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Arresting the Eye: Surveillance, Social Control and Resistance 21

Space and Culture 7 / 8 / 9

Arresting the Eye:Surveillance, Social Control and Resistance

Willem de Lint

‘Surveillance’ conjures up images of a conspiracy of secret knowledge. It calls to mind big gov-ernment eager to pounce and rend our privacy, toss aside our sanctity, and trample our dignity andrights. It elicits cloak-and-dagger imagery of hapless citizens diminished under a vast network ofpower, a power unimaginably dark and deep. Less prolific is the understanding that how we thinkabout surveillance is the product of the peculiar interests and institutions we live by. Such anunderstanding is elided, it may be argued, because the popular view serves, rather than harms, theinterests and institutions that keep the few concealed and the many exposed.

In this paper, it will be argued that surveillance, particularly as it is represented in the literatureexpressly devoted to its explication, is too narrowly conceived as the hard edge of social control.Most of what we think about when we think surveillance is wrapped up in a control and securitynexus as ‘security surveillance.’ In fact, surveillance includes a wider array of objectives; it mayfollow an ethic of care or pleasure. These alternative objectives create distinct looking architectures1

that may override, subvert or recast the security objective. The synthesis of pleasure, care andcontrol in new media hybrids of surveillance may also be seen as a testimony to our insatiabledesire, not solely for more control of the other in a society of more danger and risk, but also formore interaction with the processes of norm-clarification through media and the formats which(also) comfort us.2

What is offered here is an analysis of some discursive forays by which ‘security surveillance’has been built up as a panoptic ‘assemblage.’ These ‘lines of flight’ are also lines of fault accordingto which it will break down and transform (Patton 1999: 14). While surveillance has hitherto hadan elective affinity with security, the suturing of the two is already degenerating. It will be sug-gested that we may be ready to forsake the ruse that the knowledge of the many by ‘the eye’ is more

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Assemblages / Love and Mourning / Dialogues

1. By ‘lookingarchitectures’ Irefer to thevariety ofconfigurationsof surveillance,particularlyobjectives,which arepossible withvariation alongthe 8 dimensionswhich I set outNote 5.

2. Lyon (1993:673) notes that:‘it depends uponcategories, thatno knowledge ofthe individual isrequired, that itis increasinglyinstrumental,that areas ofpersonal lifeonce thought tobe inviolablyprivate areinvaded, andthat it effectivelyerodes personaland democraticfreedoms.’

pressing an issue than lapses in the surveillance of the few. The lines of fault areshowing: and now it can be said that the distribution of the favour of opacity in theservice of powerful interests and power-politics ought be a more compelling ob-ject of inquiry in the first instance.

Social Control

Janowitz (1991: 73) argues that social control is ‘the capacity of a society to regu-late itself according to desired principles and values or to set goals.’ He argues,further, that ‘the core element of social control is the idea of self-regulation of thegroup – whether the group be a face to face primary group or the nation state’(1991: 83). Social control, in its broadest definition, refers to all of ‘the humanpractices and arrangements that contribute to social order and, in particular, thatinfluence people to conform’ (Black 1984a: 4).

Black (1984a) has also maintained that these practices and arrangements maybe more or less formal, and that a shift to more formal social control practices maybe attended by a shift from informal practices, and that such substitutions will notnecessarily produce more social order. Similarly, Janowitz (1991: 35) argues thateffective personal control is necessary to strengthen collective self-regulation:without adequate personal control prospects for social control decrease. On thewhole, social disintegration and conflict is expected with the ‘weakened and inef-fective social control in advanced industrial societies.’

Two core problematics of social control thus include the problem of the so-ciability of the regulation and the problem of the dependence of the control. Interms of the sociability or mutuality of the control, the concept has been elabo-rated in a layered approach in which one moves from ‘unilateral’ or ‘bilateral’control or regulation involving only the primaries or principles (Black 1984a:7) to‘trilateral social control,’ in which a ‘settlement agent’ intervenes. Similarly,Ellickson (1991: 131) offers a comprehensive system of social control in whichone moves from first party control or self sanction, through second party controlor personal self-help, to third party control by social forces, organizations, or gov-ernment in which vicarious self-help, organizational enforcement, and state en-forcement are the respective sanctioning agents. With respect to dependence,Katz (1968: 158) argues that conflict is a key element in the maintenance andregulation of social structures and that autonomy is incorporated in complex so-cial organizations and serves such organizations, and that both structure and so-cial control is always only partial in concrete situations: ‘interrelated systems canhave inversely proportional external and internal portions of autonomy.’ Thus,



3. Not allowingoneself to beknown togovernment orrestricting thefield ofgovernment, asin the liberalmodel, onlyproduces the sortof opaquesurfaces whichthen contour theinstitutionaldistribution ofgovernmentalrelations, as in adifferentialprobing ofmarket, family,and economy.

4. The subject orsubject popula-tion’s complianceis securedaccording to twinprocesses: viasupervision ofworkers, and viastate administra-tion of citizens.Giddens (1985)has also arguedthat surveillanceworks by makingtargets visiblethrough a‘strategic controlof the conditionsof disclosure.’

autonomy, conflict, and even resistance are not anathemic to control so much asa necessary dimension of it.

At the macro-level of sociability, Cohen (1985) has made the argument thatthere has been historical, structural change in how social control has been exer-cised. Under the transformations of the eighteenth century, a centralized, bu-reaucratic state apparatus began to undertake the control and care of crime anddependency. This involved the distinction of criminals and dependents accord-ing to an emerging expertise which also ‘disciplined’ their segregation and con-finement. A second transformation occurred with the decarceration movementin which it became more expedient to control deviants such as the insane, in theirplace or through finer and finer graduations of distinctions between guilty/inno-cent, freedom/captivity, inside/outside, with the result of blurring and erasingthese distinctions, at least in the extreme. This transformation was facilitated inits broad contours much earlier, when jurists deployed positive science andhygienics, and solicited the opinion of psychiatrists or alienists to justify punish-ment of the criminally insane on the basis of the protection of society from thefuture dangerousness of these individuals (Foucault 1988a; Castel 1991).

If we follow Janowitz, the relative erasure of these distinctions has also al-lowed the mechanisms of formal social control to become more subterranean orless visibly conflictual. It has allowed much intrusion under the guise of techni-cal violations, with such intrusion becoming increasingly separated from the ju-ridical and political process in the mutuality of clarification, or in the goals andprinciples which the intrusion is to serve.

Surveillance

At root, surveillance is a necessary condition of governability. As Foucault (1988b)has argued, government came to want to know subjects as they lived, so that itcould deploy them better.3 Here, surveillance is an ambiguous instrument ofknowledge, one which produces new intrusions and new freedoms simultane-ously. Similarly, Giddens (1985) sees surveillance as a process of power-gen-eration, which has been bifurcated in its utilization for both industry and govern-ment, both of which have benefitted from the timetable as a ‘time-space orderingdevice’ (Lyon 1992: 166).4

Surveillance is also a medium in which differences of subjects are captured,crystallized and then ultimately dissolved. It unravels facets of individual biog-raphy or identity through techniques of identification, classification or registra-tion. As exercised in the electronic language of our current information ‘mode,’

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surveillance undermines time/space coordinates and meshes subject and object and essence andexistence (Poster 1990: 85). Surveillance thus alternates modalities of (closely distant) penetrationand exposure to dissolve differences. It also offers intermittent or regular exposures or announce-ments both of its matches, and (directly or by extension) of the schedule of interest according towhich it operates schedules of order and value.

This isolates two characteristic operations of surveillance: the one its separation from transpar-ent goals and principles, and the other its elaboration of temporal and spatial advantage. Withrespect to the latter, Bogard argues that surveillance is very often anticipatory in intervening on atarget, working backwards as ‘a look before the look.’ He notes that surveillance is a ‘makingvisible’ in space or in a series or succession of durations; it is ‘a machinery for making a surfacetransparent.’ Surveillance technology works on the time of movement, recording flows of eventsas motions, sounds, rhythms and performances, or activities of persons or populations or groupsinto information (1996: 43). It thus ‘breaks a flow by recording it.’ What ‘interests’ the apparatusis always ‘what is on the other side of this surface, what remains to be seen’ (1996: 33). That ‘otherside,’ increasingly, is the code by which not only production, but also reproduction can occur.Thus today there is a pitched battle over encryption keys to communications software, and specifi-cally whether the National Security Agency should have access to all such keys in the interest ofAmerican ‘security.’

