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I am a new member and I would need some urgent academic help. Tomorrow i have to submit an essay for my postgraduate study. as Slovenian I am not sure if everything is in order in the essay. I attached the essay in this message. If anybody would consider looking into my essay I would be more then glad about that.
Introduction
This essay represents a possible answer to the question of the transforming the form of power from classical physical, person-to-person alike configurations to the new formation of ubiquitous - virtual – power. In contemporary society the classical Bentham’s idea of Panopticon has been employed to society as an ‘Electronic Panopticon’ wherein government agencies, commercial interests and corporations use information technologies to sort people into ‘groups’ or ‘types’. Supervisors exert power over the supervised in some manner or other (King 2001). As some authors still interpret Western society with the few-watch-many panopticon model, called as exclusionary fortress (King 2001), others are more focused on many-watch-few the Synopticon model (Bauman 1998). Yet, essay examines the similarities and differences of those two models, with an additional consideration to a hybrid model of the superpanopticism.
Why is than that this utilitarian two hundred years old idea of panopticon survived and extended in to new – hybrid – forms? This essay provides also the retrospective of the development of the power and public surveillance from the panoptic initial idea till nowadays electronic global power.
The spread of globalization and electronic era brought new technologies in everybody’s everyday life. Over all, I should repeat the questions raised by Lyon (1994) whether do those new technologies spell a qualitatively new surveillance? If so, does this add up to the emergence of a more authoritarian, prison-like society? I conclude with the question if this is really prison-like society for everybody or only for non reluctant citizen. Therefore, is the new society really the limited society? Do we as contemporary residents have lack of opportunities and live in virtual cells or are we all just blinded and idled of all opportunities?
But again, what about the residents of the non-western, ‘underdeveloped’ world – under what source and type of the surveillance do they live and what is their opportunity of resistance when they choose to ‘enter’ the West – so called surveillance society. What does it mean to shift the ‘real jungle’ with the ‘manufactured jungle’?
From Panopticon to Synopticon
Today’s society is often called as surveillance society. Many consider contemporary society as Post-Panopticon society, as a copy of initial idea of the total, the 360 degree surveillance area.
In the eighteen century a British reformer Jeremy Bentham presented the blueprint of optimal surveillance object called the Panopticon. This rounded structure with the watch tower in the axis of circle gives the gatekeeper/supervisor the ability to see all without being seen; ultimately it gives the keeper the ability to exert power over the inmates. Primary, it was meant to revolutionise the way in which prisons were administrate (King 2001). “There were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks…” (Foucault 1991: 202)
In the Panopticon, the peripheral mass cannot see the observers, and must assume that someone may be watching over them at all time (Boyne 2000). One of the most influential theoretic of the philosophy of Panopticon, Michael Foucault describes it as a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad. In the ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing, when on the other side in the core tower, one sees everything without ever being seen (Foucault 1991). Another weighty sociologist Zygmunt Bauman foremostly sees Panopticon as a weapon against difference, choice and variety (1998). In this point, we can presume that Panopticon is really an opposite idea of democracy. But, as we will see latter, many connect the panopticism with the Western democratic society. Bauman further claims that “The Panopticon’s main purpose was to install discipline and to impose a uniform pattern on the behaviour of its inmates.” (Bauman 1998:50)
A pictorial description of original Bentham’s Panopticon was provided by Foucault, describing it as an architectural figure of this composition. He describes the principle on which it was based:
“…at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, tower. A watchtower is pierced with wide windows that open onto inner side of the ring. The peripheral building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building. They have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to other. All that is needed, than, is a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a school boy.” (Foucault 1991: 200)
While poignant, the architecture of Foucault’s version of Bentham’s Panopticon produces a kind of double vision; two different, divergent stories of the development of evidently modern relations of surveillance, domination and control. Firstly, the story of what goes on with the supervisor or inspector in the central tower and secondly what happens to the person in the cell. The tale of the supervisor takes us to the techniques of observation, information gathering, data management, simulation and to (what Foucault later describes as) ‘a biopolitics of the population’ (Simon 2005). George Orwell (1984 in Simon 2005:4) precisely describes the effect as a result of Panopticon:
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time… You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”
The Panoptic machine makes one visible and at the same time it hides the operations (motives, practice, and ethics) of the supervisor. This relation (being seen without being able to see) provides uncertainty which become a source of anxiety, discomfort and even terror (Simon 2005).
