Things to Come

This chapter deals with of recent novels and films that project forward into the near future, suggesting where surveillance might be heading. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, surveillance is figured into a future world of interplanetary environmentalism, in protecting planets and helping to monitor the ‘rewilding’ of an environmentally devastated Earth. Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium fashions another Earth under environmental stress, patrolled by stringent surveillance operatives and systems that also screen the put-upon inhabitants from the eponymous eutopian space station literally and metaphorically above them. The film concentrates on the utopian urges of that population in their endeavour to overcome oppressive monitoring and receive medical treatment reserved for those on Elysium. Dave Eggers conjures up an apparently eutopian hi-tech company, The Circle, in his novel of the same name, representing how new technologies manipulate data and images for economic, social and political control. Spike Jonze’s film Her explores the relationship between surveillance and intimacy through the interaction between a human and an operating system. As with Eggers’ The Circle, Her investigates how data confuses definitions of identities as it allows for the fusion of surveillance and intimacy. These novels and films suggest some of the ways in which new forms of surveillance promise or threaten to fashion the worlds of the future. As with all such texts, they suggest options and present narratives and characters that enable readers and viewers to think and act so that the future approximates the eutopian rather than the dystopian.

Introduction

This chapter argues for the importance of literature and film in understanding the human dimension of surveillance. It recognises that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is the ‘go-to’ text when surveillance is discussed in the pubic arena, but it argues that, in a world of computer surveillance and Big Data, we need to move beyond Orwell if we are understand surveillance and respond imaginatively to it. It makes the case that the utopian genre has long presented a rich and provocative set of texts that encourage us to think imaginatively about surveillance. It also registers how surveillance scholars have often utilised such texts for illustrative purposes without fully exploring the rich generic links the current book analyses at length and in depth.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

This chapter is devoted to George Orwell’s compelling and still-influential masterpiece of dystopian surveillance. It deals with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s dominant and unique place in the public imagination, while considering how surveillance theorists have dealt with the novel. It also traces connections between Nineteen Eighty-Four and previous utopias, showing how Orwell’s ideas were in different ways influenced by writers such as H.G. Wells, Jack London, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Aldous Huxley. The chapter then presents a reading of the novel that stresses new ways of interpreting the treatment of surveillance, emphasising the limitations of monitoring in the novel: how the proles, who make up 85% of the population, are largely left alone, and how the countryside is a space seemingly surveillance-free. It also examines the distinct characters of Winston Smith and Julia, noting that, despite having lived under Party control all her life, when Winston meets Julia she is already consciously resistant to the putatively totalitarian ideology. The chapter also addresses the surprising extent and nature of resistance that Winston puts up, even in a world terrorised and warped by the Thought Police, telescreens, Newspeak, the Party, and Big Brother. Despite its efforts, the Party never really gets ‘inside’ Winston’s head in the sense of knowing his thoughts, reducing him to a compliant shell at the end of the narrative a hollow victory that marks the failure of Oceania’s surveillance regime.

Identities

This chapter considers how different forms of surveillance capture, fashion and potentially distort identity, sometimes without the subject knowing. It raises questions about how surveillance personnel and procedures establish and monitor authentic and inauthentic identities, as well as the strategies individuals and groups take to counteract malevolent scrutiny in order to retain control of their identities. Going beyond visual surveillance of actual bodies, the chapter examines the importance of computers and Big Data in creating new forms of identity. It also touches upon the intriguing area of the post-human and the ways in which creatures who seek personhood, such as replicants and robots, complicate notions of human identity. This chapter interprets an array of novels and films considered in other chapters (including The Truman Show, The Handmaid’s Tale, Blade Runner and Gattaca), while introducing new texts, such as Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Alex Proyas’s I, Robot. All these works probe at the boundaries of what it is to be human or fully human, and how surveillance functions to define, dehumanise and disempower.

