Loving Big Brother

Surveillance Culture and Performance Space

John McGrath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134476879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In Loving Big Brother the author tackles head on the overstated claims of the crime-prevention and anti-terrorism lobbies. But he also argues that we desire and enjoy surveillance, and that, if we can understand why this is, we may transform the effect it has on our lives. This book looks at a wide range of performance and visual artists, at popular TV shows and movies, and at our day-to-day encounters with surveillance, rooting its arguments in an accessible reading of cultural theory.

Constant scrutiny by surveillance cameras is usually seen as - at best - an invasion of privacy, and at worst an infringement of human rights. But in this radical new account of the uses of surveillance in art, performance and popular culture, John E McGrath sets out a surprizing alternative: a world where we have much to gain from the experience of being watched.

This iconoclastic book develops a notion of surveillance space - somewhere beyond the public and the private, somewhere we will all soon live. It's a place we're just beginning to understand.

1

An Ideology of Crime

Videos are watching me

But dat is not stopping me

Let dem cum wid dem authority

An dem science and technology,

But

Dem can’t get de Reggae out me head.

(Zephaniah, 1996: 20)

You are under surveillance. Not many years ago, this statement could not have been made in a generalized form to an unknown addressee. Today, assuming that you are an urban dweller in a developed country, to be ‘under surveillance’ is a general condition. Cameras watch over you as you journey to work, registering your number plates or recording your behaviour on the underground train platform. Your image is recorded by every ATM you use, in almost every convenience store you enter, and many times on virtually every street you walk along. Vast commercial data banks assess your shopping habits and your credit history. Intergovernmental networks analyse your phone conversations, searching for key words as indicators of subversion.¹ Your boss is probably recording you too.² Your neighbours can now buy satellite pictures of your back yard.³ In New York, even the police dogs carry cameras.⁴ ‘You are under surveillance’ is no longer an announcement made to a selected individual – it is a description of our culture.

While it is difficult to give a precise figure, the general consensus is that currently the average city dweller in the UK is captured on CCTV 300 times a day;⁵ the USA and many other Western countries are fast catching up. In London, capital of the world’s most surveyed country, the figure may be far higher. And the cameras are only the tip of the surveillance iceberg. Writers such as John Parker (2000) and David Lyon (1994, 2001) have exhaustively documented the quite extraordinary degree to which the average citizen in Western society is documented by government and commercial data banks, and the comprehensive reach of phone and email monitoring systems such as the US-controlled Echelon.⁶

In the wake of September 11, US, UK and European governments have enacted sweeping legislation in the name of anti-terrorism that will further strengthen the right of a variety of security and other government bodies to gather and store information on residents. The Bush administration’s proposed Total Information Awareness programme (renamed the Terrorist Information Awareness System after congressional and public protests) has the potential to take data surveillance of citizens to previously unimagined levels in an attempt to identify terrorist behaviour traits in evidence ranging from educational and medical records to purchasing and travel patterns.

A belated rearguard action is emerging in some instances to limit the more over-reaching powers of government,⁷ and on the web in particular there is a sophisticated group of core users who continue to work to undermine the claim of nation states to control this medium. However, even with the efforts of organizations such as Privacy International, the Omega Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and UK civil liberties group Liberty, there seems virtually no chance at this point that these vast systems of surveillance will be rolled back. The battlegrounds that remain for campaigners are primarily in relation to the areas of privacy that an individual may be allowed by law to create (a key example here being the ongoing argument over encryption on the web, with the US and UK governments in a war of attrition with web users over whether encryption technologies for which national security services do not have the key may legally be used on the international medium of the Internet – see Perri 6, 1998: 116–21) and the nature of a citizen’s rights regarding disclosure of and access to the information held on him or her.

My purpose in this book is not to add my bit to a discussion of the legal limits appropriate in a high-surveillance society, although I will document some of the arguments and refer to several of them. In the last few years, many books examining the growth of surveillance in the UK and in the USA have been published, and it is right that such an important development in our society is finally being analysed widely and in depth. The point of this book, however, is to explore the experience of surveillance – how we feel and live within what we might call surveillance space, and how we respond creatively. I have chosen Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem as my starting point, because, as an artist who addresses the black male experience, Zephaniah is responding directly to the lived condition of surveillance and can, I hope, help to keep us grounded in the fact that surveillance is a reality that we must think and feel our way through. Zephaniah also provides us with a couple of good clues on how to proceed. He indicates that surveillance space is deeply politicized – that science and technology are inevitably about authority; and he reminds us that, while much of contemporary surveillance may function outside the realm of the visual, the issue of the surveillance image is as vital a place as ever to start.

