On Marcel Top’s photo-book Reversed Surveillance1
by Endre Cserna
Interviewer: Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing.
What would you take?
Jean Cocteau: I would take the fire.2
Although photography is traditionally considered an invention of the bourgeois world and a product of a positivist worldview—one that explores, describes, and organises the world (and is thus essentially utopian)—it is not merely a technology of liberating and egalitarian vision. Its history and development are inseparable from its uses in the military-industrial complex, law enforcement, deception, and surveillance. In essence, the dialectic and downfall of the Enlightenment lie at the heart of photography: what once was the promise of the photographic gaze—the faithful depiction of the world, the honest and thus liberating representation of reality—was, within its very first decades, co-opted by the status quo and diverted in a way that served to maintain its economic and political domination. These characteristics, even if in a now hidden way, are embedded in the DNA of photography, and they define its operational modes at all times—despite the fact that, in the perception of technological optimism and the value systems it suggests, photographic tools seemingly should serve the purpose of infinite self-improvement, representation as an act of agency and globally interconnected visual communication.
Roger Fenton, the second official war photographer after the Hungarian-Romanian Carol Szathmari, documented the Crimean War between 1854 and 1856. His images largely sought to counterbalance the British public’s negative sentiments in the press, even though his portraits taken in military camps and his long-exposure landscapes of battlefields still convey profound and timeless statements about the horrors of war. By World War I, aerial reconnaissance photography had already transformed these landscapes into topographic combat maps—surveyed, controlled, and designated for destruction—stripping the attacking gaze of the vision of its target. American filmmaker D.W. Griffith, the only civilian filmmaker permitted on the front, was reportedly surprised while shooting his propaganda film Hearts of the World (1918) at how rarely the enemy could actually be seen during combat. Yet, paradoxically, his own work contributed to obscuring these conditions of visibility on both an abstract and a societal level. By the early twentieth century, the camera (be it photographic or cinematic) had already reduced the human being from an individual to a mere alienated data unit within the framework of control, command, communication, and intelligence. 20th-century photographic developments that sought to emphasise the medium’s egalitarian qualities, despite becoming part of the cultural canon, pale in scale compared to these uses.
The short-lived French anarchist publication series Tiqqun and the anonymous collective of authors associated with the same name highlight in their work, The Cybernetic Hypothesis3, that although common thought associates the postmodern era with the disappearance and fragmentation of grand narratives, the post–World War II world continues to be organised around a single fictional principle, committing the crimes of cybernetics under the guise of liberalism. In their understanding, cybernetics is not merely the virtual sphere of information control and information production that imposes itself on us "from above" but, in essence, a much more abstract "machinery"4 that, intertwined with capitalism, constitutes sovereign power. This new technology of governance merges previous forms of domination—such as discipline, punishment, propaganda, etc.—into a global "war machine"5, representing the next fundamentally anti-human generation of totalitarianism. Almost all contemporary modes of thought are also deeply imbued with the concept (and/or the critique of) that the world—not only politics but virtually everything—can be described and "managed" according to the principles of cybernetics. The various types of contemporary capitalism, its phenomena, and the problems centred around them, can all be placed into a broader, perhaps deliberately less frequently mentioned but at the same time more precise descriptive category. Whether we speak of surveillance capitalism, informational capitalism, digital capitalism, internet capitalism, platform capitalism, algorithmic capitalism, cloud capitalism, or the newly reshaped capitalism driven by artificial intelligence, cybernetic capitalism encompasses6 them all. This is why they strive to adhere to this term. What Tiqqun calls the cybernetic hypothesis designates a political worldview rooted in American military research of the 1940s, which ultimately assumes that humans can be reduced to pre-programmed biological, intellectual, and social behavior patterns that fit into systems, can be re-programmed, and thus their flaws can be eliminated. The seemingly innocuous and politically neutral theory of information—first defined by American computer scientist and mathematician Norbert Wiener7, later applied to address sociological and political issues—suggests that by surpassing ourselves and eliminating the human factor from the system, we can achieve a stable order maintained by impartial, self-regulating, and teleological mechanisms. This rationalising system is primarily evident in the organisation of bureaucracy and the market economy, yet its ambitions extend far beyond that. The self-operating teleology of Cyber-capital undertakes to eliminate all uncertainty, yet it inevitably encounters the contradiction that if labor moves toward full automation, then, at an imaginary point, it must ultimately cease to exist. Thus, "[t]he problem of cybernetics is no longer forecasting the future but reproducing the present."8
While contemporary political discourses continue to be structured around the antagonism of liberalism versus authoritarianism, the cybernetic hypothesis already bracketed both decades ago and can, in fact, operate seamlessly within any current political system, whether it be the centralised power of the Chinese Communist Party or the more or less democratic neoliberalism of Western states. The unprecedentedly extensive communication systems and the seemingly emancipatory phenomena of interconnectivity serve as tools for social control and personalised, automated propaganda. In the wake of computerisation, the "invisible hand" is no longer merely an economic metaphor but the principle of society's self-creation and regulation, operating within the flow of information-driven automation. The internet’s ecosystem enables the real-time recognition and influence of consumer preferences while the flows of information circulate in unstoppable, infinite feedback loops—fostering an organic and reciprocal communication between humans and machines. "Nothing expresses the contemporary victory of cybernetics better than the fact that value can be extracted as information about information."9 The logic of the cybernetic hypothesis is both the endless pursuit of growth and the continuous reproduction of the illusion of human communal bonds. Our world is held captive by the „centaur”10 of implicit destruction and pseudo-organic circulation.
