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Return to the Current Issue Index
Editorial Revisiting Foucault The Urban Panopticon Resistance / Subversion After Panopticism Editorial David Wood — Foucault and Panopticism Revisited
This editorial introduces this issue in the context of the progress of the Surveillance & Society project. It discusses the theme of this issue, the importance of Michel Foucault’s work for Surveillance Studies, briefly summarises the contributions of the authors, and also considers what comes next.
Editorial Revisiting Foucault The Urban Panopticon Resistance / Subversion After Panopticism Revisiting Foucault Stuart Elden — Plague, Panopticon, Police This article resituates the Panopticon in Foucault’s work, showing how it emerged from research on social medicine in the early to mid 1970s, and relating it to discussions of the plague and the police. The key sources are lectures and seminars from this period, only partly translated in English. What is of interest here is how Foucault’s concerns with surveillance interrelate with concerns about society as a whole – not in the total institution of the prison, but in the realm of public health. This is pursued through detailed readings of Foucault’s analyses of urban medicine and the hospital. The article closes by making some general remarks about situating Foucault’s books in the context of his lecture courses, and about how the analysis of medicine may be a more profitable model for surveillance than the Panopticon.
Majid Yar — Panoptic Power and the Pathologisation of Vision: Critical Reflections on the Foucauldian Thesis This article attempts to evaluate theoretically the applicability of Foucault’s Panopticon to the practices of public surveillance utilising CCTV technology. The first part maps out three “strands” in the reception of panopticism in surveillance studies, suggesting that it tends to fall into one of three broad kinds: its wholesale appropriation and application; its wholesale rejection as inadequate with respect to a supposedly “post-disciplinary” society; and its qualified acceptance subject to some empirically-dependent limitations. I then attempt in a preliminary way to supplement these three positions. In particular, I question the logical adequacy of equating visual surveillance with effective subjectification and self-discipline by drawing upon a range of philosophical and sociological perspectives. Philosophically, it is suggested that the Foucauldian thesis may well “pathologise” the relationship between subjectivity and visibility, and thereby overlook other dimensions of our experience of vision. Sociologically, it is suggested that the precise relation between surveillance and self-discipline requires us to attend, in ethnomethodological fashion, to the situated sense-making activities of subjects as the go about everyday practical activities in public settings.
Paulo Vaz and Fernanda Bruno — Types of Self-Surveillance: from abnormality to individuals ‘at risk’. The major objective of this article is to inquire into the kind of subjectivity produced by surveillance practices. The analysis begins by questioning a certain understanding, widespread in the literature of new surveillance technologies, of Foucault’s conceptions of power and surveillance. In brief, this understanding privileges the surveillance of many by few, of ‘us’ by ‘them’. We contend, instead, that Foucault stressed in diverse books and articles the nexus between power relations and practices of the care of the self. Hence, techniques of surveillance are necessarily related to practices of self-surveillance. This theoretical framework constitutes the basis for differentiating two historically distinct types of self-surveillance: the first, proper to disciplinary society, is promoted by normalizing power; the second is associated to the increasing relevance of the epidemiological concept of risk in the problematizing of health-related behaviors. Epidemiology of risk factors, medical testing and genetics are opening up a temporal gap between the diagnostic of illnesses/diseases and their subjective symptoms. This gap is equivalent to a space for individual ‘pre-emptive’ action against possible illnesses/diseases.
Editorial Revisiting Foucault The Urban Panopticon Resistance / Subversion After Panopticism The Urban Panopticon Hille Koskela — ‘Cam Era’: the contemporary urban Panopticon
Deriving from Foucault’s work, space is understood to be crucial in explaining social power relations. However, not only is space crucial to the exercise of power but power also creates a particular kind of space. Through surveillance cameras the panoptic technology of power is electronically extended. The article examines parallelisms and differences with the Panopticon and contemporary cities: visibility, unverifiability, contextual control, absence of force and internalisation of control. Surveillance is examined as an emotional event, which is often ambivalent or mutable, without sound dynamic of security and insecurity nor power and resistance. Control seems to become dispersed and the ethos of mechanistic discipline replaced by flexible power structures. Surveillance becomes more subtle and intense, fusing material urban space and cyberspace. This makes it impossible to understand the present forms of control via analysing physical space. Rather, space is to be understood as fundamentally social, mutable, fluid and unmappable – ‘like a sparkling water’. The meaning of documentary accumulation changes with the ‘digital turn’ which enables social sorting. The popularity of ‘webcams’ demonstrate that there is also fascination in being seen. The amount of the visual representations expands as they are been circulated globally. Simultaneously the individuals increasingly ‘disappear’ in the ‘televisualisation’ of their lives. The individual urban experience melts to the collective imagination of the urban. It is argued that CCTV is a bias: surveillance systems are presented as ‘closed’ but, eventually, are quite the opposite. We are facing ‘the cam era’ – an era of endless representations.
