Surveillance of Culture, Culture of Surveillance

Abstract

The chiasmus in our title (“surveillance of culture, culture of surveillance”) was not meant as a frivolous, would-be elegant catchphrase: it is rife with meaning.1 The rhetorical figure of chiasmus involves the notion of reciprocity (Forsyth 2013), implying that the second arm of the formula is an unavoidable consequence of the first. It is precisely this reciprocity that is at the heart of our special issue of East Central Europe. Indeed, we mean to indicate that the surveillance of culture in a police regime does result in a culture of surveillance. Hence we chose here to study surveillance as a self-standing culture of its own. In fact we extended our reflection on surveillance all the way to our present democracies, as we took into account the current development of mass surveillance via the internet. Work Group 1, “Culture Under Surveillance,” chaired by Muriel Blaive and James Kapaló, was one of six groups within the cost project New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent, led in 2017–2022 by Maciej Maryl and Piotr Wciślik. The aim of the project was to study the cultures of dissent under socialism in a transnational and multidisciplinary perspective. The narrower aim of Work Group 1 was to “explore the effects of the