Arndt Brendecke, Cultures of Vigilance, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
There are more than 80 CCTV cameras in Times Square. Police officers are permanently stationed there. And yet, the only verifiable terror attack that has taken place in New York after 9/11 was not prevented by cameras or police officers. Instead, it was two “normal citizens”, street vendors Lance Orton and Duane Jackson, who noticed an oddly parked Nissan Pathfinder on 1st May 2010. They immediately alerted a mounted police officer who checked the car, realized that there were bombs in the boot, and evacuated and cordoned off the entire square. Barack Obama personally phoned Orton and Jackson three days later. According to a speech Obama gave on 4th May 2010, the attack failed “because ordinary citizens were vigilant and reported suspicious activity to the authorities”.[1]
New York’s security measures had successfully relied upon something that already exists in all societies, human vigilance. But how does that work exactly? How is the attention of many focussed on a concrete goal, in this case the threat of terrorism? An advertising agency asked to achieve exactly this created the now famous slogan “see something, say something”. However, to see the right “something” and then to alert others relies upon prior knowledge, behavioural expectations, roles and ideals, all of which have undergone centuries of complex cultural formation. We know little about this history and the cultural means it has passed on to us. It is the history of a willingness, and the existence of opportunities, to amass different parts of individual acts of vigilance to serve a supra-individual goal.
A group of researchers in Munich have joined forces (as the German Research Foundation’s Collaborative Research Centre 1369) to study the history and diversity of processes used to activate and bundle the attention of individuals and use this attention to serve particular goals – to avert danger, for legal or religious purposes, but also to assist the implementation of, and adherence to, specific societal or individual objectives. Our interest here goes far beyond simple societal functions, such as the early detection of fires so that they can be quickly extinguished. It encompasses deeper, more profound mechanisms that shape societies and individuals beyond a given here and now. For if attention is successfully and permanently paired with specific goals, say fending off the Devil or the prevention of sin, if individuals train their perception accordingly and identify with such obligations, then vigilance becomes something profoundly “political”. A part of the task therefore lies in finding out what effect the direction and employment of attention can have on societies and individuals.
We use the term vigilance to differentiate these types of phenomena from more general forms of attention, and define vigilance as the linking of individual cognition with supra-individually defined goals. We turn to cultures of vigilance not only to complement the extensive body of research on the biological and psychological basis of attention, but also because culture is essential to understanding how attention is usually oriented, attuned, and linked to behaviour as well as identities. Culture is by no means just an instrument for, say, communicating social expectations. It is creative in its own right. The full creative potential of a culture of vigilance can be gauged by looking at a problem that psychology has been dealing with since Norman Mackworth’s experiments on sustained attention. Triggered by the observation of the rapid decrease in radar operators’ ability to focus on critical signals during World War II, the Royal Air Force commissioned Mackworth to begin research on how to achieve sustained attention. In the cultures of vigilance in which we are interested, one hits upon a simple answer to this question of how to sustain attention for as long as possible: variety. Cultures of vigilance must be creative to be effective in the long-term: danger must be something tangible – a pulsating force; events must be created, stories told and interests served. However, the cultural side of vigilance reaches far beyond the issue of attentional focus or sustained attention. It also creates opportunities for critical reflection by enabling second-order observation: literature, theatre and art reflect how attention varies over time, show how people fail to notice what later turns out to be crucial, or do notice but fail in their response. They thereby display what is otherwise so difficult to observe: the inner drama of decision-making processes, of doubt, of wavering judgements. They let us speculate on whether the protagonists will or will not take up responsibility and thereby raise questions of morality, and identity, and about what is right and what is owed. And they sometimes teach us to doubt the true motives of those involved.
The latter highlights an important aspect: Vigilance provides a variety of opportunities for those involved including the opportunity to participate, to identify with something, to make decisions, and not least to make distinctions. Vigilance is therefore always political and structurally ambivalent. Orton and Jackson’s act was undoubtedly a good one, but their behaviour was structurally identical to certain forms of denunciation: here, too, those reporting on others usually maintain that they serve a common goal such as that of preserving the law. Right-wing militia groups for instance, such as the United Constitutional Patriots, claim that they help to secure the US border to Mexico and to work hand-in-hand with the official Border Patrol. They claim legitimacy due to their alleged vigilance, whilst breaking the law itself, for example by persecuting and kidnapping migrants. Their activity is also motivated by campaigns and here, too, we cannot rule out the possibility that a president (or former president) may praise their vigilance.