In The Panopticon also the observers were under possible control, it may ever provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms. (Foucault 1991)
One of the important deficiencies of the Panopticon model was exposed by Simon (2005). Though, the Panopticon makes all acts in principle visible in cannot distinguish between acts that conform to the rules and acts which pretend co conform to the rules. Nevertheless, the idea of Panopticon is not always the optimal explanation for the role of power in the modern society. Although, as we will se latter, we can easily name modern public sphere with Foucaultian expression ‘laboratory of power’, has the contemporary society mirrored the sight to the surveillance. The supervision of the few watching the many has turned to the many watching the few.
Reading with Foucault rather than against him Mathesion (in Simon 2005) theorizes a role for the synoptic machine of the contemporary culture industries; accounted for by the critical theory tradition. By the critics like Mathesion and Baudrillard the individual’s relation to the modern media is rather synoptic than panoptic; the relation is extremely visual, where the many (an audience) observe the few (the television programme). But yet we can argue, that provided synoptic apparatus is in tight symbiosis with the panoptic. But one can at this point draw on media theory and argue that synoptic function of the media is the production of homogenous knowledge and wide spread culture (ibid.).
At this point in the theory, the Synopticon emerged as the hybrid version of the Panopticon. Thomas Mathiesen coined the memorial phrase, where the introduction of panoptical power represented a fundamental transformation from situation where the few watch the many to a situation where the many watch the few (Bauman 1998). Bauman (1998) further adds that Synopticon is in its nature global. The watchers are united from their locality and at least spiritually they are transported into cyberspace. Distance no longer matters, even if bodily they remain in place. Globalization is not about what we all wish or hope to do, it is about what happening in the worldwide level, it is about what is happening to all of us (ibid.). It does not matter any more if the targets of the Synopticon mutated from the watched into the watchers stay in the place or move around the globe. And who are the new watched population at whom Synopticon ‘aim its arrows’?
“The many watch the few. The few who are watched are the celebrities. They may come from the world of politics, of sport, of science or show business, or just be celebrated information specialists. Wherever they come from, though, all displayed celebrities put on display the world of celebrities – a world whose main distinctive feature is precisely the quality of being watched – by many, and in all corners of the globe: of being global in their capacity of being watched.” (Bauman 1998:53)
The main difference by the word of Bauman (1998) is that Panopticon forced people into the position where they could be watched, but Synopticon on the other hand needs no coercion. People are seduced into watching and the watched few are tightly selected. Surveillance and consecutively the power are therefore spreading among all of us. We-as the audience are all the part of Synopticon and therefore we are all in the possession of power. We have the possibility to survey and the possibility to be a part of the apparatus. The fictive power is dividing from our television receiver to yours receiver. The power and the surveillance are spreading through the signals, networks and internet connections and they are imaginatively connecting us. Ultimately, we are all part of the game of surveillance, gathered in the electronic arena, where in a fictive menagerie we watch over the selected few. We are covetous for their private life. Their privacy is our required publicity.
The development of new technologies and new techniques of power, consist – on the contrary – in the many watching the few. That is shown in the rise of mass media – television more than any other. That leads to the creation, alongside the Panopticon, of another power mechanism which, coining another apt phrase – Synopticon (Bauman 1998).
History review of surveillance and power
Lyon (1994) sets out as prominent work about surveillance two main traditions the Marxian and the Weberian. Karl Marx’s special attention on surveillance is in aspect of the struggle between labour and capital, where worker is viewed as a means of maintaining managerial control on behalf of capital. Opposite, Max Webber concentrates on the manners that all modern organizations develop means of storing and retrieving data in the form of files as part of the quest of efficient practice within bureaucracy. Such files contain personal information so that government can supervise population. Furthermore, we should opt on Foucault’s contribution to surveillance theory. He claims that modern societies have introduced and employed a range of disciplinary practices rather than relaying on external controls and constrains. This practice is necessary for life to continue in a regularized patterned way. (Lyon 1994)
For Foucault (1991) the panopticism is the general principle of new political elites, who use it as a relation of discipline and not the relation of sovereignty. He sees the idea of panopticism have spread over the globe:
“…although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, in the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law. /…/ in the genealogy of modern society, they have been, with the class domination that traverses it, the political counterpart of the juridical norms according to which power is redistributed. (Foucault 1991: 223)
Governments in 1960s and 1970s developed large-scale date integration projects, which had raised the fear of the omniscient ‘Big Brother’ state. In that time individuals knew when data about them, and for whom and for what reason had been collected. Surveillance systems at that time were discrete and bounded. The concept of databanks expressed a technological and political reality that personal information system had some clear boundaries (Bennett 2001). 1970s were also the time of Orwellian Big Brother states.” This position might be contrasted with that of Lyon (1994) who kept the Orwellian nightmare of 1984 at bay with a Foucauldian emphasis on discipline but has moved on (Lyon, 2001) to incorporate some of the arguments about risk society from Beck.” (Lyon, 2001:10-113).
