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Ah, those were the days, when I would hang out with Rockwell and shoot cans off the top of Germaine’s afro. Everything’s different now, of course – Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Panopticon:
Conceived of as a theory of social control by the 20th century’s Michel Foucault, the Panopticon was originally the design of the 19th century’s Jeremy Bentham for a prison in which all the inmates would force themselves to behave because they would assume that every moment and act was being observed. Foucault argued that state programs to monitor and record our comings and goings create imaginary cages that limit what citizens do out of fear of being observed by those in power…
So far, so non-significant – the Panopticon is regularly trotted out in discussions about law and order, civil liberties, surveillance and so forth. Yet Vaidhyanathan questions whether the concept has any explanatory power:
… people tend to act out and get weird regardless of the number of cameras pointed at them. There are thousands of surveillance cameras in London and New York, yet those cities do not lack for the eccentric and avant-garde. Long before closed-circuit cameras, cities were places to be seen, not to be not seen… There is no empirical reason to believe that awareness of surveillance limits the imagination or cows the creative in a market economy under a nontotalitarian state.
This is where your doubts start to grab the sides of the kayak and start rocking, because I’m not sure that either Bentham or Foucault were worried that the Panopticon might prevent maverick art installations. The genius of the Panopticon is that it disposes of the need for the obvious trappings of totalitarianism – you didn’t need to keep an eye on people all the time when they’re disposed to keeping an eye on themselves on your behalf, even when you’re not actually watching them. Vaidhyanathan gets back on track though:
Basically, the Panopticon must be visible and ubiquitous, or it cannot influence behavior as Bentham and Foucault assumed it would.
But wait! We hear news (in our kayak) of the complete failure of the Panopticon from the UK, where Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office at New Scotland Yard tells the world:
CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure. Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.
So even when the Panopticon is visible and ubiquitous, nobody cares. How’s that for rad irony? Foucault was wrong; he was also French, and now he’s dead; three strikes against his credibility. Vaidhyanathan now plumps for the Nonopticon (or latterly, Cryptopticon):
The Nonopticon describes a state of being watched without knowing it, or at least the extent of it. The most pervasive surveillance does not reveal itself or remains completely clandestine (barring leaks to The New York Times). We don’t know all the ways we are being recorded or profiled. We are not supposed to understand that we are the product of marketers as much as we are the market. And we are not supposed to consider the extent to which the state tracks our behavior and considers us all suspects in crimes yet to be imagined, let alone committed.
It’s none of those things – it’s just that we don’t care. All of this information is accessible, it’s just that most people can’t be bothered to track it, and the reason for that is twofold.
- We don’t care that we’re the product of marketers because the marketers sell us shiny things which help us get our buzz on. The invisibility of this is partly what appeals to us, because it helps to maintain the illusion that we’re choosing our purchases and pleasures freely. Our illusion of control is more appealing than control itself.
- We don’t care about the state considering us all suspects because our particular state has repeatedly shown itself unable to organise the Olympics a piss-up in a brewery. When you hear about human rights abuses attributed to surveillance technology, it always turns out that somebody somewhere dropped the ball and got embarrassed.
Of course all that changes if our state started to turn into that other type of state – you know, like the one I saw in that film about leftwing bedroom DJs – but in that film, the surveillance was ubiquitous and invisible, and the mixing was crap. Remember what I wrote earlier about the genius of the totalitarian? The real power of the panopticon lies precisely in its invisibility – you know that somebody might be looking but you have no idea if they are. The surveillance state that you see in The Lives of Others shows this perfectly – you don’t know if they’re watching or listening, or even who they are.
With a jarring shift in tone, Vaidhyanathan ends on a rousing chorus:
We must demand to know the terms of surveillance by our state and its partners in the private sector. We must be allowed to be agents in the construction of our reputations. We must insist on fairness, openness, and accountability in those institutions that commit such widespread surveillance. Otherwise we will cease being citizens. We will be subjects, mere fodder for our watchers, means instead of ends.
That’s all very inspiring, and of course I agree, but it misses one key point. Following the information revolution, we cease being citizens and become data points, the inevitable outcome of the layer of technology that’s being added to our societies and our lives. Bentham and then Foucault were absolutely right about how the Panopticon fitted their respective times, and the Panopticon is still with us.
In fact, the Panopticon is us.
(HT: Eric Rauchway at Crooked Timber.)