Surveillance, Cyberspace and the Panoptican
1. Each of these articles point to the ways in which the visual and ways of seeing are linked to surveillance and to the functioning of power and discipline. Not only does being seen and watched function as a mode of (self) discipline, as seen by the Panoptican (Foucault) but the visual itself is always already implicated within power structures and is not only seen, but read (Butler). Thinking about surveillance online shows that a body does not need to be present and seen to be surveyed; I wonder how we can further think about surveillance in terms that are not visual.
2. Others have commented on the watcher watching back, and ways in which those in power are surveyed. Continuing that I wonder how we might think about participatory surveillance as not only connecting people and cementing identities but also speaking back to power. How might Albrechtslund’s argument change or be expanded in light of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movements use of the internet to connect and pass information around about those in power? On a related note, how do we read the videos of police brutality against the Occupy protesters? As Butler points out, race matters–and we can also see how age and gender will have acted to produce sympathy for certain victims of police pepper spray.
3. As we create our surveillance map on campus today, I wonder if we can also think about the other ways that bodies are disciplined on campus. Why do certain student groups require police presence at their parties/functions and others do not? How does the classroom operate as a disciplining space? Also how does power work to hide certain bodies and practices on campus, for example the work that is done by custodial staff)
Definitions:
Space: relationship between bodies and objects; understood in relation to our embodied experience of the world, the meaning that we attach to the areas that we move through–be they virtual or physical. Cannot be separated from our concepts of time. “we are just as much spatial as temporal beings, that our existential spatiality and temporality are essentially or ontologically coequal, equivalent in explanatory power and behavioral significance, interwoven in a mutually formative relation.” (Soja, 16). It can not be seen as merely physical or philosophical, it is also social. Furthermore, space is always in some way disciplined or surveyed, and spacial relations are always embedded in particular relations of power.
The body: that through which we experience the world, connected intimately with our conceptions of space. “Everybody has a body, nobody can escape from their body, and consequently all human activity–every form of individual and collective practice–is a situated practice and thus geographical.” Furthermore, the movement of bodies through space is something that is surveyed and disciplined. Our relationships with our bodies is also implicated within power relations and the self-discipline that we impose on ourselves and identities.