always fails to fully control the global cinemascape precisely because a fi lm is not only an industrial product but also a complex system of representation.

Copyrighting Hollywood Scholars have reminded us that Hollywood’s hegemony is maintained by many industrial mechanisms that regulate its transnational markets, capitals, and labors. Most of its revenue comes from its international markets, which continue to be fed back to the cinematic apparatus to mold the global taste according to a fantasized American standard. The media conglomeration process begun in 1985 also made all the major studios transnational. 8 There has been an exodus of production from Los Angeles to anglophone countries with lower production costs.9 But Hollywood’s “transnationality” describes only its investment and production; the brand name continues to be American. In other words, Hollywood’s “transnationality,” which traverses both its production and its market, only reinforces the American control. As Toby Miller and others in Global Hollywood summarize the contradiction between labor and control:

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“There are highly-developed efficiencies available from a skilled working class in places that nevertheless continue to import what is made on ‘their’ territory—but never under their control.”10 A major player sustaining the order of this transnational control is the copyright discourse. The underlying logic of the universal application of copyright is its indifference to the nationalities of the products and parties involved, yet both Hollywood as a cultural product and copyright as a global political discourse are fi lled with national interests. While Americans are bringing legal actions against everybody for copyright infringements, almost no producers outside the United States fi le lawsuits against the American studios for related matters. In an interview I asked Lawrence Ka Hee Wong, director of fi lm-physical production of Shaw Brothers, about the “Shaw Scope Wide Screen” title card that appeared in Kill Bill: Vol. 1.11 Wong disclosed that Tarantino’s Super Cool ManChu production company did contact Shaw for the title card. For similar cases Shaw would need to watch the fi lm before it made the decision; but for the case of Kill Bill, Shaw was so honored by this credit that it released the copyright without watching the fi lm beforehand. In fact, as Wong revealed, Shaw originally wanted Tarantino’s production company to put the credits in words instead of indirectly through the Wide Screen title card. However, Super Cool ManChu refused the request based on some alleged artistic concerns, and Shaw happily conceded. Secretary Evans’s arrogance and Wong’s humbleness reveal one interesting feature in the present copyright discourse governing the fi lm industry: America’s dominant position versus the rest of the world. This copyright discourse has a strong national tag: people believe that the United States is the leader of the copyright discourse and thus should be held up as the standard to which all other countries’ copyright protection should aspire. Unlike the situation in Hollywood, the increasing global popularity of Hong Kong cinema has not led Hong Kong’s major studios, such as Shaw, to seek more copyright of their works. To my surprise, Lawrence Wong revealed that Shaw never seriously investigates if the copyright of its works is being encroached on, particularly by Hollywood’s productions. Hollywood, according to Wong, is a trustworthy enterprise, as shown in some previous cases when Hollywood producers properly sought copyright permissions from Shaw. It does not mean that Shaw has no copyright concepts. In fact, Wong complained that the copyright legal protection in Hong Kong is very weak, so Shaw registers the copyrights of its fi lms not in Hong Kong but in the United States. Wong believes that things related to copyright “always” work properly in the States. According to Wong, the only legal copyright case Shaw has ever launched took place in 1971, when its major rival

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The United States is both the leader of world cinema and the owner of global copyright, not only the copyright of products but also the discourse of copyright itself.

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Golden Harvest brought Wang Yu and the Japanese star Shintaro Katsu together to make the fi lm The Blind Swordsman Meets His Equal (Shin Zatôichi: Yabure! Tojin-ken; Dubidao dazhan mangxia) (dir. Kimiyoshi Yasuda). Shaw fi led a suit against Golden Harvest’s production, saying that it infringed on Shaw’s earlier box-office hit One-Armed Swordsman (Dubidao) (dir. Zhang Che, 1967), in which the title role is also played by Wang Yu. According to Wong, this is the only legal case Shaw has ever pursued involving copyright matters. The irony is that the image of the one-armed swordsman is so frequently seen in Kill Bill that it almost becomes a parody, particularly in the case of the character Sofie, whose arms are brutally chopped away, a violent act that symbolizes the desire of The Bride (Beatrice Kiddo, or Black Mamba) to engineer the castration of Bill.12 Arguably, Tarantino is consciously using and stealing the image and the symbolization of the one-armed swordsman for his own fi lm, which to Shaw should be as “guilty” as Golden Harvest’s borrowing was thirty years ago. But, of course, the reference to Shaw fi lms in Kill Bill is read as an honor instead of an infringement. The underlying assumption is that Hollywood productions are superior to the local ones both in terms of creativity and in the legal sense—only Hong Kong plagiarizes Hollywood, and never vice versa. The United States is both the leader of world cinema and the owner of global copyright, not only the copyright of products but also the discourse of copyright itself. As copyright discourse becomes an American diplomatic tool, the United States as a nation and Hollywood as a culture industry composed mainly of transnational corporations are confl ated into one single monolithic power that defi nes what copyright is. Therefore the current copyright discourse circulating in commercial fi lm industries is highly conscious of nationality, but only in one direction, with American corporations accusing people of other countries of infringing copyright. Under the protection of the globally applicable yet U.S.-centric copyright discourse, the United States is always the victim and, ironically, is legitimated to ask for revenge (similar to The Bride in Kill Bill). However, although today’s major cultural conglomerates effectively manipulate copyright for their own interest, the ability of the legal discourse to regulate the order of world cinema is less powerful than what Evans would like it to be. A fi lm is not only a commodity but also a complex system of cultural representation, in which cultural exchanges are so complex that today’s copyright discourse can never clearly differentiate between copyright infringement and cultural appropriations, as clearly shown in Kill Bill. One interesting example that demonstrates the complexity and contradictions of this “copyrighting” discourse of Hollywood is again the “Shaw Scope Wide Screen” title card seen in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, which as