Technologies

The association of surveillance with technology is longstanding and profound. In the contemporary world, the computer has supplemented the camera and the mobile phone. This chapter deals with relationships between types of technology and types of surveillance, recognising that in the world of Big Data information becomes a central monitoring source. Much computer surveillance is invisible to those under scrutiny, done at light speed, and potentially global in its reach. Repeated technological advances determine that surveillance endlessly morphs into new and unexpected directions, without due consideration of the personal, ethical and social consequences. This chapter also investigates texts that deal with the failure of technology, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, as well as the ways in which new technology can call into question the purpose and consequences of surveillance, as in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.

Spaces

If surveillance involves the monitoring of people, it necessarily requires monitoring the spaces and places people inhabit. Utopian texts have the root word ‘topos’ (or place) encoded in their genetic DNA. And because utopias inevitably provoke comparisons between the spaces that people inhabit and those projected in utopian novels and films, the genre is ideally situated to investigate surveillance systems. Many utopias incorporate good (eutopian) and bad (dystopian) spaces within them, the borders between theses zones being key pinch points for monitoring, and with it inclusion and exclusion. So, the chapter looks at the ways in which borders between spaces and worlds are critical to surveillance in films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, as well as novels such Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The chapter also considers the ways in which degraded, dystopian spaces are prone to surveillance in order to separate them from eutopian spaces, a trope seen in Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men. The chapter also ventures in cyberspace, evaluating the ways in which virtual spaces are monitored in William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Visibility

The next four chapters critically consider key aspects of surveillance represented in literature and film after Nineteen Eighty-Four. Given that surveillance by definition involves seeing things, chapter 4 deals with the question of visibility and the ways in which forms of scrutinising operate and are resisted. An important aspect of this chapter is the possibility of being invisible to surveillance technologies, systems and processes, and about the potential for consciously not seeing, something China Miéville in his speculative novel The City & The City labels making ‘unvisible’. The possibility of not being seen underscores the point Gary T. Marx makes: that all surveillance systems have blindspots or weaknesses that can be exploited. This chapter explores then the various driving forces behind surveillance in different projected works and worlds, foregrounding the ways in which characters manoeuvre successfully or unsuccessfully in these environments. It looks at forms of gendered monitoring (exemplified in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale), surveillance as visual entertainment in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, and visualising future crimes in Steven Spielberg’s film of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report.

Surveillance Studies and Utopian Texts

This chapter surveys the history of the emerging academic subfield of surveillance studies, noting key developments in surveillance theory that start with the invocation of Nineteen Eighty-Four and George Orwell by James Rule. Surveillance theory moves, in the 1970s and 1980s toward the rich and generative work of Michel Foucault, and his revision of Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the ‘panopticon’, and then beyond Foucault into new territory. The chapters argues that an often-neglected link between these ideas is that of the utopian genre, which provides a challenging and illuminating set of texts through which to explore some of these notions. The chapter shows how these texts have been used, or might be used profitably to explore concepts raised by such foundational surveillance studies scholars as Gary T. Marx and David Lyon. It shows that more recent and important scholarship by, amongst others, Kevin Haggerty and Zygmunt Bauman, continues to invoke (even if negatively) utopian texts, suggesting the challenge and enlightenment such works still offer to surveillance studies more generally.

Surveillance Before Big Brother

This chapter traces the history of utopian depictions of surveillance before Nineteen Eighty-Four. It argues that we understand Orwell’s novel better when we see it in terms of a long tradition of such works that have from at leas the time of Thomas More in the 16th century have represented and critically analysed social structures and processes, as well as their relationships to individuals and groups. Inherently, utopias are speculative, testing out good and bad possibilities for readers (and, later, for film goers), enabling them to contemplate the worlds they inhabit and to think about optional ways of being, both individually and socially. Concentrating on this genre, the chapter suggests, uncovers a focused, historically- and imaginatively rich body of works that present a valuable array of depictions and analyses.