In their book Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape11, the members of the philosophy podcast collective Acid Horizon argue that when cyberpunk fiction (for example the movie Blade Runner12 and the novel Neuromancer13) emerged in the last years of the Cold War, it drew attention to the visible dangers of neoliberalism. It showed us futures that could both astonish us (thanks to the intoxicating spread of technology) and evoke a sense of helpless fear (thanks to the chilling superiority of technology). Yet, more than thirty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, they believe that the "low" aspects of cyberpunk literature have now become reality. The "high"14 world of ecstatic technology, which promised to redefine collective intelligence through Cyberspace and transcend the biological determinism of the human body through the Cyborg, has not yet arrived—or at least not in the form we expected. Futuristic innovations, such as rejuvenating gene therapies or intelligent prosthetics, are available only to the top percentage of societies, while communication tools and networks, which are essential and easily purchasable by anyone, serve as instruments for surveillance and the analysis of our behaviours, turning us into mere clouds of data. This is the cyberpunk present: we enable, create, and maintain the omnipresent cybernetic apparatus responsible for our oppression.
The spirit of cyberpunk fiction turbocharged our zeitgeist: Cyber-capital continuously analyses and maps our identities and desires while strictly defining their limits within the possibilities of consumption. Acid Horizon's collective endeavour in their book is essentially to develop methods and a comprehensive subversive theory for escaping the gaze of Cyber-capital. This is reflected in their beautiful definition of philosophy, which can also be considered their motto: "Philosophy, as we understand it, is the conceptual proliferation of theoretical weapons aimed at the order of things. Anything else is mere collaboration."15 They argue that in today's cybernetic capitalism, the surveillance by informational systems, the processing of data, and the algorithmic automation of these processes continuously control social and economic processes. Every community and every individual within them—mind and body alike—functions as a regulated, tuned machine within the production systems, constantly evolving towards the perfect "manageability." They do not merely serve as components of a larger system but also perform their own work of continuously re-manufacturing and redefining their identity through consumption's mapped habits. In other words, we have irrevocably become cyborgs—only in the dystopian sense of the word. From these feedback loops, cybernetic capitalism discards and abandons those who are no longer fit for work or the reproduction of new bodies, while at the same time exiling those who maintain the readiness of people for labor to the lowest rungs of society—thus making it impossible for us to escape the capitalist cycles of capital accumulation through the sharing of care, solidarity, and mutual aid, even temporarily. In the thermostatic/thermodynamic symbolism of Anti-Oculus, capitalism creates conditions and standards of living that, while fit into the notion of systematic violence, still allow the "steam to escape without sacrifice," preventing the system from overheating and exploding (like in the case of revolutions), and ensuring that actual sacrifices, with "burning heat," do not interrupt the operation of the cybernetic loop. According to Acid Horizon, the reconciliation with the cyberpunk present stems from the fact that the working and middle classes, in exchange for enjoying the pleasures of consumption, accept the feedback-based automated control of cybernetic capitalism and the "population management" methods encoded into the system, such as xenophobia, limiting social mobility, curtailing labor rights, or even deporting undesirable groups. They argue that opposing the cyberpunk present means short-circuiting the system from within (since there is no other way but radical inner intervention!), misdirecting its self-regulating mechanisms, abusing the automatism of domination, and confusing its surveilling and categorising gaze in such a way that faith in progressive technologies falters, and comradeship arises among the conspirators. The short-term goal is ultimately to liberate the solidary and sacrificial, accumulated "heat" and overload the system's thermodynamics. Heat = sacrifice. Behind this rebellious, Marxian aesthetic, the forms of what Walter Benjamin called divine violence—a kind of law-destroying, revolutionary and just action breaking oppressive structures without instituting new laws, in contrast with the mythic violence of lawmaking and oppressing state power maintained through force—are also present, even though we may feel like Acid Horizon is simplifying (us vs. them) and perhaps even writing with a naïve spirit. Nevertheless, the interpretation and analysis of both the past and present history is a struggle as well. It is a heretical battle first in language (as in public discourse, in memory politics, in philosophy) and then through language within the virtual, unified field of our cognitive abilities, fantasies, and finally in our civic actions. If we accept that the cybernetic dystopia has become non-fiction, we must first understand its operating modes in order to direct our theoretical (or practical) weapons at it: noise that cannot be described by binary code, information gained by counter-surveillance, heat released to outsmart the system, ungraspable improvisation interpreted as meaningless by the system, and glitches that the code cannot interpret—all of these become useful and trigger a destabilising short circuit in the system only in the correct context.
