04th Oct2012

Participatory Panopticism

by melissarogers

Definitions:

Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our bodily presence, by virtue of our relationships with other bodies (including objects), and by virtue of practices of representation (digital or otherwise).

Place: those specific spaces to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented toward by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects), through embodied practices of power (biopolitics), and through practices of representation, visualization, and mapping; those spaces that come into being through technologies of surveillance.

Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools, technologies, and virtualities, and the disciplining of self through technologies of surveillance.

Questions:

  1. In his essay “Panopticism,” Foucault describes Bentham’s panoptic prison as arranging space so that the prisoner “is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication” (200). While this is how the panopticon functions, forcing the prisoner to discipline himself since he cannot tell whether or not he is being watched, I wondered if this description was not too reductive when it comes to resisting surveillance. Even if the prisoner does not know if he is being watched, can’t he still gaze back? Can’t he communicate in some albeit highly limited way? Similarly, despite the distribution of the panoptic principle throughout society, don’t people find creative ways to resist or subvert surveillance, such as Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience project? I think this is partially what Anders Albrechtslund is getting at in his essay, “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance.”
  2. I am particularly interested in Judith Butler’s framing of “white paranoia which projects the intention to injure that it itself enacts, and then repeats that projection on increasingly larger scales” (22) in order to protect the “always already endangered” white subject from imagined or perceived racial threats (21). Butler shows that what we “see” is never self-evident, but is always evoked through a reading process. Thus, in spite of the desire for surveillance that is continuous across space and time or that can capture everything, surveillance can never be “neutral” but is always marshaled in service of particular regimes of power. If there is no opting out of surveillance, what are forms of surveillance that can draw attention to our contested and conflicting readings, or that can highlight the underlying epistemes that Butler argues shape the visual field?
  3. To dovetail off both of these questions, it seems somewhat trivializing to ask how surveillance can be “fun,” via Albrechtslund, in light of its use by those in power to reinforce dominant ways of seeing and knowing. It is clear that we are already accustomed to “playing” with surveillance and the creation of identity in a primarily visual mode. Considering increasingly nuanced mobile technology, what new forms of surveillance will arise to monitor aspects of our lives that cannot be accessed through the self-evidence of sight?

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