Eviction’s Spectacle: The role of surveillance, witnessing, publics, and notices in actualizing property’s violence

Keywords: Eviction; Property; policing; surveillance; spectacle; dispossession; racial capitalism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine a specific feature of power inherent in how evictions happen – the role of spectacle. In my work, I have sought to understand how evictive relations (ie. rent, the lease, landlord-tenant subjecthood, notice) are not only modes of accumulation under racial capitalism – but modalities of deterritorializing and dehumanizing control that are explicitly colonial and racial in their function and their effects. I have examined the authoritative power of landlord-tenant law that mediates ‘tenant’ and ‘landlord’ relationships; the role of textual technologies in eviction paperwork; and the adjudicative infrastructure where the juridical is spatialized in courts and arbitration platforms. Each of these are sites of state power on the part of the ownership class to physically remove tenants from dwellings: They bring forth, though they precede, the moment of eviction itself. But what can we say of the role of spectacle in eviction’s violence? Whether we examine rules of service through tack and mail, written or verbal demands for possession which must be ‘posted’, how landlords and lawyers construct visual evidence with surveillance and recordings, public written warnings, the presence of police to carry out eviction in the final instance, or the public destruction of belongings – the ‘spectacular’ is present all along in eviction’s violence. In a colonial-racial context that constructs difference as less than human, this paper considers how the ocular grammars of racial regimes serve as a generalized mode of rule through the spectacled violence of making public and producing witness.