Anthony Giddens (in Lyon 1994) describes some differences of surveillance in the western societies and the surveillance in the totalitarian eastern block. He finds a gap distinction between surveillance as ‘gathering data on’ and ‘supervising’ people. Giddens claims that totalitarianism is, first of all, an extreme focusing of surveillance (ibid.). But the changes in the political systems, the global technological progress and above all the globalization changed the rules. To conquer and survey the world, one does not need to be present in all places for all the time.
“In the world we inhabit, distance does not seem to matter much. Sometimes it seems that it exists solely in order to be cancelled; as if space was but a constant invitation to slight it, refute and deny. Space stopped being an obstacle – one needs just a split second to conquer it.” (Bauman 1998:77)
In fact, as Kavanagh (1996 in Bauman 1998) stated, globalization is a paradox. While it is very beneficial to a very few, it leaves out or marginalizes two-thirds of the world.
Latest surveillance studies have gone further than Foucault in demonstrating new data collection with sophisticated, yet manipulated forms to alter, manage or even control the live chances of the supervised person (Gandy 1993). As an example Simon (2005) proposes census data, used to generate profiles of various populations to guide the development of government policies, which have further define effects on persons, independent of their knowledge. Only a step away is insurance data, credit information, marketing data etc. In all this cases, data obtained from people is managed independently and used to structure the lives of those people.
New forms of surveillance
As we see, in the contemporarily people are facing the paradoxical situation, where everybody can be the object of observation and simultaneously the subject that execute the surveillance. The strength of the surveillance is taking away our privacy; it prevails into ours most intimate moment and places. The systems of surveillance possess the power for assembling and finally to assemble all needed information that we have ever put into the circulation. Our credit card or post code of our home address, calls made from the mobile and even type of food that we buy in our favourite shop with our favourite club card all tell more about us than we would at anytime wanted to be known. In the traditionally disciplinary the object of surveillance was the body but in ‘dataveillance’ the object of control is simply the digital representation of the body (Simon 2005). Huge data collection systems connected to each other also support each other with the latest information about us and use us and information about us as crucial capital and power.
“No one is spying on us, exactly, although for many people that is what it feels like if and when they find out just how detailed a picture of us is available. ‘They’ know things about us, but we often don’t know what they know, why they know, or with whom else they might share their knowledge.” (Lyon 1994:4)
Dataveillance (the collection, organization and storage of information about persons) and biometrics (the use of the body as a measure of identity) have not only come into focus with the post 9/11 security consciousness of state institutions. These technologies are now becoming a regular feature of the everyday lives and culture of citizens. (Simon 2005)
Deluze (1992 in Simon 2005:17) for example claims that in societies of control what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code – the code is a password and it stand in for bodies. He remarks “the numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals’ and masses, samples, data, markets or ‘banks’.” We can support the Deluze’s idea with a claim that societies have shifted from disciplinary societies to societies of control. This idea parallels the critiques of panopticism, which point to a shift away from classical visual surveillance to dataveillance as a mode of ordering information. Clark (1988 in Howard et al. 2005:69) coined the term dataveillance to signify “the systematic use of personal data systems in the investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons” in an effort to analyze the potential for new digital technologies to allow “increased surveillance of the citizen by the state, and the consumer by the corporation.”
Simon (2005) claims, that the surveillance apparatus does not act on bodies or minds but on information about them. Thus, we can say that dataveillance corresponds to the modulatory effects of power, as it is described by Deleuze (1992 in Simon 2005:15):
“the image of a city ‘where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighbourhood, thanks to one’s ‘dividual electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation”.
Poster (1992) explains the shift to control societies in terms of the superpanopticism. He argues that, it does not operate through external force or expected internal norms but rather in terms of discourse and the linguistic properties of digital computation. The electronic database is the core of the superpanopticon, it is a sorting machine that organizes and produces subjects. As David Lyon summarizes:
the subject is multiplied and decentred in the database, acted on by remote computers each time a record is automatically verified or checked against another, without ever referring to the individual concerned /…/ computers become machines for producing retrievable identities (Lyon 2001: 115).
