Modern society, particularly modern American society, is endlessly patting itself on the back. It thinks of itself as a spectacular society, a fantastic society which is more or less the most fantastic place which there is or ever has been on Earth to make one’s home. These things are partly true. What does it mean, though, that these are the adjectives which we employ to denote ‘goodness’? Why is it that we consider ’spectacular’ and ‘fantastic’ to be synonymous with “good,” indeed, to be the superlative forms of ‘goodness’? Is it not the case that they mean simply, “in the manner of a spectacle” or a “fantasy”, respectively? Indeed, this is the case — and this is why we believe these terms to denote positive attributes. In a society enthralled by an endless parade of spectacles, to be considered spectacular, is the highest of compliments. As Guy Debord writes:

“The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.’ The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance, which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance” (12).

I have always been intrigued by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, in that it seems to present a somewhat oppositional reading of history to that undertaken by Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas, two of the most prominent figures in critical theory. Both Foucault and Habermas propose that in preindustrial societies, power was primarily deployed through spectacular imagery: torture, public executions, shamings, and the cultivation of an image of monarchic omnipotence. In industrial societies, however, they propose that societies are governed by different principles: in Habermas’ case, the public sphere, and in Foucault’s case, the institutions of social discipline. And yet Debord is arguing — quite persuasively, I think — that in contemporary society, “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles” (1). I find all three thinkers to be quite convincing, and yet, it is quite difficult to figure out how these divergent accounts can best be reconciled. It is for this that I appreciated Peter Weibel’s article, “Pleasure and the Panoptic principle.” Other theorists read thus far in this course have generally presupposed that the objects of surveillance are in a more-or-less adversarial (or at the very least, indifferent) relationship to those who are conducting the surveillance. Weibel, however, looks at surveillance with an eye to uncovering the voyeuristic, scopophilic tendencies which quickly become apparent when considering visual culture and surveillance.

He writes that, “as Foucault has already revealed, behind the mechanisms of surveillance lie the mechanisms of power, which are likewise supported by libidinal mechanisms. These power mechanisms are formed from psychological mechanisms” (208). It would be a mistake to construct surveillance as a force of social control imposed on humanity by a nameless, faceless bureaucracy; surveillance does not form in a vacuum, but rather is the product of certain specific psychological mechanisms in the human consciousness. The Panopticon, and by association surveillance in general, are the product of a human assumption that visibility deters delinquency. The mechanisms of power are less ‘behind’ the mechanisms of surveillance in contemporary society than they are one and the same. To be seen is to be the object of power, for the gaze always holds some authority. This is the significance of Weibel’s discussion of luggage-screening and passenger checking procedures at airports (208). By subjecting oneself and one’s belongings to the gaze, one is thereby subjected to the discipline of the airport authorities. Passengers and their luggage pass “through zones of visibility” (Weibel 208) which in themselves constitute the disciplinary authority of the airport security.

And yet the disciplinary elements of ’seeing’ are indissociable from its scopophilic elements, just as the imposed elements of being-seen are indissociable from its exhbitionist elements. Recall, for example, in the “Working Rules” text, where it is noted that male operators tend to look at women through CCTV overwhelmingly for voyeuristic rather than disciplinary reasons. Conversely, consider a phenomenon like American Idol, in which contestants offer themselves up ostensibly for ‘judging,’ but more importantly for ’seeing.’ Indeed, is ’seeing’ not in itself a type of ‘judging’? Weibel writes that, “since desires cannot be satisfied by reality, they are satisfied through images that function like hallucinations. The result is post-real satisfaction. The images of the mass media show the social unconscious, the repressed collective desires and fears” (210).

Weibel’s article does well to consider the ‘reality-tv’ phenomenon. Most of the theorists studied thus far have considered pop-cultural conceptions of surveillance society primarily in their dystopic forms, as assorted riffs on the theme of 1984. However, with the rise of ‘reality’ television, Orwell’s “Big Brother” is reappropriated by the culture industry (without a trace of irony) as the moniker for a television show, the ‘hook’ of which is the scopophilic pleasure one finds in watching surveillance footage of the young and beautiful. As we can see by the contemporary youthful obsession for constructing online video archives via MySpace, YouTube and the like, surveillance has passed from the realm of ‘frightening spectre’ to that of ‘pleasant recreation.’ Webel calls this “the panoptic principle turned into the pleasure principle” (218).