But surveillance is not merely the recording or penetration of opaque surfaces. Informationmay often be revealed in the way of the recording of the sound of a tree falling in the woods: whenno-one is present to listen to the sound or its recording, it can also not be made use of and cannot beturned into knowledge. The point is that surveillance, in being a watching, requires a registrationof information to be complete, an operation which we may call ‘the fix.’ Such registration may betransferred back to the subject (self-regulation) where there is no operator behind the camera, butit nevertheless must take place. However, a camera left long enough without an announcementtying it to an agency will be ignored as operating for nothing. There is then no surveillance beingmediated. The intervention on an individual or population’s behaviour must have the potential totake place. Thus by ‘the fix’ we refer to the exposure of a subject to an observing agency’s sched-ule of intervention: such exposure, like a snapshot, freezes time, space, and, in the attempt, mean-ing.

Also with respect to that schedule, the temporal and spatial play of the architecture of surveil-lance allows the apparatus to be relatively detached from the ‘social order’ as a prior phenomenon.The social order is here a work in progress or an ideal form, rather than something already evident,which the subject is being matched against, and in the service of. More importantly, it is absent.Values and goals are not vetted by ‘the social’ in a recursive process: unlike social control, eventrilateral or third party social control, the orders and values of the surveillance have already beenaccomplished from a distance for a prior ‘future’ in a form which thus denies the immanence of thesocial order. Even simulated surveillance has already announced an object or a schedule of value



or order for which surveillance is taking place. This is to say that while surveillance apparatusesare devices to dissolve surfaces, in the ideal they are themselves deliberately or deceptively opaqueand impenetrable: they are designed to give up nothing.

To sum up, surveillance is a sanction previous to the transgression, anticipatory of the norm,and prior to the moral. This brings us to a consideration of surveillance as a revision of socialcontrol themes along these contours.

Juncture

It follows that a key distinction between social control and surveillance lies in the question ofinstrumentality. Surveillance under our conceptualization brackets goals and principles, pushingthem out of bounds of the gaze interaction. From the point of view of an instrumentalization ofinterests or goals, the ‘social’ is a terrain of risk as an ‘unsupervized’ encounter. In other words, itcarries the danger of a ‘lateral assemblage.’ Politics are therefore clarified at another place, an-other time, and according to a simplified prophylactics. Encounters of the social are supervised.Indeed, Castel argues that a ‘new mode of surveillance’ is that of a ‘systematic pre-detection’ inwhich ‘the intended objective is that of anticipating and preventing the emergence of some unde-sirable event . . . . This surveillance dispenses with actual presence, contract, the reciprocal rela-tionship of watcher and watched, guardian and ward, carer and cared’ (Castel 1991: 288; see alsoGandy 1989: 64-5; Shearing and Stenning 1985). Moreover, in offering prevention against socialrisks, it acts not against the subject, but against a combinatory of risk factors (see Simon 1987).This juncture between social control and surveillance is perhaps best seen in the break between aradical and Foucauldian view of power. As Digeser (1992) argues, Foucault departs from both theliberal (Dahl 1961; Bachrach and Baratz 1962) and the radical view of power (Lukes 1974). Theliberal view had it that power is an overtly or covertly conflictual relation between agents coercivelyadvancing well-understood self-defined interests against those of other agents.

The radical view allows that an agent may be manipulated by power to do willingly and con-sciously that which is against her objective, real interests (Digeser 1992: 978-80). Foucault arguesthat there are no objective real interests that distinguish subjects in opposition to the interests of apower-over. Rather, the subject is a node of power, she is conveyed in practices and interactions,and does not exist independently of them. What the Foucauldian view of power has offered, in thefamous dictum, is a strategy without strategists. The panoptic is its own agency, a technique with-out technicians (or with only technicians to run it), a will-to-power without interests or without asubject who may possess power. The relation between the subject and power is captured in theidea of the cyborg: the cyborg is at once the possibility of the organism as a for-itself and ofexploitation of the object as an in-itself. (Such a view also has consequences where resistancerelies on a discourse about interests, politics.)

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5. Building onMarx (1988), I see8 dimensionsalong whichsurveillancetechnologies maybe distinguished:equilibrium(balance of powerbetween sourceand target);directionality ormutuality (ofknowledge orinformation flow);visibility orsimulation (thespecularity of thesurveillancesystem);transparency (thethird partyreviewability ofsurveillancesystems);penetration (depthof infiltration oftarget); scope(range ofcatchment zone);functionalseparation(betweeninformation intake,analysis, responseand legitimation);and objects(interests, goals,principles,missions served bythe intervention).

While ‘social control’ distinguishes the external and social from the internaland individual, ‘surveillance’ makes direct reference to the recursivity and ‘play’of power. In addition, social control under a conflict version and as a range ofrelations between individual, group and institutional-level interaction, understandsthat real interests and objectives are contested, and through such contest, clarified.Once power is a relation in which the subject has already spoken, the utility of hertruth as an opposition to power, as a restraint in a conflict against power, is nolonger tenable. What this permits, with the redundancy of the intentionality of theagent as a productive enterprise of power/knowledge, is a preventative manipula-tion of the social, the politics of which are ‘dead’ already inside the codes of itsmedia and formats. What this relative collapse of differentiation between subjectand object then also allows is the untrammelled pursuit of the secrets of the sub-ject which, although it might include a body politics of counter-signage, is a power/knowledge which still has no powerful political response. Finally, it leads to atotalizing of the agent or agency (as always already an instance of panoptic power)where otherwise distinctness, juncture, and separate interests might be found.

We have noted the erasure of the moral necessity of an intentional agent againstwhom it was legitimate to act in the movement to what Cohen called the secondtransformation. We have also seen the erasure of the visibility and constitutiveforce of contest in the difference between a radical or conflict view of power andthat which expresses Foucauldian power/knowledge. In order not to be toototalizing and in order to understand how individual instances of surveillance mightbe resisted, it is necessary to problematize the several dimensions5 and diverseobjectives of surveillance: to distinguish the who and the what which are often(presumptively) pulled together. Momentarily, we will argue that surveillancerequires an objective, and that these objectives are multiple and varied. Next, wewill address the question of how difference is sought: surveillance is a ‘lookingfor’ difference, but the opposite of difference may not be a form of control that issocial.

The ‘New Surveillance’: The De-Socialization of Control?

It is becoming almost axiomatic that we are now more fully known in our social,economic, and ‘private’ transactions than ever before. Gary Marx (1988: 217-219) has argued that ‘the new surveillance’ is distinguished from social control inthat its new forms penetrate more deeply and reach more widely, transcend time-space barriers, are less visible, more involuntary, more preventative, more labourintensive, more decentralized, and target categories rather than specific subjects.Lyon (1991) similarly maintains that computer surveillance constitutes ‘an un-precedented intrusion into the intimate texture of daily life.’ Altheide (1994: 666)



has argued that social life is fundamentally changed by the developments of new communicationformats. Information technology and communication ‘chase each other’ in a loop which has beennecessary for industrial technological change and has become a ‘guiding feature of modern soci-ety.’ Others have argued that surveillance technology in the workplace and in the marketplace hasaugmented surveillance by the State, and that these have become more integrated, expanding thecapacity and reach of an over-arching, interconnected surveillance system (Gandy 1989; Lyon1993; Hillier 1996; Rule and Brantley 1992; Crush 1992). In the meantime, privacy protection isseen to be woefully inadequate to stem our subjectification by these new technologies (Gandy1989; Goodwin and Humphreys 1982). Not only are we being better known or more thoroughlyregistered in our biographies and through the exposure of our fears and wants, but our biologicalidentities are being penetrated more deeply so that we are known down to the very codes of ourgenetic programming. Consequently, we are classified, registered and perhaps intervened uponbefore we even have a chance to act according to prediction (Bogard 1996). Finally, that knowl-edge is increasingly instantaneous and durable. The result, many authors agree, is a surveillancesociety of the ‘superpanopticon’ (Poster 1990) in which there are fewer and fewer spaces in whichwe can claim ourselves against the claims of the bureaucratic other.

We have already seen that the operation of surveillance may be distinguished from socialcontrol in terms of the question of conflict and in the articulations of goals and principles. There isanother feature of social control which does not appear sufficiently problematized in the surveil-lance literature, namely, the intermediation of regulation through the vehicle of the various organi-zations and groups to which people belong: work, residential, avocational, etc. The role of thenormalizing group as an intermediary between the individual and the knowledge interests of gov-ernment is understated in surveillance: it is understated, in part, because surveillance is conceptu-alized totalistically. This elision occurs because much talk of surveillance already assumes theimportance of mediation technologies and plays down the potential mistranslation/corruption/nu-ance/error/difference between the apparatus and normative action.

