The new easements

The book by American jurist and philosopher Bernard E. Harcourt, whose French translation has just been published by Seuil, is part of the tradition of surveillance studies. It is about understanding how digital technology works, thwarting its totalitarian tendencies, and doing so in order to resist it. It is in the wake of the thinking of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and in particular the “Post-Scriptum on Control Societies” published by Deleuze in theOther-Journal (1990), in which he wrote: “we are entering into societies of control which are no longer exactly disciplinary (…) which no longer function by confinement, but by continuous control and instantaneous communication” (text taken from TalksMinuit, 1990, p. 236). Deleuze devoted only a few pages to this new configuration of power relations. Since then, a number of authors, such as Olivier Razac (With Foucault, after Foucault, Dissecting the control societyL’Harmattan, 2008) analyzed the power configurations that emerge in our societies through the decomposition of the disciplinary institutions described by Foucault.

The concept of exhibition society

Digital technology provides us with constant stimulation, through notifications, pushes us to connect and draws us into arrangements: we constantly couple ourselves with machines, our phone or a social network, finding pleasure and dependence there. The digital phenomenon is characterized by the desire it arouses and emotional contagion mechanisms that make us happy when we read good news on Facebook. The most relevant literary reference to describe our addiction to the internet would be, according to the author, Soma, a hallucinogen described by A. Huxley in The best of worlds.

The concept of the “desiring machine” is borrowed by BE Harcourt to Deleuze and Guattari (Anti-Oedipus): on the one hand, desire does not aspire to an object, but seeks an arrangement, “associating sensations, experiences, pleasures and symbols” (p. 54), it is in this sense that it is machinic – and consumerism particularly liberates the flows of desire; on the other hand, sexuality is everywhere, notably in the political field, and the masses can desire fascism. Desire can be led to desire its own repression; “desire is everywhere where something flows and flows, dragging interested subjects, but also drunken or sleeping subjects towards deadly mouths” (Deleuze and Guattari, cited p. 193).

BE Harcourt characterizes the digital age as a new era: a new form of rationality characterized by the model of digital correspondence or Doppelganger (a term meaning double in German, with an evil connotation). Everyone exhibits themselves and observes the others, everyone is both leader and follower. The recommendation techniques developed on the Internet to suggest videos to everyone, for example, are based on the idea of ​​a digital double. It is assumed that similar traffic patterns on the Internet, including the time or date of connection, are based on identical tastes. From there, we look for the perfect match and the correct prediction.

Furthermore, the digital age produces a “new form of value”: everyone contributes to their surveillance, allowing free advertising and thus creating “added value” (p. 109). Several criteria can be used to characterize the exhibition society: a new form of transparency, accommodating a deliberate distortion of the image we give of ourselves; an omnipresent seduction; a relative opacity, which attempts to make everyone forget that they are the target of advertising; a virtual authenticity that transforms everyone into a biographer of themselves. Finally, a new form of confessionality, permanent, but lighter because it allows us to exhibit on social networks the ideal self that we would like to be.

From surveillance to exposure

One of the interests of the work lies in the distance that the author takes from the idea of ​​a surveillance society. BE Harcourt, in fact, calls upon several references that the digital age seems to naturally call for in order to reject them. The first is the surveillance described in 1984: if Orwell is right about the development of the omniscience of the State, his error, according to the author, is not to have seen that human beings are more easily disciplined by trapping them in their passions than by trying to eradicate desire, as Big Brother tries to do. The Internet gives us pleasure, far from the gloom of the world described by Orwell. The second model rejected is that of the surveillance State, developed by the American lawyer Jack Balkin. Certainly, State surveillance is colossal and the NSA., the American intelligence agency, employs the equivalent of a city of 30,000 inhabitants. But if some programs like Xkeyscore allow everyone to access the data of an internet user, the surveillance that results is not the work of the State alone, but of an oligarchic concentration bringing together intelligence, Silicon Valley, telecommunications companies, social networks, among others, in a global cooperation (with common interests: countering the espionage of foreign companies for example). The author recalls some instructive data on the way in which the NSA invests up to 70% of its budget in private companies.