The central lesson of Weibel’s article is that surveillance and exhibitionism are intrinsic to our visually-focused culture. We live in a society of ‘the gaze;’ except, where Sartre could once write that “my fundamental connection with the Other-as-subject must be able to be referred back to the permanent possibility of being seen by the Other” (306), now we are presented with a plethora of scenes in which we can see without being-seen. This, I think, is the ultimate source of scopophilic pleasure: as voyeurs, we see, without being seen. The result of this peculiar uneven visibility is that we see ourselves in relation to others in a fashion reminiscent of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The voyeuristic subject — the master — need never acknowledge the subjectivity of the object being-seen, for the object cannot perceive the subject who gazes upon them. In short, if it is true that “my apprehension of the Other in the world as probably being a man refers to my permanent possibility of being-seen-by-him” (Sartre 306), then if we cannot be-seen by the Other, then we need not acknowledge the Other as a subject.

And yet, new forms of discipline beget new forms of resistance. Bentham’s panopticon, and the concept of surveillance which it spawned, was predicated on the Enlightenment idea that total visibility accomplished through the illumination of dark spaces (en-lighten-ment) would deter all forms of delinquency. The Enlightenment mind could not, however, grasp the concept of a delinquency which occurs because of and through visibility. This delinquency is terrorism, in the broadest sense: this being the reasoning behind the assertions of Baudrillard and other theorists that contemporary terrorism constitutes some sort of rebuttal to the Enlightenment in general. Terrorism in fact exists because of visibility; it confronts surveillance with the ultimate dilemma. How does one use visibility to deter a violent crime which is done “for the cameras”? The World Trade Center was not a ’strategic’ target in the conventional sense – the actual damage done to the United States by the events of 9/11 is practically negligible. The symbolic damage done to the United States by the photos of 9/11, however, is irreparable. As Weibel observes, “terrorists, who understand the logic of this world, don’t seek out the dark; they seek the light” (214). Why else does a terrorist group inevitably ‘claim responsibility’? Terrorism without visibility is merely absurd violence; it is because an act is seen, and its image reproduced, that it becomes capable of breeding terror.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Available on-line.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. Washington: Washington Square Press, 1992.

Weibel, Peter. “Pleasure and the Panoptic Principle.” In CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance. 206-223.

]]> http://supplem.net/2006/10/of-a-spectacular-society-surveillance-exhibitionism-and-scopophilia/feed/ 0 http://supplem.net/2006/10/indirect-light-and-the-extension-of-visibility/ http://supplem.net/2006/10/indirect-light-and-the-extension-of-visibility/#comments Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:25:35 +0000 ali http://supplem.net/blog/?p=10

One of the most mysterious and wonderful things about physics for me is the ‘electromagnetic spectrum.’ I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that this huge spectrum of divergent phenomena — the light we see, the radio we hear, the TV we watch, the magnetism we feel, the microwaves that cook our food, et cetera — are all manifestations of the same physical process. What would it be like if we could ’see’ all of these waves in the same way that we can see visible light? After all, particularly in Western society, the air which surrounds us is literally humming (well, maybe not literally, but doing something) with electromagnetic radiation, both naturally-occurring and artificially-created. The wireless internet on our laptop computers, our cellular phones, the satellites which transmit news across continents, the navigation systems that guide us through unfamiliar territory – all of these technologies communicate by the invisible oscillations of subatomic particles.

