SP Seminar Series - André Mondoux

André Mondoux
Faculté de Communication
Université du Québec à Montréal

Me and My Big Brother

Wednesday, November 25th
12:30pm to 1:30pm
Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room D-411

The evocation of the Orwellian figure in debates on surveillance rests on the traditional opposition between private life and public space: one finishes where the other starts; all infringements constituting an undesired (unsustainable?) situation. We will argue that this opposition needs to be revisited in the light of two main – and complementary - social dynamics. The first one, hyperindividualism, is the valorization of the self (Me) as primary (only) determinism in the social life, thus engendering practices of self-expression as means of engaging with the others. The second dynamic is the “technologization” of society; the advent of a dominant ideology that presents itself as non-ideological (technical). The social is projected as a “system” that is thus not view as a symbolic/political production but as an ontological entity, the world itself, and as such cannot have an exteriority (which would deny its ontological/worldly pretention). This is why the socialisation processes are driven on the basis of the impossibility of being “outside” the “system”, i.e. banalization of surveillance as a form of integration. Here, it is now the public space that needs to tightly integrate the private life.

Everyone welcome!