Poster (1992??preveri ker spodaj maš 1996) writes about new forms of power where the unwanted surveillance of personal choice becomes a discursive reality through the willing participation of the surveilled individual. In this instance the play of power and discourse is uniquely configured. The one being surveilled provides the information necessary for surveillance.
The diagram of superpanopticism is not a diagram of surveillance in the traditional sense, no one is watching us and we do not perceive ourselves as being watched. We simply go about our business while our databased selves are assembled, scrutinized and evaluated in much more detail than the inmates at Foucault’s Mettray prison ever experienced (ibid.).
At the same time we allow the surveillance as we are part of surveillance society – where for exchange of our information we can be part of ‘the many’ that watch ‘the few’. We live in the Panopticon but at the same time we participate and even with ease enjoy the Synopticon. Foucault’s version of Bentham’s plan has been upgraded, so that the inmate is aware of the gaze of the supervisor through signs of their presence. This is initially ominous tower with its shielded windows signifying the presence of the guards, but it could also easily be the insidious sign of the CCTV camera or the spy satellite as material extensions of the human eye (Simon 2005).
However, it is the sign of presence of surveillance and not its actual presence that matters here. Yet we can say that this is what makes possible to substitute fake supervisor (cameras) for real ones and still achieve the same effects of power and domination. (Norris 2003). Or as Foucault (1991:200) claims “visibility is a trap.”
Lyon (1994) claims that interesting challenge to surveillance studies presented by processes such as computer-matching is than an essentially technical procedure contribute to the blurring of conventionally conceived boundaries.
King (2001) asserts that Panopticon is still a useful metaphor for the examination of the world we live in and as well understanding of its history and how it is mirrored in nowadays Western society.
It is on this point that the critique of Foucault takes on its strongest form. As Anthony Giddens (1990) has noted, modern surveillance can be denoted by increasing distances between the observer and the observed. So can we ultimately find the connections between the initial Panopticon prison idea and modern surveillance society? Following Gary Marx (1988 in Simon 2005) we can extrapolate from guards in the watchtower to some hi-tech management and policing systems: a kind of prototypical hybrid-police-cyborg using progressively more sophisticated technical capacity for monitoring (CCTV, infrared cameras, electronic tags), data storage (huge hard drives systems), networking (data conversion) and analysis (systems capable of advanced pattern recognition and multivariate sorting) (ibid.).
Particular forms of communication are vital aspects of what it means to be human. What we disclose to whom, and under what conditions, is highly significant. What once we might have revealed, consciously, about ourselves to someone we trust – friend, doctor, priest, therapist – may now be involuntarily disclosed by electronic means to organizations or machines that we cannot know, let alone trust, in the same way (Lyon 1994).
“Precise details of our personal lives are collected stored, retrieved and processed every day within huge computer databases belonging to big corporations and government departments. This is ‘surveillance society’.” (Lyon 1994:3)
An interesting comparison with the new Lyon’s surveillance society was a lot earlier provided by Foucault, when he talked about the power of the Panopticon. He considers the activity of the Panopticon also as a kind of laboratory of power. Because of its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men’s behaviour; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised (Foucault 1991). Introducing the Panopticon into the contemporary society, we can understand the present public sphere – surveyed, tracked and surrounded with the linked apparatuses filled with data of citizens as a huge laboratory of virtual power.
For Mark Poster the post-modern is classified as a ‘mode of information’. He raises the question of location of human self if fragments of personal data constantly circulate within computer systems, beyond any agent’s personal control. (Lyon 1994)
Further, for Bauman (1998), then, the dream of total control, exemplified by the Panopticon, is really fully applicable only within a ‘clockwork’ society, whose inhabitants are required to have fixed places, functions and appetites. ‘Advanced Western’ societies are not like this. On the other hand, for the inhabitants of the first world state borders are levelled down, as they are dismantled for the world’s commodities, capital and finances. But for the inhabitant of the second world, the walls built of immigration controls, of residence laws, and of ‘clean streets’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies, grow taller. (Bauman 1998)
My thesis and conclusion
The provided literature and shown examples have, therefore, made a systematic case in support of the proposition that technology and advance have made possible the systems of domination and power, especially virtual apparatus to supervise with supremacy over the people of postmodernity. As power is indeed strongly roped with forms of technology, it is possible to agree that power is nowadays virtual in form, with “surveillance /…/, as an institutionally central and pervasive feature of social life…” (Lyon 1994:24)
In fact, it is interesting to accept the fact that new virtual forms of information technology are constructing society as well physically (modern surveillance systems) as also socially (changing of public behaviour, new ways of pleasure and voyeurism – when many watch the few, or surveillance for pleasure, etc.). Although, it is significant to point out that in contemporary society – as Anthony Giddens called it with felicitous phrase, a ‘manufactured jungle’ no physical presence of ‘another’ is needed to perceive his influential power and surveillance; no matter what place or what moment in the society do we take into consideration.