Black (1984b) has offered the useful proposition that starving informal social control fattensformal social control. Christie (1977) and other critical social control analysts have made similarobservations about the relationship between formal and official sanctions and proximate or per-sonal knowledge: the further we are from the other whose actions may be threatening to us, themore we mediate our reaction to them through law, the courts, or another third party process.

It is also a mainstay of critical social control thinking that the normativity of the intimate grouptraditionally sorted out those differences and dangerous others seen to pose a threat to local order.If we understand that the bulk of norm-clarification takes place–or at least up until very recentlyhas taken place–within the family and according to the interests and values of immediate socialgroupings, then any sort of relative decline in this social infrastructure will offer a correspondinglevel of normative vacuum. In such a case, the infrastructure for sorting out the dangerous other is

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also dilapidated, and there is a crisis of trust. Bianchini (1990) has suggested there is today a crisisin urban public sociability.

Surveillance, as encounter supervision, offers a mechanism for restoring trust in a society ofstrangers: documentation, licensing, profiles, codes, etc., are means of brokering trust in the con-text of distant relationships in post-industrial societies. Because families have been stretched andthinned in post-industrial societies, estrangement and distance have increased and more privacy inthe form of social isolation has been the result. Steven Nock (1993) has argued that as the privateself has been continually expanding, too much privacy has produced just such a crisis. For Nock,intimate knowledge and contact is replaced by detailed information as a consequence of increasedprivacy in post-industrial societies (c.f. Giddens 1990, 1991). Bogard (1996: 150) adds that mod-ern surveillance provides us with more of this privacy by reproducing it on a higher level, giving usperfect privacy while comforting us that we are still connected.

The commercial applications of the information age also change the meaning and context ofthe private. In Silicon Valley there is a movement towards ‘intermediation,’ which refers to aprocess of removing intermediaries between the consumer and producer: the agents, brokers, mid-dlemen, ‘professional interlopers’ or the ‘handlers of intellectual goods’- including teachers, ana-lysts, editors and perhaps the city itself. These all distort the purity between the consumer, herwants, and the product. As Ullman (2000) argues, the internet serves as an ‘enabling technology’by which contact with such persons may gradually become obsolete for all but the upper classes.For the rest, the messy intervention of such intermediaries in ungainly social space, and in socialintermediation, is gradually eliminated. This ideal of the Internet ‘represents the very opposite ofdemocracy, which is a method for resolving differences in a relatively orderly manner through themediation of unavoidable civil associations’ (Ullman 2000: 33).

As we see, the argument here is that security surveillance has been proliferating to fill a gap insocial control previously mediated by devices which are said to be on the wane. Surveillanceapparatuses, it can be argued, come to act as mechanical substitutes for what would have been thesocial control interactions of the group. Societies are increasingly telematic (Bogard 1996), andthe dangerous instantaneousness of an intimate knowledge of the stranger is both provided andcountered by the filters, frames, and probes of computer-assisted telecommunications. While normclarification according to principles, values and goals is key to social control in its traditionalunderstanding, social and political mechanisms through which these goals are democratically es-tablished may be in disarray. In this respect, security surveillance is not an indication of greatersocial control, so much as a signal of our experience of its relative lack. Tools of surveillance havefilled a vacuum in norm clarifying capacity in the wake of the diminished family and small group.Indeed, new mechanisms of surveillance are in this way both an indicator and determinant of apost-industrial formalization of social control.



The Fixed Gaze of the Expert Looker

To further explore the problematics of surveillance and its relationship with social control requiresthat we contextualize surveillance as an expert look for intervention within a range of possibilities.In order to do this, we will analyze bystander apathy as a look avoiding intervention. This followsthe argument that bureaucratic ‘surveillance’ has been emerging as other mechanisms of socialcontrol have been subverted or transferred (eg. watching television). Finally, it also speaks to thecultural consequences of both movements we have been discussing.

Bystander Apathy: Gaze Aversion

Bystander apathy has been defined as non-intervention in an interaction in which a person is avail-able for intervention and may have the capacity to intervene. Thus, rather than a gaze for interven-tion, this is a gaze averted. A person on his way to do some shopping who happens to cut across anunfolding homicide may have an immediate impulse to leap into the affray, but perceiving otherswatching and doing nothing, he may begin to doubt this ‘heroic’ impulse. He may stay peripheralto the conflict, and may even continue with his plan to shop.

Studies on bystanders have concluded that the chances of non-intervention are greater when agroup, as opposed to a single bystander, is present (Latane and Darley 1968; Latane and Nida1981). Work on bystanders has also broken down bystander response in terms of 1) noticing theevent; 2) interpreting it as an emergency; 3) assuming personal responsibility; 4) feeling competentto help; 5) helping (Latane and Darley 1975). The diffusion of responsibility, these researchersfound, was more likely when more bystanders were present: this is a ‘bystander effect.’ Bystanderapathy also increases with social and territorial distance.

The apathetic bystander differs from the agency of surveillance in not being interested in tak-ing up information for storage and possible later use. He already knows more than he wants toknow. He may even try to ignore the evidence of his senses. He may doubt his own ability todiscern the truth, may feel inexpert in his abilities of perception and diagnosis. He may want tohide from his own beliefs, rather than impose them on others. Thus it is that the bystander, initially,and in many cases more enduringly, may be seen as a look without social control or even a lookingwhich acquiesces in the subversion of the social order, as when bystanding or looking upon a socialwrong without acting may be seen as a form of passive sanction. Bystander guilt may occur as aresult of being proximate to a perceived injustice.

In terms of the work distribution of norm clarification, we have today been called a bystandersociety, so much of our time is spent in passive looking. The average Canadian spends 23 hoursper week watching television (Stats Can 1996). Via television we watch conflict, drama, all kindsof norm-violation–but from a distance or telematically, so that it does not interfere with the flow ofour daily lives: we often watch these mediated conflicts in the expectation that they are resolvedwithout a requirement of action or intervention on our part. Watching from a distance also allows

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6. And although wemay also seek to bethe subject for aday in front of thescreen, ourpolitical, cultural,or social participa-tion in theresolution of social,political andcultural questions isrichly mediated andformatted (seeAltheide 1994).

watching of norm clarification that at the same time erases the connection ofsuch distant watching with the experience of bystander guilt.

As has been argued (Fyfe 1996), this is schooling in social docility: or moreto the point, a sensitization to the normativity that conflict is resolved alreadywithout our participation. Our political participation in norm-clarification maybe limited to our consumer choices. We may express our preferences for theresolution of conflict in our selection of programming: as a member of a cohortof viewers. However, the conflict itself will have been resolved without ourindividual intervention.6

The Fix Is In

Lived reality is primed as a site ready for expert mediation, rather than activeparticipation. With security surveillance, there is a specialization of lookingwhich may also intervene. The growth of the welfare state and also theprofessionalization and scientization of security services (Ericson and Shearing1986) has installed the convention that social intervention not only is but shouldbe left to the experts: those who have developed experience both in lookingthrough or behind appearances and in the methodologies of intervention. Fixingthe interpretation of a problem thus comes to be seen as requiring expert sys-tems, specialist surveillance technologies, or specialists themselves ascraftspersons. Those without specialist skills or access to specialist technolo-gies for rooting out the ‘truth’ come to believe that they cannot distinguish noisefrom information or navigate complex social interactions. In the shadow of suchexpert looking, the rest of us have, or come to believe we have, fewer resourcesfor independent analysis of what is occurring, and limited access to the method-ology which deploys the event interpretation back again on a subject or site forintervention. The convention develops that all of this is best relinquished to theexpert lookers (or the devices of expert looking).

Such reliance, following this argument, is aggravated by our relative inca-pacity to distinguish the real from the simulation. Media like television andradio and much of electronically mediated conversations ‘cancel contexts’ andare primarily monological and self-referential (Poster 1990: 45-46). Poster ar-gues further that ‘media language replaces the community of speakers and un-dermines the referentiality of discourse necessary for the rational ego’ (1990:46). He notes that in the ‘mode of information’ media now provide a montage ofselected information in the appearance of objectivity or a ‘depoliticized simula-tion of truth’ (1990: 62). Politics, in the media format, is a prior event the dyna-



mism of which is ‘screened out’ in the same way that the mis en scene of the television frame iscarefully constructed.

