Surveillance and Space

Francisco Klauser, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781473907775
  9781473907768
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473987883
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

The digital age is also a surveillance age. Today, computerized systems protect and manage our everyday life; the increasing number of surveillance cameras in public places, the computerized loyalty systems of the retail sector, geo-localized smart-phone applications, or smart traffic and navigation systems. Surveillance is nothing fundamentally new, and yet more and more questions are being asked:

• Who monitors whom, and how and why?
• How do surveillance techniques affect socio-spatial practices and relationships? 
• How do they shape the fabrics of our cities, our mobilities, the spaces of the everyday? 
• And what are the implications in terms of border control and the exercise of political power?

Surveillance and Space responds to these modern questions by exploring the complex and varied interactions between surveillance and space.  In doing so, the book also advances a programmatic reflection on the very possibility of a 'political geography of surveillance'.

 

Part I Conceptual Foundations

If we are to investigate how surveillance interacts with space, we need a solid conceptual framework to do so, and we need a clear definition of, and analytical focus on, surveillance. The four chapters that follow respond to these needs.

Chapter 1 delimits the book’s analytical take, focused on the everyday making, functioning and acting of surveillance in its interaction with space. Surveillance is understood as techniques of systematic, routine and focused attention for purposes of influence, direction, protection and/or administration. The chapter thus makes a double contribution to my endeavour, in that it defines surveillance and sets the book’s ‘scale of analysis’, the everyday, on which to approach the surveillance–space nexus.

Chapter 2 develops a mediation-centred understanding of surveillance, which allows for an analytical and empirical focus on how and ‘through what’ surveillance is being co-produced in its everyday exercise and spatial articulations. The chapter thus works out an overall relational posture, while also providing a series of more specific analytical tools, on and through which to approach surveillance in its interactions with space. This discussion places centrally actor network theory, and more specifically Bruno Latour’s work.

Chapter 3 sets surveillance in relation to the concept of power, approached from a Foucauldian viewpoint. In Foucault, I find not only a relational approach that resonates with actor network theory, focused here on the techniques through which power is being exercised, but also a conceptual toolbox for analysing the regulatory and indeed spatial logics that ‘guide’ the exercise of power. Regarding the study of how surveillance interacts with space, there are two key lessons to highlight. On the one hand, Foucault’s power conception invites an understanding of spatial organization itself as a technique that mediates the exercise of power, or, in my case, of surveillance. Space thus appears not only as the object, locus and product, but also as the tool and producer of surveillance. On the other hand, Foucault’s distinction between differing types of governmentalities offers an initial organizing framework for analysing differing logics through which surveillance is bound up with space.

Chapter 4 deepens the spatial side of this discussion. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s and Claude Raffestin’s work in particular, my aim is to develop a mediation-centred conception of space that complements the framework within which I propose to approach surveillance as techniques of power that interact with space. The chapter thus also completes my outline of the conceptual grounds for a possible political geography of surveillance.

1 Surveillance and the Everyday

In its popular understanding, surveillance evokes a rather negatively connoted register of associations, implying a form and finality of control that relates to policing, punishment and repression (Klauser and Albrechtslund, 2014). This book moves beyond such a narrow perception of the term. It does so in the tradition of the field of surveillance studies (Lyon, 2002; Haggerty and Ericson, 2006a; Ball, Haggerty and Lyon, 2012), which has in recent years highlighted the vast range of objectives, agents, technologies and practices of IT-mediated forms and formats of systematic attention. One of the main, albeit not universally accepted (Fuchs, 2011), claims in the field is that a merely negative and policing-related understanding of surveillance ignores the extent to which systematic information gathering and analysis today shape everyday life. As David Lyon puts it, drawing upon Giddens’ (1985; 1990) portrayal of bureaucratic surveillance as a constitutive dimension of modernity:

The growth of surveillance in today’s world is an outgrowth of the processes of modernity, particularly high-technology systems applied to the problems of bureaucratic control, efficiency, productivity and speed. Surveillance is an unavoidable aspect of living in twenty-first-century societies. But at the same time it is far from a neutral process. (Lyon, 2007: 177)

The book starts from and further develops this broad conception of surveillance. In so doing, it approaches surveillance as a mode of governing the everyday that relies on systematic and routine techniques of attention, focusing on human or non-human objects (inspired by Lyon, 2007: 14). Thus, by definition, surveillance includes both IT-mediated and more traditional forms of systematic attention. Often, both types of surveillance are in fact combined, complementing rather than undermining each other – consider, for example, the case of urban policing by CCTV cameras and patrolling police agents. Yet the book’s main concern lies with the current proliferation and intensification of IT-mediated surveillance. Surveillance is thus defined broadly, but approached analytically from a more specific viewpoint, centred on the problematic of IT-based monitoring and management of the everyday in the digital age.

