week 6: surveillance
Thinking about the panopticon and notions of constant surveillance (and thinking in the context of today rather than Foucault’s 18th C. example) I wonder what is happening in the spaces when we forget we are policed, where transgressiveness is an imminent and unconscious possibility. This is sort of an abstract thought, but with surveillance being so present and pervasive in every facet of our lives today in the forms of actual video/photographic policing, but also social policing via how we present ourselves and our obsessions with ‘checking up’ on others, what is the value/implication of unconscious transgression? I’m drawn to the person picking their nose in traffic sort of thing, or when I catch myself making overt facial expressions on the bus because I think of something cute or funny.
Butler notes the white racist epistememe in ‘reading’ the body (18), and this made me think about the ways that the racialized body intersects with surveillance. I suppose in my previous readings of Foucault, I never really connected an intersectional approach to the notion of surveillance (why I haven’t is baffling to me as its painfully obvious), but I’m interested in looking deeper at the ways that race, sex, class, sexual orientation, etc, interact with surveillance and in particular, discipline and punishment. Butler gives us the Black male body against the white epistememe, but what about other bodies?
I suppose this is less of a question and more of an observation and area of interest, but Albrechtslund’s discussion regarding participatory surveillance was really intriguing. I couldn’t help but think about aspects of performance and ‘reading,’ to go back to Butler, in regard to empowerment. There is a certain social currency that is connected with the amount that one interacts with their friends and the way we present ourselves (I.e. hipster instagram photos). I admittedly am not ‘on’ facebook as much as others I know, so when I do go on, I sometimes feel awkward about which friends and what updates to acknowledge and which ones to pass over. Even further, Albrechtslund uses MySpace as a case study in the beginning, so I’m interested to know how issues of perceived ‘deviancy’ come into play, particularly in the post Facebook migration from MySpace.