Perhaps the biggest methodical challenge of our approach is therefore dealing with this ambivalence and being able to examine it using a conceptual framework that is, itself, not already biased. For however necessary it may be to evaluate each case in political terms, and however smoothly the available terms seem to facilitate this by ascribing virtue to a certain behaviour on the one hand, and evil intentions on the other, for instance through a distinction between care and intrusion in a neighbour’s gaze and attitude, it is analytically far more interesting, and more appropriate to this phenomenon, to base any study on the assumption that a fundamental and enduring ambivalence exists, and that this ambivalence lies deeper than one would first presume, and that parties involved in vigilance practices often have diverse and fluctuating motives. This ambiguity and inherent contradictoriness are the substance of a second type of drama, one that again features heavily in theatre, literature and cinema. An archetypical example of this is Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), which is why we have used the film’s iconography on our website and in publications.
In Rear Window, Hitchcock demonstrates how the protagonists’ motives remain unclear, even to themselves. A photographer named Jeff, played by James Stewart, is temporarily confined to a wheelchair and passes the time spying on his neighbours. It does not take long however, until his idle voyeurism takes on a darker twist. As a potential witness to a murder, he believes his duty is to help convict the murderer. Jeff’s wandering gaze becomes a searching one. His private pastime becomes coupled with a supra-individual, societal goal. Suspicion triggers a change: it suddenly seems to be appropriate to systematically observe one’s neighbours. And yet doubt remains, highlighted when Grace Kelly, playing Lisa, exclaims, “Sitting around, looking out a window to kill time is one thing, but doing it the way you are – with, with binoculars, and with wild opinions about every little movement you see is – is, is diseased!”, to which Jeff evasively answers, “What do you think I consider it – recreation?”.
Later Jeff himself states, “[…] that was pretty private stuff going on out there. I wonder if it is ethical to watch a man with an ocular and a long focus lens”. Even the protagonists cannot fully comprehend their own motives or the boundaries of what is permissible. This example once again demonstrates that there are no underlying biologically fixed mechanisms that can be measured medically or psychologically. Vigilance is adjusted and implemented according to the society and culture within which it is practiced. It can, according to the situation, at one point in time be assessed as legitimate and necessary, whilst at another as excessive and threatening. Literature, theatre, the media, and, in this case, film, are heavily involved, which is why, to reiterate, competencies won, developed and polished in the humanities, cultural studies and the social sciences are indispensable when exploring vigilant behaviours.
It has already become evident that our collaborative research centre does not take cases of institutional surveillance as a starting point. We work on the assumption that mutual observation (and, indeed, of oneself) happens more frequently and is of equal importance, for the simple reason that seeing, hearing, smelling and sometimes touching each other is ingrained in our basic biological equipment. It is free of charge, requires no or little technology, and can never be effectively turned off. It involves all the senses and is deeply ambivalent. This is because the boundaries between caring and controlling are fluid and reversible, motivations are often contradictory, and functions manifold. It is precisely for this reason, and because corresponding attitudes and processes– such as notions of duty, the swearing of oaths and ideals of civilian behaviour – have a long history, that our collaborative research centre encompasses so many different disciplines. Along with the fields of History and Literature Studies, these include Drama Studies, Ethnology and Legal Studies. In our individual subprojects and working groups, we deal with, among other things: the evaluation of whistleblowing; stories of fighting off the devil; the denunciation of luxury in cities in the late Middle Ages; the use of the senses in times of plague; and the investigation of prostitution in countries in which this type of bourgeois capitalist behaviour should not exist, such as in socialist Czechoslovakia.
[1] Obama, Barack: Remarks to the Business Council, Attempted Terrorist Attack in New York City, 4. Mai 2010, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-business-council-2 [letzter Aufruf: 13. Mai 2020].