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far as I know is included in versions for all regional markets. It is clearly an indication of piracy; or, more correctly, it is against the trademark law. But in this case, Tarantino’s piracy becomes an act of honor, because the title card not only is a trademark but also calls attention to a specific representation politics. The card differentiates those Shaw fans, like Tarantino himself, against those, probably the majority of its viewers who are teenagers in the West, who do not know Shaw fi lms. And the fi lm would be read very differently by those viewers who recognize the Shaw title card and those who do not. From Tarantino to Wong and the fans, the title card is a secret code that marks a network of community, something the copyright discourse never addresses or is equipped to understand. In the following, I elaborate on the complexity of Hollywood as a national cinema by focusing precisely on these two levels of cultural circulation in Kill Bill: the legal copyright discourse defi ning and protecting the fi lm’s commodity status, as well as its representation politics allowing it to be embraced by viewers all over the world.

Idea Copying versus Product Copying To understand the complicity between Hollywood and the copyright discourse serving it, I fi rst examine some of the fundamental principles of the current copyright discourse. The present scope of intellectual properties includes patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and copyright. While the fi rst three protect business interests and can more easily be conceptualized within legal discourse, copyright is ambiguous, as it aims to provide incentive to create and distribute creative works, and therefore concerns the complex cultural domain. A major foundation of today’s copyright discourse is the “ideaexpression” dichotomy, which upholds the universal right to freely access and recycle ideas but prevents anyone from using creative expressions without the consent of the copyright holders. An assumption behind this universal right to access ideas is the limited number of ideas existing, so that everyone should have access to them in order to continue to create new expressions, whose possibilities are infinite. Ideas are considered the taproot of all creativity; restricting them to the ownership of a few people harms the well-being of human civilization in general. But expressions are linked to creativity, which should be protected. However, this idea-expression separation cannot be easily differentiated, and it has created countless debates inside and outside courtrooms. As the copyright legal expert William S. Stone claims, the differentiation between idea and expression is riddled with ambiguities: “Many a court has formulated an all-embracing theory, only to see it discarded by the next court.”13

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Despite their legal complexity, many copyright-related issues about commercial fi lmmaking could also be comprehended by translating this idea-expression dichotomy to the differentiation between idea copying and product copying. In the case of Kill Bill, for example, all the ideas being appropriated, such as the graphic violence and action designs, in general fall outside legal protection, and Hollywood, in this case, can freely use ideas of other cinematic traditions without worrying about being sued. Plagiarism, straightly speaking, is an ethical issue, not a legal one, as long as it concerns the infringement of idea instead of expression.14 On the other hand, piracy is direct product copying, which suggests no ambiguities in the idea-expression dichotomy. Pirates are clearly parasitic to the existing creative products and processes, as they introduce almost nothing new to the product, with exceptions I discuss in the last section of this article. Hollywood might always incorporate foreign ideas, which, however, are rendered into new expressions, whose reproduction and distribution rights are subsequently fully protected by copyright laws. The Hollywood producers, while continuing to benefit from new ideas of other cinemas, have all the legal and commercial rights they need to stop all kinds of piracy, from video/disc to the Web. The two poles of the idea-expression foundation of copyright discourse can be further linked to the practice of Hollywood fi lmmaking in its basic production and distribution industrial structure: that the copyright discourse allows the producers to borrow ideas of other cinematic traditions on the production levels while it strictly prohibits unauthorized distributors (pirates) to make and sell the products. This logic makes much sense in view of the economy of today’s culture industry, as most of the investment goes into production rather than distribution, because of high up-front costs and the relatively low cost of duplication. “[Copyright protected] works all have in common what economists call a ‘public goods aspect’ to them. Creating these works involves a good deal of money, time and effort (sometimes called the ‘cost of expression’). Once created, however, the cost of reproducing the work is so low that additional users can be added at a negligible or even zero cost.”15 Hollywood itself is exploiting this fi nancially uneven productiondistribution system, as the major studios are increasingly relying on smaller production houses to make the movies more cheaply, while the major studios still directly control the distribution arms. As is widely known, among the three major sectors of the movie industry—production, distribution, and exhibition—Hollywood’s most profitable component is the distribution, specifically the global distribution. While independent producers are responsible for the production of more fi lms than major Hollywood studios, the majors are the only organizations that have a global network

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for the distribution of a movie, so that the small production houses must collaborate with the major studios.16 Distribution, whether legal or illegal, is where the profit is made in the movie business. Because of the weight of profit in distribution, copyright law naturally developed around that area. However, while both the Hollywood major distributors and the pirates engage in the same relatively low-cost section of fi lmmaking—the distribution—the current copyright is designed to protect the interests of the Hollywood majors against the pirates. Combined with the government’s painstaking diplomatic efforts, major Hollywood studios invest lavishly in setting up various copyright enterprises, including the colossal Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), to chase after pirates, coerce other countries to comply with copyright principles and policy, prove infringement, and sanction copyright violators. The originally nationality-blinded “idea-expression” principle ends up fitting into and strengthening the present global wealth hierarchy, thus legitimizing Hollywood, as a national cinema, to continue appropriating and thereby reaping the benefits of any new ideas from other cinemas, while piracy—product-expression copying—is criminalized, as most obviously shown in the gesture of Evans equating American interests with Kill Bill. However, would there have been any difference if the disc Evans held was a piece of computer software with an American brand rather than a Hollywood fi lm? To Evans and the political ideology he represents, a pirated fi lm and a pirated computer program produce the same political signification: an American product being violated by another country. But as a fi lm, Kill Bill is culturally more complex than a piece of computer software, in the way that it is not only a commodity circulated transnationally but also a system of representation itself composed of many transnational “information flows.” An example may help illustrate the point: in 1990 Hong Kong received 9.8 percent of New York’s total Federal Express exports, showing the strong tie between the two global cities in the production and exchange of higher order information.17 Sociologists have insistently pointed out that today’s global economy is organized around command and control centers coordinating and innovating the intertwined activities of fi rms, which, according to Manuel Castells, can all be reduced to knowledge generation and information flows.18 The global cities, of which Hong Kong is certainly one, play the key role in facilitating transnational flows of knowledge and information, which constitute the bedrock of the new global economy.19 Using this analogy, Kill Bill can be seen as transnational on two levels: that the fi lm itself is one of these Federal Express parcels (as products) circulating between different areas yet is also a creative combination of many of these parcels (as ideas). Kill Bill is a uniquely rich text: not only does it

