Surveillance Societies in a Once-Bipolar World (virtual talk)

Presentation by Katherine Verdery, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York's Graduate Center

This is a virtual talk. Please contact Sandra Burri (s.burri@unibas.ch) for the zoom link.

Abstract

With the end of Communist-Party-led regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991, scholars entered an open field for comparative studies of surveillance.  A few of them produced work along these lines (e.g., Timothy Garton Ash, for Poland; Andreas Glaeser,for East Germany; Katherine Verdery, for Romania).  The kind of surveillance we had experienced was very specific to communist societies and is perhaps the prototype of what the word means to English-speakers, if not others as well.  For people in the US, the image of this kind probably originates in Cold War representations of the Soviet Union   It invokes shadowy figures intercepting our phone calls and correspondence or listening in on our conversations, as in this painting by Magritte.  

That is now too limited an understanding of it, however, as we know not only from more recent research on communist surveillance mentioned above but also from growing attention to surveillance in modern capitalist countries.  A leading example of the latter is Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.  She argues that although ordinary citizens acquired personal computers to us as a vehicle for more efficient correspondence, in the hands of capitalist firms it became a vehicle for ever-expanding surveillance as a means of commerce, drawing people into advertising they might otherwise manage to elude and, thence, into purchasing commodities.  Any attempt to use email for correspondence is by now a vanishingly small percentage of its use in e-commerce.  Our email is now jammed with things we get from having looked, even inadvertently, at a website somewhere.  Having become almost useless as an instrument of communication among friends and family, email—and the personal computer more generally--have become an instrument of surveillance.  Surveillance and capitalism, possibly building on surveillance in communism, have pioneered the rise of capitalist commerce.  This conjuncture would appear to be an excellent instance of a “crossroad.”  It encourages the unexpected possibility of seeing this millennial moment as a convergence between the preferred instruments of a once-antagonistic relationship.  The lecture will explore these once-unthinkable connections.

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