Theorizing Surveillance

David Lyon

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134023660
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about explaining surveillance processes and practises in contemporary society. Surveillance studies is a relatively new multi-disciplinary enterprise the aims to understand who watches who, how the watched participate in and sometimes question their surveillance, why surveillance occurs, and with what effects. This book brings together some of the world's leading surveillance scholars to discuss the 'why' question. The field has been dominated since the groundbreaking work of Michel Foucault, by the idea of panopticon and this book explores why this metaphor has been central in discussions of surveillance, what is fruitful in the panooptic approach and what are the possible approaches can throw better light on the phenomena in question. Since the advent of networked computer databases and especially since 9/11 questions of surveillance have come increasingly to the forefront of democratic political and policy debates in the global north and to an extent in the global South). Civil liberties democratic participation and privacy are some of the issues that are raised by these developments. But little progress can be made in responding to these issues without an adequate understanding of how, how well and whether or not surveillance works. This book explores the theoretical questions in a way that is grounded in and attuned to empirical realities.

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

The search for surveillance theories

David Lyon

The field of ‘surveillance studies’ has grown rapidly over the past two decades, spurred by both rapid developments in governance and new technologies on the one hand, and fresh initiatives in theoretical explanation on the other. While surveillance practices are as old as human history, they took some rather specific forms in the modern world, becoming routine and systematic, based especially on individuation and on bureaucratic organization (Dandeker 1990). From the last part of the twentieth century onwards, it became clear that new technologies would be implicated decisively in surveillance processes, as computer-based systems augmented older paper file and face-to-face modes (Marx 1988; Rule 1974). At the same time, the work of Michel Foucault stimulated new approaches to understanding surveillance. His book, Discipline and Punish (1979), was central to the new debates, even though surveillance appeared as a theme in several of Foucault's works.

The panopticon concept has caught the imagination of many researchers, for better or worse. The prison architecture invented by the Bentham brothers but elaborated by Jeremy Bentham became the crucial ‘diagram’ for Foucault's work on surveillance. Interestingly, it encapsulated both an emphasis on self-discipline as the archetypical modern mode, supplanting previous coercive and brutal methods, and a focus on the classificatory schemes by which sovereign power would locate and differentiate treatment of the variety of prisoners. Whether these two approaches are ever brought together in Foucault's work is unclear; the more recent work of Agamben suggests not (Agamben 1998). However, while Foucault prompted a new ‘panopticism’ in theorizing surveillance, others quickly claimed that his work was flawed (e.g. Ignatieff 1977) or that one had to go beyond Foucault to understand contemporary electronic technology-dependent surveillance (Webster and Robins 1986; Zuboff 1988).

I commence with a conundrum: the more stringent and rigorous the panoptic regime, the more it generates active resistance, whereas the more soft and subtle the panoptic strategies, the more it produces the desired docile bodies. But that is only a starting point, still within the panoptic frame. My comments move, secondly, to the range of theories available, whether inside the panoptic frame or not, and the possibilities for dialogue and mutual learning presented if we bring together the classical and the cultural, the critical and the post-structuralist. The even larger frame behind these is the realm of metatheory. Surveillance theories are also situated within these debates and are inevitably informed by them. They relate to history, humanity and, yes, to life itself. All these comments serve as entry points into a lively debate about ‘theorizing surveillance’ represented by the authors of this book, to whose ideas I offer trailers or previews in the final part.

Moral panoptics and the panopticommodity

The panopticon refuses to go away. Despite the appearance of a number of critiques (e.g. Bauman 1992; Bogard 1996; Lyon 1993; Mathiesen 1997), the idea of the panopticon still appears routinely in surveillance discourses. The reasons for this are manifold but clearly one of them is that the panopticon is such a rich and multifaceted concept. It is capable of interpretation in a number of ways, and of course draws upon the major problematics of modernity. It helps in the exploration of knowledge and power, highlights the Enlightenment elevation of vision (partly expressing and partly parodying Christian notions of omniscience that it sought to dethrone; Lyon 1991) and is imbricated with a quest for social order and for progressive social change. We cannot evade some interaction with the panopticon, either historically or in today's analyses of surveillance. It may be best, as Roy Boyne (2000) suggested a few years ago, to accept the panoptic presence, even if only as the ghost lurking within the post-panoptic world. That is the strategy adopted here.

