From:Kate_Maxwell@brown.edu

Alright, well, there were a couple points I’d like to add to the
debate about our expectations of privacy...I think there’s great
importance in Julie’s point that constitutional privacy rights are not
explicitly stated, but inferred if anything through a lack of specific
mention. this gives one pause as to whether we do consider the
security of the walls of the home as something inherent to
membership in mankind, as the brevity of our founding fathers has
left huge wide spaces open to question. But i think it’s also
important to consider a couple other things, particularly that if one
does consider liberty to be a freedom of movement, it is probably
necessary to reconsider privacy beyond spatial boundaries, ie
personal data, anonymity of movement or even something as
mundane as what i can only call the privacy of personal
relationships...maybe i don't want big brother to have a videotape
of me and my man arguing on the subway platform. it certainly
seems as though there are reasonable expectations of exposure
from publicly performed activities, but the nature of the available
technology has a great influence on such...the aforementioned
subway fight would of course be seen by everyone else waiting on
the platform, but in previous times it would also be reasonable to
assume that these people would lack knowledge of the couple’s
identity and any tangible memento of the occasion -- they might
remember what was said, but aside from passing on the story to
some friends the spread of such information is limited, and limited
to relatively “private” use. However, modern surveillance
technology, especially in the hands on a “public” authority such as
the government, certainly puts a new spin on things. a
conversation with a friend on a public park bench is no longer a
“safe” idea, as the eye of potential discipline can be everywhere.
Moreover, defining expectations of privacy in such specific spatial
terms as house walls, especially when flirting with the idea that
such rights may be natural, sets up an economic bias -- do i only
expect privacy if i can afford a huge windowless fortress? if i’m
sleeping in the park, should the contents of my bag be considered
“public”? and on...private experience and information in the
information age are increasingly associated with identity in ways
that more spatially expansive olden days did not consider. Often
times we seem consistently on the edge of a crisis because the
importance of these rights are not considered until threatened with
technology capable of quickly dissolving them, at which point it
may be too late, which brings us back to the idea that perhaps
there are rights because we assume that they exist in the first
place...

posted by whkc at 8:29 AM

From: Lisa_Tobias@brown.edu

So far, our readings have explored notions of subjectivity and objectivity in rather general terms, attributing a certain amount of agency to human beings in determining where they stand on the issue of representation (this is perhaps over-simplified, but here goes: i.e. whether or not one decides to commits a criminal act determines what position he occupies in the Panopticon; if one decides to follow the fixed methods of the enlightenment, he risks becoming object in its system; if one exposes himself to a window (virtual or not), he becomes vulnerable to the possibility of an objectifying surveillance or any other of privacy invasion). However, what struck me most about tomorrow’s articles, was how they presented rather recent, specific situations when people have become objectified and had no control in the matter—even more unnerving is that our American government/politics aided in the justification of such personal invasion. In the court case, the dominating force is!
pervasive technology, which, although the individuals involved decided to illegally grow pot, the case still shows that everyone everywhere may be vulnerable to technology’s omnipotent gaze. The objectification Spiller’s article explores was much more unnerving for me, as the invaders were people, themselves, rather than mechanical bodies. The African slaves had NO control over their enslavement—they were forced into a system of domination which eradication/robbery of all their human rights, even their own names. Beyond the lack of privacy in terms of a physical domestic space (like that of the home discussed in the court case), Spiller’s investigates the slaves’ lack of privacy in terms of “kinship”/ “family” (the basic unit of any domestic realm) and in terms of their own individuality (let alone an individualizing space). The passage that Jacquelyn explores on page 68 demonstrates that even after the physical fact of slavery was abolished, the “dominant symbolic act!
ivity…originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation” still linger
today, in a perpetually unchangeable state. Scary…
posted by whkc at 11:13 PM

From: Serika_Gooden@brown.edu

I thought that Spillers argument on pg. 72 about the Middle Passage was interesting. It’s important to point out that all slave bodies were “nowhere” and uprooted from their original spaces. The unknowability of where the journey ended must have disrupted their identity by taking away the right to move one’s body wherever they want to someplace knowable. In addition to the shock of unknowability came the education of a white other, from somewhere other than Africa. Did the slaves know there were more vast spaces outside of what they knew? With this move from home to nowhere the slaves lost their identities, in relation to each other, to their recognized spaces and through the enforcement of a new, subordinate way of life. They were “not-yet ‘American’ and became “culturally unmade at the same time, P72.
posted by whkc at 11:12 PM

