Surveillance aesthetics and theatre against "Empire"

Deposited with permission of Double DialoguesOver the 1990s technologies and uses of surveillance developed at an expediential rate. We became accustomed to the presence of micro-cameras, sound recording devices, cross-referencing databases and software designed to recognise shapes and patterns, even human faces. Surveillance now performs an expanding array of regulatory, disciplinary, entertainment and protective functions. State and government organizations have adapted surveillance technologies to measure, predict, control and protect citizens. In the light of a sceptical public, politicians use surveillance images, transmitted by compliment media companies, as ‘justification’ or ‘evidence’ for their acts of rule, border protection and warfare. The corporate state freely monitors the activities of its workers and customers; both are now observed and measured in their everyday behaviours, their work and consumption patterns are monitored, their communications and habitual movements are ceaselessly recorded and reviewed. Such information is used to administer workplace regimes, ensure compliance to corporate ideology, censure thought and prevent collective organisation among workers. Detailed customer information gleaned through surveillance is itself a commodity. Although sometimes regulated, the sale of such information without the knowledge or approval of the consumer is commonplace. In the private sphere, individuals responding to the marketing of a general ‘ambient uncertainty’ (Bauman, 1998) sustain a massive home surveillance industry of cameras, movement sensors, gated communities and the like that far exceeds either the value of home wealth that is being protected, or the actual level of the security threat. And all this is extracurricular to a military-surveillance complex that instructs us to obey through carefully selected cinema verite images of missiles that can reach every corner of the globe and enter every domain. With such a visible, affective presence in society and culture, it is important that we debate the ongoing implications of surveillance mechanisms for society and for cultural production. Specifically this essay will consider how theatre might address the surveillance world. Surveillance will be discussed as a function of ‘Empire’ - a recently developing notion of power approximating and extending the logic of globalisation (Hardt and Negri, 2000). The essay will ultimately consider how theatre has offered insightful possibilities for challenging and resisting Empire in its most dystopian forms