The sanitized and telemediated event has thus also filled the void of social control. As Mathiesenhas argued, both panoptic and synoptic power serve together to subdue the dynamism of politicaland social debates (1997: 230). The mediated drama or telematic conflict offers predictable clari-fications on matters of social, political, and interpersonal values. It offers this, often bypassing theintermediation or filter of the social group. It also facilitates selection in terms of ‘event’ resolu-tion: as we noted, one chooses a drama in the terms of a preference for certain denouement profiles.Contra Christie (1977), it is not the court or the town square, but rather the distantiated, preselected,and preformatted TV drama which provides members of the telematic society with the ecstasy ofparticipation: a participation which resolves without endangering the individual chooser. Suchwatching of drama resolution is also a knowledge without risk. It feeds a voyeuristic pleasure thatattends watching the other’s exposure and vulnerability and, perhaps, rescue by other expertinterveners. As Bogard (1996: 151) argues, in this way, through familiar formats and expert me-diation, privacy and trust (vs. publicity and risk) are reprogrammed into the ‘normal’ operation ofour systems.

Surveillance and the Master Narrative of Resistance

Is the ‘surveillance society’ simply another version of the modernist dystopia? Is there somethingtruly paradigmatic about recent developments in the ‘infrastructure’ of the ‘new surveillance’ thatbrings the correspondence quest of modernity (Rorty 1979) more profoundly into the social of theeveryday?

We have argued that a productive power affords a preventative manipulation of the social inways not available to its conflict or radical versions. Surveillance technology has been movingquickly in the direction of ‘the look before the look’ on one hand, and also to erase the distinctionbetween the simulated and the real on the other. In this respect, the ‘simulation of surveillance’(Bogard 1996) is argued to make the modernist dream of correspondence more realizable by alsomaking it more virtual. Correspondence is between programming and performance which may besimulated in order to reduce human error. In addition, later model surveillance technology, whilemore prolific in shaping the social today, is an artefact of yesterday’s programming, and engendersresistances and distortions which will tend to be dated even as they occur, and which will alreadyhave been deployed in the perfection of better programs (and prevention).

Resistance is Fertile

Much like the relationship between social control and chaos described by Cohen (1985: 235), inwhich ‘control can never work . . . it can never be a means to anything but more social control,’resistance to the new surveillance has a master narrative: new modes of surveillance eat up resist-ance into an ever deepening, elaborated, and comprehensive web.

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What makes this possible in the first instance is the relationship between citizen/consumersand bureaucracies. Access to services, employment, etc. often comes with the proviso that bio-graphical information or vital statistics must be relinquished. The release of such information tothe individual is a small ‘privacy cost’ outweighed, at least in the perceptible short-term, by theexpected benefits (Gandy 1989: 66). Consequently, Gandy argues, ‘because monitoring the bu-reaucracy’s use of that information has such a high cost, individuals are incapable of acting in theirown interests’ (1989: 66).

In the second instance, however, such interests are casualties of the refinement of how bothsurveillance and power are seen to operate. Against the radical view articulated above, resistanceis disaggregated from the autonomy of the subject: presumptively discrete individual interests arenot seen as standing apart from regulatory interests. As Giddens (1985: 14-15) notes, data-gather-ing is a productive and enabling activity: increasing the potentialities of self-government. Opacity,it follows, can be viewed not so much as a counter to surveillance, as a counter to the knowledgecapacity of government.

What follows, is a further elision of the frame and context. Surfaces that are most opaqueattract the greatest and latest technological interest. Surveillance is tightened as it clears away orregisters the resistance as an opacity to be cleared up. In the organic or ecological metaphor(Altheide 1994), the growth of systems or the approximation of systems to an ideal form of com-plete knowledge integration also depends on the continuing practice of absorption and the co-presence of difference. In Bogard’s Simulation of Surveillance (1996), individuals are offeredopportunities to go beyond current limits, but this only facilitates their incorporation into the sys-tem: to be an individual is to be the limit itself, to assume control by always pushing against theboundaries of surveillance. However, when the conditions of disclosure are simulated, includingthe gap between space and time, and human agency and human perception, virtual agents are alsoproduced whose ‘resistance’ is only an artefact of their previous condition as actual persons.

Since surveillance follows a logic of virtualization in a process of positive production, resist-ance only shifts surveillance to hyper-virtuality so that the very conditions of disclosure or the gapbetween the actual and the virtual also become simulated and frozen (Bogard 1996). He also ar-gues that that resisting absorption into the simulated surveillance network would appear to meanputting a break in the connection by pulling the plug. One break in the connection,

means little in a vast and growing network of connections. One only walks away to take up another game later, plugin somewhere else . . . . To resist absorption here would mean resisting not only the entire network of connections,but overcoming their imaginary, and that means subverting somehow the very dream-desire of absolute control thatgoverns these technologies’ (Bogard 1996: 50).

Even where difference, in its absorption, still leaves a remainder that is unaccounted for, this isthen the material basis and legitimation for a subsequent elaboration of surveillance capacity. Inthis way the growth of the technology mobilizes sites of resistance in its development, and



resistances are comprehended in a training for an elaborated register. Resistance offers newsurfaces or ‘affordances’ in the growth of surveillance (Michael and Stills 1992). In the recentcase of the ‘I love you’ virus, said to have infected 50% of all computers in the United States,there was an immediate call for more internet security, which will further integrate the system.

In this view, the political and the technological are blurred: power/knowledge has built theapparatus, and the subject is only sensible according to the contours of power/knowledge. Foradvocates of this view, there is no ‘far side’ or ‘behind the scenes’ of the operation of a panopticpower. Where power is a relation, surveillance technology is not simply the messenger distin-guished from the message. It is the development of the panoptic machine, and not the politicsand interests it ‘serves,’ that is the agency and interest that matters most. It is the mode ofpower, and not distinguishable interests and goals, that is replicated and modified endlessly. Inthe extreme, this view outlaws the negation with the radical or conflict view of power and itsdependency on a foundational truth-claim.

Sovereignty is Dead and Privacy Won’t Protect You

The master narrative of unstoppable surveillance is upheld with reference to a linked and equallyevocative argument regarding the status of sovereignty and of formal legal protections offered bythe status of the individual as a bearer of rights. There is an underside to the liberal juridical frame-work of formal rights, privacy, and equality before the law, which undercuts playing the ‘rightscard’ to counter the putative growth of surveillance.

The rights of the individual is a notion rooted both in modernism and liberalism. Both Marxistand Foucauldian treatments of the emergence of bourgeois law have emphasized how such lawencoded and formalized a non-egalitarian or hierarchical grid of power relations. Marx argued thatit incorporated privatization into human identity as the egotistic, separate self, and converted thesocial character of human life into an increasing abstractness defined in the citizen of a free state.Foucault argued that beneath the formally egalitarian juridical framework was a ‘dark side’ of tiny,‘everyday physical mechanisms’ and systems of ‘micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarianand assymetrical which we call the disciplines’ (Foucault 1979: 222). The disciplines were elabo-rated with the development of state infrastructures as less wasteful, less risky, more economical,and less susceptible to resistances than sovereign power, which was susceptible to the carnivalesqueand the spread of interpretations (O’Connor 1997).

More importantly, the displacement of law from modernity, according to Foucault, is a transi-tion in which a power founded on prohibition and violence is displaced by one established in thepositive production of useful individuals. Accordingly, even the concrete administration of entitle-ment rights under the welfare state required a penetrating knowledge of the individual according tothe maximization of his/her abilities (her limits, her talents, etc.). Thus what has been called the‘Foucault paradox’ (Lyon 1993: 672) emerges in which the achievement of welfare citizenshipdepends on and is only possible if accompanied by a powerful state bureaucracy capable of allocat-

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ing resources and administrating these entitlements. Such bureaucratic infra-structure is non-egalitarian and hierarchical and allows a system of ‘paralleljudges,’ of technical experts– such as doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists andsocial workers–to reach more deeply behind the opacity of each individual, in-vading her privacy, so that the citizen may get her entitlement. Thus, accordingto this second point in the master narrative of surveillance and its resistance,privacy rights are a poor gambit. Privacy legislation or ‘reform’ is unrealisticwhen such reforms rely on governmental support at odds with the aim to distrib-ute monies more ‘efficiently’ only to the ‘deserving,’ an aim which is served bymore records matching and surveillance, not less.

For example in Canada, the now deleted Longitudinal Labour Force File,established in 1985 and managed by Human Resources Development Canada,contains data on an estimated 33 million living and dead Canadians. It includedinformation from other government databanks, from tax returns, child benefitfiles, welfare files, employment insurance files, jobs training and employmentprograms and services, the social insurance files, used to research and evaluatethe effectiveness of federal employment insurance. The HDRC Director has saidthat it allowed policy research so that the programs offered by government meetthe needs of Canadians (Windsor Star, May 17, 2000: A2).

