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Chapter 2: A Diagram of Panoptic Surveillance
Overview
As consumers make purchases, request catalogues, return goods for servicing and repair, or simply browse for desirable commodities and services, their transactions are duly noted, stored, cross-referenced, and often tracked or mapped. This process is ubiquitous and has broad implications for the study of techniques of social control, consumerism, market rationalization, and risk management. For the many critics of consumer surveillance, the theoretical impact of Michel Foucault’s (1977) analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s seventeenth-century architectural plans for an all-seeing, or panoptic, prison cannot be overstated. Although most critics have attempted to analyze panoptic surveillance from contemporary technological perspectives, this chapter argues that the development of a theory of panoptic surveillance has been limited by literal readings of Foucault’s panoptic prison that are simply critiques of carceral enclosures.
Contemporary interpretations of the panoptic model typically offer one or more of the following three arguments. The first and perhaps the most broadly articulated critique focuses on the shifting architectural and categorical qualities of surveillance, moving from the carceral enclosure of the prison to the consumer database. In attempting to extend the logic of Bentham’s Panopticon to contemporary definitions of information, this ‘‘dataveillance’’ critique—first articulated in the expansive scholarship of Roger A. Clarke[1] but also compellingly revised and adapted in some of the most influential work in contemporary ‘‘surveillance studies’’ (Gandy 1993; Lyon 1994, 2001)—discusses the discriminatory social implications of panopticism, often to expand debates over personal privacy.By comparison, a second and growing group of scholars has argued that the disciplinary effect of panopticism is not automatic and that contemporary information theory needs to account for a more networked and transparent kind of surveillance. These authors share the view that the transparency of institutional solicitations for information prevents individuals from being easily coerced, forced, or otherwise disciplined into giving up personal information. Rather, they argue that consumers consciously offer their personal information in exchange for a perceived personal benefit (whether a ‘‘prize,’’ a rebate, or an exclusive service). Thus, regardless of the enticement, Reg Whitaker (1999, 141) argues, ‘‘The Panopticon rewards participation.’’ And while this ‘‘enticement’’ model helps to qualify the process of surveillance as ultimately an act of solicitation and exchange, it also downplays the degree to which such ‘‘requests’’ for personal information are altogether automated (for example, as the Web and browsers initially worked)[2] or realistically provide consumers with viable options to decline the offer (to opt out).A third group of scholars, many inspired by Tim Mathiesen’s (1997) critique of Foucault (1977), has similarly problematized the disciplinary effect of panoptic surveillance. These scholars (Fiske 1993; Bauman 1988; Levin 1997) argue that unlike Foucault’s panoptic arrangement of prisoners encircled around a central guard tower, contemporary media technologies are more aptly defined by a synoptic relationship where the many now watch the few. John Fiske (1993, 85), for instance, points to the football stadium as a ‘‘reverse panopticon,’’ where the power to individuate, segment, and control gives way to fan power, knowledge, and pleasure (especially when mediated through the multiple angles of television cameras). The synoptic argument, however, assumes that panopticism derives from corporeal surveillance—in other words, that the one literally watches the many. However, in the panoptic prison, disciplinary power does not reside in the ‘‘watcher’’ or central prison guard; it stems from the architectural arrangement of light that suggests panoptic surveillance to the prisoners. Thus, as a media critique, the synoptic model is seemingly biased toward spectatorship. Moreover, as a critique of Foucault’s work, it largely fails to note how synopticism and panopticism potentially work in concert.
These three variations of panoptic criticism are more nuanced and often overlapping in their contributions than initially described here. Nevertheless, as I soon show in greater detail, the categorization of such critiques is helpful in expanding the theoretical debate over the relevance and applicability of Foucault’s panoptic model, particularly in an increasingly complex economy of personal information. Moreover, such critiques have distinct implications for claims made about the dubious social effects of panoptic surveillance. The enticement and synoptic critiques, for example, can lead to a relatively unfettered notion of consumer agency and choice where private information is consciously bartered and exchanged for a perceived benefit. By contrast, dataveillance arguments often result in questions about the technological ability to guarantee privacy. Ultimately, chapter 7 argues that all three critiques of panoptic surveillance are limited by their heuristic points of departure—the technology or architecture of panopticism (dataveillance), the solicitation and exchange of personal information (enticement), and the reverse panopticon where the many watch the few (synoptic model).
With the help of Foucault and his ‘‘interlocutor’’ Gilles Deleuze and collaborator Felix Guattari, chapter 7 conversely theorizes panoptic surveillance as a process that quantifies and qualifies the behaviors of consumers (or other sales, inventory, or distribution data) and also the efficiency of the panoptic process itself. Such an overarching theory of surveillance (or even an appreciation of the specific dynamics of panopticism, such as data accumulation or storage) cannot privilege any one step in the process of panoptic surveillance by focusing exclusively on questions such as ‘‘How is personal information solicited?’’ or ‘‘How and where are personal information and other forms of consumer data stored (in databases or networked systems)?’’ Consequently, in explicating the diagrammatic characteristics of panoptic surveillance, this chapter attempts to account for how consumers and their personal data become continuously integrated into the collecting, storing, and cross-referencing of a multitude of consumer market data (inven- tory, distribution, and sales).[1]Cf. <http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke>. [2]Cf. Elmer (1997a) and (2002) for analyses of Web cookie.
