User:Birgit bachler/readings2/simon panopticism

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Simon B. The Return of Panopticism

Supervision, Subjection and the New Surveillance, Surveillance Society Vol. 3 (1)

ABSTRACT

Simon tries to put Foucault's concept of panopticism in a more contemporary relation with surveillance studies, juxtaposing the role of the inmate and the supervisor in Benthams model and relates it to modern representations, mentioning "dataveillance" as a logical consequence of new technology and compares it to models of "surveillance". He mentions physical presence and vision as distinctions between "old" and "new". By making use of the Deleuzean "dividual", naming it himself the "databased self" he questions the existence of a superpanopticon, a sorting machine based on digital images of identities, that organizes and produces subjects. He proposes also to understand surveillance in terms of simulation and emphasizes "Interpellation", questions "interfaces" of surveillance and the willing participation of subjects.

TAGS

identity, enclosure, supervisor, inmate,visibility, presence, (feign) conformity, databased selves as an attachment to the embodied subjects

ANNOTATIONS/QUOTES

  • "Dataveillance" : collection, organization and storage of information about persons (p.1)
  • "Biometrics": the use of the body as a measure of identity (p.1)
  • post 9/11 -> (surveillance) technologies "become a regular feature of the everyday lives and culture of citizens" … "these technological innovations fundamentally alter the organization, practice and effects of surveillance relationships … making them dispersed, pervasive, fluid and invisible (p.1)
  • "…whether surveillance conforms to a more or a less panoptic social order than Foucault describes" … "divergence in interpretations of what is meant by the idea of panopticism" … "two seemingly different interpretations of Foucault's approach to panopticism" (p.2) // the problem for surveillance studies scholars generally according to Simon
  • "In its most concrete form, the Panopticon is a socio-material template for institutional orders of all kinds ranging from prisons, to schools, to factories, to hospitals." Citing Foucault's Discipline and Punish from 1977 the Panopticon "is a diagram of mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form." Followed by Bogard (1991) calling it an "unstable historical formation". (p. 2f)
  • The "iconic value of the Panopticon" is partly a result from "Foucault's jarring description of Bentham's architectural plan." From Foucault p. 200: "They are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible." (p.2)
  • …"This material structuring of visibility is only one half of the panoptic equation" …. Foucault: "…the Panopticon machine is a machine for dissociating the seeing/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower. one sees everything without ever being seen." (p. 3)
  • "seeming combination of structurally imposed visibility (one is always seen) and perceptual uncertainty (but one cannot see)" -> "the centrality of vision in the production of social control"… "Foucault's comments on the seeing/being seen relationship should be understood as a consequence, not a cause, of the panoptic diagram." … "the importance of the gaze" "standardization of multiple techniques"… "partitioning space"… "ordering temporal relations" … (p.4)
  • "The panopticon is not a vision machine … as an ordering machinee … sociomaterial assemblage for sorting and arranging social categories and individual persons so that they can be seen and understood" … "panoptic sortig" (p.4)
  • Two Panoptic Sorts; 1-Supervisor: "techniques of observation, information gathering, data management, simulation", Foucault:"Biopolitics of the population" - 2-Inmate: "techniques of the self, focus on self-discipline, normalization, 'soul-training', 'anatomo-politics of the human body", "studies of subjectification and governmentally" (p. 4f) >> Mark Poster
  • "Faced with an uncertainty with respect to whether he is being watched, the inmate begins to watch himself." (p.5)
  • important: "inmate be aware of the gaze of the supervisor through signs of their presence.", sign of the CCTV camera, the orbiting spy satellite…(p.6)
  • "Foucault himself later abandons all pretenses to the 'internalization of control' thesis (1993) but "the relationship between subjectivity and power remains." (p. 6)
  • "As Bentham saw it, the Panopticon would be less resource intense, less expensive and more efficient in its effect." (p. 6)
  • 'docile bodies' (p. 7)
  • On Lyon's society-as-prison metaphor (1992) "the issue of agency and knowledge as it pertains to the problem of subjection and the issue of enclosure as it pertains to the problem of power and control". (p. 7)
  • "…the simple Panopticon presumes a population of rational actors who share a homogenous base of knowledge." … "Under a purely structural-deterministic model, people who are blind, ignorant or irrational would be immune to the effects of panoptic power." (p. 7)
  • "While inmates need to know what counts as an action in conformity with the rules in order for them to conform, the same knowledge allows them to act 'as is' they are in conformity." … "actions that conform and actions than feign conformity will look the same and the inmate has not internalized the norms of the prison at all." (p. 7)