Governmental support for privacy reform will also be weak when the gov-ernment has a countervailing stake in knowing its internal and external enemies(Martin 1993: 118) Not surprisingly, there are as a consequence few privacywatchdogs for ordinary citizens and these privacy concerns are easily quashed‘by the steamroller of surveillance’(1993: 117) which, via fast-paced changes toinformation technology, is always years ahead of privacy legislation (Bogard1996: 125). Privacy protections are also founded on the myth that privacy canoffer the possibility of escape from observation. As Bogard argues, in the telematicsociety, privacy would mean being unencoded, or un-coded (1996: 131). Today,however, privacy legislation refers increasingly to the right to control access toinformation: and this, according to Bogard, refers to the codes that govern theinterpretation of individuals, rather than to respect for the individual as a for-itself.

Privacy protection is in sum an inferior right in the constitution of sovereignsubjects (as the Marxists claim), and the call for better privacy protection in thedefense of the opacity of the individual has worked rather to institutionalize theunverifiability of corporation and state. When our strongest defence is a claim toprivacy, we are looking backward to a liberal and modernist heritage rather than

7. Unionprotections arethus described asa modern form ofresistance in apost modern age(Crush 1992:841).



forward to a constitutionality secured with current power brokers according tocurrent threats to individual autonomy.7 The artificial barrier of privacy directsattention to the individual whose privacy is invaded rather than the exercise ofpower and the groups who disproportionately have it (Martin 1993: 116). 7

And, as we have seen, from the Foucauldian position, privacy is not opacity,but rather affords a surface for power. Where to turn? Lyotard (1979: 67) hascalled not for more privacy on the part of the individual, but more transparency onthe part of corporations and the state, in the right to dossier inspection and openand free access to the memory and data banks. Martin (1993) calls for ethics codessetting standards of behavior for those administering data banks and information.Alas, whether soft ethics or hard law, such calls, the master narrative retorts, onlypush the mode of information to higher registrations of hierarchy and security.

Surveillance and Alternative Narratives of Resistance: Sleeping, Slipped, andCrossed

If on a technical level resistance is swallowed up, and if everyday recourse toprivacy is deficient, then what might be the basis of an argument that the doomsayersof the new surveillance may be overstating the coming dystopia? The counter tothis argument is three-pronged. First, as weak a protection as it may be in practice,the right of privacy protection is still a powerful resource for what tenaciouslyremains of the rights-based subject. That surveillance still relies on consent, asreluctant as many of us are to sacrifice a service by refusing it, and as weak as theprotection has become against uninvited disclosure: consent is often both requestedand refused. And with respect to that weakness, sovereignty does still remain theultimate arbiter, with constitutional law representing the guarantor of guarantees.Even when governments and states are little more than propaganda agents for‘globalization’–and we might expect a demand for more surveillance in counter-ing political resistance to this movement–calls for the ‘new economy’ only shiftthe sights for a new political order on the basis of transnational rights protections.Weak as the ‘rights card’ may be, sovereign subjectivity remains sutured to ourthinking of who and what we are, and calls for legal protections–for law, statute,prohibition–are still a powerful rallying cry of that individuality and autonomy.

Second, it is necessary to unpack the various objects served by surveillancetechnologies. Strategies of resistance need to point attention to these objects intheir multiplicity, and not focus so exclusively on the means. Attention to multi-plicity will allow us to see that ‘the eye’ can be hooded, can wink, can look away,can be of a limited modality: in everyday reality, different interests and agendas,

8. This is not tosay that systemsof surveillanceareunproblematic:they are also toolsfor counteringdemocracy.

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as well as an incapacity or unwillingness to see everything, can get in the way of the ‘steamroller ofsurveillance.’

Third, thinking about strategies must get away from under the cloud and shadow that some-how the practices are always most of what is important in the political. Reversal, counter-deploy-ment, inversion–the turning of the tables or the utilization of practices of surveillance in a reversalof its targets–these are not strategies to be dismissed as more of the same political rationality,because to do so only disclaims the importance of distinct interests, goals, and objects. Here, to theextent that large-scale surveillance technologies like Echelon serve a single master, they also pro-vide a window to it: but the window itself is still only a tool of the political.8The use of sovereignpower as a counter to surveillance is already the subject of much work (see Pratt 2000); here wewill spend the remaining time of this paper looking at how the multiple and crossed objects ofsurveillance corrupt, divert and counter the ‘eye’ and the ocular. In this, we are only offering asynthesis of much current work on surveillance.

Rust Never Sleeps: The Winking or Snoozing Eye

To read that surveillance eats up resistance as difference is to suspend the question of the unity ofits objective(s). When agency is pushed forward into practice, we can assume that all practice isdeliberate. Indeed, surveillance technologies do serve purposes, however, these purposes can becorrupted, ruptured, or diverted, and the delivering agency can itself operate at cross-purposes inits mission.

Herbert (1996) has shown this in his analysis of the LAPD. He offers two contrasting vi-gnettes aimed to demonstrate that the agency of surveillance itself may be opaque, obdurate, andreluctant. The first vignette offers a glimpse of a police chase of a stolen car, complete withhelicopter cover, FLIR (a foward looking infrared device mounted on the helicopter), a ‘nightsun’spotlight with 20 million candlepower, broadcasts between helicopter and patrol cars on the ground,and use of the onboard computer terminal to check the car’s registry. The chase ends with thesuspect with nowhere to run, exposed in the brilliance of the helicopter’s spotlight and the coordi-nated trap of the cruisers on the ground: resistance, indeed, appears futile. The second vignetteinvolves a suspected gang related shooting, which involves the police going through the motionsof collecting bullet casings, setting up tape, interviewing one or two witnesses, and turning overtheir evidence to the detective squad, who ‘are likely to ignore it.’ In this second illustration, policelack, and are relatively indifferent about obtaining, sufficient intelligence to crack the case. Herbertnotes that the very techniques designed to enhance surveillance capacity, like the onboard compu-ter systems, may also substitute for ‘observational policing,’ in which individual officers rely ontheir perceptive powers. In addition, law may work as a counter-discourse, imposing itself be-tween surveillance capacity and target, and restricting their access to privileged spaces, like thehome (c.f. Stinchcombe 1963).



Restricting ourselves only to policing, organizational evaluations of public policing have foundthat they are complex organizations serving a variety of missions–crime prevention, law enforce-ment, emergency services, peacekeeping–and that these often compete with one another, a factmost crystallized at budget time. As well as making information available, police agencies makeinformation unavailable, converting information from common knowledge to privileged policeknowledge. As Green (1997) shows, police convert ‘offered knowledge’ (or information freelygiven to authorities), to ‘revelatory knowledge’ (information that is coercively extracted throughthe power of authority). Police also fail to take mandated notes of an event, thus erasing knowl-edge from organizational memory, and also actively resist their own supervisory surveillance,facilitating a redirecting of the scope of police intervention ‘from below’ (de Lint 2000). Class orsocial status, political connections, race: these have all been shown to influence how information iscollected and where information resurfaces, and also whether information is deemed sufficient toprovoke intervention back again on a subject.

Such illustrations above can be replicated endlessly, and with reference to other institutionsand organizations (see Gilliom 1997). They underscore the ultimate futility not of resistance, butof the final realization of the Hegelian dream. The idea that surveillance is everywhere and ex-panding seizes the imaginary, but from the point of view of its agents, there are breaks and corrup-tions from the singular purpose, with the result that information gets buried, deposited in the wrongplace, or used for interventions inconsistent with missions. To turn the screw once again–this timefrom the inverse perspective of the fertility of surveillance–new ways are constantly devised toerect opacity: the innovation to cultivate this opacity and to hide behind it, inspiring surveillancetechnologies, also inspires those who deliver those technologies from being penetrated themselves.Agents of surveillance guarantee the reproduction of opacity: they depend on it: they are mastersof the membrane.

And here, the erasure or absorption of interest and conflict in Foucauldian theory becomesespecially problematic: there is difference inside the machine: both of the interested and disinter-ested variety. When we think not of apparatuses, but more concretely of organizations as needingto be staffed, given directives, provided incentives, then we quickly see a schedule of interests,appeals to principle, to the hegemonic, etc. We also see that organizations, even whole states andcivilizations, can rust out from the inside. Pinkerton’s famous slogan ‘the eye that never sleeps,’ itshould not be forgotten, is promotional copy.

