Re-enchanting a Technologically Disenchanted World: Anti-surveillance Art as an Ethical Energetics

By focusing on the case of anti-surveillance art, the article argues the capacity of the arts to induce, catalyze, and energize solidaristic, resistant and affirmative organizing for hope in the face of technologically disenchanted world: a world dominated by the toxicity of surveillance capitalism and the ensuing loss of privacy, autonomy and free will. Drawing eclectically on theories of enchantment from literary studies, art history, political thought and philosophy, I theorize anti-surveillance art as an ethical energetics that is as a art-full means of re-enchantment that remove the constrains of imagination and move people to act hopefully, generously and caringly in spite of technology-induced harms and toxicity. By pursuing an affirmative critique of anti-surveillance art practices, I show how the arts critique and subvert entrenched imaginaries of surveillance capitalism while simultaneously fostering hopeful and caring attachments to a more flourishing technological world. In emphasising the ethical agency—vibrancy and resonance—of anti-surveillance art to stimulate organising for hope and solidarity, we stride with, and contribute to, recent efforts within organisation studies that have argued the ‘organisational turn of the arts’.