By Gordon Hull
A couple of weeks ago, I noted my newly discovered appreciation for Philip Agre’s “Surveillance and Capture” and outlined why I think his development of capture (and retreat from surveillance) is particularly applicable to the privacy concerns surrounding big data. Here, I’d like to suggest that Agre’s distinction is also helpful in understanding a frequently remarked limitation in Foucault. The limitation is this: a Foucauldian model of disciplinary power treats Bentham’s panopticon as its ideal image. That image, and the model it subtends, has come under sustained critique over the last twenty years in a scholarship inspired by Deleuze. Let me start with a review before getting to what capture can tell us about Foucault and surveillance.
“The panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use” (205).
It's fair to say that he won the argument; the cultural influence of Discipline and Punish has been enormous. As Agre noted, it and Orwell’s 1984 became the dominant images of surveillance.
Somewhere around 2000 though, surveillance studies decided that the panopticon was dated. The field turned to Deleuze, whose brief “Postscript on Societies of Control” (1992) had argued that Foucault focused on “societies of enclosure” and the assumption that people moved from one such enclosed disciplinary space to another (from school to factory, etc.) Today, these systems have merged into one that regulates and modulates movement across these registers. For example, “just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation” (5). Unlike the movement between systems characteristic of panopticism, “in the societies of control, one is never finished with anything” (5). It’s a system in which one is always obligated; Deleuze anticipates Lazzarato: “man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” (6).
The Deleuzian claim has figured prominently in studies of surveillance and privacy, in particular since its application in a piece by Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson. They argue that Foucault’s analysis, though productive, didn’t consider more contemporary examples of surveillance. Borrowing explicitly from Deleuze, they suggest that:
“While surveillance is used to construct and monitor consumption patterns, such efforts usually lack the normalized soul training which is so characteristic of panopticism. Instead, monitoring for market consumption is more concerned with attempts to limit access to places and information, or to allow for the production of consumer profiles through the ex post facto reconstructions of a person’s behavior, habits and actions. In those situations where individuals monitor their behavior in light of the thresholds established by such surveillance systems, they are often involved in efforts to maintain or augment various social perks such as preferential credit ratings, computer services, or rapid movement through customs” (615).
This is very close to capture, in particular Agre’s emphasis on grammar and the co-constitution of systems of capture and those who participate in them.
But did Foucault ever address this, or provide any resources for doing so? A recent paper on smart cities by Francisco Klauser, Till Paasche and Ola Söderström bucks the doxa and says he did – just not in Discipline and Punish. He did it in his lectures after; they find resources in:
“[Foucault’s] conceptualisation of (the apparatus of) ‘security’ as opposed to (the apparatus of) ‘discipline’. More specifically, this paper starts from the assumption that in Foucault’s security we find a conceptual tool that allows the emphasis and exploration of the intrinsic flexibility of contemporary governing through code, in its relation to reality, normalisation, and space” (872).
Klauser, Paasche and Söderström refer to the Deleuzian thesis and the studies that follow it, noting that “what is often ignored in such discussions is that Foucault’s own work – most notably his lecture courses given in the late 1970s at the Collège de France – offers a hugely inspiring contribution on this very issue, centered on the concept of security.” (872) Security is promising in three ways. First, if disciplinary power is individualized, security “works on the relationship between components of a given reality …. what matters is the optimized adjustment of the assembled components of reality depending on and in relation to each other” (873). Second, if discipline starts with an optimal model of normativity, security “lets things happen within the limits of the acceptable” (874). Third, space is not treated rigidly, but is a matter of “of managing multiplicities as a whole, in their openness and fluidity” (875).
The Foucault retrieved here is coming very close to having something to say about privacy as capture. Here is Foucault from Security, Territory, Population:
“The milieu appears as a field of intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions – which would be the case of sovereignty – and instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organism, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances – as in discipline – one tries to affect, precisely, a population. I mean a multiplicity of individuals who are fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality in which they live. What one tries to reach through this milieu, is precisely the conjunction of a series of events produced by these individuals, populations, and groups, and quasi natural events which occur around them” (21).
There is obviously a lot more to be said here about this confluence of images and terms, and what they might project for the usefulness of Foucault in thinking about contemporary privacy in the context of big data. I want to close by noting one aspect that suggests the plausibility of the connection.
Recall that Agre argues that capture systems work through “grammars of action.” He suggests that “they each employ formal ‘languages’ for representing human activities. Human activity is thus effectively treated as a kind of language itself, for which a good representation scheme provides an accurate grammar” (745-6). We find these grammars in diverse sites, from accounting systems to scripts for telemarketers to computer interfaces. He adds:
“What matters in each case is not the sequence of ‘inputs’ or ‘outputs’ from any given machine, but rather the ways in which human activities have been structured. The capture model describes the situation that results when grammars of action are imposed upon human activities, and when the newly reorganized activities are represented by computers in real time” (746)
Foucault obviously has a lot to say in his earlier work about grammar and language and classification. There are also clearly a number of shifts from Discipline and Punish to the later lectures; Stuart Elden has done the most toward helping us understand them. What I want to point to is a recently translated 1978 lecture (recall here) in which Foucault explicitly embeds his work in Anglo-American philosophy of language – Wittgenstein and speech act theory. He writes approvingly of these philosophers who, instead of trying to say universally what language “is,” emphasize what language does, through terms like “language games.” By analogy, we need to develop “a philosophy that would address the relations of power rather than the games of language” (192).
This, it seems to me, encapsulates the shift from Discipline and Punish to the discussion of security as Klauser, Paasche and Söderström articulate it: discipline-via-panopticon is still too much of a description of what power is, and not enough of an analysis of what it does. In other words, there is a tension running through Discipline and Punish between the analysis of the techniques and strategies of discipline and the image Foucault uses as a synecdoche for them. The line between them is a fine one – but Foucault’s emphasis on the imagery of the panoptic prison leads him to a more transcendental emphasis on what disciplinary power is and away from where he is ultimately going, which is a trajectory from governmentality to the late lectures on the Greeks. It’s a thread that gets dropped, as he moves toward more granular analyses of what power does. And what power does is make people through processes of subjectification.
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