Modal Slippage

If the panopticon relies on the ocular and minimizes other dimensions of the material, should weexpect a modal slippage between the capacity of surveillance and the availability of resistance?Indeed, as Rhodes tells us, (Rhodes 1998: 287) prisoner resistance relies on smell and sound pol-lution as the logical counter to just such an overdetermination of the scopic. The ‘prisoner discov-ers that his body, the very ground of the panoptical relation, is also its potential undoing; he haswithin himself the making of a perverse opacity.’ In the IMU, prisoners resort to, among other

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devices, the throwing of feces ‘as the eruption into the controlled space of the panopticon of theirreducible materiality, a materiality that cannot be cut off at its source and yet, in the words of aunit supervisor, must not be allowed to ‘contaminate the community’ (Rhodes 1998: 296). The siteof the body of the inmate is one of a highly charged struggle, a battle for control. Rhodes notes thatwith acts like throwing feces the prisoner turns highly private acts into spectacles, they retaliate byproducing unsavory ‘sensory effects of all kinds, afflicting their keepers with an aversive up-closeexperience of their own bodies’ (1998: 307). ‘[D]isciplinary spaces . . . invite and magnify disor-der, pollution and noise’ (1998: 288).

This is one illustration (others could be given) of the slippage between modes of presentationand review, or between discourses and practices, or between utterances and speech acts and bodilypractices and interactions. This may be understood using the concept of assemblage: the spatialityof the panoptic as a kind of ‘virtual machine’ or diagrammatic, is countered by movements of‘deterritorialization,’ or ‘lines of flight along which the assemblage (panopticism) breaks down orbecomes transformed into something else’ (Patton 1999: 14). Under the panoptic, deterritorializationtakes the space advantage away by making spatial order less consequential as a governing princi-ple. In the example of the feces-throwing prisoner, the norm is presented through the visual but isreviewed by bodily practices and other fields of the sensory.

Crossed Objects of Surveillance: Finessing Juncture, Gap, and Contradiscursives

Herbert’s study of the LAPD provides a relatively clear-cut illustration of a crime control agenda.There are other goals and interests that may buy into particular surveillance technologies, and thesemay be cross-cutting or contradictory. Thus surveillance mechanisms are insensible without ob-jects. Surfaces need to be discovered before they are penetrated, and their search and discoveryrequires an agenda, a ‘for what?’ or ‘for whom?’

Here we identify three such objects: looking through for security, looking after or taking care,and looking over for pleasure. The fact of their multiplicity, as we have been arguing, allows afinessing of juncture, overlap, and counter-discourse. Again, this is one way we differ and legiti-mate our differences: we call upon other recognizable and valued goals and interests. Practices andapparatuses in their full meaningfulness are still tools, and surveillance mechanisms must be un-derstood as complex on the question: penetration for intervention for which order, interest or need?We wondered earlier whether surveillance responds to and accomplishes a de-politicization andde-socialization of the norm. In looking at how different and competing objects may be absorbedin the totalizing metaphor ‘the eye’ we also see a re-politicization and re-socialization of the normin the interstices: in the cross-currents of subjection.

Looking Through for Security

As we have argued, much of the literature on surveillance situates it as an expression of more andmore social control. The other is disclosed–penetrated, exposed and registered–with an eye to a



vista of security at the backside of opacity. The power of knowledge is here a weapon of liberationfrom a danger whose own power is secret. The exposure of the operation of the will of the ‘danger-ous other’ will immobilize the advantage of this secrecy. Security is here an absolute knowledge ofeach and every thought, gesture, instinct, genetic predisposition, because such knowledge, suchexposure, in subjecting each to the will of all, will deprivatize spaces for difference.

First, it is necessary to revisit the idea that surveillance augments a perceived absence of socialcontrol. We noted earlier that the sociability of this control is eclipsed by surveillance, and that theorder that is putatively maintained is suspended as a possibility or an ideal. It might be furthercontended that surveillance, filling the gap between the real and ideal, has as its true object themaintenance or protection of a given interest in order. As just one example, there are politicalinterests which combine to place a CCTV system in the town square as a preferred allocation of thetown purse.

Second, looking through for security has a mechanics that is opposed, in many respects, to itsobject. Deprivatizing spaces of difference sets the discovery of homo criminalis against the immo-bilization of homo economicus (see Gordon 1991; Pasquino 1991). Thus the technology of expo-sure must, and has always been, distributed according to a hierarchy of interest behind the gaze,lest homo economicus be stymied or handcuffed. Accordingly, security is not the object so muchas the immediate justification of a resultant differential penetration of the other, a penetration ac-cording to the flexible fixing of the entrepreneurial and criminal. The body of the condemned isstill a matter of spectacle (witness reality TV), but it is a spectacle erected at the boundary of freespeech and free enterprise. This, too, is a time of libel chill, off-shore banking, and the SLAP suit.

We are familiar with the Hobbesian moment in which we agree to a social contract with an all-seeing Leviathan to prevent us from a war of each against all. Today, our schedule of dangers andthreats is of a different variety than posited by Hobbes: rather, the constant discursive exemplifica-tion of the Hobbesian threat serves to reduce the ‘heterodox debate’ and to make more pressingconflicts ‘invisible’ (Christie 1977). What Simon (1997) has called ‘governing through crime’ isan imposition of a limited field of security as a permissible object of the political. Yet, when ascitizens we rack up the top ten dangers which are likely to rob us of our lives, health, livelihood, theenjoyment of our loved ones, or the chances of our progeny, we find they are little penetrated andexposed by surveillance security systems, which concentrate on this delimited reading of risk.Knowledge of the dangers and risks to the living environment on which we depend: this other sideof security is insufficiently mediated; it lacks exposure as a security problem. As Halsey and Whiteargue, we lack an ‘ecological imagination regarding crime and crime control’ (1998: 367). In-deed, the question of the restrictive politics of surveillance for security can stand more penetration.Our security is indeed threatened, and it may be argued that we have indeed seen through to whatthreatens it most, but the division between the privacy of homo economicus and the all-too-ex-posed homo criminalis has left a legacy along which our political surveillance is bifurcated. We–

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9. It is interestingthat in criminol-ogy, a disciplineestablished tojustify interven-tion against theindividual on theprinciple ofminimizing socialrisks, is mergingin some placeswith studies inecology andpeace and conflictstudies (seeHenry andMilovanivic1990; Halsey andWhite 1998).

10. Fox notes the‘dominancearising fromprofessionalclosure,patriarchy,capitalism orbureaucracy’(1995: 110).

for whatever it is ‘we’ are–apparently lack the political will as a collectivity tolaunch a preemptive rescue.

This draws attention again to the contours of the surveillance problematic.Here a counter-discourse is not to refuse that security is a problem, but rather toargue that security is a problem that is not adequately penetrated by the practicesof surveillance. What much of surveillance security does is look to security offi-cials as experts who may fix interpretation of the security problem at a specificsite, and as a property of security experts themselves. This is a practice that pro-duces its politics in the social problem (Gusfield 1983; Henry and Milovanovic1991). Such interpretive fixing (see Esquith 1987; Ward 1997) in a politics of fearserves a large and expanding criminal-industrial complex in which public resourcesare allocated, systems of surveillance keyed, and expertise continues to be di-vided and delimited.

A counter-strategy is to exploit a concern about security using surveillancelanguage and technology to penetrate those institutions that most threaten thelargest collectivities. This kind of expanded or counter-surveillance is beginningto take place (again), with demonstrations against the IMF in Washington in April2000 and against the WTO in Seattle in November 1999. Here an ethic of care orstewardship competes with the Hobbesian lineage of security and order–or ex-pands the security field beyond the current economic, social and political restric-tions placed on it: first world, anthropocentric, discounted.9

Looking After or Taking Care, and Looking Over for Pleasure

So readily the Panopticon shadowed our thinking about regulation, and so easilyis sociology reduced to being paradigmatically about social control (see Sites1973), that we have forgotten that surveillance is a practice which can and some-times does follow an ethic of care (Lyon 1992: 170; Martin 1993: 115; Hillier1996: 103). Disallowing discursive space for (altruistic) care has been a legacy ofmuch Foucauldian post-humanist and anti-foundationalist thinking which has foundthe will-to-power or a subjection to power/knowledge underneath each govern-mental gesture. Such a gesture, in the pastoral described by Foucault (1988b),intends to leave no remainder by which the citizen may care for herself to theexclusion of what is good for the state. Thus, political or social reform can neverbe a victory of humanism, and every victory is always anti-humanist.

Many critical Foucauldian and post-structuralist thinkers have struggled torescue a will-to-care behind surveillance which is not also an absorption of theneeds of the individual into the needs of the state (see Foucault 1988b). Fox(1995: 108) has noted that care has a dual meaning of ‘caring about someone’ and



‘caring for someone’ (citing Thomas 1993), but that in large part in the socialsciences it is ‘care-as-discipline’ or the ‘vigil of care’ grounded in a Foucauldianpower/knowledge that has been most dominant. Citing Bond, Fox (1995: 118)notes that care-as-discipline involves four processes including: ‘the implementa-tion of expert knowledge, the legitimation of care through medical judgements ofhealth and illness, the individualization of behaviour, and its consequentdepoliticization.’ Following Cixous (1986) Fox (1995: 108) notes that an alterna-tive form of care, the ‘gift of care,’ that ‘celebrates difference and is mediated bylove, generosity, trust and delight’ offers a counter to the dominant reading.

