Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Walking in the city / new voyeur-gods?



This week, I was particularly struck by de Certeau's experience of a “voyeur-god” who sees “only cadavers” from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. To finally be allowed a vision of the whole transforms the “world by which one was possessed into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read, to be a solar eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and Gnostic drive; the fiction of knowledge is related to the lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more” (92). Such a description made me immediately think of the police security camera systems of metropolises worldwide – systems that, apart from the elevated height, seem to fit a strikingly similar description.

Last year I had the chance to meet a member of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, an NGO that helped to win a lawsuit in 2006 against the Budapest Police Headquarters to have the locations of its 600 surveillance cameras provided to the public. The HCLU also organized ‘camera dances’ where participants perform for multiple cameras throughout the city. Those who couldn’t make it were encouraged on their site to watch from "the perfect seat," or the police monitor room, which now fits de Certeau’s description of a “bubble of panoptic and classifying power.”

In New York City, the continued increase in surveillance funding and scope is seen as an effort against terrorism. Today, cameras in New York attempt to detect chemical, biological, and radiological threats. As surveillance techniques and technology improve, cameras seem to take on a human quality, in that they could potentially track, follow and zoom in on subjects (like the [in]security camera shown above that avoids direct eye contact). The camera becomes a cop in a box, and somewhere is the potential data for a new breed of voyeur-god. As data collection improves, it increasingly constitutes a similarly legible, albeit fragmented, view of the whole.

How do cameras alter De Certeau’s over twenty year old conceptions of city structure and experience? He describes in detail the unsatisfactory representation graphics give to the “pedestrian enunciation.” The legible and rich text of pedestrian steps offered by security film data offers a counterpart to the simple line trajectory between here and there. He also mentions how such rhetoric of walking is one of selection; the walker can accept or avoid spatial paths put in place by the inherent physical order. In making such a selection, “the user of a city picks out certain fragments of the statement in order to actualize them in secret” (99). The selection of steps actualized in secret – all the while in public spaces – becomes increasingly difficult in the ‘control society.’

In the same way that de Certeau relishes the sanctuary offered by the restrooms on trains (“Only the restrooms offer an escape from the closed system. They are … a little space of irrationality” 111), how does one interpret or escape technocratic power and its new “urban text without obscurities”?

No comments: