31 How would you read the surveillance file?
The “surveillance file” is a public document organized as a montage that includes intimate private details alongside the banal and ordinary. The surveillance officer is tasked with interpreting the raw material and constructing a narrative from it. Interpretation involves re-reading, analyzing, and divining a sense in the data collected. A good case file, for example, constructs a story whose author remains invisible. To read oneself as a speculative fiction spans the unspeakability of trauma as well as a horrifying fascination of the eerie. Ontological displacement renders the text both art and authority.
Christina Vatulescu has written about the way police state archives problematize the documentary form. “The surveillance file was articulated at the intersection of two conflicting practices : that of the informer, denouncer, literary reviewer, and mail censor, who shared an inclination for writing, collecting, and collating and produced a collage portrait of the subject, and that of the investigator, who wrote a synthetic portrait that reduced the cacophony of the collage to one incriminating conclusion,” writes Vatulescu. As such, the surveillance file is a collaborative text authored by an informer and an officer of the secret police. The audience is the leadership of the police state, and the file is written to please this audience. The tone of the surveillance file is matter-of-fact.
Taking the tone as part of the text’s communicative action, we can say the way one asks a question reveals the sort of answer one desires. Sarcasm, for example, indicates a disbelief that the question can be properly answered. Tone marks language as meter marks a sonnet. Likening tonality to gesture, Svetlana Boym describes tone as “irreversible notation.” It is written, interpreted, and read. She traced the rise of expertise and authority in tonal interpretation in the U.S.S.R. Under Stalin, the untruth wasn’t in the content of statements—everyone complied, lied, recited fake news to survive—but in the intonation, in the tone of their utterance. Formally, officially, and aesthetically, Stalinism turned satire, curiosity, and inquisitiveness into facets of the criminal mind.
The Stalinist surveillance file emerged from Stalin’s war-time directive to isolate the eternal enemy within by imprisoning entire groups based on demography, employment, education, religious affiliation, etc. Romania’s Securitate (or secret police) modeled its arrests and surveillance on the Stalinist precedent, building an infrastructure of surveillance based on status, class, and elective affinities.
Directive 7, issued by the Ministry of Internal Affair, ordered entire demographics to be surveilled as threats to national security. These threats included people with relatives abroad, people who had been liberal lawyers in the past, academics, the pious, the groovy, those associated with artistic avant-gardes, and so on. As the lists of potent