Surveillant Antiquities and Modern Transparencies: Exercising and Resisting Surveillance Then and Now
Workshop project scheduled for Berlin, October/November 2015 (Excellence Cluster TOPOI)
 
Organizers: Dr. Tudor Sala (FU Berlin) and Dr. Seda Gürses (NYU)
 
 
Summary:
 
Intelligent drones, microscopic tracking devices, brain scanners: the unlimited technological possibilities of surveillance make it seem a thing of the future, not of the past. Edward Snowden’s recent disclosures and bleak predictions about comprehensive spying in an age of electronic communication only increased public anxieties about surveillance in the now and the tomorrow. Yet centuries, if not millennia, before the surveillance apocalypse of the 21st century, there is evidence for the construction of various models of social and individual transparency in writings and architecture from ancient Mesopotamia to early medieval China and from classical India to the late antique Mediterranean world. One can think of, for example, the different types of a surveillance society conceptualized by the legalist philosopher Shang Yang in Qin China (4th cent. BCE), by the Artha?astra in classical India (c. 1st cent. BCE-1st cent. CE), or by Plato and Isocrates in classical Greece (4th cent. BCE); the bold and controversial social experiments of corporate lifestyle carried out by religious sectarians such as the Greek Pythagoreans, the Jewish community at Qumran, early medieval Daoist sects, or early Christian monastics; and, last but not least, the various notions of individual and collective sin and pollution that kept ancient society under the close watch of divine beings ready to punish the slightest transgression. Total surveillance??whether as an ideal or as a nightmare, whether as theory or as practice, whether as tradition or as innovation??is by no means a contrivance of the present or the near future but of the distant past.
The current public debate over ‘surveillance’, which we encounter in various forms of intensity in politics, social activism, and the media takes place almost exclusively in the long shadow cast by such thinkers of modernity as George Orwell and Michel Foucault. Mesmerized and menaced by conceptual clichés such as Panopticon and Big Brother, policy makers and the general public are, however, oblivious to the earliest designs and models of organized interpersonal supervision. For heuristic reasons scholars of surveillance usually differentiate the ‘postmodern’ type of electronic surveillance from the ‘modern’ and the ‘pre-modern’ types. A number of recent studies, however, complicate such a neat dichotomy between past and present systems of surveillance, challenging historians and sociologists to reevaluate supervision in ‘pre-modern’ times as not being simply informal, unsystematic, and local. 
The workshop’s contribution is to shed light on the complex practices, strategies, and imaginaires of total surveillance in the ancient and late ancient world, both the familiar and the alien ones. Thus we are interested to explore ancient forms of mediation and centralization of information, the employment of record keeping and accounting, technologies of self-discipline, and the strategic use of architecture and organization of space, while not neglecting notions of all-seeing gods and demonic beings, of sin and pollution, as well as practices of purification or expiation, of divination, ordeals, and omens. Using this historical knowledge, the workshop intends to turn the gaze back upon the present-day surveillance complex and discern in the lofty and imperturbable lenses, which surround us, reflections of age-old struggles, resistances, and failures. The following guiding questions frame our approach:
1)    What do we gain by comparing ancient and modern systems of surveillance? Can we move beyond identifying similarities and differences toward drawing genealogies? Would the comparative also allow us to question some widespread assumptions about the ethical and social challenges of surveillance in the present? 
2)    Can we identify specific historical, political, social, religious, and/or economic contexts that were propitious for the implementation of systems of surveillance in the past? Can we establish parallels to the present? 
3)    What social groups endorsed/opposed surveillance in the past/in the present? Were certain segments of society or particular individuals in the past subject to more surveillance than others? Did this effect distinctive modes of resistance? Can we draw analogies to the present? What role did/does religion play whether in the past or the present in maintaining or opposing systems of surveillance? 
4)    How does organized surveillance whether in the ancient world or the present shape the construction of community and self in the respective cultures? What ideologies and belief systems were/are used to motivate the implementation of surveillance? Do religious forms of surveillance, e.g. the notion of all-seeing god(s), shape a different kind of self and community than secular surveillance? Is it even feasible or desirable to speak of a secular surveillance and sacralizations of technological surveillance?


List of Possible Invited Guests:
locals: Wolfgang Coy Julia Maria Moenig (arendt) Jake Appelbaum Lorraine Daston, who is in Berlin at the MPI  Joerg Pohle, Kavita Philips , Norma Möllers <norma.moellers@Gmail.Com>
per skype: Julian Assange Zygmunt Bauman  
international/interdisciplinaer: Omar Jabary Salamanca Eyal Weizman (uk) Nadia Fadil (be) Rosamunde van Brakel (be)  
techno: Paul Dourish Claudia Diaz George Danezis  
law: Julie Cohen   
surveillance studies: David Lyon  
usa: Arun Kundnani (us) erica robles anderson (kann wahrscheinlich selbst bezahlen) simone browne (sklaverei und ueberwachung heute) Page DuBois at UCSD, who works on ancient Greek torture and truth claims;  Danielle Allen at Harvard;  John Arnold at Birkbeck UL;  Helen Hills at the University of York;  Mitchell B. Merback at Johns Hopkins;   
suggestions from Rosamunde:
    Concerning other speakers, 
-someone for your number 4 who is very good is: https://ericstoddart.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/about/
-Christian Parenti who wrote http://www.amazon.com/Soft-Cage-Surveillance-America-Slavery/dp/0465054854/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
-Midori Ogasawara she's just great, she does fascinating (also historical) stuff on ID systems in Japan currently doing her phd with david lyon in kingston
-someone you should definitely get and I think he actually lives in Berlin is: http://www.gschrey.org/ID/?tag=alphonse-bertillon, he is also an artist
-Ola: http://www.sh.se/p3/ext/content.nsf/aget?openagent&key=sh_personal_publ_en_914099#!/p3/ext/content.nsf/aget?openagent&key=sh_personal_profil_en_914099
-Chiara (although she is now at JRC so not sure she's allowed to do academic workshops :-) http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chiara_Fonio

    
To do List:
Zygmunt Bauman anschreiben
Gelder finden