System Error: Complicity with Surveillance in Contemporary Workplace Documentaries

Abstract

This article sets itself against the bulk of scholarship on surveillance, which is characterized by emphasis either on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon, or on Gilles Deleuze’s too-brief “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” In contrast to these dominant critical paradigms, the article recuperates a mode of governmentality proposed in Foucault’s last lectures on “Security,” in order to draw out the latent instabilities that beset contemporary surveillance systems and hence reveal the possibility of resisting them. The article’s recuperation of “Security” proceeds by way of close readings of workplace documentaries by radical filmmakers Harun Farocki (Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten, Ein neues Produkt, and other films) and Carmen Losmann (Work Hard Play Hard). When analyzed in concert with Foucault’s neglected late lectures, and in a final move with the post-Freudian theory of perversion, these films prompt new reflection on complicity with surveillance and, importantly, the unexpected potential of that complicity as an error in the systems of contemporary workplaces and leisure-spaces.

Uncertain Archives: Approaching the Unknowns, Errors, and Vulnerabilities of Big Data through Cultural Theories of the Archive

“…In relation to contemporary surveillance practices, we can observe instances of system error as productive interruptions of seemingly liberal environments that nonetheless closely surveil human behaviour in order to control attempts at resistance. Annie Ring (2016) argues that such productive interruptions are found in recent documentaries by Harun Farocki and Carmen Losmann, who explore new regimes of surveillance by documenting the constitutive disruptions that threaten their persistence. Indeed, as Mark Nunes notes, errors-in their failure to communicate-signal "a path of escape" from the "predictable confines of informatic control: an opening, a virtuality, a poeisis" (2011: 4).…”

Beyond cyberutopia and digital disenchantment

“…As Nakamura puts it in her analysis of a Jennifer Lopez video: "We are often put in a position in which we must watch a male watcher watching; we must witness his interactivity as our means to visualize the body of the woman" [4]. At other times it works more subtly, as when Google, Netflix, or Facebook "algorithmically curate the content they wish us to see" [5], or when complicity is designed into surveillance technologies (Ring, 2016). Some of the pragmatic engagements, such as the hacking practices explored by Mareile Kaufmann in this special issue, take the risk of engaging with ambiguous political infrastructures for the sake of subversion.…”