And yet, as Virilio’s ‘Indirect Light’ shows, these vibrations are less ‘invisible’ than they might once have been. The ‘essential characteristic’ of video technology is that it transforms visibility into a process which takes place over much more of the electromagnetic spectrum than the particular swath commonly termed ‘visible light.’ As Virilio observes: “How can one fail to see here the essential characteristic of video technology: not a more or less up-to-the-minute `representation’ of an event, but live presentation of a place or an electro-optical environment — the result, it would seem, of putting reality on waves by means of electro-magnetic physics” (1). Television is, by its original nature, ‘on waves,’ even though we might no longer often receive it over-the-air in that fashion. Digital video ‘webcams’ are frequently connected to the internet wirelessly over 2.4ghz radio signal, thereby allowing them to be placed in any convenient location without the restrictions of connectivity: the ‘closed circuit’ of CCTV is no longer ‘closed.’ We occupy a society which has transcended visible light. In Virilio’s words, we occupy “a domestic environment for which electronic light, a direct form analogous to daylight, is no longer sufficient” (1). Rather, contemporary surveillance observes the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and its observations are often transmitted over another band of that same spectrum.

The most obvious consequence of this colonization of the electromagnetic spectrum is a proliferation of broadcasting. Communications technologies are ubiquitous and interoperable because reality has been transformed into ‘waves.’ Virilio writes that the crisis of the cinema as entertainment venue will soon be repeated with the living-room: “the emancipation of the screen will involve not only its sudden expansion into the giant open-air Jumbotron or Olympic stadium screen, but also its compression into a scattered array of ordinary objects unconnected with televisual performance or information” (2). This is less a prediction than an actual fact. Already television is viewed as often on a laptop via youTube or on an iPod via iTunes as it is in a living room. In Southeast Asia, live television is broadcast in high-definition digital quality via DMB to the screens of cellular phones. And, as if to exemplify the ‘emancipation of the screen’ taken to its absurd dénouement, there is always this ridiculous offering from LG. The promotional copy says it all: “Why integrate a TV into a refrigerator? Why not?” As Virilio explains, the real-time spectacle which constitutes popular culture in the 21st century is made possible by this (occasionally comic) ubiquity of videography: the immanence of video technology “in the very body of the various pieces of equipment in which it began to be incorporated nearly twenty years ago” (3).

We cannot comprehend this proliferation of screens, however, in the simple terms of human visibility and reflected sunlight. Direct light is the fundamental instrument by which we experience the world. As sensory beings in a predominantly visual culture, the majority of our cognitive input comes from light reflected off objects and focused on our retinas. By transforming direct light into indirect light with videoscopy, we fundamentally alter the spatiality whichs determine the subjective human experience. With the development of videoscopy, every surface “has an objective existence only in and through the interface of an observation which, instead of just being the visible result of direct solar or electric lighting, is due to indirect lighting by the radio-electrical field of a Hertzian system or an optical fibre cable” (Virilio 4). When the reality we perceive is mediated by an omnipresent assemblage of screens, it is a fundamentally different type of reality from that viewed by the unaided human gaze. We can see around corners, into dark spaces, even beyond the spectrum of the light we can actually ’see.’ Surveillance does not so much ‘extend the gaze’ as it does extend the concept of what it is to ‘gaze,’ and what sorts of things one is physically able to gaze upon.

As Virilio says, “As the electro-optical faux jour of indirect public lighting dawns, as the real is put on air as the figurative, a new artificial light now complements electric lighting in much the same way that electric lighting once filled in for daylight” (7). It is worth noting here as an aside that Virilio’s terms are sometimes cumbersome and imprecise, as exemplified by his often clumsy distinction between ‘artificial,’ ‘natural,’ ‘direct,’ and ‘indirect’ forms of light: he seems here to be equating ‘artificial’ and ‘indirect’ light while in other places he uses ‘artificial light’ to refer to electrical light and ‘indirect light’ to refer to other forms of electronic visibility (unrelated to actual lighting). Nevertheless, the above statement is useful because it outlines what Virilio takes the role of ‘indirect light’ to be. By extending the gaze into regions formerly impenetrable to visibility, the indirect light of electronic surveillance supplements the actual ‘lighting’ of public spaces. Thus, the sorts of indirect-light surveillance Virilio describes when talking about ‘Stealth’ technology (5) — RADAR and similar non-visual detection mechanisms — are part of the same surveillant assemblage as those forms of surveillance which rely on ‘light’ in the conventional sense.