It is worth outlining in more detail the constitutive elements of, and main logics behind, this approach to surveillance. I will do so in two steps. Firstly, I advance a series of claims that account for the book’s focus on the scale of the everyday in exploring the surveillance–space nexus. Secondly, I discuss the main thematic foci, implied by the voluntarily broad understanding of surveillance adopted here.

Dialectics Of The Everyday

The book investigates the interactions between surveillance and space from the perspective of the ‘everyday’, understood in a Lefebvrian sense both as the petty, humble and sordid side of life, and as its most profound and fundamental expression (Lefebvre, 2002: 42, 45). As Lefebvre stresses, ‘nothing could be more superficial [than everyday life]: it is banality, triviality, repetitiveness. And yet in another sense nothing could be more profound. It is existence and the “lived”’ (2002: 24).

Thus Lefebvre approaches the everyday as a ‘level of social reality’ (2002: 15) that is shaped by a series of dialectical characteristics: triviality and repetitiveness on the one hand, profoundness and creativity on the other. Furthermore, Lefebvre also, and perhaps most importantly for my purposes, conceives the everyday as a mediating level between the individual and the social, the particular and the universal, the local and the global (Lefebvre, 2005: 16, 45, 47). Thus, by definition, a Lefebvrian approach to the everyday foregrounds the co-constitution of individual agency and structure as interacting explanations of daily life.

It is in this defining ambiguity of the everyday that my interest lies. Setting the focus on the everyday implies both critical attention to the power structures, rules and logics of IT-mediated surveillance imposed on individuals and social groups, and careful consideration of the possibility of individual resistance. Put differently, everyday life as a scale of analysis invites a focus not only on the rationalities of governing through techniques of systematic attention, but also on the cracks, chinks and gaps left open and produced by these techniques, in which opportunities for escape, creativity and ‘interstitial freedom’ arise (Lefebvre, 2005: 127). In Lefebvre’s work, both dimensions are acknowledged and developed, although the latter might appear somewhat underplayed. To compensate for this imbalance, Michel De Certeau’s work on the everyday as a site of opportunities, micro-tactics and strategies of resistance offers a complementary source of inspiration and conceptual toolbox (De Certeau, 1984).

The preceding comments also raise a series of crucial questions in terms of scale. For Lefebvre, the local, or micro, scale is of major importance as the site in which everyday practices are enacted. Yet in approaching everyday life as both shaped by and in turn shaping the organization and functioning of society, Lefebvre also sets the everyday in relation to larger power structures on the meso and macro scales.

In the present book, Chapters 8 and 9 take up this reflection from a specific surveillance viewpoint. Surveillance is hereby positioned within the complex field of agencies, driving forces and motivations that condition particular projects as they are implemented, operated and lived, including a range of international processes and stipulations as well as diverse local and national predispositions and impulses.

If the everyday combines differing scales, it also incorporates and encompasses differing milieux. As Lefebvre notes, there is an everyday life of the state, or of bureaucratic apparatuses, just as there is an everyday life of the army, factories, trade unions and public figures (2002: 42). Thus Lefebvre’s theorization of the everyday allows for wide application of the concept, relating to urban and rural settings, ordinary people and experts, rulers and ruled. Again, this is of major significance for my own work. In later parts of the book, I study how surveillance affects the everyday experience and use of monitored areas (Chapter 10), and also explore the everyday practices of surveillance in various contexts, from CCTV control rooms to the world of IT professionals involved in the installation and use of surveillance systems (Chapters 8, 9 and 10).

My aim therefore is to move beyond the predominant focus on urban space that characterizes the contemporary surveillance literature. IT-mediated techniques of systematic attention, such is my basic assumption, shape the rural just as much as the urban: indeed, ‘smart farms’ are just as fashionable as ‘smart cities’. Furthermore, many fields of surveillance that are approached exclusively as urban phenomena in scholarly research involve de facto very important rural dimensions. Think of sport mega-events, one of the key examples of surveillance explored in the present book, which not only imply significant surveillance efforts across the host cities of the tournaments, but also affect rural areas in many ways. Examples range from the monitoring and filtering of inter-urban fan flows to the security measures directed at training camps in small villages, downhill ski slopes or at the Olympic torch relay. Another good example to highlight the connection between the urban and the rural in contemporary surveillance matters lies in the field of smart energy management (Chapter 11), which aims to optimize energy flows from rural to urban areas.