Rooted in Enlightenment privileging of vision as a means to order and control, today the complex dialectics of watching and being watched are still central to regulation and to governance even if – or just because – we acknowledge both in the shift to ‘dataveillance’ and the growth of many other forms of mediated watching by the few of the many as well as the many of the few. If not as an actual architecture expressed in stone and cement, the panopticon still functions as an ideal, a metaphor and a set of practices. The utopian vision machine (alluded to by Paul Virilio 1994) continues to drive initiatives such as the US Department of Homeland Security. The idea of omniscient visibility lies behind many schemes from urban planning to military intelligence. And the practices of unseen observation and categorical discrimination are encountered on a daily basis beneath the CCTV cameras and on the phone to the call centre. This is why surveillance studies is so intellectually engaging and politically relevant, and why the panopticon will continue to play the role of a marker.

At the sharp end of the panoptic spectrum lies the prison which, even if it was antedated by the workshop, still expresses panoptic power at its most extreme. It is here that one might expect the panopticon to evidence its effects most powerfully, producing if not Bentham's morally reformed individuals, at least Foucault's docile bodies. Of course, there is a sense in which the panopticon must ever be an uncompleted project and will tighten the focus whenever opacity threatens to undo it. Yet the maximum security prison, such as Kingston Penitentiary (KP), also turns out to be a place of uneven but not infrequent refusal, of revolt, and of ingenious escape attempts. KP has always been controversial, both for its treatment of prisoners and for their responses. Not only this, the ‘supermax’ prison evidences some seemingly curious reversals of panoptic principles in behaviours that, as Lorna Rhodes eloquently puts it, may actually ‘diagnose us all’ (1998: 308).

Lorna Rhodes has managed to undertake an unusual and very illuminating empirical study, exploring the lives of inmates in a Washington State supermax (2004). Among other things, she observes prisoners engaged in self-mutilation – one deliberately and repeatedly hits his hands on a stone wall in an exercise yard, causing laceration and bleeding – and in faeces-throwing and smearing within and beyond their cells. Such prisoners are diagnosed as ‘behaviorally disturbed’ but Rhodes examines their ‘behaviours’ as means of diagnosing the panopticon. The technology of power intended to produce a ‘calculated manipulation’ of the body (Foucault 1979: 202) actually produces more than this. As she says, the ‘perfection’ of the mechanism actually calls forth its opposite (1998: 286). This resistance may not be liberatory – indeed, it invites further control – but it calls in question both the panopticon and our representations of it.

Summarizing Rhodes in her own words, the prisoner ‘… discovers that his body, the very ground of the panoptical relation, is also its potential undoing; he has within himself the makings of a perverse opacity’ (1998: 287). Beyond the bare life – mere existence – (Agamben 1998) to which the supermax inmate is reduced, suggests Rhodes, is the human who will always find ways of transcending that situation. The most panoptic circumstances do not necessarily produce the most docile bodies. Prisoners may experience their bodies as abandoned – but then they use them to assert themselves. The disciplinary spaces actually invite and magnify disorder, pollution and noise. As they throw faeces, self-mutilate and create disturbances, they produce selves for the observer, but they also treat their bodies as bodies for the observer, turning private and destructive bodily acts into spectacles.