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present itself as a hyperpluralistic fi lm with so many origins and sources of influence that a clear remapping of these influences is impossible and meaningless, but it could also be seen as a metacinematic text that selfreflexively comments on the “appropriating” mechanism of Hollywood. To understand the system of transnational circulation of Hollywood fi lms, we cannot just read the fi lm as an inert commodity being thrown around the world, we also need to examine the fi lm text itself, which reflects and manipulates many cultural exchanges simultaneously. It is, I argue, on the level of representation that copyright becomes the least pertinent, although copyright rules precisely cover representations.

The Eternal Problem of Hollywood The United States has become such a strong cultural power partly because it was a pirate nation in the nineteenth century. Lawrence Lessig reminds his American readers that “our outrage at China notwithstanding, we should remember that before 1891, the copyrights of foreigners were not protected in the United States. We were born a pirate nation.”20 Such active pirating practices were particularly important to the development of Hollywood in the beginning of the twentieth century, allowing it to become the largest fi lm factory in the world. As Siva Vaidhyanathan demonstrates, Hollywood transformed from copyright-poor to copyright-rich during the twentieth century, as it shifted from its free and easy adaptation of works from copyright-rich literary authors to become in itself a global enterprise highly protective of its own works. 21 The thick copyright protection the U.S. government is seeking globally does not mean that the American culture industry need not “consult” the ideas of others. Quite the contrary, Hollywood has always actively appropriated both ideas and expressions of other cinematic traditions. As is well known, the U.S. fi lm industry has always imported cultural workers from around the world for their creative ideas, and it also usurps ideas directly from other cinematic traditions. 22 The rapid and effective appropriation of other cinematic traditions into its own might be, ironically, one major defi ning feature of Hollywood as a national cinema. As such a prolific culture industry producing hundreds of featurelength fi lms annually, it is clear that Hollywood cannot afford the doctrine of “originality.” Alan Williams identifies an eternal Hollywood problem: “Where to get the basic narratives for the huge number of fi lms to be made each year?”23 Kill Bill, consciously or not, foregrounds this eternal Hollywood problem by stating almost explicitly the fi lm sources that it borrows. In fact, few viewers would miss the “postmodernist” style of Kill

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Bill, which freely takes and parodies François Truffaut’s fi lm The Bride Wore Black, blaxploitation fi lms, spaghetti westerns, Japanese samurai, and, of course, Hong Kong action movies. Kill Bill is frank about this web of “intertextuality,” as shown in the opening titles—one to Shaw Brothers and one to Kinji Fukasaku—and the numerous pilfered soundtrack cues clearly directed to the Japanese and Chinese fi lm traditions to which the fi lm “pays homage.” As many audiences would also notice, Bruce Lee is almost the god of the fi lm, as seen in Uma Thurman’s yellow jumpsuit; the “House of Blue Leaves” sequence, which clearly was modeled after the ending scene of Fist of Fury (Jingwumen, dir. Luo Wei, 1972); the mask of the Crazy 88 team, which resembles that of Bruce Lee in Green Hornet; and the character Bill, played by David Carradine, who starred in the U.S. television series Kung Fu (1972–75) as Kwai Chang Caine, a series allegedly based on a concept by Bruce Lee. Tarantino is honest about the influence of Hong Kong movies on him. He admits in an interview about the fi nal “House of Blue Leaves” sequence ending Volume 1 that I didn’t write it as a stand-alone action scene. It was just like the whole rest of the script. I was kinda working my way through it, you know. But when I didn’t have a middle section, what I would do is I’d think of something I’d seen in a cool Kung Fu movie. A cool moment that Samo Hung did in that movie or Yu Wang did in that movie and let that be the space in between. Then over the course of a year I’d constantly rewrite it and rewrite it until all those things I’d take from other movies were gone and it was all fi lled with original stuff, so that’s how I did that. 24

If Tarantino is a distinct cult fi gure representing American cinematic creativity, this confession tells us partly how Hollywood creativity operates. Although Tarantino claims his authorship by asserting his “rewriting” process, the fi lm itself betrays that Tarantino has introduced relatively little new to the sequence. Originality, according to this interview, is nothing but free appropriation and transformation, which are retouched to the point that viewers can no longer identify the originals. But an interesting statement Kill Bill made, in relation to Tarantino’s comment on the fi lm, is that we do see the originals everywhere in Kill Bill. As we all know, the fi lm is choreographed by “Master” Yuen Wo Ping, whose work on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon drastically redefi ned the fi lming of human actions in Hollywood. But Yuen, who himself is also highly influenced by Japanese samurai fi lms and Hollywood westerns, also choreographed many Hong Kong action fi lms, the fi lms to which Kill Bill pays tribute and which it copies. Although in Kill Bill, particularly in Volume 1, many of the actions are supposed to be Japanese samurai fighting