From Adrian_Baker@brown.edu

Comments on the Kyollo vs. US decision:

Before reading the legal briefs I was familar with the case and certainly could
have told you my opinion. It seemed to me that the narrow victory for Kyollo was
a bit startling. However, as I saw the composition of those who voted in the
majority versus the minority, my initial reaction to the liberals supporting
civil liberties and conservatives siding with the state (in this case, greater
powers for law enforcement) was clearly wrong. It shocked me that the Court's
two most conservative justicies, Scalia and Thomas, voted for Kyollo and that
the Court's most prominent liberal (along with moderates such as O'Connor and
Souter) were arguing the surveillance was not a violation of the fourth
amendment.
I think Justice Scalia's brief brilliantly articulated the reasons for the
unconstitutionality of the surviellance, as well as effectively dismantling the
arguments advanced by the minority, written by Justice Stephens. As I began to
read the brief and heard Justice Scalia describe the nature of the techonology
and how it was used, I began to formulate a more clear idea of why, to me, this
practice clearly constituted a "search" (a central point of contention to the
decision) and why it is unconstitutional. Scalia noted that earlier precedents
that upheld the use of aerial surviellance without the use of a warrant.
However, as Scalia points out, there are two fundamental differences. First,
while it is clearly a case of improved technology encroaching on the privacy of
citizens, aerial surveillance can only see those things that are in plain view.
Stumbling upon something viewable to the naked eye (even if the vision of the
eye is amplified) is acceptable (e.g. a cop seeing !
marijuana on the driver's back seat of a car, as oppossed to searching his
glove compartment). However, the use of the technology does not amplify the view
of the naked eye (such as aerial surveillance or even binoculars do), it permits
the office to see something which could not otherwise be seen without being
physical present. Why not do away with search warrants altogether and just bring
giant x-rays, or heat sensors, to view one's house? Secondly, in the first case
they said it should the aerial surveillance could not be used on a private
residence or adjacent to one. The protection specifically of the person to be
secure in their home from unreasonable searches and seizures is the most fundmental place of privacy. The fact that the technology was not available to the general public was a crucial point for the majority (personally i don't
think the police or my neighbor should be able to spy on my house but maybe that's where Justice Scalia and I differ).
Using the heat sensor without a warrant was an obvious attempt to arrest someone by officers who did not, without this information, have the necessary probable cause to obtain a warrant and abide by the constitutional process. The fact that the Court narrowly struck down this opinion truly frightens me. I don't know whether I take more heart in the fact that Scalia and Thomas care more about our civil liberties than I thought or the fact that the justices who I was counting on to protect these rights are advancing these bogus arguments to inappropriately expand the powers of the State. As Justice Scalia noted in his
brief, the advances in technology have, over time, eroded the privacy previously afforded to the citizens. It seems to me that too many of the justices have
failed to uphold the spirit of the fourth amendment, by advancing, as Justice Scalia put it, a "mechanical interpretation."


posted by whkc at 11:11 PM

Bridget Stokes' post:

I was struck immediately by the relationship between the Spillers reading and Heidegger. Primarily when Spillers discusses ethnicity on page 66:

"Apparently spontaneous, these "actants" are wholly generated, with neither past
nor future, as tribal currents moving out of time. Moynihan's "Families" are
pure present and always tense. "Ethnicity" in this case freezes in meaning,
takes on constancy, assumes the look and the effects of the Eternal.We could
say, then, that in its powerful stillness, "ethnicity", from the point of view
of the "Report", embodies nothingmore than a mode of memorial time...As a
signifier that has no movement in the field of signification, the use of
"ethnicity" for the living becomes purely appreciative, although one would be
unwise not to concede its dangerous and fatal effects."