This understanding of the panopticon, says Rhodes, diagnoses a view from nowhere; of a vision that undermines vision. Self-cutting prisoners, for example, react against the negative visibility that would produce ‘compliant selves’ by making themselves even more visible. These are strategic acts. They subvert not merely the immediate situation of the prisoner, but also, by extension, the basic seeing/being seen dissociation that the panopticon is intended to sustain. Ordinary citizens in Kingston or in Washington State today do not see inside the prisons as such citizens paid money to do when they were first built (and as Bentham intended); the prisons are hidden from sight. Yet these glimpses inside the supermax are very revealing, not just for what they show of prisoners’ lives and their paradoxical resistance, but for what they reveal about the limits of Western Enlightenment rationalities based on the privileging of vision.

If the supermax represents the sharp end of the panoptical spectrum, however, it is also worth travelling the other way to look at the soft end. While the panopticon has been invoked in analyses of prisons, workplaces and government departments, it may also throw light on zones of consumption and entertainment. Oscar Gandy's ground-breaking work on the ‘panoptic sort’ (1993) demonstrates clearly the ways in which consumers are filtered through a triage that distinguishes and treats differently those of more and less worth to the corporation. More recently Mark Andrejevic (2004) has shown how Big Brother is now a television trope for late modern unrealities that serves to domesticate and justify surveillance to both watchers and the watched. The apparently least-panoptic forms of surveillance are ones in which a paradoxical docility is achieved in the name of freely chosen self-expression. Perhaps we should call it the ‘panopticommodity’.

In Reality TV: The Work of Watching, Andrejevic shows how scientific management is applied to consumers rather than workers, to improve their ‘productivity’ for the corporation. Yet for him, the consumers of TV may also be thought of as ‘workers’ who view advertising for the ‘payment’ of programming content (2004: 98). To ensure that the consumers do their work, audiences are monitored and demographic profiling is done to check that the work of watching is not wasted. Traditionally, of course, this enterprise has been very limited. Surveillance is acceptable in the workplace, perhaps, but less so in the realm of consumer ‘freedom’. In this realm, detailed monitoring depends on the consent of the subject, so for a long time TV companies relied on ratings as a rough guide to audiences. But first cable TV and now digital delivery promise to overcome such obstacles, such that the ‘work of being watched’ can now – in principle – be developed more fully.

The success of interactive online marketing may be traced, suggests Andrejevic, to the ways in which the labour of watching is integrated with the labour of being watched (2004: 102). While TV depended on a separate ratings industry to monitor viewers, e-commerce depends on the monitoring of consumers while they are surfing the Internet. Of course, you need consumers who are properly prepared for this process, who see the benefits of surveillance and who know that the new economy is good for them. This time, TV comes up with the answer – ‘reality TV’, that is. For Andrejevic, reality TV shows such as Road Rules provide precisely the right messages and encourage the appropriate attitudes for the online economy. Individuality can be rescued from mass society through customized production, and customization depends on surveillance. Equating pervasive monitoring with creativity and self-expression is a hallmark of reality TV.

Participants in reality TV shows appear to be untrained ‘ordinary people’ engaged in everyday life, whose activities are caught on camera because they managed to get on to the show. It seems ‘real’, unscripted, and ‘controlled’ by the participants themselves, who seem to make of the show what they will. Despite the de facto editing and the show producers’ inducements to create interest, participants are willing to exchange access to the rhythms and intimacies of everyday life for minimal compensation (and a prize at the end of the show). They are encouraged to ‘be themselves’ and ‘wear their hearts on their sleeves’. As one producer says, ‘We try to cast people who have a natural openness’ (Andrejevic 2004: 106). There is a reward for displaying your body and its activities. It is gratifying to be watched; close surveillance is destigmatized.

To make the connection between reality TV and online economy, Gandy's finding is quoted, that TV watchers are more inclined to think that businesses can better meet individual needs and that those bothered about privacy have something to hide (Gandy 1993: 165). The surveillance-based economy persuades individuals that they count when all it wants is to count them. Gaze is no longer a threat of mass homogeneity but a promise of mass individuation; the person is no longer just one of the crowd, but the individuation is commodified. This is what Reg Whitaker (1999) calls the ‘participatory panopticon’ or what I dub the ‘panopticommodity’, in which people market themselves. Self-disclosure apparently equates with freedom and authenticity. But you individuate only by submitting to mass surveillance. So in this case too, in so far as we believe that our customized products express our individuality and our creativity, we are diagnosed by the panopticommodity.