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instead of Hong Kong kung fu, the actions are almost all identical to ones seen in Yuen’s earlier productions. While Yuen remakes his own works, Kill Bill is a Hollywood remake of Hong Kong fi lms, which themselves remade Japanese and Hollywood fi lms: it becomes difficult to differentiate between homage, parody, or simple knockoffs. Transnational borrowing also helps facilitate Hollywood’s global receptions. As many scholars have demonstrated, Hollywood’s cultural imperialism is built on an effective appropriation or copying of transnational ideas. 25 The mythologized American nationality portrayed in Hollywood fi lms is made possible through a narrative structure that tends to produce plural meanings to suit different viewers, encouraging diverse populations to read them as though they are indigenous. These narratives have meaning to so many different cultures because they allow viewers in those cultures to project their own values, archetypes, and tropes into the fi lms. Instead of debauching a unified national identity, such diversification of meanings holds a fantasized Americanness together. Hollywood cannot but continue to copy ideas and expressions from other cinemas in order to maintain its annual output and global domination. However, while Hollywood actively appropriates and benefits from foreign cinematic creations or production environments, the American people watch fewer and fewer foreign fi lms. David Desser illustrates a new cinephilic culture beginning in the 1980s when video stores sprang up around the world, and when new fi lm thugs, like Tarantino himself, watched the many foreign fi lms that in the end turned him and others into a new generation of fi lmmakers. 26 Tarantino admits that he is heavily influenced by Hong Kong martial arts movies of Angela Mao and Li Hanxiang, both in terms of themes, like female revenge, and fi lm style, like the bird’s-eye view, which can both be found in Kill Bill. 27 Desser rightly points out that new carriers, including videos and later DVDs, and the new Web culture helped shape a new generation of cinephilists who are able to watch foreign fi lms rather systematically. But in contrast to this cinephilia culture, the American people in general are watching fewer foreign movies, at least in terms of theatrical attendance. In the mid-1970s, foreign fi lms accounted for 10 percent of box-office receipts. Two decades later, the number had fallen to 0.5 percent. 28 As Peter Wollen concluded about Hollywood’s global reign, “American dominance . . . [is] harmful not simply to everyone else in the global market but also, above all, to America itself.”29 Tarantino is defi nitely one of those self-selected die-hard fans of Asian cinema, and it took him a lot of effort in studying and enjoying many Asian movies to come up with fi lms like Kill Bill. 30 But the new cinephilia Desser describes, to which Tarantino belongs, remains the pursuit of a small population. Most American viewers watching Tarantino’s fi lms know

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little about Asian cinemas in general. Or what they have is a generic image of Asian cinema, composed of speed, violence, and exoticism, for which Hollywood is largely responsible. If Kill Bill, or Hollywood in general, benefits from its free appropriation of foreign cinematic practices, a major problem that results is a cultural confl ation among the different cinemas and cultures that it appropriates. People are attracted to Kill Bill by its diffused Asianness, in which the Japanese and Chinese fi lmic traditions merge into an undistinguished whole, although the hilarious Master Pai Mei in Volume 2 does remind viewers of the racism in Hong Kong cinema against the Japanese. The fi lm is clearly too self-reflexive for us to believe that Tarantino is so confused by the two distinct cinematic cultures to misread one as the other. Instead, working along the Generation X mentality, everything is there to be mocked, including both Hollywood itself and the Asian cinemas to which the fi lm supposedly pays tribute. As a result, neither the Japanese nor the Hong Kong cinemas being credited in Kill Bill remained unified. The climactic Japanese restaurant “House of Blue Leaves” scene in Volume 1 was fi lmed in Beijing.31 According to Tarantino, there are three main advantages of this location: “The Beijing team of master Woo Ping, the Crazy 88; a vividness and invigoration of Chinese cinema that Tarantino aspires to; and shooting in the Chinese way, i.e., lame concept of scheduling.”32 Clearly, Tarantino is attracted to the Hong Kong way of fi lmmaking, from the skilled labor (Yuen Wo Ping and his crews) to daily logistics (the lame scheduling). But the distinct Hong Kong fl avors correspond not only to the production logic behind the scene but also to the general tone of the fi lm. The architecture of this Japanese restaurant is so un-Japanese (despite the few Japanese icons such as flower arrangements) that it resembles less a Japanese restaurant than the traditional Chinese teahouse or motel (kezhan) so often seen in Shaw costume pictures, with flying bodies freely tossed away from the second floor to the foyer. Deliberate or not, the fi lm is full of such Japanese-Chinese confl ation. It inserts a “Shaw Scope” title card in the fi lm’s beginning, while the fi lm is supposed to be an homage to Kinji Fukasaku. Lucy Liu, who is a Chinese American, portrays O-Ren Ishii (Cottonmouth), queen of the Tokyo underworld. Combining Japanese animation (anime) and the Hong Kong style of kung fu, Kill Bill can be seen as distinguishably American, as it is neither Japanese nor Hong Kong. As James Steintrager claims, for the cult phenomenon of Hong Kong cinema in the United States, “We are led to infer that the fan’s biggest crime is really that he does not care for the hermeneutic task of understanding the other at all.”33 However, I am not condemning this plagiaristic, or parasitic, practice of Tarantino, in the same way that Steintrager reminds us not to use cultural

