Paper long abstract:

This contribution tackles modern surveillance from the perspective of politics of disappearance, which problematizes the presence and absence of heterogeneous elements in concrete practices. It aims to illuminate neglected styles of association encompassing what is present, but also what is left out, banned or omitted. Relying on the notion of obscenity, the paper attempts to bridge the gap between these politics and more established accounts of surveillance focused on the (in)visibilities at stake, moving beyond visions too narrowly entrenched in discussing who observes what.

Two case studies flesh out this approach. First, the paper considers how revelations about US NSA's surveillance triggered operations of unveiling and concealing, from an initial uncovering of covert practices towards a displacement of their visibility by the image of Edward Snowden, and followed by the progressive transformation of the whistle-blower's image into a ghostly presence.

Second, it looks into so-called resistance practices, and particularly into a selected set in which activists re-activate notions such as subjectivity and privacy through a saturation of nakedness. Here, exposure is used to reclaim a right to hide, and asserting the presence of the body is played out as a mode of contestation of increasingly nebulous and un-fathomable data processing operations.

These cases allow interrogating the meaning of the ob-scene, by bringing to the fore its location at the crossroads of what is (too) (in)visible and what is just (not) there. Finally, the contribution asks which new configurations open up when surveillance and counter-surveillance are addressed from this standpoint.