While this week’s authors break with Foucault, there are certainly elements of his thought that linger. If as Browne notes, the Foucauldian paradigm of power in modernity is the Panoptic gaze, what do we make of a moment when practices of surveillance constitute the proliferation of data rather than an identifiable subject? Moreover, how do we account for the fact that the production of abstracted data nonetheless continues to subject and order life? How is it that the conditions of surveillance and subjection might be the shared conditions informing the rise of the type and the loss of the subject?
As Andrejevic and Gates demonstrate, these questions are related to a radical shift in practices of knowledge. They write: “Big data surveillance is not about understanding the data, nor is it typically about explaining or understanding the world captured by that data—it is about intervening in that world based on patterns available only to those with access to the data and the processing power,” (190). The claim that knowledge doesn’t just reveal something about the world, but intervenes in it is very Foucauldian. The difference seems to be that whereas modern practices of surveillance and knowledge were tied to the claim of truth, the practices of big data are increasingly severed from it.
What about the issue of resistance though? In Foucault, resistance is predicated on the prior constitution of the subject through subjection. The implication is that there’s no agency without productive constraint. I think that Browne’s critique of Foucault and the notion of a universal subjection is useful here. As she asserts, the slave ship was an immensely significant racialized site in the history of surveillance, a site overlooked by Foucault and others. She also states that, “dark sousveillance speaks not only to observing those in authority (the slave patroller or the plantation overseer, for in- stance) but also to the use of a keen and experiential insight of plantation surveillance in order to resist it,” (22). Although Browne’s articulation of dark sousveillance as resistance depends on authority, it puts pressure on the idea of a universal subjection and highlights the erasure of (anti)Blackness in genealogies of surveillance and power.
Finally, I was struck by Brunton and Nissenbaum’s discussion of the ethics of obfuscation as a strategy for resistance. Their assessment of ethics suggest that obfuscation can’t be taken as an instance of agency in a positivist sense. It relies on some prior structure of obligation and cooperation. Their text reminded me of Glissant, who I later found cited in Gaboury’s essay. It’s interesting that Glissant refers to opacity as a right. As such, opacity or privacy would depend on the juridical and the ethical. While I absolutely don’t think that we must unquestioningly obey the law or strive for a moral high ground, I do think that a concept like opacity or privacy might be unthinkable without a legal and ethical framework.
The panoptic diagram is so iconic and steals attention away from other models in Discipline and Punish. I think Foucault's overlooked example of the medical examination is far more relevant to the capture/dataveillance model:
ReplyDelete“The examination, surrounded by all its documentary techniques, makes each individual a 'case': a case which at one and the same time constitutes an object for a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power. The case is no longer, as in casuistry or jurisprudence, a set of circumstances defining an act and capable of modifying the application of a rule it is the individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc.”
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977, 191.
“This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.”
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977, 197.
Yes definitely! Also the forms of classification in The History of Sexuality. I guess what's of interest for me is how some type of self-aware identity is produced through practices of knowledge and subjection, rather than acted upon. I think the medical examination example is really pertinent because of its discreetness.
DeleteI was also struck by the use of the term opacity and liked how it took the term away from the opacity of the black box of technology (how we can never really know how the technologies we use actually function, how the language surrounding their processes are really opaque, as we discussed in the first few weeks of class) towards to a more community-centered approach/decentralized (maybe not the right terms?) approach to opacity. This nicely linked with the format of their piece and I wonder how and why the "how-to" guide", the "user-guide" as a mode of knowledge sharing is so prominent in discussion surveillance. This type of methodological approach to the topic seems to be more prevalent than in any other academic fields? Why surveillance rather than say, algorithmic biaises? What strikes a nerve differently with surveillance? What time of communal imaginary does this counter-tactics stimulate?
ReplyDeleteThese questions are really interesting. I think there's something about surveillance that hits deep, because it transgresses our understanding of selfhood and property as preexisting our place in a social order. Although today the algorithmic bias and surveillance are inextricably linked, I can still conceive of the bias as existing independently of my actions. With mass surveillance, that fantasy can't be sustained.
DeleteAlso, like Noa, I'd like to add another element of Foucaul'ts theory of power to our model of surveillance: whats the role of the confession in surveillance?
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