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criticism to legitimize a “right” kind of spectatorship against the “wrong” kinds.34 It is unproductive and ignorant to hold onto individual cinematic traditions as discrete and independent, as we all know that they, like all national cinemas in the world, mutually influence each other constantly. If Kill Bill plagiarizes Hong Kong cinema, Hong Kong cinema has often plagiarized Hollywood and other cinemas. Plagiarism is not only an eternal problem of Hollywood but also an eternal problem of cinema as a culture industry, which always works hard to maintain the pseudo-individualization of its indeed very standardized products. Kill Bill is unique largely because it highlights instead of conceals such acts of plagiarism. While the climactic fi ghting scene in the Japanese restaurant is distinctly Hong Kong, the Shaw kung fu style developed in the 1960s and 1970s was highly indebted to Japanese cinema. The two most distinct Hong Kong cinematic entities Kill Bill refers to are Shaw Brothers and Bruce Lee, which in their own ways are connected to Japan. 35 The 1970s Shaw Brothers Tarantino pays homage to was a quintessential dream factory, which produced a steady output of formulaic fi lms in the most efficient and effective way. If it is famous for Hollywood to recruit foreign talents to support its empire, Shaw ran the same way during its peak. The studio was engaged in elaborate cooperation with Japanese studios, fi lmmakers, and talents beginning in the 1950s, and the recruits included masters like Mizoguchi Kenji, who directed Princess Yang Kwei Fei in 1955, and some less famous but highly talented Japanese directors, such as Inoue Umetsugu, to station in Hong Kong to produce standardized generic works. 36 In fact, it was the Japanese cinematographer Nishimoto Tadashi who patented the Shaw Scope Wide Screen process, 37 whose title card was shown in the beginning of Volume 1. The several rapid zoom ins on Pai Mei in Volume 2 so clearly calling viewers’ attentions to Shaw fi lms was also likely a technique Zhang Che and his generation of Hong Kong fi lmmakers learned from Japanese costume epics (Jidaigeki) on fi lm and in television dramas. 38 Li Hanxiang’s famous “bird’s-eye fi ghting shot” that fascinates Tarantino, who reproduced it in Kill Bill, can also be found in Japanese cinema as early as 1943 in Akira Kurosawa’s fi rst fi lm, Sanshiro Sugata. On the other hand, the fi lms of Bruce Lee also have a strong Japanese dimension. As I have mentioned earlier, the “House of Blue Leaves” sequence is modeled after the ending scene of Fist of Fury, in which the space— shifting through the Japanese sliding doors—gives both Thurman and Lee different layers of spatial and emotional dimensions. We must notice that while Fist of Fury preaches an anti-Japanese sentiment, the fi lm appropriates a lot of Japanese cinematic stylistics, particularly from the samurai fi lms, partly reflecting the practice of Hong Kong cinema at that time. Bruce Lee himself, of whom Uma Thurman’s yellow jumpsuit and Asics Tiger shoes

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unmistakably remind us, also incorporated Japanese martial arts into his Jeet Kune Do. The yellow jumpsuit allegedly represents no specific style of martial arts, but it gives the wearing subject the freedom and power to adapt to any form of fighting, which might also accurately describe Hollywood as a national cinema. In other words, Thurman’s gender-ambiguous Lee look could be seen as the sublimed cultural symbol of “having no style as style.” Since Hong Kong cinema always freely appropriates ideas and expressions from other cinematic or cultural traditions, the sources that Kill Bill plagiarizes are not “original” as such. When advertising Volume 1 in London, Tarantino explained to British reporters his favored style of movie making: “I like movies about people who break rules, who are mavericks.”39 The yellow jumpsuit may represent precisely such an attitude of rule breaking. But what are the rules to break? In what ways can cultural appropriation with such elaborate intertextuality be seen as rule breaking, or rule abiding? Or is the question “who is copying whom” still a meaningful one in today’s global culture industry, which has to be fed by the rapid recycling of ideas and expressions? Notwithstanding its diverse sources of appropriation, Kill Bill, however, is not a metatextual celebration of Hong Kong and Japanese cinema; the fi lms being appropriated are as honored as defamed. I must emphasize here that such a “dialogic” system of mutual borrowing is not necessarily egalitarian and receptive, as literary critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin would suggest.40 Instead, violence is often involved in every act of appropriation and alternation, particularly in commercial cinema. According to Thomas Leitch, remakes in the end always deny their originals. “Although remakes by defi nition base an important part of their appeal on the demonstrated ability of a preexisting story to attract an audience, they are often competing with the very fi lms they invoke.”41 According to Leitch, the fundamental rhetorical problem of remakes is to mediate between two apparently irreconcilable claims: that the remake is just like its model, yet that it is better. Leitch calls this paradox disavowal: the combination of acknowledgment and repudiation in a single ambivalent gesture.42 If Kill Bill is a remake paying homage to the Asian fi lms it alludes to, it is also an update and a transcultural rewrite of Asian cinema for serving and entertaining a new generation of American and global audience members. The remake, therefore, implicitly criticizes the original as outmoded, which in this case would mean that the white woman Uma Thurman is more relevant to today’s fi lm viewers than the Asian male Bruce Lee. In other words, by so stylistically calling attention to Bruce Lee, as shown in the highlighting of his yellow jumpsuit, Tarantino is also calling attention to Bruce Lee’s datedness. It is only through Tarantino’s remake, or parody, that Bruce Lee can still be “fun.” As Leitch comments, many of Hollywood’s

