Technologies of Attribution: Characterizing the Citizen-Consumer in Surveillance Performance

Many accounts of surveillance and its subjective effects tend to focus on privacy. Along with this focus comes the assumption that surveillance’s objects are simply facts and attributes, straightforwardly ‘mined’ (or stolen) from people’s private lives. Yet, the habits and propensities ascribed to individuals through surveillance apparatuses are complex, relational phenomena: co-produced, selected and interpreted with interest by various actors. This essay begins to develop a critical language for surveillance as a form of characterization, by analysing SWAMP's McService (2003), Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience (2005–) and Erica Scourti’s Life in AdWords (2012–2013). Following Sara Ahmed, I theorize characterization as a ‘technology of attribution’ that attaches such interpretations of character to people within surveillant scenarios. Drawing from literary studies as well as recent work on the surveillance economy, I analyse the forms of attribution made possible within surveillant scenarios. Within SWAMP, Elahi and Scourti's works, which span a decade between 9/11 and the Snowden revelations, one can trace an evolution of structures through which such attributions manifest: from self as threat, to self as set, to self as product

The production of chemical worlds: Territory and field science in global agribusiness

This article explores how the marketing practices of an agrichemical corporation can be understood in relation to particular landscapes and soils. Surveying material from a three-year ethnography of farming practices in Sri Lanka, the text interrogates how paddy fields are rendered expressive for farmers. This ‘territorialisation’, the article suggests, is not to be understood as an effort to claim authority over a geographical space, but rather as a ‘worlding’ technique. Thus, the globalisation and agricultural modernisation promoted by the agrichemical corporation co-exists with an affirmation of the uniqueness of particular soils, and with a celebration of site-specific rural knowledges over general physical principles