SUBJECTIVITY UNDER SURVEILLANCE : RHETORIC REDUX

 Surveillance agencies labour under an haphazard or archaic conception of what is, today, a community of communicating subjects: they have not fully realized that audiences and producers of texts are no longer individuals, but points of application of a system, or functions that alter sources themselves. Surveillance agencies live in a disconnect between massive technological and information advances, and archaic and instinctual (non)understanding of human communication in the postmodern age. They apprehend the world of postmodern cyber-communication from a technological or legal, simply made more complex at every turn, at every "leak," by the addition of mores procedures and mores processes. Surveillance agencies, and their critics, do not take cognizance of their own archaism, and of the complexity of what I have attempted to describe, "surveilled subjects" playing with noise, affects, subterfuge, evasion, legalities, and having the sudden ability to claim a differend from the dated idiom of surveillance. And resist.

In my view, it is rhetoric's duty to take up this challenge, and to perform in our times what Aristotle did in his time: to question how subjectivity operates rhetorically, then in a declining democracy subverted by imperialism, now in a democracy perverted by surveillance.

Philippe-Joseph Salazar
Février 2015

http://www.cf2r.org/fr/tribunes-libres/subjectivity-under-surveillance-rhetoric-redux.php