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remakes of foreign fi lms are imperialistic, as the goal of the remake “is to translate not a language but a culture.”43 The Hollywood remake tries to tame the uncompromising, difficult, and ultimately unresponsive elements of the original fi lms to the demands of American consumers. In the case of Kill Bill, despite the same jumpsuit, Thurman is purged of the animalistic nature of Bruce Lee: she kills because her child is killed, while the narcissist Lee kills often for the sake of self-performance and self-mythologization.44 Although in Volume 2 Bill reminds The Bride that she is obsessed with killing, at the end she happily recedes to the mother role she has so much desired. In the fi nal scene of Fist of Fury, Lee hops into the camera, posing a direct confrontation with the viewers; in contrast, Thurman smiles gently and romantically at the ends of both volumes, a gesture that tames all the previous anger she shows in the fi lms.45 Therefore the kind of transnational cinematic appropriation shown in Kill Bill is more than a cobweb of intertextuality that few contemporary cultural productions could avoid; it also reveals necessary blending of cultural specificities in the mutual copying of ideas in today’s commercial cinema, on which Hollywood as a (trans)national cinema is based. Hollywood cinema constantly borrows elements from other national cinemas, but at the same time the cultural identities of these details are deliberately confused and diffused. These foreign influences, which themselves are not culturally pure to start with, are either concealed by Hollywood packaging or highlighted as cultural gimmicks, which are put back in the market to be consumed by viewers all over the world.

Piracy and Its Demystification of Hollywood’s (Trans)Nationality If the eternal problem of Hollywood, as Alan Williams claims, is to fi nd new fi lm expressions, copyright also becomes its eternal problem, as copyright supposedly prevents people’s free appropriation of cultural creativities. The biggest irony, of course, is that the current copyright discourse ends up protecting Hollywood but not protecting the sources it appropriates. Despite the extremely complex politics of transcultural appropriations in Kill Bill, Secretary Evans is able to resort to the totalizing discourse of copyright to forge the fi lm as a national product. Seeing piracy as an economic crime, the American movie industry is determined to annihilate it as a production and distribution system outside the control of the U.S.-centric cinema order. We can go back to the pirated disc of Kill Bill that Evans held in his hand to discuss why movie piracy is so threatening to Hollywood. I also

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picked up a pirated DVD version of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 in an obscure shopping mall in Hong Kong, which might reveal partly how this Hollywood (trans)national identity works. The visual quality of the DVD was quite satisfactory, and its prompt availability indicated that the version was taken from a screener copy, leaked out during the postproduction process.46 Despite the good visual and audio quality of the pirated disc that very much resembles official copies, one major element defi ning the unique pirated-Hollywood-movie-watching experience is the ridiculous subtitles. While the pirates try to invest as little as they can in their businesses, they are the distributors of these pirated fi lms and have to assume one major duty: dubbing or subtitling. The screener copies that serve as the master version usually do not provide subtitles yet. So the subtitles in the pirated copies are interesting on the grounds that, fi rst, they are the most obvious components the pirates add on the product, and, second, they demonstrate how people outside the United States understand Hollywood fi lms. Predictably, we run into translations of very low quality in pirated fi lms. The results are sometimes incredible, with subtitles suggesting little of, or sometimes meanings opposite to, the real dialogues, thereby subverting the meanings of the story. One interesting mistranslation I found in my pirated Kill Bill DVD is in the scene of the kitchen of Vernita Green (Copperhead), when the two fi ghting women are taking a break after Green’s daughter comes back home from school. The dialogue between the two is as follows (copied from the subtitles of the official DVD version): Green: “You bitch, I need to know if you will gonna starting more shit around my baby girl.” The Bride: “You can relax for now, I’m not going to murder you in front of your child, ok?” Green: “I guess you are more rational than Bill led me to believe you are capable of.” The Bride: “It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness that I lack, not rationality.”

But the subtitles of the pirated version translate the dialogue as follows: Green: “You bitch, never want to hurt my daughter.” The Bride: “Can we have a chat? I won’t hurt your child.” Green: “I can’t believe you have such a temper.” The Bride: “That’s my way, passion; not nationality.”47

This set of subtitles, as clearly shown, corresponds little to the real dialogues, and even suggests incorrect information, as The Bride originally says she does not have any passion, while the subtitles of the pirated ver-

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This beautiful American lady has been too violent to comply with the stereotypical Chinese reading of the American people. . . . No matter how much Kill Bill incorporates features of other cinematic traditions to become a global product, the American tag is always in its global receptions.

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sion suggest otherwise. These kinds of subtitling mistakes are everywhere in pirated movies, sometimes to the extent that the story line becomes incomprehensible. But the most astonishing mistake in this clip is the term “nationality” replacing “rationality.” The viewers do know that The Bride is an American, and the nationality she refers to would be her American identity. So she is really saying: “Yes, I am a rude person, in spite of my American nationality, which is supposed to make me otherwise.” Not grasping the dialogue, the interpreter has to rely on his or her prior cultural assumptions—the American people, at least seemingly, are not rude—to make sense of the scene. In the fi lm, this beautiful American lady has been too violent to comply with the stereotypical Chinese reading of the American people, for which Hollywood is partly responsible. This subtitle translation demonstrates that no matter how much Kill Bill incorporates features of other cinematic traditions to become a global product, the American tag is always in its global receptions. There is another subtitle mistake in the pirated Kill Bill. In the ending scene of the “House of Blue Leaves” sequence, The Bride is engaged in the fi nal fi ght with O-Ren Ishii in the snowy backyard. Ishii hits The Bride in her back, and The Bride is seriously wounded and dying. Ishii says, “Silly Caucasian girl likes to play with samurai sword. You may not be able to fi ght like a samurai; but you are going to die like a samurai.” But the subtitle says: “Like the sun-rising flesh blood, your attack is just like the blazing sun of the summer; because that’s your style.” Unlike the earlier section, in this scene The Bride’s ethnicity/nationality is repressed instead of highlighted in the pirated version. The effect is very different: while the original line presents itself as a self-reflexive metacriticism of the fi lm, or of Hollywood in general, the pirated version maintains a poetic general tone, highlighting not the individuality of The Bride but the general cultural feelings of samurai–kung fu cinema: the “your style” mentioned here can refer to the general style of samurai fi lms. So that while the earlier set of translation mistakes highlights the concealed American identity of the fi lm, this second set of mistakes evades its cultural identity. But these two sets of subtitling mistakes reveal a common logic of the cultural reception of Hollywood cinema in general—the extremely diversified local readings. Subtitling is in fact a critical component in the global circulation of fi lms, specifically in the context of Hollywood being “properly” received globally. Notwithstanding the increasing weight of spectacles, the story line of a Hollywood fi lm is still largely conveyed through dialogue, which is spoken most of the time in English. Proper and effective translation seems to be intrinsic to Hollywood’s global regime, which, however, is the only feature that piracy cannot directly copy. At times when the translator/viewer fails to grasp the exact dialogue, he or

