Core Post 4 - What is Total Surveillance?

Thoughts on the week's readings: I appreciated Simone Brown’s bringing together histories of transatlantic slavery and surveillane systems, as her intervention provides an important historical look at how certain populations have always been wrapped up in regimes of (almost) total surveillance. We can’t understand contemporary surveillance without looking at how black people and bodies are sur- (and sous-)veilled, as blackness has always been a site of intense concern and management. For Brown, racialized surveillance is not merely the application of race to fixed control systems, but “those moments when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries, border, and bodies along racial lines, and where the outcome is often discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized by such surveillance” (16-17). What we learn from her historical dive into the archives is that surveillance was (is) an integral part of the daily reinforcement of a violent social reality.

A theme that runs through the readings is the notion that contemporary surveillance is totalizing and complete (or seemingly total). The common point of comparison, Bentham’s Panopticon (through Foucault) is useful for thinking about surveillance and affect, but it might also be limiting because the Panopticon is oriented around a center/periphery structure with a singular guard that cannot look in all directions at once.  Does this match the contours of contemporary surveillance, or do our surveillance structures take on different shapes (distributed, piecemeal, computationally surveilled, “un-intuable correlations” (Andrejevic and Gates 187))? As Gates and Andrejevic point out, structural incompleteness is a characteristic of big data (where the sheer size of datasets is meant to make up for any inaccuracies (189-190).

How do notions of accuracy and completeness play out in our understandings of surveillance? While the systems of surveillance described by Gates and Andrejevic are seemingly total, it still requires the coordination of numerous different systems and infrastructures to create a composite picture of someone’s movements. There is not yet a surveillance singularity, but given our discussion on infrastructure last week, are we on our way to it?