  • The capacity to feign conformity: "While the Panopticon makes all acts visible … it cannot distinguish between acts that conform to the rules and acts which pretend to conform to the rules." .. "the simple panoptic machine fails" (p. 8)// Does it matter whether conformity is feigned or internalized? What does a computer expect us, in terms of forms to conform to (format of an e-mail adress, captcha's), what can be feigned by a script that tries to act "as a person"? >>Lanier et al.
  • Desire - produce - subjects: "the source of desire cannot be the rationalized world of a society-as-Panopticon but rather a more subtle and diffuse process of enculturation that would produce subjects under less structured and regulated conditions. That is, the simple panoptic machine alone is incapable of producing a genuine desire to conform." (p. 8)
  • surveillance of urban streets, CCTV cameras: "The population of most urban streets is much more diverse than that imagined by the Panopticon. Their background knowledge varies along with their understandings of what counts as conformity and what is a recognizable sign of the supervisors' presence." (p. 8)
  • I wish to stress the double-sided nature of stories of surveillance as subjection. The more one knows about how one is supposed to behave the more one is able to conform, but by the same token one is also more able to feign conformity." "…more appropriate from a security point of view for there to be no general awareness that surveillance is occurring." (p. 8)
  • "Panoptic discipline functions first by enclosure." … "Once contained, the population is divided, isolated (placed in individual cells) and oriented to the signs of the presence of the supervisor." … " Routinization and training homogenize the population giving individualized agents the shared ability to recognize and conform to the rules."(p.8f)
  • !!"Where the Panopticon signals immobility through enclosure, the urban streets signal mobility and the permeability of boundaries as citizens come and go at will." (p. 9)
  • "But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form;" (p. 9)
  • "…whether power strives to be panoptic despite actual obstacles, resistances and frictions." (p. 9)
  • Enclosure - mobility - isolation: "…late modern condition of high mobility is arguably one of relative enclosure not the absence of enclosure." Spaces of enclosure: highway, airplane… "these material boundaries and limits are continually augmented by cultural discourses that reconstruct the home, the workplace, the school, and the mall even as the distinctions between these spaces are eroded. Once enclosed not just by walls, but also by the cultural perception of limits, isolation and differentiation are possible."…(p.10)
  • "All that panopticism arguably requires of us is segmentation and differentiation, the marking of our passage from one cultural zone to the next" (p. 10)
  • How to behave in certain spaces: "One needs to know when one enters the space of a school or a home in order to know how one is supposed to behave there." (p. 10)
  • "Our relation to modern media is synoptic not panoptic." … the many (=audience) observe the few (the television broadcast) (p.10) // how has this relation changed through 'broadcast yourself'?
  • Homogenous knowledge & culture: "…function of media is to produce a more or less homogenous knowledge and culture that will ideally be share by ever larger and more diverse populations across space and time (p. 10)
  • the Panoptiocon works without the supervisor. What is his role in the end? >>invisible audiences; "Why does Foucault initially focus so much on the supervisor's capacity to organize time and space, and generate knowledge when the point of the panoptic machine is that power may function perfectly well without his presence?" (p. 11) // what about the 'google is reading all your e-mail threat?
  • "Why bother to look?" … Foucault, 1977: "Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine." (p. 11)
  • "… the structural arrangement of inmates allows for the controlled intervention of experimentation." (p. 11f)
  • Updating the rules: "laboratory model" … "keeping the system dynamic by developing better and more efficient protocols for training inmates to act in accordance with appropriate norms." (p. 12)
  • "Producing knowledge about the social world" (p.12)
  • The microscpe-analogy: "the process is not at all ad hoc but the result of the application of skill in accordance with detailed protocols. This is what allows the object to be compared to others and to a general body of knowledge. The visible object is, in effect, a by-product of all these operations." … "the act of recording: there is an accumulation of notes, labels, diagrams, images that account for the transformations so that the object can be tracked back to its source." (p. 12) // tracking back to the source: EXIF-data in photos, other meta-data produced…, what about google maps/street view? a dissection of a city only a result of the city after some processing, especially dissecting the city into something that can be viewed in 2D?
  • the knowledge of social groups & populations, isolation & division, organization & classification through discursive practices: "On the side of the supervisor, there is actually a lot of work to do."…"Panopticism speaks to the capacity of individuals, institutions and states to know about social groups and populations." … "arranging the material and social world in a way that allows for the display of social behavior through the isolation and division of social beings as well as their organization and classification" (p. 12)