Thus, to give the humanist discourse another turn of the screw, the soul-pen-etrating tyranny of the treatment or care profession and its ongoing proprieties,engendered a collapse of the distinction between control and care.10 However, asFox points out, there remains a dogged non-reciprocal giving in the interstices ofa technology of power.11 Fox goes further and argues that care-as-gift offers re-sources for a resistance to the discourse of care-as-vigil (1995: 109, 117; see Mikeand Still 1992). He argues that the gift of care offers discursive space whichaffords, enables, or empowers ‘the recipient of the gift to become other.’ As par-ents and good neighbors we know that the supervision of our children is neither inpractice nor intention in toto an expression of authority or power which aims toswallow autonomy, freedom, and also resistance whole, or to deploy it to advancetighter regulation: quite the contrary, parental care (not unlike complex social or-ganization–see Katz 1968) cultivates a space for refusal for use by the child. In-deed, maybe care in the ideal is counter-surveillance: we offer affordances to ratherthan absorb the difference(s) of the other (see Michael and Still 1992).

Much work on surveillance has ignored this idea that supervision is also alooking for intervention, but a looking for intervention which cannot be erasedunder the steamroller of more and more control, more and more subjection. Tosay that individually and organizationally we do not attempt to foster growth as afor-itself, in its unpredictability, its potential to shut us out and swallow us, is to bea hopeless cynic, and in this context, to be hypocritical. Here too, we can takeheart at the post-Geertzian, Cliffordian, or post-post colonial moment, which alsoemerges in anthropology: doing nothing is also not doing good.

When we erase interests, or penetrate them into infinity or oblivion, it is littlewonder that care of the self or of the other is also erased. But this is only to allowtoo much partiality in thinking about surveillance. Martin (1993: 115) argues thatthe difference between supervision and surveillance is that the latter is character-ized by both a lack of trust and a lack of balance of power in the relationship.Gilliom (1997) notes how deeply Appalachian welfare recipients experience this

11. Lyon (1992:170), and Marx(1988) note thatsome ‘praise-worthy goals’are behind theproliferation ofsurveillance.Martin (1993:115) notes thatwatching overthe sick andinfirm is a formof surveillancewhich can bemost welcome.‘Many peopleappreciatesomeonewatching out forthem when theyare doingsomething thatis potentiallyrisky, such asswimming at seaor climbing aladder.’

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lack of trust under the computer surveillance to which they are subject. But we also take comfortfrom lifeguards and air traffic controllers, playground supervisors and traffic cops: these too havecolonized the spaces of our ‘sociability.’ Which is only to point out once again the danger of fixingour sights on surveillance as message instead of messenger.

In addition to looking through for security and looking after to take care, we may see lookingover for pleasure as a third object to which looking architectures enable the pursuit. We havementioned in passing that there is a pleasure in the look. This pleasure (or scopolophilia) is easilyexploited to serve exclusive security interests at the level of social and political organization. Thepsychology of pleasure may be sutured to a politics: Benthamian pleasure as good may be recog-nized with Foucauldian state-maximization through citizen-utilization (1988: 158) In addition,specular technologies reify and commodify this satisfaction of ‘looking over for pleasure.’ There isenjoyment in being recorded, of having one’s existence verified in one’s ‘cookie trail’ of internetexplorations (Goodwin and Humphries 1982; Elmer 1997).

While the sociology of social control makes much reference to the relationship between powerand the specular, surveillance literature undervalues the pleasure obtaining in the Look, and particu-larly the consequences of this pleasure as a counter to the master narrative. Freud has argued thatlooking is a sexual or libidinal drive desire activated in the play of absence and distance. Pleasur-able looking may take the form of voyeurism, in which the object of the look is outside of and safelydistant from the subject. Pleasurable, secret, looking is, according to Metz, a kind of ‘lawlessseeing’ (Metz 1975, cited in Kuhn 1975: 58). Lacan argued that the ‘mirror stage’ in which thechild sees their reflection in the mirror, marks a realization that one can be ‘the other,’ no longer onewith the subject of the mother. Sartre (1956) speaks of the reversal of roles as someone watchingsomeone else in a park becomes the watched and master or subject becomes slave or other. Thegaze is thus both thrilling and terrifying as it represents difference and absorption. In a looking overfor pleasure we refer to the excitement or pleasure experienced in the ‘capture’ of ‘the other’ in alook which cannot be returned. The experience of secret looking breaks the limit of the subject byimposing the object in a context of limitations of which it/he/she is not aware. This hierarchicallook lacks bi-directionality and audit: it offers the pleasure of interpreting the other without ac-countability to second and third-party oversight. The specular as a source both of power and pleas-ure has, of course, a long history in cultural studies after Adorno (1990), including Benjamin (1983),Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Kuhn (1985), and others. Benjamin’s Le Flaneur and Conrad’s TheSecret Agent illustrate this tension between power, pleasure and the spectacular. While Conrad’ssecret agent is a menace of unaccountable state power who has no access to and may interveneagainst each other and all and is himself accessed only by the very few, if at all, Benjamin’s LeFlaneur is more a scopic thrill-seeker, whose pleasure is not in making a difference in secret, but inkeeping his own intervention limited to the joy of the observation itself.. In mid-century, there wasa strong view in which interests and power were a source of inquiry in this analysis. Kulturkritikbegan to theorize the relationship between capital and pleasure in commodity fetishism. More re-



cently, Poster (1990: 72-73) notes that information, which is potentially everywhere instantane-ously, is being quickly commodified and attached to market forces. Altheide (1994: 667) arguesthat the discourse of social life is becoming more uniform and less segmented, particularly in ourconceptions of normality, order, and our ‘vocabularies of motive.’ Shearing and Stenning (1985),taking the panoptic to Disney, demonstrate that increasing corporatization and mass private prop-erty lifts the veil of privacy, exposing us to a surveillance which attends to our consumptive pleas-ures, promising to make them safe.

‘Sneaky thrills,’ in which one takes enjoyment from the exposure of the other from a safevantage point (voyeurism), or in which one risks the exposure of the self to the other for thepleasure of the unveiling (exhibitionism), may be quite at odds with the object of social security, orconditions maximizing longstanding absence of conflict. However, the former is easily and rou-tinely consolidated with the latter. This is demonstrated in the use of media like vigilante surveil-lance and in such exemplary cultural fixtures as the amusement park or arcade. Through off-the-shelf consumer products or by linking up to extant expert systems, our thirst for hide and seek ismediated. And, we are told, we can work the membrane of security and exposure, we can make‘arrests’ just like the professionals.

Denied a standpoint for an essential self or unfalsified consciousness after post-structuralism,the individual is already hemmed in by a language that structures expectation and desire within anarrow grid of the security concern. And this would be our lot. However, the same corruptions,gaps and slippages that dog security surveillance also hound the mediation of our pleasures, caresand fears.

Mediating Our Pleasures, Cares and Fears

It is necessary to bring together some of the strands of argument we have been presenting. We havenoted the contention that surveillance may reflect a relative absence of socialibility in control. Wealso made mention of the temporal contingency of the social order, and the direction of surveil-lance towards more and more simulation. We suggested that this may invite more docility and thepreconception that politics is something fixed behind the screen. We entertained the argument thatthe capacity of the individual to co-produce local social and political orders may be weakened. Asubstitution of surveillance for social control has been said to pose consequences for the veryinfrastructure of socialibility.

If local, informal, immediate social controls are in relative decline, the telematic society hasemerged to serve an apparently insatiable appetite for safely-distant norm clarification spectacles,such as the television drama. The architecture of looking in the telematic society is one in whichdistance and virtuality are deployed through our pleasures, cares and fears to sensitize us to a fixingof security at a certain point as a set piece drama in which life may imitate art (which is also adepoliticization of security or a ‘governing through crime’).