In focusing on these and other fields of surveillance, the book highlights not only the everyday experiences, but also the everyday functioning, of surveillance in various milieux. Key questions are as follows: How do contemporary IT-mediated techniques of surveillance ‘colonize’ the everyday, to use Guy Debord’s expression (Debord, 1961; Lefebvre, 2002: 11)? And how is space involved in this? In sum, I have in mind a politico-geographical engagement with IT-mediated surveillance in its everyday functioning, expression and experience.

Thematic Foci On Surveillance

Having accounted for the book’s understanding of the everyday, I now want to return to the definition of surveillance provided above, to discuss the thematic foci implied by the approach that is pursued here. There are three key points to highlight, as described below.

Firstly, it is worth insisting on the purposeful, routine, systematic and focused nature of surveillance (Lyon, 2007). In scholarly research, these four characteristics are often used to distinguish surveillance from more fleeting and unpredictable forms of social control (Murakami Wood et al., 2006: 4). For my own purposes, this distinction is helpful for two main reasons. On the one hand, it allows an emphasis on the intrinsically surveillant (systematic, purposeful and routine) element of most IT-mediated forms of data gathering and analysis in the present-day world. On the other hand, the distinction enables the critical assessment of the problems and power issues arising from the superimposition of novel surveillant techniques of regulation on more traditional forms of control. As shown in Chapters 10–11, there is also an important spatial dimension to this discussion.

Secondly, by definition, the book explores surveillance in a deliberately wide range of settings, relating to a variety of aims and ambitions. Surveillance is not only set in relation to the fields of risk and security, but approached more broadly as a set of techniques and practices of systematic and focused attention, aiming to protect, influence and manage everyday life on multiple levels.

Again, this take on surveillance connects with a range of other approaches that exist in the field. For Haggerty and Ericson, for example, ‘surveillance involves the collection and analysis of information about populations in order to govern their activities’ (2006b: 3). Gilliom and Monahan define surveillance in almost identical terms as ‘monitoring people in order to regulate or govern their behaviour’ (2013: 2). Finally, as Haggerty and Samatas stress, ‘surveillance involves assorted forms of monitoring, typically for the ultimate purpose of intervening in the world’ (2010: 2).

The advantage of such a broad understanding of the aims and purposes of surveillance is that it allows an investigation of the cross-cutting characteristics, driving forces and implications of different forms and formats of systematic attention, from policing and border control to state administration, mobility and consumption management. Furthermore, it invites the study not only of how surveillance technologies are deployed in diverse settings for diverse reasons, but also of how the functions, purposes and uses of these technologies are renegotiated and readapted over time (cf. the concept of ‘function creep’ as developed by Lyon, 2007: 201). Finally, a polyfunctional understanding of surveillance allows an investigation of how exactly the disparate aims and modalities of the technological mediation of everyday life converge into larger ‘surveillant assemblages’ (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000), bringing together heterogeneous driving forces, actors and means.

The book thus offers an insight into the congruent and conflicting aims associated with surveillance across a range of milieux. For example, emphasis is placed on the interacting security and business rationales associated with video surveillance in inner-city zones (Chapter 10), on the public–private and local–national–international coalitions of interest shaping surveillance in the aviation sector (Chapter 9), on the multiple impulses and driving forces underpinning sport mega-event security (Chapter 8) and on the search for increased speed, sustainability, efficiency, self-management and self-cultivation that motivate current developments in the field of smart cities and big data (Chapter 11).

Thirdly, the book adopts a viewpoint that approaches surveillance in its referent object as relating to both human and non-human phenomena (Donaldson and Wood, 2004). Although I am aware that the human/non-human distinction is in itself prob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Governing the Everyday in the Digital Age
• Part I Conceptual Foundations
• 1 Surveillance and the Everyday
• 2 Surveillance and Mediation
• 3 Surveillance and Power
• 4 Surveillance and Space
• Part II Spatial Logics of Surveillance
• 5 Punctual, Linear and Planar Logics of Surveillance
• 6 Surveillance Relating to Fixity and Flexibility, Enclosure and Openness
• 7 Spherical Attributes of Surveillance
• Part III The Functioning of Surveillance in Its Relation to Space
• 8 Surveillance, Authority and Expertise
• 9 Policy Mobilities and Exemplification in Surveillance Matters
• Part IV The Socio-Spatial Implications of Surveillance
• 10 Spatial Distancing and Separation
• 11 The Orchestration and Automatic Production of Space
• Conclusion: Towards a Political Geography of Surveillance
• References
• Index