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she adds in his or her own interpretation to complete the meanings. In the fi rst set of mistakes shown above, the translator adds in his or her readings of American femaleness; in the second case, while the translator misses the wittiness, or the specific auteur mark, of Tarantino, he or she substitutes for it a general cultural feeling of Japanese–Hong Kong swordplay. In both cases, the translator relies on his or her own imagination to reach the missing meanings of the American product. These subtitling mistakes reveal that diversified readings are always at work in the receptions of Hollywood fi lms. Such diversified local readings are defi nitely not allowed to be manifested in the official version. However, no matter how important such diversified local readings are for Hollywood fi lms to access different markets, they are not allowed to be manifested in the official versions. Translations of the dialogues are standardized around the world, and distributors would generally not allow regional markets to include their own taste and values to alter the original dialogues. The “creative” subtitling of pirated movies reveals a nightmare of Hollywood’s global marketing, whose main task, among others, is to efface the diversified transnational receptions by forging the unity of the product, so that its major story line and dialogues are the same globally.48 This homogenizing effect is fabricated not only in Hollywood productions but also in international fi lms whose distribution rights major Hollywood studios acquired. Miramax, for example, both sells American fi lms in other countries and buys the copyrights of foreign fi lms for the U.S. market, very much overseeing and engineering the entire global fi lm flow. While the Hollywood distributors seldom alter their American fi lms to be screened in different parts of the world, they always alter the foreign fi lms they purchase in order to cater to the American market. There has been a Web petition appealing to Disney, which owns Miramax and Dimension Films, to cease altering Hong Kong fi lms that they distribute, particularly in their irresponsible editing. As the petition’s statement claims, “The movies often have footage removed by Disney because they consider it objectionable (violence, drug use, etc.), because it contains Chinese/Asian cultural and/or political references which North American viewers may not fully understand, or (most often) simply because they want to make the movie shorter and/or change its pacing.”49 In fact, Disney claims exclusive distribution rights for many Asian fi lms not only in the United States but also in many parts of the world, thus deciding how these Asian fi lms should be watched worldwide.50 A major rationale behind the alterations done to the original fi lms to be shown internationally is the comprehension ability of the American audience, so that the world is watching the Hong Kong fi lms in the versions supposedly most comfortable for American viewers. Pirated fi lms might be able to escape this total Hollywood control,

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so that global viewers could resort to pirated Hong Kong fi lms to bypass the mediation of U.S. distributors. However, we cannot consider piracy subversive at all. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the cultural meanings of movie piracy are precisely not its implications of (anti-)capitalist will and discipline but its dissemination and disorder. Movie piracy can be seen as the largest crime collectively committed by the people against the authority of both the state and the capital. But this piracy by no means creates a self-empowerment of the people. Piracy demonstrates a lack of authorship, and a lack of authority, rules, and discipline.51 Producing and watching pirated movies must not be romanticized as guerrilla warfare against media conglomerates; the pirating industry itself maintains many other forms of exploitations. But pirated fi lms might be one of the few cultural products that demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the U.S.-centric global media order. Hollywood constantly copies ideas and expressions of others as its own, forging a national identity composed of transnational influences. The copyright discourse, which is the major guardian protecting Hollywood’s global hegemony, chooses to be blind to this cultural traffic and violence; fi lm is seen as just a commodity instead of a system of representation. The complex politics of representations, not surprisingly, resurfaces where copyright fails—pirated fi lms reveal the underlying transnational components the Hollywood fi lm tries to incorporate, tame, and cover up. The fl awed subtitles help us see through a national myth, the myth that Hollywood fi lms are global because they are national.

Notes An earlier version of this article was presented at “Hong Kong/Hollywood at the Borders: Alternative Perspectives, Alternative Cinemas,” a conference at the University of Hong Kong in April 2004. I thank Gina Marchetti for her kind invitation to the conference. 1. Don Evans, speech, American Chamber of Commerce, Beijing, 28 October 2003. Quoted in Chow Chung-yan, “China Will Take More Imports from U.S.,” South China Morning Post, 29 October 2003. 2. Ibid. 3. Ngai-Ling Sum, “Informational Capitalism and U.S. Economic Hegemony: Resistance and Adaptations in East Asia,” Critical Asian Studies 35 (2003): 378. 4. For some relevant data, see Mark Balnaves, James Donald, and Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, The Global Media Atlas (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 33–43. 5. Andrew Higson argues that national cinema can be a real practice, but only on the policy level, in the areas of censorship, state funding, and local economics.