Zephaniah’s poem also issues a more obscure challenge. In proposing the space of the Reggae Head, a space filled with complex systems of rhythm and language, Zephaniah suggests a role for some kind of interiority, for coded, cultural, non-dimensional spaces which challenge surveillance authority in ways that it can never fully address. As we disentangle the maze of fears, philosophies and interests that constitute the ideology of crime under which surveillance has proliferated, we will also begin to see the many ways in which these other kinds of space can emerge.

Hey You!

In the face of the degree of covert or undisclosed surveillance of the average citizen by government and corporations reported by Parker, Lyon and others, it might be easy to become almost sanguine about the CCTV cameras that point down at us from every street or shop corner. And, indeed, the kinds of worries about privacy that many of these writers and campaigners focus on as their core approach to the issue may seem to be of limited relevance in the case of street surveillance. After all, few of us would claim a right to privacy in the street or shopping mall. However, CCTV remains the most public and discussed form of surveillance. As a visual medium in a visually oriented society, its characteristics are of particular relevance in discussing the cultural impacts of surveillance, and an analysis of CCTV may in fact help us separate the wider question of surveillance from an argument about privacy that has, to all intents and purposes, already been lost.⁸

In general, our relations to street surveillance are largely determined by our relationship to crime and policing. It is important in this respect not to underestimate the role of policing in constructing who we are and how we behave. Althusser (1984: 48) identified the voice of the policeman – ‘Hey you there!’ – as a quintessential moment of ‘interpellation’ into the contemporary state. It is in this naming as potential wrongdoers that we become aware of our status as citizens. However, the impact of this policing voice is not felt evenly; certain bodies can more confidently expect to believed when they protest their innocence in response to the policing voice: ‘Who me, officer? I live here!’ While there are important gaps (which will be discussed below) between Althusser’s vocal police presence and the removed gaze of the CCTV camera, it is not hard also to see the links between the two moments – the police voice, and the camera’s eye – ‘You are under surveillance.’

As a Rastafarian poet living in east London, Benjamin Zephaniah has for many years written about the Black British experience of policing – of, for example, the notorious ‘sus’ laws, which in the 1980s allowed police to detain individuals on ‘suspicion’ of an intent to commit crime.⁹ Zephaniah’s work documents an experience in which suspicion is often dependent upon skin colour.

Equivalent examples exist in the experiences of racial minority groups in any developed Western society. (New York’s zero tolerance campaign is one of the most recent and notorious cases.) In the poem Reggae Head, Zephaniah highlights the likelihood that the systematic spread of CCTV will in fact extend this culture of suspicion, so that every camera functions within a field of power and prejudice structured by visual markers. His poem acts as a challenge to any analysis of surveillance – a challenge to understand the ways in which generalizations about surveillance experience, about the statement ‘You are under surveillance’, must be opened out into an examination of the various and specific experiences that this sentence may signify.

The street surveillance camera, far from being a neutral tool of crime prevention, basically works, one way or another, by targeting groups that the employers of the systems deem likely to commit crimes. Operators of surveillance systems routinely use the systems to watch, zoom in on and follow the members of the public they judge likely to display criminal behaviour. Overwhelmingly, these individuals are young and male, and very often they are black (Norris and Armstrong, 1999: 108–10; see also McCahill in Norris et al., 1998: 51). The introduction of automated systems that will identify criminals through use of records and algorithms will hardly be less prejudiced.¹⁰ Automated face-recognition programs, such as the Visionics FaceIt system (pioneered in the London borough of Newham, and touted aggressively for business in the wake of September 11), are advertised as identifying criminals known to the police, but there is very mixed evidence of their ability to identify individual faces. What is far more likely is that such systems will be used – as current manual systems are – to identify ‘criminal types’ based on age, behaviour patterns, location and, perhaps, skin colour. On an anecdotal level, when I visited Manchester City Council’s new Urbis Museum – a museum focusing on urban life (Manchester is, like Newham, one of the UK local councils most aggressively implementing CCTV) – I tried out the interactive surveillance face recognition systems available to the public. The system that was meant to recognize me as I wandered around the museum identified ten matches – all of them different people and none of them me. My niece, who wears glasses, was matched with a window! In another display, I was encouraged to try and find a criminal in a crowd on a computer screen by asking a range of questions of the ‘male or female?’, ‘bearded or clean-shaven?’ variety. I identified the criminal. He was a young black male!

While surveillance is routinely justified in terms of crime prevention and routinely criticized as an invasion of privacy, an accommodation between these two universalizing viewpoints will do nothing to affect the experience of the black man under surveillance in the streets of New York or London. Protection of privacy is not relevant to the ways in which the camera targets him. The terms in which surveillance is routinely critiqued obscure his experiences, and those of many others, in the name of a ‘privacy’ fantasized as a universal right.