And as the surveillant gaze is extended into these new realms, one’s characteristics of visibility become the central defining characteristics of one’s subjectivity. The political sphere in contemporary society is wholly mediated by electronic visibility; this is true to such an extent that not only can we say that the demands of electronic visibility shape conduct in the political sphere, but that the contemporary political sphere would simply cease to be without the indirect lighting of modern visibility. As Virilio proclaims, “public image is on the way to replacing public space, and the political stage will not be able to do without indirect lighting, any more than it has been able to do without direct artificial lighting” (9).

I have more or less picked and chosen from Virilio’s paper here, for as I alluded to earlier, he is sometimes far less than clear in his reasoning. While at times he seems to acknowledge that direct and indirect light are fundamentally interconnected phenomena, at other times he seems to be suggesting the more spurious thesis that ‘indirect light’ is on its way to completely supplanting actual illumination. Consider, for instance, Virilio’s assertion that car travel will “develop from a means of absolute physical transport to a means of ‘relative transport’ associated with instantaneous transmission, the kinematic energy of the video-computer image advantageously replacing the kinetic energy of engine capacity” (13). Either he is making the ridiculous assertion that physical locomotion by automobile is somehow going to be wholly displaced by some sort of video-image manipulation, or he shrouding whatever substantive claim he is making in so much metaphor and hyperbole that it has become indecipherable. Neither alternative casts a favourable light on the intellectual tendencies of the author. Notwithstanding these flaws, “Indirect Light” is one of the first readings thus far to tackle some of what I feel are the substantive philosophical issues underlying the phenomenological experience of the human subject in a culture of surveillance. I feel that the central concern of Virilio’s paper is what it means to live in a society wherein the limits of human physicality have been so dramatically modified through video technology; that is to say, how is it that the ‘indirect light’ of ubiquitous videography reworks the basic experience of being human? While Virilio’s answers are not always entirely satisfying, the questions are of sufficient importance and difficulty that he deserves a good deal of credit for even having asked them.

“CCTV catches criminals. It spots crimes, identifies lawbreakers and helps convict the guilty. The spread of this technology means that more town centres, shopping precincts, business centres and car parks around the country will become no-go areas for the criminal…. CCTV is a wonderful technological supplement to the police… One police officer in Liverpool likened the 20-camera system as having 20 officers on duty 20 hours a day, constantly taking notes.” (Clive Norris, 255)

What does it mean to say that CCTV is a supplement to the police? Language has the poor befuddled constabulary trapped. To supplement is always to supplant! In the most basic sense, if CCTV catches criminals, what role is left to the flesh-and-blood police officer? The once-romanticized detective becomes a mere felon-collector, a servant of an all-seeing eye rather than an autonomous investigator. The police regard the surveillant assemblage as a useful, but ultimately inessential tool added on to their already-complete investigative apparatus. The supplement always corresponds to a lack, however; the disciplinary institution that is the contemporary police department would be noticeably ‘incomplete’ without its ’supplement.’ 20 surveillance cameras are in fact quite different from 20 police officers ‘taking notes.’

Consider, for example, the archival information produced by these two different recorders. 20 surveillance cameras will produce a digitized, photorealistic, reproducible document for as long as they are left to record. Their catalogue of events will be regarded as objectively ‘reliable’ by all but the most paranoid and/or subjectivist among us. The data they produce can be stored, manipulated, cross-indexed, edited, and patched back together.

20 police officers watching the same scenes, by contrast, will produce conflicting accounts, perhaps tinged with bias, of a decidedly mixed quality, depending on their individual levels of hunger, fatigue, cynicism, and/or corruption. They will be likely to have missed some important things and noticed some insignificant ones. Even in the unlikely event they were to witness a crime take place, their accounts of the perpetrators’ appearances will often be unreliable, particularly if said perpetrators happen to be of a different race from said hypothetical police officer.