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See Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (New York: Routledge, 2000), 63–74. 6. Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 206–19. 7. See, for example, Stephen Crofts, “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14, no. 3 (1993): 49–55; Ana M. López, “Facing up to Hollywood,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 419–37; and Chris Berry, “If China Can Say No, Can China Make Movies; or, Do Movies Make China? Rethinking National Cinema and National Agency,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998): 129–50. 8. Douglas Gomery, “Hollywood as Industry,” in American Cinema and Hollywood: Critical Approaches, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 25. 9. Aida Hozic, Hollywood World: Space, Power, and Fantasy in the American Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 116. 10. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 63. 11. Lawrence Ka Hee Wong, telephone interview with the author, 17 December 2003. This particular title card, together with its famous jingle, was the trademark of Shaw Brothers production in the 1970s. 12. In the American version of Kill Bill: Vol. 1, only one of Sofie’s arms is chopped away, while both of her arms are lost in the fi lm’s Asian version. 13. William S. Stone, The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 14. 14. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33; Paul Goldstein, Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celesial Jukebox (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 8. 15. William M. Landes, “Copyright,” in A Handbook of Cultural Economics, ed. Ruth Towse (Cheltenham, UK: Elgar, 2003), 132. 16. Philip McCalman, “Foreign Direct Investment and Intellectual Property Rights: Evidence from Hollywood’s Global Distribution of Movies and Videos,” Journal of International Economics 62 (2004): 111. 17. Ronald L. Mitchelson and James O. Wheeler, “The Flow of Information in a Global Economy: The Role of the American Urban System in 1990,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84 (1994): 99. 18. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Maldan, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 409. 19. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 20. Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001), 106. 21. Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs, 82. 22. See Frederick Wasser, “Is Hollywood America? The Transnationalization of the American Film Industry,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 423–37. 23. Alan Williams, “The Raven and the Nanny: The Remake as Crosscul-

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tural Encounter,” in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 151. 24. Matthew Turner, “Kill Bill Interview: With Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman,” www.viewlondon.co.uk/home_feat_int_killbill2.asp (accessed 1 May 2004). 25. See, for example, M. Mehdi Semati and Patty J. Sotirin, “Hollywood’s Transnational Appeal: Hegemony and Democratic Potential?” Journal of Popular Film and Television 26, no. 4 (1999): 176–89; Wasser, “Is Hollywood America?”; Scott Robert Olson, Global Media and the Competitive Advantage of Narrative Transparency (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999). 26. David Desser, “Hong Kong Film and the New Cinephilia,” in Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, ed. Meaghan Morris, Siu-leung Li, and Stephen Ching-kiu Chan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming). 27. Turner, “Kill Bill Interview.” 28. Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 38. 29. Peter Wollen, “Tinsel and Realism,” in Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity, 1945–1995, ed. G. Nowell-Smith and S. Ricci (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 134. 30. There have been many new Web sites set up and numerous dialogues surging on the Web tracing the intertextual cobweb of Kill Bill, demonstrating the specific kind of appeal of the fi lm to the cinephilia Desser describes. 31. The ending titles of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 clearly state: “Produced with assistance of China Film Co-Production Corporation.” 32. Turner, “Kill Bill Interview.” 33. James A. Steintrager, “An Unworthy Subject: Slaughter, Cannibalism, and Postcoloniality,” in Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema, ed. Laikwan Pang and Day Kit-mui Wong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming). 34. Ibid. 35. Bruce Lee did not make any fi lms with Shaw Brothers; he is the Golden Harvest prodigy, although Golden Harvest’s boss Raymond Chow had been production manager of Shaw, which shows the unbreakable links between the two companies. 36. Darrell W. Davis and Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu, “Inoue at Shaws: The Wellspring of Youth,” in The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study, ed. Wong Ain-ling (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2003), 255–71. 37. Ibid., 259. 38. These zoom-in shots are also frequently seen in spaghetti westerns, but the Hong Kong fi lmmakers more likely pilfered it from the Japanese source, as the new 1970s Hong Kong action fi lms are in general very much indebted to the influence of Japanese cinema and television. Thanks to Darrell Davis for the advice. 39. “Tarantino Defends Kill Bill Violence,” news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/fi lm/3157596.stm (accessed 1 May 2004). 40. For the concept of dialogic, see, for example, Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

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41. Thomas Leitch, “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake,” in Forrest and Koos, Dead Ringers, 44. 42. Ibid., 53. 43. Ibid., 56. 44. See David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 53. 45. This fi nal scene of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 can be compared with that of Alien. See Barbara Creed, “Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1990), 128–41. 46. For a more elaborate discussion about the technologies involved in the making of pirated VCDs or DVDs, see Laikwan Pang, “Mediating the Ethics of Technology: Hollywood and Movie Piracy,” Culture, Theory, and Critique 45 (2004): 19–32. 47. The subtitles in the pirated DVD have both English and Chinese versions, and this quotation is the English one, on which the Chinese ones are based. 48. Of course, there are always exceptions, which sometimes are more promotional gimmicks than real considerations of cultural differences; for example, the Asian version of Kill Bill is advertised as being more violent than the Western version. 49. “Appeal to Miramax: Web Alliance for the Respectful Treatment of Asian Cinema,” alliance.hellninjacommando.net/faq.htm (accessed 1 May 2004). 50. In fact, Disney sometimes purchases the distribution rights to certain fi lms for parts of the world with no intention to show the fi lms there, to create a situation where there is less competition for Disney’s own productions. 51. Laikwan Pang, “Piracy/Privacy: The Despair of Cinema and Collectivity in China,” boundary 2 31, no. 3 (2004): 116.

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