Profiling Machines [Electronic resources] : Mapping the Personal Information Economy نسخه متنی

A Modulating Theory of Surveillance

The term diagrammatics has been evoked by a number of individuals associated with the philosophy of art, logic, and language. Apart from the previously quoted passage from Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault himself makes no other specific references to ‘‘diagrams,’’ a diagrammatic method, or on a more general level, contemporary information and communication technologies. An explicitly diagrammatic approach has therefore been largely conferred onto Foucault’s works by Gilles Deleuze. John Marks (1994,98) rightly argues that Deleuze’s primary purpose in consistently returning to the concept of the diagram was to push the limits of Foucault’s ‘‘spatial metaphors.’’ Hence, in an attempt to capture the tension between these two authors, D. N. Rodowick (1990,17) has argued that perhaps

The most succinct way of defining the diagram is to call it a map of power—diagrammatics is the cartography of strategies of power. As such, the diagram produces a historical image of how strategies of power attempt to replicate themselves in forms of surveillance, documentation, and expression on one hand, and in the spatial organization of collective life on the other.

The death of Gilles Deleuze in 1995 (over a decade after Foucault’s passing in 1984) heightened the mythical narratives surrounding the two influential philosophers. Their numerous published exchanges, interviews, collaborations, and references to each other’s work may have even discouraged any sustained critical discussion of the productive differences between the two authors. In other words, their exchanges were distinctly complementary and collegial in tone, emphasizing, for example, a shared commitment to conceptualizing ‘‘tools’’ or methodologies for political life (Deleuze & Foucault 1972). In the preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983, xii), Foucault insists that ‘‘Informed by the seemingly abstract notions of multiplicities, flows, arrangements, and connections, [Deleuze and Guattari’s work] yields answers to concrete questions.’’ Deleuze (1992b, 165), likewise, characterizes Foucault’s work as engaging in the study of ‘‘precise archives’’ and employing ‘‘extremely new historical methods.’’

With the publication of the essay ‘‘Postscript on Societies of Control’’ (1992a) and the book Foucault (1986), Deleuze began to question and relate panoptic forms of surveillance and contemporary information economies. This was a shift from architectural and optical modes of surveillance to the integration of dispersed sites of information solicitation within simulational feedback loops. Deleuze (1992a, 4) questions the applicability of spaces of enclo- sure with direct reference to his colleague Foucault, arguing that disciplinary apparatuses (panopticon prisons, hospitals, and factories) function as mere ‘‘Enclosures’’ or ‘‘molds, distinct castings,’’ whereas throughout geographic spaces ‘‘controls are a modulation.’’ For Deleuze, the concept of ‘‘modulation’’ emphasizes the manner in which relations of power are themselves reproduced in and through technological networks. Francisco Varela, likewise, compares ‘‘allopoietic’’ machines (which produce ‘‘some- thing other than themselves’’ in the process of constituting ‘‘their own organization and limits’’) to the modulating ‘‘autopoietic machines,’’ which, conversely, ‘‘undertake . . . the replacement of their components’’ to ‘‘continually compensate for the external perturbations to which they are exposed’’ (Guattari 1995: 39).

Thus, in attempting to offer a corrective to the Foucaultian panopticon, Gilles Deleuze offers the concept of ‘‘rhizomatic’’ or nomadic movement. Deleuze posits his contemporary rhizomatic diagram as existing in a perpetual state between the architectural processes of drawing and building; and in so doing he attempts to avoid the primacy of the visual or fixed architectural structure (enclosure). Hence, in Deleuze’s (1986, 35, 44) own words,

The diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. [Furthermore, the] . . . diagram is a map, or rather several superimposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. Thus, there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture.

This cybernetic and topographical dimension of both surveillance and simulation—originally characterized by its complex ‘‘pattern of computation’’ in the act of ‘‘forecasting the future’’ (Wiener 1948, 13)—has been largely overlooked in contemporary Foucaultian or panoptic studies of personal information, consumer data, and information technologies. Taking a diagrammatic approach to panoptic surveillance conversely requires us to conceptualize the manner in which modes of data accumulation, storage, and processing are networked in an increasingly dispersed and automated infoscape.

