Critique of the Invisible Seer: Civil Disobedience in a Digital Age

MARTIN PLOT

Mesa redonda; West Hollywood Aesthetic and Politics Lecture Series; 2014

The City of West Hollywood and the CalArts' Aesthetics and Politics Program

The political implications of the late Merleau-Ponty?s aesthetic philosophy: All seeing creatures are also visible and thus ?visibles?; all carnal beings?i.e. beings made of the element of flesh?are visible seers; no-body, not even a collective body?made as it is of the flesh of language and intersubjectivity?can legitimately claim the privileged position of the ?invisible seer.? This two-dimensionality of all flesh?of all visible-seers?is one of the many theoretical ways in which we could normatively ground the largely practical democratic principle of publicity: for a collective body to be democratic, no significant aspects of political life should be kept in shadows of state secrecy. In this presentation I will advance a hypothesis: the revelations of hidden war crimes and of the secret practice of generalized NSA surveillance made by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, together with the largely ?neither affirmed nor denied? extended use of drone targeted assassinations and the institution of CIA black holes for the ?interrogation? of detainees, all point in the direction of a radical attempt by our national security apparatus to become the global invisible seer.