Acid Horizon, by the way, is quite restrained in this regard; they mainly engage in recording podcasts and other kinds of educational work. On the other hand, at least one member associated with Tiqqun has been imprisoned on charges of terrorism after planning a sabotage operation against the French TGV railway network.
In this sense, compared to Acid Horizon’s and Tiqqun’s pursuits, Marcel Top’s practice occupies a middle ground. His book visualises invasive surveillance technologies, not only questioning the automation of crime detection during the 2023 mass protests in France but also providing the necessary codes—stylishly concealed within the book—that allow anyone to rewrite the algorithm for recognising different police units. Reversed Surveillance explores the present evolution and legislative complexities of mass surveillance, presenting a case study on how individuals can repurpose the very tools used to monitor them for their own protection.
From Top’s well-grounded perspective, our communities have no real reason not to fear these technologies, which are supposedly deployed for our safety but, in reality, serve as instruments of our very oppression. What makes this particularly intriguing is that, with minimal programming knowledge and freely available resources, we can—albeit not always entirely effectively—harness these same technologies to our advantage. Doing so can help safeguard the right to free expression, assembly, and protest—forms of revolutionary heat. These kinds of activities—mostly illegally—can disrupt the feedback loops we are forced to live within: it can noisily interfere with the functioning of circuits, help release pent-up social tension, and divert the gaze of surveillance, ultimately weakening its power.
Mark Fisher writes in his PhD thesis, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction16 (drawing mostly on Baudrillard and McLuhan), that power circulates through the network in a way that is impossible to trace back to a singular source17. The opposition outlined by the Situationists in the 1960s—between appearance/spectacle and the passive spectator18—no longer holds. The situation is far more hopeless: there is no hidden truth to uncover, no alienation from which we might return to our freedom. The famous image on the cover of Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle19, where a crowd stares in the same direction in a movie theatre, is useless as a model. If power has a real source, it manifests in the system’s total, decentralised circulation. Alienation of modernity has been replaced by immersion—the radical immanence of the network. Capitalism no longer functions through the suppression/oppression of the body but through its integration into the circulation of the network. Marcel Top’s work can disrupt this system of mythical violence.
Marcel Top: Reversed Surveillance
Year: 2024
Published by: Kult Books
288 pages and a separate leaflet
Essay by Carolina Semprucci
Designed by Janne Riikonen
The book can be purchased on this link.
This text was edited by Anita Salamon—special thanks to her for her thorough work and valuable suggestions.
Notes
1 Marcel Top, Reversed Surveillance. Marcel Top & Kult Books, 2024.
2 In 1951, André Fraigneau interviewed Jean Cocteau on the radio. The transcripts were published in the book Entretiens: Jean Cocteau et André Fraigneau (1965), but in fact, this is a well-known anecdote that circulates in several different, yet essentially identical forms.
3 Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis. semiotext(e), 2020.
4 Ibid., 12.
5 Ibid., pp. 24, 37.
6 Ibid., 9.
7 In his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
8 Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis, p. 56.
9 Ibid., 59.
10 cf. Ibid., 63.
11 Acid Horizon, Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape. Repeater Books, 2023.
12 Ridley Scott, Blade Runner. Warner Bros, 1982
13 William Gibson, Neuromancer. Ace Books, 1984.
14 Acid Horizon, Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape, p. 7.
15 Ibid., 3–4.
16 Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction. Exmilitary Press, 2018.
17 Ibid., 78.
18 Ibid., 77.
19 The cover of the 1983 edition features a photo by J.R. Eyerman from the 1952 premiere of Bwana Devil, the first full-length color 3D film, showing the audience wearing 3D glasses. (Cinemas were a recurring motif in Eyerman's oeuvre.)