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In the hyper-reflexivity of telematic societies in the information mode, an uncommodified (anddangerous) care-as-gift and a re-politicization of the security field would appear to be still-born.Politically, and normatively, the effects are said to be powerful. Normatively, punching keys togain access to the world, watching staged conflicts from a secure distance, relying on expert sys-tems: such practices change the dynamics of interaction and influence behaviour (see Altheide1994). Politically, mass mediated ‘normative chatter’ is informed by concentrated, monopolisticinterests that reduce the ‘heterodox debate’ (Mathiessen 1997). Bogard’s ‘simulation of surveil-lance’ together with Mathiessen’s ‘synopticism’ portend a dystopia where what is apparent to us isa dead conflict–one in which our pleasures, cares and fears have already been chosen and resolved.

To counter these powerful arguments, we have observed that a monolithic surveillance is nev-ertheless undermined by the multiple interests and goals that surveillance apparatuses execute.While it is important to pay attention to the media in which norms are clarified, it is also worthstressing that there is no truth, no purity that media can keep clear. Whether appeal court orpopular justice, street corner or city centre, digital or analog, norms are always clarified in the‘distortion’ of the medium, and will also absorb the contexts and politics in which they are situated.Here, one may better take the position of Henry (1985) and Merry (1988) than of Foucault (1988)on popular justice: while Foucault sees the court as antithetical to revolution, Henry and Merryunderstand that much of what is objectionable about a court finds its way to alternative vehicles ofnorm clarification and conflict resolution and that what is necessary in norm clarification andconflict resolution also requires action (transparency, fairness, standing) associated with a court.

Norms are also being constantly redefined through emerging and alternative media. We havealso hinted with reference to the political desensitization which attends turning norm clarificationinto a consumptive pleasure, that here too there is much disjuncture and alternative narrative whichdoes not always deflect off of the frame and keep clear of the format. It is also an age of alternativedispute resolution, family group conferencing, victim-offender reconciliation, and new age grouptherapy. At the same time that the conflict is fetishized and commodified, to extend Christie’s(1977) argument, new media are deployed to retrieve the local, the political and the cultural, withthe norm.

In the meantime, the incessant reproduction of worn and frayed differences begins to producenot more of the same order, but rather indifference to it. Another, perhaps more powerful, readingof the narrow fixing or arrest of care, pleasure and security in our mediated experiences is that wequickly require more and more radical changes not only in the formats of representation, but also inthe frames in which they are offered. We constantly need a new vehicle of representation lest ‘thefix’ becomes too redundant. The interplay between context and content is an exciting dynamiconly if the context cannot be shown to always escape unaltered, like a film for the next bunch ofmovie-goers. The endless representation of the norm through, for example, the criminal other,does inevitably run out of permutations to become not satisfying, but culturally stultifying or bor-



ing. Reality TV or vigilante co-productions max out until nothing different, nothing new, can becaptured and displayed in the format: at this point, it is the context of the frame to which thespectator turns, asking, is this all you got? What is, after all, in you that you cannot give me some-thing different? We noted earlier that a strong caution against underestimating technologies oflooking is that it invites political apathy. However, it may be that not apathy, but rather boredom orindifference is the cultural precursor to political activity, in which the debates of mainstream poli-tics will include currently marginal and elided dimensions of security, care and pleasure.

Finally, we have wrestled with the modernist variation on a theme: when pleasure, cares andfears are expressed as commodity fetishisms won’t ‘the other’ and ‘difference’ finally becomeartefactual? We have argued that surveillance is paradoxical conceptually. If one follows theimagery of the organic, surveillance feeds on a resistance and difference that it also must continu-ously discover. In the meantime, the more integrated the system, the more prone it is to radicaldisintegration (see Altheide 1994: 672). If, on the other hand, we bracket ‘the eye’ and view itfrom the margins, it turns out to be comprised of a fluid and pro-active consolidation of manydifferent looks, with objects which may indeed be arrested at the sight-line of order, security, andeven control, but which can also be further probed and found to serve other objects and interests.When we ourselves peer behind the looking specialists and their quick fixes, or when we viewthese fixes from the margins, from the spaces between the lines, or even from a lowly positionbehind the line of sight, we instead perceive how corrupted the gaze is, and how lapses, disjunctures,oversight, and partiality seem altogether too powerful. From here, for some, it is a short step toseek to return to the hope for some mechanism of oversight by which such corruption and margin-ality may be brought to account.

Here, it is important to punctuate once again that there is separation between interests operat-ing both behind and in front of the screen: the modernist dream is always just that. Finessing thisseparation, shopping for favorite ‘looks,’ playing discourses against one another, parodying ourbranding, spoofing the other to rescue our own credibility: this shapes what becomes our individu-ality. Gaps, junctures, free spaces, the unmapped: each time it is thought that the code is finallybroken, new oversights/frontiers are discovered and the process begins again: begins again invest-ing the emergent with the residual. Speaking of the spatial representation of the panopticon byFoucault, Deleuze (1988: 44) noted, ‘there is no diagram [of it] that does not also include, besidesthe points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is with these that we ought to begin inorder to understand the whole picture.’

Surveillance is not simply about social control, nor is it simply about the eradication of differ-ence, nor is it ultimately about more security. Rather, it is a practice serving diverse and contradic-tory ends, and a discourse attended by many counter-discursive narratives and undisciplined spaces.It is through an analytic of modes of resistance that the totalizing and depoliticizing consequencesof surveillance may also be countered. The master narrative in which the other is dissolved into a

46 Willem de Lint


dystopic Subject is, and remains, a modernist artefact, especially when security is the unitary ob-ject served by surveillance: in this respect thinking about surveillance is itself guilty of inadequatepenetration of the object. A post-modern reading would not try to fit current technological ad-vancements into the modern sleeve, as a way to final completion. Rather, and as we have at-tempted to do here, such a reading would point out the multiple constitutionalities of both subjectsand objects. Where this reading may differ with a non-materialist. post-modern treatment is ingranting importance to interests and political power. A power which, consequently, is better un-derstood as a relation of relative advantage where there are competing interests.

Conclusion

The assemblage of ‘panopticism’ or security surveillance has evolved over time as a short-hand ofthe trivialization of the individual in the shadow of state or corporate power. It has been arguedhere that the lines of flight according to which the panoptic has become a scarecrow on the horizonof communities and collectives, are also the lines of fault according to which that scarecrow dis-solves back into dust. The worry about security surveillance, whether pro or con, is in this way aneffort to right and fix Leviathan; it is an expression of sensitivity to liberal capitalist angst, ratherthan a positive attempt to look through its weaknesses.

As members of political organizations, we each have an interest in governing ourselves ac-cording to verifiable knowledges and by adhering to principles and goals which are democraticallyand transparently established. We should always have the right to look behind the screen to unpackthe politics of the formats, protocols, and profiles that are used to convert us into the excuses ofpower. For the most part, however, we should devote our energies to, and place under scrutiny, notthe fact of the vehicle or apparatus that does the conversion, but rather the purposes and interests,the goals and objects, which are served by such technology, and also the sites at which expertinterpretations of security threats are fixed. The danger of positioning the technological as the coreof the problem is that technological innovation will always be generated to satisfy our desire tolook into the other; it will constantly be innovated upon to help mediate our normativity. There-fore, we should be looking at the distribution of opacity in the first instance: where are the barriersto the scrutiny of one another? Who gets to hide behind these barriers and why? Who gets thebenefit of a numbered Swiss bank account, and for whom is it a necessity? Think for a momenthow much corporate crime is exercised carte blanche behind the security and surveillance curtain:the fix is in.

There is much room for a post-Marxist and post-Foucauldian sociology of resistance, onewhich bridges Deleuze with the sociology of social control. Such a sociology will need to addressmany things we have elided or failed to address here: a thoroughgoing comparison of Marxian andFoucauldian resistance or refusal, a full treatment of agency and power, more attention to thearchitecture of affordances, to borrow from Mike and Still (1992), and an attempt, at least, atclarifying the meaning(s) of the term ‘resistance.’ Like social control and surveillance itself, ‘re-



sistance’ is chock-full of a power/knowledge: it suggests unity, agreement, hypothetical consen-sus. So let us keep it lower case, keep it plural, and hold it near the Deleuzian line of flight.Perhaps a sociology of difference/resistance to meet power/knowledge in the corner?

Institute of Criminology, Victoria University of Wellington,Wellington, New Zealand

AcknowledgementsThis paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, May 26, 2000. Special thanks tothe graduate students who participated in the Winter 2000 version of 48 560 at the Department of Sociology andAnthropology, University of Windsor. Your terrific enthusiasm and superb participation helped me through some of thedensity of ‘the surveillance fix.’ Thanks also to Peter Kemp, of Memorial University, for dogged and relentless libraryresearch. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Suzan Ilcan and Dan O’Connor for three years of friendship, encouragementand good talk and for their support of this paper. Finally, thanks also to Kevin Haggerty and the participants of the Lawand Society Association panel.

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