Surveillance Realism and the Politics of Imagination: Is There No Alternative?

Abstract

Someone once said it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than it is to imagine the end of capitalism," wrote Frederic Jameson, in a now famous reflection on the stifling parameters of cultural life in late capitalist societies.Building on this, Mark Fisher advanced the concept of "capitalist realism" in his 2009 book of the same name as a way to articulate the peculiar persistence of a system that has proved itself so full of fallacies, so unjust and inegalitarian in its rewards (Fisher 2009).Writing in the wake of the financial crisis, Fisher described the contemporary condition of capitalist realism as a ''pervasive atmosphere" that comes to regulate thought and action, limiting the possibilities of even imagining alternatives: "[it is] the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also…it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."(Fisher 2009: 6; italics in original).In describing capitalism in these terms, his ambition was to stress its contingency and destroy its appearance as an inevitable ''natural" order.The dominance and resilience of contemporary capitalism has been a prominent theme in debates on the politics of imagination, and linked to that, the field of social and political imaginaries (Adams et al. 2015).In looking at imagination and imaginaries, we are invited to consider how we make sense of society, instituting and instituted by social practices in their emergence, formation and reproduction.As such, a concern with the politics of imagination is as much a concern with the way in which social institutions and practices are legitimized and continued as it is a concern with the possibilities for the articulation and doing of alternative formations.That is, imagination can both open and close a path to critique (Bottici and Challand 2011).Capitalism, as a political-economic imaginary in the context of modernity (Adams et al. 2015), is intimately linked to contemporary forms of surveillance.Today, capitalism is said to increasingly progress through an accumulation logic based on the ability to monitor and track different forms of social activity with the view to predict and modify human behavior as a means to gain revenue and market control.An information order Zuboff (2015) has described as ''surveillance capitalism", advanced in the form of ''big data", and underpinned by a digital economy based on mass data collection and analysis.Turow et al. (2015) have argued that this information order now constitutes what can be described as a ''21 st century imaginary" in which we see the discursive and institutional normalization of surveillance infrastructures pervading more and more aspects of everyday life.Despite prominent concerns with how these infrastructures might be inherently unjust, Turow argues that ubiquitous and continuous data collection has become ''common sense" -a set of practices that people have become widely resigned to.In this article I engage with this interplay between data-driven surveillance and contemporary social imaginaries, using research based on the aftermath of the Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, which revealed unprecedented details of contemporary surveillance programs.Drawing on Fisher's use of the term '''realism" in relation to capitalist realism, I advance the argument here that public debate and response to the Snowden leaks indicate a similar ''pervasive atmosphere" that comes to regulate thought and action, in which the active normalization of surveillance infrastructures limits the possibilities of even imagining alternativesa condition I describe as surveillance realism.I also use this to highlight some of the opportunities and challenges in articulating and doing resistance, such as the Surveillance realism and the politics of imagination: is there no alternative?

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