Surveillant Antiquities and Modern Transparencies

Intelligent drones, microscopic tracking devices, brain scanners: seemingly unlimited technological possibilities make surveillance appear a thing of the future. Edward Snowden’s recent disclosures and bleak predictions about comprehensive spying in an age of electronic communication only increased public anxieties about surveillance in the now and in the tomorrow. Yet centuries, if not millennia, before the surveillance apocalypse of the twenty-first century, various models of social and individual transparency were evident in writings and architecture from ancient Mesopotamia to early medieval China and from classical India to the late antique Mediterranean world. Total surveillance—whether as ideal or nightmare, whether as theory or practice, whether as tradition or innovation—is by no means a contrivance of the present or the near future, but rather a construction of the distant past.

The workshop will shed light on the complex practices, strategies, and imaginaires of total surveillance, both familiar and less well known, in the ancient and late ancient worlds. We will explore ancient forms of information mediation and centralization, the employment of record keeping and accounting, technologies of self-discipline, and the strategic use of architecture and the organization of space, while drawing also on notions of all-seeing gods and demonic beings and of sin and pollution, as well as on practices of purification or expiation, divination, ordeals, and omens. Using this historical knowledge, the workshop intends to turn the gaze back upon the present-day surveillance complex, discerning in the lofty and imperturbable lenses that surround us reflections of age-old struggles, resistances, and failures.

For further information please visit community.topoi.org

Program