‘ Spying for the People ' : Surveillance , Democracy and the Impasse of Cynical

sovereign subject of democratic politics (Habermas 1974, 52). Appositely, the trope of public supervision has been indispensable to the critical literature on surveillance and Big Data (e.g., Allmer 2011; Fuchs 2011; Hier & Greenberg 2009; Gandy 2006; Lessig 1999; Lyon 2014; Marx 2004; Monahan 2010; Simon 2005; Turow 2014; O’Harrow 2005; Wood 2009). Indeed, even ‘post-panoptic’ and ‘post-representational’ analyses of dataveillance, despite their explicit rejection of discursive and intersubjective models of politics, continue to appeal explicitly to this principle (e.g., Haggerty & Ericson 2000; Lyon 2006; Andrejevic 2013; Amoore 2013; Bauman 2013). In both public and academic debates on surveillance, then, the ideal of supervision by and for ‘the people’ is the ultimate court of appeal, epitomizing the ‘liberal common sense’ that Žižek nonetheless attempts to distinguish from its paradigmatic expression in Kant, which he has repeatedly argued signals democracy’s inherent self-subversion and the source of its inevitable failure (Žižek 1991, 229–277; 1999, 322–369). Indeed, he has explicitly glossed the hacker fantasy 4 as an index of democracy’s structural paranoia, which forms the obverse of its normative skepticism toward authority: the heroine ... hunched over a computer, frantically works against time to ... access ... ultra-secret information (say, about the workings of a secret government agency involved in a plot against freedom and democracy, or some equally severe crime). Does this topic not represent a desperate attempt to reassert the big Other’s existence, that is, to posit some secret Code or Order that bears witness to the presence of some Agent which actually pulls the strings of our chaotic social life?