Of course, a human police officer is not all ‘bad;’ a camera, after all, can only deter crime to a certain extent, and can be fooled by the criminal in-the-know by any number of tricks-of-the-trade. A police officer in the flesh presents a much more imposing deterrent, and can often defuse conflicts before they begin – as Norris notes, the ‘restitution of order’ is a police officer’s main task in such situations, and this is almost invariably accomplished via face-to-face interaction (252).

But this increasing reliance by the police on CCTV implies some significant structural transformations in the role of the police officer. In a society policed by surveillance of this sort, the individual investigator’s role becomes increasingly involved with the manipulation of digital archive information. This is the ‘lifting out’ referred to by McCahill (in Norris, 253). By correlating the various tracks which individual subjects leave behind in digital space – credit card charges, web browsing patterns, purchased items, and of course, CCTV images – the police can reconstruct the suspect’s digital body from the distributed archive of the surveillant assemblage. Physical evidence is of course not ‘irrelevant,’ but many crimes in an electronic society are of such a nature that they traces they leave are exclusively digital.

Of course, the police are by no means uncritical celebrants of surveillance technology. This is perhaps similar to the paradox noted by Steve Mann (345) in his sousveillance experiments, when he noted that the institutions most likely to object to his filming on their premises were those with the most surveillance cameras of their own. The watchers, in effect, do not take kindly to being watched. Rodney King is really only the most immediately obvious example of this kind of sousveillance being targeted against the police. Police objections to the installations of cameras in their vehicles also illustrate the flexibility of their opinions regarding surveillance. Though I can’t find a citation at the moment, I recall the police officers’ associations in Canada made a reasonably-sized fuss about the issue of installing cameras in police cars to record police compliance with department protocols. Surveillance is acceptable when its gaze is directed on the Other, but unconscionable when one is subjected to it oneself.

Do I have a point with all of this? Does deconstruction ever have a point? Not in so few words. Essentially, I just wanted to think a little about the video camera and how its archive is a ’supplement’ to the police. These kinds of simple user/technology dichotomies characterize a lot of common thinking about surveillance technologies, often leading us to ignore how such technologies necessarily shape user behaviour in definite ways. The police don’t just ‘use’ CCTV, rather, the police – and disciplinary institutions in general – are in the process of being themselves transformed by CCTV’s ubiquity.

Works cited

Steve Mann, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments”

Clive Norris, “From personal to digital: CCTV, the Panopticon, and the technological mediation of suspicion and social control”

Deleuze’s ‘postscript’ raises some interesting questions about the contemporary validity of the kind of disciplinary, panoptic model of social control outlined in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Deleuze posits that these kinds of disciplinary societies, having succeeded the ‘societies of sovereignty’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are now undergoing a transformation into what he calls ‘societies of control’ (3). The substance of this claim is not immediately obvious. If anything, contemporary society in the West seems less overtly ‘controlled’ than in previous centuries. Sovereignty and discipline are quite clearly different, to be sure; their respective ends, to “tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life” (3) are quite clearly distinguishable. Deleuze’s ‘society of control,’ however, seems less distinct from its predecessor. Both theoretical forms of society involve the interaction of a series of disciplinary institutions, both state and non-state, observing and cataloguing individual behaviour for the purposes of social administration.

And yet, in examining Deleuze’s argument and Haggerty & Ericson’s piece, the salient points of this distinction become more clear. In a disciplinary society, the institutions of discipline operate along a distinct linear timeline, in a concrete and sequential fashion, and according to their own unique — but generally consistent — logics. In the factory, for example, “individuals are constituted as a single body, to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance” (Deleuze 5). Discipline, in the form of managerial supervision, is in this case explicitly deployed to construct a population of useful bodies for the purposes of material production.

