surveillance cameras cast their watchful eye upon the streets and subways of new york, weaving together the so-called emergency situation with everyday life. yet it seems that returning the recording gaze is prohibited, if not regulated. the nypd qua ‘petty sovereigns’ (a term dubbed by judith butler) suspends law through its discretionary (mis)interpretation. perhaps this securitization of the visual, in its differentiation of technologies of the gaze, implies that 9/11 and its state of emergency has not been left so far behind. rather, 9/11 is an event manifest in a variety of what m. m. bakhtin calls ‘chronotopes’, or materialized spatiotemporal dynamics; it organizes our experience in and of space and time through unpredictable and singular (because arbitrary) ways.
nonetheless, it would do good to ponder who may provisionally act as a petty sovereign. security counterintuitively reveals the weaknesses in the system it attempts to protect. recall ranciere’s description of the police message: ‘move along, there is nothing to be seen here.’ it is in that very nothing that everything is to be seen – the very shimmers of possibility illuminated within the cracks of the fragile policed order. putting surveillance itself within our focus, then, may provoke critical scrutiny of the supposed need for heightened security.
so when our gaze is centered on technologies of the gaze, we secure the opportunity to become petty sovereigns. in doing so, we may alter the trajectory of 9/11 and its organization of in/security chronotopes by heeding a lesson delivered by walter benjamin in the context of struggles against fascism: ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule. we must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency.’
I love these pictures. Surveillance cameras always make me feel like I should be on guard. It is a heightened sense of emergency if you’re not walking past these huge monitors and cameras day in and day out. But you probably get used to it. We get used to it. We can get used to a whole lot. There’s a whole chain reaction of events that take place, we’re being watched and we react to being watched, it is a kind of a mundane sort of invasion on my privacy. But I don’t see a world without them anymore. We can live without bodies. We’ll just be screens or mirrors or images reflecting. That’s strange.