Definitely Maybe

You know an ideology is totalizing when the only conceivable resistance is more of the very same ideology. Case in point: the Baltimore Sun recently reported on a City Council bill to outfit all 3,000 BCPD officers with body cameras. (http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-09-22/news/bs-md-ci-police-cameras-20140922_1_body-cameras-police-brutality-baltimore-police-officer) The bill comes on the heels of several instances of alleged police brutality, including the death of “44-year-old Tyrone West, who died while he was in police custody,” (ibid) and an incident in September in response to which “Baltimore police officials suspended an officer shown on camera beating a man at a North Avenue bus stop.” (ibid)

To get a sense of how the proposed body cameras fit into the ideology of total surveillance, one must first situate the police within the structure of the surveillance state. Police officers contribute very little to the actual surveillance of the American citizenry; that function is filled quite capably by a slew of other actors, most notably the NSA by way of its monitoring of our email and cell phone accounts, but also by corporate America through the monitoring of its employees’ and consumers’ behavior. Regarding the former, if your job involves a computer your boss essentially knows your every move. And as to the latter, cameras are ubiquitous in brick and mortar stores, and every click on the internet is reduced to raw data. So, whether one is on-line, at work, or in the (“virtual” or “real”) marketplace, or even just in range of a cell phone camera, one is essentially in Bentham and Foucault’s panopticon, where a “single watchman (can) observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon) But if the police aren’t the panopticon’s “single watchman,” what, then, is their role? Which is where police violence, exponentially increased by police militarization, comes into play. Because if surveillance is the brains of the operation, police are the muscle.

Foucault was perhaps most famous for Discipline and Punish, a work exploring our panopticon culture. Playing off the title of that work, I would say that if we are disciplined by surveillance, then we are (corporally) punished by the police. Violence always carries a message. Where domestic violence says “This is our little secret,” and where terrorism of all stripes (i.e. including State terror) says “This could be you,” police violence now says, to borrow a famous phrase from George Orwell, “Big Brother is watching.” Police violence must needs only explode intermittently to serve its purpose; like the watchman’s gaze in the panopticon, just the fact that it might happen upon you is enough. Because, as Orwell explains in his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, “there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… you had to live… in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.” The NSA might be watching, and the police might decide to treat me like Abner Louima. The whole point of which “mights” is that it is, as Orwell astutely points out, safer to live in the assumption that maybe is, paradoxically, definitive.

You know an ideology is totalizing when the only conceivable resistance is more of the very same ideology. This is just a fancy way of saying if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. By pinning our hopes for relief from police brutality on police body cameras, we are endorsing the very surveillance that police brutality announces. In doing so we are continuing to follow Orwell’s script, retreating from the rushing darkness by escaping into an enveloping darkness.

The old question, “Where are the police when you really need them?”, has taken on new meaning in our surveillance state cum militarized police. Once a rhetorical question, it now has an answer. They are on camera. And if you’re wondering whether this means you should be preparing for your big close up, check out the title of Oasis’ (bitchin’) first album, Definitely Maybe.