Events
Privacy Rites: Space, Surveillance, and Power in Historical Perspective
Brandeis University
Wednesday, November 8, 2006
4:00 - 6:30 p.m.
Levine-Ross, Hassenfeld Conference Center
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Co-conveners: Mark Auslander (Anthropology) and Andreas Teuber (Philosophy)
The landmark essay, “The Right to Privacy” (1890) by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, was reportedly inspired by a highly evocative episode: a newspaper photographer climbed over a garden wall to photograph Warren’s daughter’s breakfast wedding party, leading to the image’s mass dissemination across the city. This symposium explores some of the fascinating paradoxes suggested by this telling example. “Privacy” and its twinned antithesis, “surveillance,” emerged out of the intersection of built domestic space and emerging optical technologies of mass reproduction. Note the spatial metaphors in Brandeis and Warren’s anxious prophecy: “numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.’” A violation of the core spatial distinction of the modern city, the tenuous distinction between public and private, helps catalyze the image of a sacrosanct, sovereign self that is in principle beyond the gaze of sovereign state power or the untrammeled forces of the market.
In this symposium we will reflect upon the broader historical antecedents, resonances, and implications of Brandeis and Warren’s anxious plea. For some theorists, the accelerating proliferation of optical and electronic technologies of surveillance and mechanical reproduction exemplifies a postmodern decoupling of space and power. Bentham’s Panopticon depended on fixed architectural structures, binding together warden and prisoner, the routinzer and the routinized, in intimate disciplines of mutual engagement and physical proximity. In contrast, the synthesis of electronic surveillance, mass mechanical reproduction, and complex information networks seems to promise power that is entirely “extraterritorial,” in which controlling elites are fluid, inaccessible, and no longer spatially entangled with their subordinates. In turn, other scholars insist, sophisticated technologies of remote or virtual monitoring do not transcend space and place as such, but are rather embedded in shifting forms of architecture, landscape, selfhood, and embodiment that are themselves the products of complex social and material histories.
The symposium is held in conversation with the exhibition “Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art” at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum (September 21- December 17, 2006). It also commemorates the 150th anniversary of Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941).
Participants include:
Mark Auslander (Anthropology)
Caren Irr (English and American Literature)
Kevin Hamilton (University of Illinois)
Peter Kalb (Fine Arts)
Alice Kelikian (History)
Tom King (English and American Literature)
Ann Koloski-Ostrow (Classics)
Adrianne Krstansky (Theater Arts)
Laura Miller (Sociology)
Rick Parmentier (Anthropology)
John Plotz (English and American Literature)
Michael Rush (Director, Rose Art Museum)
Ellen Schattchneider (Anthropology)
Dr. Ramie Targoff (English and American Literature)
Andreas Teuber (Philosophy)
Jonathan Unglaub (Fine Arts)
Michaele Whelan (English and American Literature)
Discuss Privacy and Surveillance
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