Perhaps mindful of criticizing his deceased colleague, Deleuze at once juxtaposes and links the disciplinary logic of Foucault’s panopticon from its architectural ‘‘molds’’ to a theory of power based on ‘‘modulations.’’ Thus, in a telling passage from his essay ‘‘What Is a Dispositif ?’’ Deleuze (1992b, 164) walks a fine line between Foucault’s panopticon (merely describing ‘‘the history of what we gradually cease to be’’) and a much more schematic difference between ‘‘closed disciplines’’ and systems of ‘‘overt and continuous control.’’ Implicitly siding with Marxists such as Henri Lefebrve, who believed that Foucault failed to theorize the ‘‘collective subject’’ (Soja 1996, 146), Deleuze (1995, 179–180) also juxtaposes the individualistic element of disciplinary society with that of societies of control:

Disciplinary societies have two poles: signatures standing for individuals, and numbers or places in a register standing for their position in a mass. . . . In control societies, on the other hand, the key thing is no longer a signature or number but a code.

Departing from molds or architectures of confinement that segment, categorize, and discipline individual ‘‘deviants,’’ Deleuze’s thoughts on the ‘‘diagram’’ attempt to account for the systemic modulations of populations by technological machines and information flows. However, unlike Levin’s (1997, 446) synoptic assertion that Foucault’s ‘‘debilitating blindspot’’ was an absence of ‘‘different contemporary gazes, multiplied and strengthened by our visual technologies’’ such as television, Deleuze’s (1995, 178) ‘‘diagrammatic’’ model emphasizes the simulational aspect of technologies that form ‘‘a system of varying geometry whose language is digital.’’ Thus, for Deleuze, the diagram provides a conceptual model for encoding, distributing, and deploying information flows from decentralized apparatuses.

In an attempt to explicate the artistic, corporeal, and rhythmic dimensions of simulation, Deleuze initially appropriates the notion of a ‘‘diagram’’ from Francis Bacon (as discussed in his thoughts on the process of painting). Deleuze was captivated by Bacon’s self- described moment of ‘‘subversion’’ where a painter’s brush creates a chaotic moment on the surface of the canvas. According to Ronald Bogue (1991, 120), Bacon dubbed such ‘‘limited catastrophes’’ a ‘‘diagram.’’ Expanding the discussion to the movement of painting, Deleuze, however, maintains that such diagrams are also characterized by the potential for corporeal rhythm (120). In this respect, Deleuze relates his belief in the continuity and circularity of thought-action—or language-speech—to the realm of production and representation. Hence, before the artist’s brush touches the canvas, the painter’s actions and motions are always within the painting. In Deleuze’s (1993, 193) words,

There is thus preparatory work that fully belongs to painting. This preparatory work may take the form of sketches, but not necessarily, and even sketches do not replace it. . . . This preparatory work is invisible and silent, but nevertheless very intense.

Although Gilles Deleuze defines diagrammatic production as a corporeal and simulational process, Felix Guattari’s definition stems from a distinctly polemical critique of the celebrated semiotic theories of American philosopher Charles Peirce. Guattari specifically challenges Peirce’s inclusion of diagrams as icons, drawing a distinction between signifying and asignifying semiotics. For Peirce, a diagram is a representational icon, whereas for Guattari, ‘‘the image is both more and less than the diagram: an image reproduces certain things that a diagram does not, while a diagram captures better than an image functional articulations’’ (Genosko 1996, 17). Guattari’s (1977, 95) notion of a diagram is thus often described as a sign machine or blueprint rather than a chain of signifiers. Putting this diagram or sign machine to work thus requires the

operationalization of signs, this work of diagrammatization . . . [becoming] the necessary condition for the deterritorializing mutations that affect the fluxes of reality; no longer is there representation, but simulation, preproduction, or what one might call ‘‘transduction.’’