With rapid cultural and technological change following the Second World War, however, the institutions of social control have become more decentred and heterogeneous, even as the processes of control have become more tightly integrated. As Haggerty and Ericson note, some theorists have tried to extend Foucault’s concepts of panopticism and disciplinary society, perhaps ‘beyond recognition,’ to account for these changes (607). Deleuze, however, draws from a completely different set of concepts to account for the different objectives for (and practices of) contemporary social control. Social control in modern societies, on his interpretation, is accomplished by a ‘surveillant assemblage,’ consisting of a multiplicity of loosely affiliated observers.

By virtue of electronic communication, however, these ‘loosely affiliated’ observers are in fact more closely tied to each other than the institutions of disciplinary society. Where once institutions were insulated from each other to some extent by physical barriers, now the knowledge contained within formerly discrete institutions is digitized and interoperable. Even the term ‘institution’ itself becomes questionable, as surveillance increasingly becomes the province of small businesses and individuals.

The shift from state-run to corporate-run surveillance is also indicative of a shift in the emphasis of surveillance itself. The Panopticon was designed to ensure compliance with certain specific disciplinary norms. Its intent was to ensure that the prisoner caused no disturbances to safety or to public morality; as long as these conditions were satisfied, the observer had no real cause to enquire as to how each prisoner’s time was occupied. The surveillant assemblage’s purpose is more or less the opposite. Being businesses, the vast majority of observers within the assemblage care little about one’s compliance with societal norms, except insofar as such compliance may affect profitability. The Nielsen rating system doesn’t prevent the viewer from watching shows it deems inappropriate, nor do the cameras in a shopping centre try to direct shoppers to specific stores. Indeed, except in cases of shoplifting and/or other egregious lawbreaking, the surveillant assemblage very rarely intervenes explicitly in the lives of those it surveills. Instead, surveillance data is compiled into an archive of one’s transactions for use in directed marketing and enhancements in productivity and profitability.

Thus, it seems perhaps that Deleuze was mistaken to call the society of the surveillant assemblage a ‘society of control’ in his ‘postscript.’ Yet, when we consider further the object of the surveillant assemblage, the nature of the ‘control’ inherent to such a society becomes more evident. Under such a society, as Deleuze states, “the operation of markets is now the instrument of social control … control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit” (6). Control in such a society is not accomplished by controlling the desire of the subject. Instead, it is effected by ensuring that a product is available to satisfy any desire the subject may have, and that desires which cannot be satisfied through consumption are commensurately devalorized. This form of control may lack the ‘long duration’ of disciplinary forms of control, but it is ‘without limit’ in the sense that it does not grant the observed any real sphere of self-determination. While the prisoner of the Panopticon was free to act however they chose in a disciplined manner, the observed subjects in contemporary society are administered and guided in every aspect of their conduct.

The weaknesses in Deleuze’s ‘postscript’ are those found in the majority of his work: he frequently puts more emphasis on rhetorical effect than basic logic, and in the process is often too ready to make sweeping generalizations based on limited evidence. His claim that, today, “the corporation has replaced the factory” (4), is one particularly notable instance. Corporations can in no sense ‘replace’ factories; in the history of institutions, corporations developed right alongside factories, and indeed, factories are an essential part of corporations and their activities. In a broader sense, as well, one might dispute the idea that ‘societies of control’ have wholly supplanted the disciplinary societies. Though society has indeed greatly changed since the development of the disciplinary society, the sheer prominence of the basic disciplinary institutions (the school, the church, the armed forces) in contemporary society should constitute evidence enough that Foucault’s model is not completely outdated.

Nevertheless, Deleuze’s analysis of the inherent differences between contemporary societies of control and the disciplinary societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a particularly useful one. Foucault’s insights in Discipline and Punish remain profound, but Haggerty and Ericson rightly note that he “fails to directly engage contemporary developments in surveillance technology” (607). Electronic communications and the characteristics of modern capitalism have greatly changed the mechanisms of social control and the ends to which they are applied. Though the institutions of disciplinary society still play a prominent role in social structures, Deleuze’s concepts of the surveillant assemblage and the society of control provide us with a useful model for social administration in the postmodern era.

Works Cited

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”

Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The surveillant assemblage”