Paradoxically, then, the sharp end of the panoptic spectrum may generate moments of refusal and resistance that militate against the production of docile bodies, whereas the soft end seems to seduce participants into a stunning conformity of which some seem scarcely conscious. Either way, so far from displacing the spectacle with self-discipline, the spectacle returns decisively, once more parading the body before audiences. But the audiences differ, as well. While in the supermax the display is catalysed by the presence of the audience; in reality TV the audience is retained by a careful manipulation of the display. At both ends of the spectrum, too, human creativity, spontaneity and autonomy – beyond bare life – are at stake. At the sharp end these are asserted through desperate acts, while at the soft end they are subverted through disingenuous art.

Now, my conundrum relies on a provocative polarization of the ‘moral pan(opt)ics’ and the ‘panopticommodity’. One may wish to interrogate more closely each situation, exploring for instance the differences in display of the surveillance subjects in each case, or the similarities and differences between the prison walls and the domestic walls in which the surveillance is enacted. Again, one might inquire how the ‘untrained’ TV contestants differ from the ‘spontaneous’ protesters in the supermax, or whether there may be an exchange (implied in the panopticommodity) in the prison setting as well. Exploring these may well involve further empirical as well as theoretical investigation, but this is not my purpose here.

This conundrum, then, is one way of addressing broad issues of surveillance theory. As we can see, even within the panoptic frame, conclusions deduced from such theory are far from self-evident and may be colourfully counterintuitive. En passant, however, we may note that several central issues are thrown into sharp relief through even a cursory awareness of the conundrum. Questions of the body and of technologies, of productive power and active resistance, and of the hiddenness or mutuality of vision are but three such. But other puzzles, to do with political economy, of governance and of morality, for example, are never far from the surface. These questions are asked both within and beyond the panoptic frame of surveillance studies, and that tension is itself one that is maintained, sometimes tautly, throughout this book.

From the classics to the post-structural and back

Today, the panopticon is still in question. Is it the case that the panopticon perfects disciplinary power (as Jeremy Bentham clearly thought and as the earlier Foucault sometimes hints) or might there be some peculiar and paradoxical outcomes of panoptic power that Foucault overlooked? How far should the panopticon be permitted to guide the analysis of surveillance? Have other explanatory tools – even those also found in Foucault, such as treatment of the plague (Norris 2002) or the confession (Cole, this volume) – been neglected because of the panopticon's prominence? Or, more radically, is the panopticon a diversion, a distraction from much more important issues that we miss at our peril through an obsessive fixation with the prison diagram? Where else might one search for suitable theory?

Without intending to establish ‘surveillance studies’, some early social scientists mapped the field in a preliminary way, drawing attention to modern disciplines of capitalist supervision (Marx) or bureaucratic record-keeping (Weber), or the accenting of the eye in the urban metropolis (Simmel), or the disciplinary response to growing social inequality (Durkheim). Each of these may yield significant explanatory clues. It is also helpful to view these ‘pre-panoptic’ ideas more broadly within the ‘scopic regimes of modernity’ (Jay 1994), dating from Descartes. Narrowing this down to how some may ‘watch over’ others, it is already clear that the ‘watching’ may be metaphorical (the work-timing machines in the factory, the office files, and the city plan) as well as physical.

As I indicate, though, it took Foucault, writing in th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the contributors
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Post-Panoptic Surveillance Theory
• Part 3 Space and Time in Surveillance Theory
• Part 4 Subjects and Contexts of Surveillance
• Part 5 Security, Power, Agency and Resistance
• Index