Richard Grusin, "Datamediation, Citizenfour, and the Affectivity of Surveillance"

Department: Critical Theory at UCI

Date and Time: February 4, 2016 | 4:00 PM-6:00 PM

Event Location: HIB 135

Event Details

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Datamediation, Citizenfour, and the Affectivity of Surveillance
Richard Grusin, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

I have coined the term “datamediation” to denote both how data is mediated through digital technologies and how data functions as itself a form of mediation. My concern with datamediation is an attempt to think through how the almost ubiquitous entity called “data” operates in almost every aspect of human and nonhuman life and nonlife in the 21st century. In this talk, I will begin by sketching out what I am getting at with the term “datamediation,” which has a much broader scope than I am able to address today. I then take up Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning 2014 documentary Citizenfour, to consider the film’s cinematic datamediation of the affectivity of surveillance and exposure. Among the questions that Citizenfour asks is one I will focus on today: “What does it feel like to know you’re under surveillance?”

Poitras filmed much of the documentary during the process of Edward Snowden’s contact with her and Glenn Greenwald, in Snowden’s room in the Hong Kong Mira Hotel, during their facilitation of the release of Snowden’s NSA leaks to the media public. My broad aim in thinking about the affectivity of surveillance in Citzenfour is to shift discussion about vital national security issues away from questions of precisely what information is under surveillance and towards questions of how surveillance functions to control, generate, and mobilize individual and collective affectivity, particularly in relation to our socially networked media devices and practices. Or put another way, I want to add to compelling arguments about privacy rights and government transparency an analysis of how the affectivity of surveillance is simultaneously concealed and revealed by the security practices of state and corporate actors and those who would contest or oppose those practices.

Co-sponsored by English and Film and Media Studies.