  • "…the laboratory technician charged with marking the connection between the individualized behavior of the inmate and knowledge of the general social body." (p. 13)
  • eye->camera->computerized database "…hop, skip and jump from the eye, to the camera, to the computerized database as instruments of panoptic supervision." (p. 12)
  • census data, insurance data, credit information, marketing data, audience feedback: Gandy, 1993: "how information collected from individualized persons is organized and manipulated to alter, manage or even control the life-chances of those persons."… (mentioned) data "is used to generate profiles of various populations that guide the development of government policies." …"definite effects on persons independent of their knowledge" … (data) "obtained from persons is managed independently and used to structure the lives of those persons." (p. 13)
  • Increasing distances between observer and observed: Giddens, 1990; "surveillance operations of the supervisor go on without any reference to the inmate at all" (p. 13)
  • diagrams of control vs. diagrams of discipline
  • "once there is nowhere to hide, it makes more sense to conform, but as soon as the prison walls are gone, the system becomes more difficult to manage." (p. 14)
  • "without the enclosure (…) subjects simply have an easier time imagining that they cannot be seen and as long as they believe they are invisible their en mass behavior will be less orderly." (p.14) // what about the Sn desire to observe the others? do we feel as an invisible audience while still participating in the data-submission? are we giving away data about ourselves based on who and what we view? are we as observers being observed by the machines and scrutinized even more? (Facebook obviously stores the people you recently searched for, without adding, and pushes them to the top results. Also obviously censores the feed according to the people you interact with most etc)
  • "sophisticated cultural apparatus for reminding citizens that they are being watched." (p. 14) // 'camerabewaking'
  • "the machine is just too faulty to make sense of the contemporary surveillance landscape." (p. 14)
  • "Institutions of postindustrial societies are more unstable and fluid than what Foucault's model of disciplinary society augmented by culture industries would seem to suggest and the effect of this is to decouple the imagined relationship between seeing and being seen." (p. 15) // discipline vs. control
  • Discipline: power by enclosure, surveillance, looking (p. 15)
  • Control: encourages mobility, modulates bodies, data analysis (code), dataveillance, information on bodies and minds (p.15)
  • Deleuze "dividual"; "In societies of control the individual is doubled as code, as information, or as simulation such that the reference of the panoptic gaze is no longer the body but its double, and indeed this is no longer a matter of looking but rather one of data analysis." (p. 15)
  • "the capacity of digital technology to generate and manipulate 'data doubles'" - "stable representations of identity" (p. 15)
  • "Information technologies act on identities" … "transform them into 'immutable mobiles'"… "data images", "data shadows", "digital personae"(Clarke, 1993), "databased selves" (Simon himself)
  • "Capacity of growth" as "new data is assimilated over time and by virtue of the systems in which they are embedded, they are capable of long-term memory, risk-assessment, and the anticipation of the future." (p. 16)
  • "Databased selves actually meet the Benthamite ideal better thiamin the disciplined bodies of the Panopticon." (p. 16)
  • !!Superpanopticon "does not operate via external force or internalized norms but rather in terms of discourse and the linguistic properties of digital computation." (p. 16)
  • Core of the superpanopticon: "the computerized database, a sorting machine that organizes and produces subjects." Lyon, 2001: "subject is multiplied and decentered in the database" (p.16)
  • Bogard, 1996: "understanding surveillance in terms of simulation (p. 16)
  • "The icon for the superpanopticon: the form" (p.16) // to be filled in. What is on your mind?
  • Surveillance is communicated by a telephone line to the computerized database. "The willing participation of the surveilled individual." … "the one being surveilled provides the information necessary for surveillance." (Poster, 1992) (p.17)// fill in your profile….
  • Databases can fill in their forms themselves (//social algorithms?) - what does it matter what the subject actually thinks? "Once the database is in place, it hardly seems to matter what actual subjects think or do since it is increasingly the case that databased selves can simply fill out their own forms." (p. 17)
  • "Without the participation of actual selves how can there be any interpellation. It would seem that with modern dataveillance, the grounded, embodied subject is increasingly left out of the story as the world is automatically made and remade around us." (p. 17)
  • Interface: "Databased selves must somehow be attachable to individual and collective bodies in the material world." (p. 17)
  • "…we need to continue to keep sight of Foucault's later work on subjection and the care of the self by focusing closer attention on what might be called 'surveillance interfaces'." (p. 18)
  • "…acknowledge the chain of social and material intermediaries that produce effects of power." (p. 18)
  • Poster: "willing participation of subjects" (p. 18)
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