Mitchell Gray — Urban Surveillance and Panopticism: will we recognize the facial recognition society? This paper explores the implementation of facial recognition surveillance mechanisms as a reaction to perceptions of insecurity in urban spaces. Facial recognition systems are part of an attempt to reduce insecurity through knowledge and vision, but, paradoxically, their use may add to insecurity by transforming society in unanticipated directions. Facial recognition promises to bring the disciplinary power of panoptic surveillance envisioned by Bentham - and then examined by Foucault - into the contemporary urban environment. The potential of facial recognition systems – the seamless integration of linked databases of human images and the automated digital recollection of the past – will necessarily alter societal conceptions of privacy as well as the dynamics of individual and group interactions in public space. More strikingly, psychological theory linked to facial recognition technology holds the potential to breach a final frontier of surveillance, enabling attempts to read the minds of those under its gaze by analyzing the flickers of involuntary microexpressions that cross their faces and betray their emotions. Editorial Revisiting Foucault The Urban Panopticon Resistance / Subversion After Panopticism Resistance / Subversion Steve Mann, Jason Nolan and Barry Wellman — Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments This paper describes using wearable computing devices to perform "sousveillance" (inverse surveillance) as a counter to organizational surveillance. A variety of wearable computing devices generated different kinds of responses, and allowed for the collection of data in different situations. Visible sousveillance often evoked counter-performances by front-line surveillance workers. The juxtaposition of sousveillance with surveillance generates new kinds of information in a social surveillance situation.
Erich W. Schienke and Bill Brown — Streets into Stages: an interview with Surveillance Camera Players’ Bill Brown. The Surveillance Camera Players, from New York City, are a performance based activist-awareness group who openly, critically, and playfully engage various elements of public surveillance. This discussion with Bill Brown, co-founder of the Surveillance Camera Players, covers the group’s history, the strategy of their public performances and, during the winter months, their weekly walking camera tours. Furthermore, Brown critiques the growth of the surveillance society and how it continues to reify a culture of public conformity and increasingly enforces a dangerous homogeneity of behavioral display across our social ecologies.
Steve Mann, James Fung, Mark Federman and Gianluca Baccanico — PanopDecon: deconstructing, decontaminating, and decontextualizing panopticism in the postcyborg era This presentation describes a series of exhibits, events, inventions, and interventions that examine, problematize, deconstruct, and critique, panopticism.
Editorial Revisiting Foucault The Urban Panopticon Resistance / Subversion After Panopticism After Panopticism Sean P. Hier — Probing the Surveillant Assemblage: on the dialectics of surveillance practices as processes of social control. Recent dialogue on the contemporary nature of information and data gathering techniques has incorporated the notion of assemblages to denote an increasing convergence of once discrete systems of surveillance. The rhizomatic expansion of late modern ‘surveillant assemblages’ is purported not only to enable important transformations in the purpose and intention of surveillance practices, but to facilitate a partial democratization of surveillance hierarchies. Seeking to account for the forces and desires which give rise to, and sustain, surveillant assemblages, this paper explicates the workings of a dialectic embedded in many surveillance practices to reveal a polarization effect involving the simultaneous leveling and solidification of hierarchies. Empirical data from the intensification of welfare monitoring are presented to illustrate the dialectics of surveillance practices as processes of social control.
Michalis Lianos — Social Control After Foucault / Le Contrôle Social après Foucault. English
After the Foucauldian model, often misunderstood and projected without nuance onto the present, the study of social control has not progressed much. Meanwhile, changes on the ground call for the construction of a new theoretical paradigm which should take account of three contemporary tendencies: a) the embedding of control in the widespread and often consensual interaction between the user and the outlets and systems of institutional action; b) the emergence of an ‘unintended control’, that is not oriented towards values; and, c) the inherent contribution of sociotechnical systems, which at once regularise social behaviour and project onto their users a consciousness formed around invisible, yet ubiquitous, threats. The paper proposes to understand these tendencies as part of the contemporary transition towards institutional normativity and institutional sociality, two concepts that the author has developed in other works.Français
Après le modèle foucaldien, souvent mal compris et projeté sans nuance sur le présent, le débat sur le contrôle social n'est pas en forte progression. Cependant, les évolutions sur le terrain appellent à la structuration d'un nouveau cadre théorique qui tient compte de trois tendances contemporaines : a) l'enchâssement du contrôle dans l'interaction large, et souvent agréable, de l'usager avec les institutions et les organisations, b) l'émergence d'un "contrôle involontaire", dépourvu de l’intention d’appliquer des valeurs c) l'apport inhérent de systèmes sociotechniques qui à la fois, régularisent les comportements sociaux et projettent sur leurs usagers un consentement formé autour de menaces invisibles mais ubiquistes. Il est proposé de comprendre ces tendances comme partie de la transition contemporaine vers une « socialité institutionnelle », analysée par l’auteur dans d’autres travaux.Editorial Revisiting Foucault The Urban Panopticon Resistance / Subversion After Panopticism
