Policing the Police in a Post 9/11 Culture
Symposium:
Session Title:
- If You See Something Say Something: Art, War, Surveillance and the Sustainability of Urgency in the Post 9/11 Era
Presentation Title:
- Policing the Police in a Post 9/11 Culture
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: If You See Something Say Something: Art, War, Surveillance and the Sustainability of Urgency in the Post 9/11 Era
In a culture of mass-mediated terror/ism, Ranciere’s notion of policing takes up from where Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s ‘panoptican’ ends. For Ranciere, policing is not so much the ‘disciplining’ of bodies as a rule governing their appearing – it is “a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed” (Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, 1998, p.29). What happens then, when the powerful and ubiquitous strategies of ordering, controlling and policing are reversed – when the police are themselves policed; when the ‘voiceless’ begin to interfere in the rules of appearance?
When Wael Ghonin created a Facebook page for Khalid Said, the 28-year-old Egyptian man who died after allegedly being beaten by police, the page became a rallying point for the January 25 protests against Mubarek’s regime in Egypt. When demonstrations started to flag, an interview with Ghonin, broadcast on You Tube, again galvanized protesters, who came back on the streets in large numbers in order to press for an end to the Mubarak regime. Similarly, many artists are increasingly turning to the strategies of sousveillance in order to explore and subvert existing power relations in a post 9/11 culture. By turning normative tools of surveillance and/or systems of dataveillance, back upon themselves, such artists seek to produce methods by which to counter-terrorise or deconstruct the mechanisms of political violence as a series of appearances in media events. This paper explores how, for artists like Rod Dickinson, Harun Farocki, Voina, Vision Machine or Ubermorgan, strategies of surveillance and control can be replayed in reverse and how the rules of appearance can be revisited and ‘detourned’.