The power of supervision has developed in recent years with the speed of the development of science and technology. With introduction of new – especially virtual technology apparatuses, one is becoming even more ‘the object’ of observation and surveillance. Discrepancy between private – intimate side of life and the public access to one’s personal matters has blurred to the degree, where one can no more foresight when, how and by who is observed at the particular moment. Yet, I could agree with intimidated and tighten theories of ‘total disclosure’ proposed by theoretic of surveillance (Orwell, Lyon, Foucault, etc.), where apparatus of the state, economic and media govern its population in the scheme of matrix. Individual can be metaphorical staged with the famous Foucaultian quote:
“He is seen, but he does not see he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.” (Foucault 1991: 200)
One has no more option to be under self control only, but has become the object of the total observation drawled in the matrix of the mass.
Is the new democracy really the new totalitarianism with millions of pigeonholes or is it opposite of the verified systems with negative connotation, known from the past?
At the Tito’s Yugoslavia there was a well known ‘brainwash’ rule proposed by the government to its population saying that ‘Non-friend never sleeps! Everybody has to be aware at all time.’ Citizens attended to be continuously frightened and therefore they suppose to trust the state and follow and obey its instructions. Police, army and other political commissars controlled the nation with ceaseless personal control. The possibility of resistance was at minimum, boundaries were almost closed and one had almost no place to manoeuvre.
Therefore, I can somehow not find the direct linking between new ‘Western’ types of surveillance and old totalitarian types of all-time pressure surveillance and I can easily argue that at this moment one has a possibility of choice whether he would like to allow (or not disallow) to be supervised or yet he can resist and try to ignore the systems of surveillance in the name of his belonging right to the privacy. Resistance always demands more inclusion then following and obeying – but what matters here is the choice of not being supervised and therefore at least in the legitimate way choice of own personal private life. In the time of the state’s personal surveillance – this possibility was not directly an option.
Such arguments, I would argue and widen with the fact that global life is possibly becoming multidimensional and as well extremely rapid – consecutively one has no more energy, time or even possibility to pay attention of own surveillance. Equally, it can be also possible to argue King (2001) which claims that information and communication technologies have advanced at an incredible rate, so that we can do things that at one time were not possible but at the same time we have become traceable to an unprecedented degree. But the fact remains: power has become in modern society virtual in form – whether we accept it or not. The only question is, whether we are utterly loosing the connection when and how the new technologies is going to track us.
Resources:
- Bauman Z. (1998) Globalization – The Human Conequences Cambridge: Polity.
- Bennett J. C. (2001) ‘Cookies, web bugs, webcams and cue cats: Patterns of surveillance on the world wide web’ Ethic and Information Technology Vol.3 pp.197-201.
- Boyne R. (2000) ‘Post-Panopticism’ Economy and Society Vol.29 No.2 pp.285-307.
- Foucault M. (1991 [1975]) Discipline and Punish – The Birth of the Prison London: Penguin Books.
- Gandy, O. (1993). The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. Boulder, CO, Westview Press.
- Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge, Polity Press.
- Green, S. (1999) ‘A Plague on the Panopticon: Surveillance and Power in the Global Information Economy.’ Information, Communication and Society 2(1): 26-44.
- Howard N. P., Carr N. J. and Milstein J. T. (2005) ‘Digital Technology and the Market for Political Surveillance’ Surveillance & Society Vol.3 No.1 pp.59-73.
- King L. (2001) ‘Information, Society and the Panopticon’ The Western Journal o Graduate Research Vol. 10, No.1 pp.40-50.
- Norris, C. (2003) ‘From Personal to Digital: CCTV, the Panopticon and the Technological Mediation of Suspicion and Social Control.’ Surveillance as Social Sorting. D. Lyon (ed.). London, Routledge.
- Lyon D. (1994) The Electronic Eye – The Rise of Surveillance Society Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Lyon, D. (2001) Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Buckingham, Open University Press.
- Poster, M. (1996) ‘Databases as Discourse, or, Electronic Interpellations.’ Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy. D. Lyon and E. Zureik (eds.). Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 175-192.
- Simon B. (2005) ‘The Return of Panopticism: Supervision, Subjection and New Surveillance’ Surveillance & Society Vol.3 No.1 pp.1-20 online: http://www.surveillance-and-society.org