In addition to the sign or signifier, Guattari also uses the example of the index to define an a-signifying semiotics, typified by the diagram. Guattari argues that in Peirce’s schema indexes function as territorial signifiers, pointing to fixed spaces and phenomena (as does, for example, a road map). However, according to Guattari, diagrams also ‘‘incorporate certain habits involved in the creation of graphic abstractions.... they also have the indexical feature of pointing ‘‘There!’’ (Genosko 1996, 18). For both Deleuze and Guattari, this ongoing production of relationships and associations is characterized by a certain level of abstraction and is also grounded in a functional, spatial politics—one that attempts to locate and map the circulation of information, data, power, and control. Explaining the shared approach, Guattari (in Deleuze 1995, 21–22) offers a wonderfully succinct comment:

We’re strict functionalists: what we’re interested in is how something works, functions—finding the machine. But the signifier is still stuck in the question ‘‘What does it mean?’’

With the emergence of increasingly more complex and ‘‘inhabited’’ virtual spaces, transjurisdictional territories, and intranets (computerized informational networks), archives of information are now characterized by their multiple sites, processes, and techniques of input, storage, and retrieval. In such a flux of affairs, Deleuze and Guattari rightly focus on the function of territorializing ‘‘machines,’’ mapping the real-time machinations of a data dispositif. Engaging the concept of the diagram from Bacon, Peirce, and Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the possibility of tracing or sketching the continuity between light and language. In the realm of contemporary infomatics, the diagram therefore allows us to trace the everyday data economy in which habits, routines, rhythms, and flows are digitized, coded, and diagnosed for the purposes of control. An impressive number of solicitations have for the large part been automated within other areas of cultural practice—most notably consumption. Solicitations of personal information are, in other words, not so much expressed or articulated as much as they are automated and networked into other ‘‘duties.’’ Foucault’s contributions to this diagrammatic approach to the information economy are in this regard quite clear. In large part, the diagrammatic power of the panopticon lies in its claims to continuity and automation—that is, its ability to function without the need for direct supervision and intervention (cf. Dandeker 1989). In the information economy, such automated systems attempt to continuously collect information on individual behavior (what Foucault dubbed ‘‘confessions’’ with respect to organized religion) to such an extent that individuals regard such solicitations as integral exchanges in everyday life.

Reworking Foucault’s panoptic ‘‘generality’’ in light of contemporary, digitized technologies of control, Deleuze characterizes diagrammatics as a simulational process in the making. By focusing on the importance of Bacon’s ‘‘chaotic’’ moment (the coming to the fore of a set of loosely preplanned ideas, sketches, and representations), Deleuze explicates the already constituted field of expression and representation (or discriminated and segmented consumers) and also the inherent difficulty in predicting effects (or the wants and desires of consumers). To Foucault’s notion of continuity and automation, Deleuze thus adds the circularity or cybernetic dimension to diagrammatics—the manner in which the signifieds and the process of signification are continuously reconstituted by each other. Within the context of corporeal movement and moving away from Foucault’s confined body, Deleuze also subtly questions the significance of such cybernetic loops for the everyday rhythms and routines of corporeal movement. Within the context of consumer routines, however, Deleuze’s point offers distinct implications for the ‘‘interaction’’ between mobile subjects and sites of demographic and psychographic solicitation. As such, Deleuze again moves toward a more expansive topographical view of exchange whereupon power implicates—and is implicated by—particular places, spaces, and technologies.

Lastly, Guattari’s critique of Charles Peirce’s semiotics imbues diagrammatics with distinctly diagnostic and machinic qualities. Guattari’s frustration with semiotic debates over signs, signifiers, and symbols leads him to critique the innocence with which the processes of signification has abstracted itself from the reproduction of social symbols and the practice, art, and spaces of signification and representation itself. Signification in this diagrammatic sense subsequently incorporates a decidedly economic and machinic element, calling into question the traces of past, present, and future techniques and technologies of rationalization.