The third rejected model is, finally, the model of the panopticon described by Foucault in Keep an eye on and punish. Used in some prisons, this surveillance model combines a central tower, where guards are posted, and individual cells visible all around. For Foucault, this surveillance has the effect of internalizing the gaze of the guards by individuals; the architecture illustrates a disciplinary power that produces docility. According to Foucault, quoted p. 84, “a society is panoptic where the exercise of power is ensured in the mode of generalized discipline” and the surveillance society would correspond to the reversal of the previous model of society, that of the spectacle, associated with the arena (many spectators monitoring a small number of people). Now surveillance and spectacle are certainly present in the digital society, but a dimension of self-exhibition is added to them. The author also returns to the idea of ​​security that Foucault distinguishes from surveillance in the conference “Security, territory, population” of 1978. The exhibition society is not strictly security-based: the knowledge that electronic surveillance seeks is “richer and more individualized than that of bio-power” (p. 96), it is nothing less than a power over all our little desires.

Unprecedented in its operation, the exhibition society is not a complete break with old models: the sovereign power uses drones for assassinations, visibility is sought by internet users who use networks as an arena.

A resistance to be invented

The other interest of the book is the reflection conducted on subjectivity. The author shows how the digital age is accompanied by a decline in humanism and values ​​such as privacy, autonomy and confidentiality. Privacy is no longer a need, as Hannah Arendt theorizes, but something that is monetized.

Digital technology is characterized by the disappearance of the boundaries between State and society in favor of a data market in which actors play on this confusion to promote their interests. This data brokerage generated 156 billion dollars in 2012 (the work in English dates from 2016) producing a vulnerability of Internet users. Thus, “state nodes” are developing, a concept borrowed from Foucault, to designate modes of intervention associated with the State, but which do not come from it.

Another consequence of digital exposure is the reshaping of subjectivity. In Asylums (1961), E. Goffman shows, based on his field experience, how the environment shapes subjectivity: in a situation of confinement, individuals see their subjectivity affected and develop resistance. A prisoner whose schedule is predefined experiences humiliation in relation to which he will develop, for example, a withdrawal into himself. Thus, the power relations in the institutions described by Goffman are associated with a “moral experience” (p. 189). New technologies also shape our subjectivity: deprived of intimate space, we become accustomed to being treated as targets. The outcome of this “self-mortification” (the term is Goffman’s), which arouses resistance or apparent indifference (in the name of the fact that we have nothing to hide), would be to let the exhibition society develop its hold. Does our daily life not resemble that of the prisoner under electronic bracelet? In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of CapitalismMr. Weber uses the metaphor of the iron cage to describe the situation of the individual struggling with a social system that he has helped to shape: the author, for his part, evokes a “straitjacket” (p. 215).

But democracy seems very weak in dealing with the problems of digital technology. First of all, in practice, democracy very naturally accommodates a form of passivity. To show this, BE Harcourt draws on the notion of “democratic despotism” developed by Tocqueville in Of Democracy in America : despotism sometimes takes on benevolent figures, in appearance, in particular when the State claims to be the agent of the happiness of citizens and infantilizes them; “it provides for their security, foresees and ensures their needs, facilitates their pleasures” writes Tocqueville (p. 221), transforming them into sheep. Our abandonment of any form of resistance to the capacity of the internet to capture our attention and our trust would be based on this temptation of passivity specific to any citizen in a democracy, which makes surveillance acceptable. But the fragility of democracy is also theoretical. Indeed, few authors question the links between surveillance and democracy and the author shows how, in certain cases, questions of surveillance are treated as external to the political field. Thus Tocqueville justifies surveillance in a penitentiary environment by the anti-social nature of the criminal: according to him, human rights have no place in prison. And at the same time, Tocqueville does not address the question of prison in Of Democracy in Americaas if, here again, the questions of surveillance and democracy were, in his eyes, disjointed.

But the exhibition society is no harsher than the previous ones; possibilities of emancipation are always conceivable. In the aforementioned “Post-scriptum”, G. Deleuze characterized control societies by communication and invoked art as a mode of resistance. BE Harcourt, for his part, encourages us to this self-knowledge which is an entry into ethics (because no one forces us to expose ourselves in digital systems which send us suggestions in return): we should be able to resist the exhibition society by admitting, to begin with, our role in its development.