Performing, Translating, Fashioning: Spectatorship in the Surveillant World

Abstract

Despite the disciplinary power of surveillance, I argue artistic performances may also provide a space of resistance and selffashioning. Discussions on artistic performance emphasize the ambivalence and uncertainty of art to resist existing power structures and create alternative meaning. However, how concretely, and when, do artistic performances challenge these structures often remains uncertain. Their popularity does not guarantee the depth of their engagement with surveillance practices, and apparent resistance may hide blatant reproduction of existing inequalities and power structures. To understand the political effect of artistic performances, I argue one needs to look at how they participate to the redefinition of individual and collective selves. This must include attention to spectatorship as a different category from state and corporate surveillance. Spectators actively engage with performers, reinforce or deny their claim to self-fashioning. By looking at spectators we can better understand how a performance can be (or fail to be) self-fashioning not only for the performer but also for the spectators.

The criminal trial as a live event: Exploring how and why live blogs change the professional practices of judges, defence lawyers and prosecutors

“…It has thus been suggested that surveillance leads to the reproduction of norms with surveillance practices – strategies for relating to and managing surveillance – reducing people’s agency (Lyon, 2001). However, it is also possible to discern the possibility of such practices being an ‘avenue for individual and collective self-determination’ (Hogue, 2016: 168) and that the presence of live blogging journalists may also be actively used to convey a performance (see Andrejevic, 2004). In the analysis we will therefore discuss how legal professionals relate to the surveillance that live blogging entails.…”

“I Do Love / To Note and to Observe”: The Pleasures of Surveillance and Resistance in the Work of Ben Jonson

“…Volpone also catalyzes critical insight among the extratextual surveillors taking pleasure in watching from behind the fourth wall. Insofar as one of the goals of satire involves readerly self-awareness, Jonson harnesses the fictional staging of surveillance to defamiliarize spectators' complicity in surveillant habits of mind (Angus 2016;Hogue 2016;Phelan 2008;Slights 1994). Jonson dramatized the enticing and destructive aspects of secrecy, aiming to implicate audiences in the pleasure and terror arising from keeping and divulging secrets.…”