For these reasons, I am starting this study exactly where most studies of surveillance start, by tracing the growth of CCTV. In following this history, I want to focus on the way in which an ‘ideology of crime’ creates a narrative not only for the deployment of surveillance cameras (a story told by well already by Norris and Armstrong (1999), Cummings (1997) and several others) but also for our psychic processing of the experience of surveillance – a processing that is most clearly revealed at the moments when the ideology of crime lets us down.

Kicking Off

It is generally agreed that, while most Western and many other countries now have pretty comprehensive surveillance camera networks in place, the UK led the world in mass surveillance of public space.¹¹ A number of factors contributed to this phenomenon – the nature of the British government in the 1980s, the relationship of that government and its policing policies to the press and, most significantly, the lack of any constitutional limits on public surveillance in British law. The earliest newspaper articles on the uses of CCTV to trap criminals seem to have been in The Times and The Sunday Times in November 1978 (Cummings, 1997; see also Moran in Norris et al., 1998: 277). However, it was in the mid-1980s, and specifically in relation to government programmes to eliminate football hooliganism, that the CCTV camera really took off.

There’s nothing we can do and we’re just sitting back playing it calm. We don’t know if the old bill have got specific information about the meeting, or just know something’s being planned. It’s a bit worrying. Like you’re being watched and your conversations taped. Seems you can’t do anything these days without spies recording the event. If it’s not a video camera watching you it’s some undercover cunt keeping his head down passing on information. It’s like being in a South American dictatorship or something.

(King, 1996: 127)

John King’s novel The Football Factory follows the experience of an English football hooligan in the early 1990s. It portrays a culture in crisis. While the book makes graphically clear that the ‘firms’ of young(ish) men who engage in elaborate rivalries and street battles organized around support for particular football teams are part of a long tradition with its own heroes and histories, it also demonstrates a growing desperation in that tradition, as policing techniques and resources make it increasingly difficult for these rituals of violence to take place in their traditional venues in and around the football ground.

The camera under the roof records our sins and it’s only kids and pissheads who step out of line. You’ve got to be daft to do anything else, though occasionally things boil over and then the papers are clocking faces and running witch-hunts. It’s hard to believe there was a time when you could go on the rampage inside the ground and get away with it week after week.

(Ibid.: 9)

The history of the surveillance camera in the UK is inextricably tied up with the football hooligan and the various cultural responses to that phenomenon. Surveillance cameras were first introduced to grounds in the mid-1980s as part of a Thatcherite attempt to curb a perceived crisis in football-related violence. In 1985, at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, where Liverpool were playing Juventus in the European Cup final, Liverpool fans were held responsible for a wall collapse that resulted in the deaths of thirty-nine people, an event that represented a watershed in the public perception of football violence. The issue was perceived, at least in the media, to have reached epidemic proportions, and Margaret Thatcher pledged to act. Television camera footage and press photography had already played a part in locating the perpetrators of violence at matches and, with video technology affordable for department store crime detection, the use of the technology in football grounds was an obvious and popular measure. By the end of the 1980s, crowd surveillance at football matches was routine. (A comprehensive history of football hooliganism and the security and surveillance measures employed to overcome it is given by Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti in their essay ‘From another angle: police surveillance and football supporters’, in Norris et al., 1998.)

The extraordinary rapidity with which Britain achieved its status as the advanced nation with the highest level of public video surveillance followed on from the perceived success of the programme to eliminate hooliganism from football grounds. In fact, the cameras could almost be said to have followed the hooligans out of the ground through the transport systems and into the town centres: ‘We wait for the next train a couple of minutes later, watched by London Underground lenses …. London’s turning into a surveillance arcade’ (King, 1996: 25).¹²

King’s novel is a useful source, because it traces the evolution of the CCTV camera from the viewpoint not of the police or criminologist, but of the young men whom the cameras were specifically installed to target. King catches the degree to which this history creates a change in consciousness in the narrator; not a wish to change behaviour, or a repentance for the error of his ways, but a changed relationship to the spaces through which he moves and the forces which act upon him. Surveillance, King viscerally demonstrates, changes the ways we feel and behave within the spaces that are surveyed. We might even say that it changes the spaces themselves.

The basic argument in favour of CCTV usually goes along the lines of ‘if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you’ve nothing to fear’. But the CCTV camera creates its own...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: thinking surveillance
• 1. An ideology of crime
• 2. Perverting privacy
• 3. Accidental Death
• 4. Dimensions, doubles and data: producing surveillance space
• 5. Staging the Spectator
• 6. Encountering surveillance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index