Nicole Falkenhayner - Media, Surveillance and Affect: Narrating Feeling-States

Surveillance has become a part of everyday life: we are surrounded by surveillance technologies in news media, when we go down the street, in the movies, and even carry them in our own pockets in the form of smartphones. How are we constructing imaginaries of our realities and of ourselves as living in structures of control? What affects, emotions and feelings do we develop in societies of control, and how do we narrate them?

Media, Surveillance and Affect represents a big step in revealing the depth of the entanglement of surveillance technology not only with our everyday lives, but with our imaginaries and affective experiences. Combining insights from affect studies with narratological and visual cultural studies approaches, the case studies in this book focus on how surveillance cameras and surveillance camera images have been used to narrate affective stories of Great Britain. Cases discussed include the memory work surrounding the murder of James Bulger in 1993 and of Lee Rigby in 2011, but also novels and artworks.

With a multidisciplinary approach Media, Surveillance and Affect will appeal to students, scholars and specialists interested in fields such as media and cultural studies, literary studies, cultural sociology and surveillance studies.

Nicole Falkenhayner is a senior lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany.

Kirstie Ball, William Webster, Charles Raab, Pete Fusey

www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Surveillance/book-series/RSSURV

Narrating Feeling-States

Nicole Falkenhayner

First published 2019

by Routledge

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2019 Nicole Falkenhayner

The right of Nicole Falkenhayner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-60943-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-46615-1 (ebk)

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There is no text that is the outcome of a monadic mind, and this is especially true for this book, which couldnt have been written without the support of many persons and institutions during the time of the gestation of its ideas, the research process, the actual writing, and the preparation of the manuscript. The first ideas for this book came while I was a member of the research group Memory and Its Media in 2012, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and I thank Silvia Mergenthal, Nina Fischer, Rosanne Kennedy and Isabell Otto for the discussions and the good time we had in Canberra. I was able to expand what was originally planned to become an article during my time as a Post-Doc researcher at the graduate school Factual and Fictional Narration at the University of Freiburg from 20122014. I am very thankful for the support of its speaker, Monika Fludernik, and my colleagues Annette Schneck, Bettina Korintenberg, and Julia Steiner. Many thanks are due to Barbara Korte for so many things: for making me believe that this project could become a monograph in the first place, for her support with a funding application, her invaluable feedback on the chapters, the proposal, and everything else. I also thank Andreas Langenohl, Andrew Hoskins and Miriam Nandi for discussing the project with me and supporting it, as well as the German Research Council (DFG) for funding and the English Seminar at Freiburg for hosting the project CCTV beyond Surveillance from 20142016. I thank Kai Tan for her help during the research, Brian Donahue for thorough language editing, and zlem Sarica for her hands-on help in the latter stages of preparing the manuscript. Many thanks go to Emily Briggs and Elena Chiu at Routledge, for their support and guidance. I also thank the participants of a master student workshop on the books themes at Freiburg in summer 2018, closing off the six years I spent thinking about surveillance cameras, their images, and stories.

At a couple of significant moments during these years, pigeons appeared in my life. I thank them also they know why.

Nicole Falkenhayner, Freiburg, July 2018

Lately, when I come back home to London and ride the Underground, I am struck by a nagging sense that something is missing. There is almost no graffiti. The London Underground [is] coincidentally watched by more than 11,000 CCTV cameras. In the worlds most surveillance-heavy metropolis, in a city that unironically welcomed tourists to the Olympics with a mascot of a lidless panopticon eyeball dressed as a police officer, it usually doesnt occur to us to be anything but compliant.1

In the above quote, columnist Laurie Penny discusses an important aspect at the centre of her nagging feeling of an absence when she comes home to Britain: graffiti on public walls. The many security cameras in the London Underground are blamed for the lack of uncontrolled public expression. In the thought-images that her essay establishes, Penny likens the surveillance cameras to Wenlock, one of the mascots created to represent Britain for the 2012 London Olympic Games. The head of the figure consisted largely of a camera lens. In official descriptions of Wenlocks design features, the lidless panoptic eye of the figure, as Penny calls it, is indeed described as a camera that lets Wenlock record everything.2 Penny links these associations the missing graffiti, the cameras, the symbolic figure of Wenlock to draw attention to the experience of Britain as a society of control a non-dramatic general atmosphere of subdued compliance and to camera fetishism. She achieves the narrative expression of this atmosphere by describing a peculiar feeling: being struck by something that is missing graffiti on the public walls. An absence of the visual has caught her attention. This is a nice rhetorical ploy in a society where we constantly suffer the onslaught of images vying for our attention, and in which we are surrounded by cameras and screens linked to networks of control. Surveillance has become an inherent part of what Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp have described as deep mediatization: the increasing interlinkage of various media and their institutions as a factor in shaping the construction of contemporary lifeworlds.3 I argue that tools and artefacts of surveillance are increasingly becoming intrinsic elements of mediatized lifeworlds and life experiences. This book is especially concerned with the kinds of affective reactions and narrativizations that are produced culturally from surveillance camera images, and how they are connected with feelings engendered by living in a surveillance state.