Dalia Hatalova Core Post #2/5 Blog Post #8/15

 With this week's texts, I found myself reflecting on the transference of surveillance as a system from the governmental to the industrial and back to the governmental, as well as the way that surveillance privileges the visual as a form of knowledge. As examples for the direction of my thoughts, I want to use a couple of Robert Bresson's films,  A Man Escaped (1956) and L'Argent (1983), as well as Theodore J. Flicker's comedy The President's Analyst (1967). Collectively, these films are interesting to me by representing different relationships with surveillance, from purely governmental and militant monitoring to a greater imbrication of the industrial and governmental. (I will include these films in a separate later post, though, to keep the length of the core post concise and maintain focus on the texts.) Here, I follow the trajectories, particularly of Mark Andrejevic's and Siva Vaidhyanathan's respective texts, in view of these topics. 

All of the four texts for the week reference Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Simone Browne connects Foucault's idea of the panopticon to the surveillance in dialogue with slave ships (Browne 24); meanwhile, for Andrejevic, the panopticon is an essential feature for differentiating between disciplinary surveillance that rests on panoptic modes in contrast to predictive modes built on environmental surveillance. Andrejevic describes that "if the disciplinary goal is the spectacle of surveillance, the preemptive one is its disappearance through ubiquity" (Andrejevic 890). Both authors highlight that, through Foucault's model, one can see the implications of power imbalances on structural levels; these can include governmental infrastructures ranging from slave ships to airports that are allowed to function in ways that are officially sanctioned in the former to prison complexes and policing in the latter text. What Andrejevic's work further points to, however, is an interesting power balance between the governmental and the industrial. He writes, "Advances in media technology and practice often migrate from the realms of warfare and security to that of the market, but in the case of predictive policing, the direction has been reversed" (887); on the next page, Andrejevic continues "security agencies have found ways to piggyback on the data collection practices of major players in the tech sector, including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook" (888). Here Andrejevic's text comes into direct relation to what Vaidhyanathan describes on the topic of data collection by platforms. For Vaidhyanathan, the idea of the panopticon is no longer as relevant because, as she describes, "mass surveillance does not inhibit behavior: people may act weird regardless of the number of cameras pointed at them" but also, more importantly, because the new digital forms of surveillance "involve not the subjection of the individual to the gaze of a single, centralized authority, but the surveillance of the individual, potentially by all, always by many" (Vaidhyanathan 112). Despite these changes, as Vaidhyanathan points out in another section, "Mass surveillance has been a fact of life since the eighteenth century. There is nothing new about the bureaucratic imperative to record and manipulate data on citizens and consumers. Digital tools just make it easier to collect, merge, and sell databases" (97). 

In thinking about the similarities between the forms of past and present surveillance, I was struck by the nature of the information being captured, as the vast majority of it pertains to the visual sense. In order for the predictive forms of surveillance that Andrejevic describes to work, data needs to be as complete as possible - to include as many dots as possible to connect. Yet, dots seem to, in most cases, remain dots: visual elements that remain but one part of the information spectrum available to humans. The phone in itself is primarily interacted with in two ways, the visual and the sonic, but as a result, it can only record and deliver these two forms of information. Yet, if a person meets another who smells of heavy perfume or who feels sweaty upon a handshake, a vastly different range of information becomes available, which a phone cannot glean. Some technical parts inhabit these forms of surveillance that lie beyond human senses, as when Browne describes "the fingerprint data template technology and retina scans where the human body, or parts and pieces of it, are digitized for automation, identification and verification purposes" (Browne 26). However, this biometric reduction of flesh to information, as Browne describes it, does not negate the way that slaves were monitored by being made to use lamps in the streets as a way of enabling surveillance through the visible. For Andrejevic, these data points can include past actions that are not necessarily connected to particular senses but more to preexistent governmental interactions (previous offenses, phone calls, etc.), but he likewise speaks of attempts to monitor biometric data, including "body temperature, facial expression, pulse rate, and other signals" (Andrejevitc 891). As these different data points mingle, the different sensory implications need to be examined in order to understand not only the ways in which surveillance is utilized by how it reads (and is able to read) the world it observes. Beyond the human, though, Vilem Flusser's writing on technical images in Towards a philosophy of photography also provides a possible ground for examining, on the other hand, the way that technical sensing can monitor - and consequently, visualize - information that is not readily viewable to people's sensory mechanism.