She examines Moynihan’s interpretation as scientific and moving away from the scholarly. Moynihan presupposes that humanity is measureable, and in a sense, Spillers goes with this presupposition, tracing African-American matriarchal ties to the middle passage and the repression of the African-American nuclear family in slave society. Heidegger says that the essence of science is research, and that research is procedure. According to Heidegger, to examine nature scientifically is to presuppose that nature is a fixed ground plan of natural events. Furthermore the procedure must bind itself to the sphere of objects it measures.

Heidegger says “The humanistic sciences, in contrast, indeed all the sciences concerned with life, must necessarily be inexact just in order to remain rigorous. A living thing can indeed also be grasped as a spatiotemporal magnitude of motion, but then it is no longer apprehended as living.” (120) Spillers essentially argues that The Moynihan Report takes this same philosophy, she says “’Ethnicity’ in this case freezes in meaning” (66)

What happens when the theories of Heidegger and Keenan are employed to Spillers’ work? To be more explicit, what happens when a human is dehumanized, racialized and ungendered? How then is a human a subject which simultaneously is a mixture of cause and effect that cannot be separated? How then is a human a non-seeing eye that produces the subject. Or does all the discussion of human as subject become obsolete? How was the African-American female slave subject? I think Spillers argues that she wasn’t and isn’t, and therefore, The Moynihan Report is null and void in calling her a matriarch. Unless The Moynihan Report is really calling her a ‘Sapphire,’ who “enacts her Old Man in drag” (66).
posted by whkc at 9:54 PM

Caroline Schimmelbusch's post:

Heidegger argues for the centrality of visualization for the definition of truth in the modern era. An object must be represented to be studied, to be known. Then, the subject behind (or in front) one of Keenan’s windows of vulnerability becomes the subject of the gaze of research, of surveillance, a gaze that aims to know the subject as object. If the subject then transports himself into a state of auto-surveillance because of the fear of being looked at in all his doings, good and bad, who and how is the true subject? If he veils the darker parts of his self from the light and the gaze, how will his truth ever be enlightened? Does he even know himself in this system of surveillance?
Spillers argues that slavery has deprived slaves of their subjectivity. They have become commodities and lost their being as subjects. In liberty, they must re-find their true selves, find “the self that was no self”. Does the Keenan’s watched subject also have to find himself? Does the glaring light, the permanent gaze take away from his own subjectivity?
Keenan’s arguments about windows serves to show the Heideggerian principle of the world picture. The world has become a series of representation in which the subject is intertwined in and of which he is an integral part.
The sphere, the Grundriss of the object of knowledge that is set a priori and precedes all kind of research in Heidegger’s thought leads me to ponder: if the subject is an object of knowledge behind a Keenian window, can he also be ‘tuned’ as new information is consumed. Are the outlines of the subject malleable?
The permeability of the modern space was inevitable. The sense-enhancing image technology, such as thermal imaging advances always and technology can penetrate deep into the privacy of the home. Interesting I find that Stevens dissents by saying the government should allow these emerging issues of surveillance to fully develop and become fully visible. He argues that one should first know the consequences of these issues before putting limits on their reach.
posted by whkc at 9:53 PM

In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” I was struck by a particular passage which links up to important notions of subjection and representation: “Even though the captive flesh/body has been ‘liberated,’ and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the human subject is murdered over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise” (68). This needs some unpacking. Spillers here implies that there exists a dominant power that names and assigns value. This power, rooted in metaphors of violence and captivity, is stagnant; it shows no development and does not stray from its murdering of the human subject. I found interesting here, however, that this power was “anonymous” and “bloodless,” much like the power created by the technology of the panopticon. It is a power that stems from metaphor, from symbolism, from representation. I think there is a lot more to unpack from this passage, but maybe we can do this together in class.
On a completely different note, I am still somewhat unsettled by the notions of gender that Spillers employs. What does she mean when she suggests that “’gendering’ takes place within the confines of the domestic, an essential metaphor that then spreads its tentacles for male and female subject over a wider ground of human and social purposes?” Is gender constructed in an essentially “private” sphere (assuming that domesticity is bound up in a private sphere)? (72) Is the slave-vessel an ultimate “public sphere”? So many questions...

posted by Jackie at 9:09 PM