[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Core #4/5, Blog #8/15] Surveillance before, of, and after the Panopticon

This week’s readings offer a complex thread of how surveillance took form pre-Panopticon, post-Panopticon, and perhaps as continuation of the structure’s legacy. I found that Andrejevic and Vaidhyanathan’s articulations of ubiquitous, “environmental,” and “infrastructural” surveillance were useful to engage with contemporary shifts in data collection methods, infrastructural transformations, etc. However, as Hyejoo questioned in her blog post, I did not find their forgoing of the visual and the visible so convincing. 

For one, their criticism of the Foucauldian Panoptic gaze as exhausting its utility (Vaidhyanathan, 111) seemed too narrow a reading of the concept. In my interpretation, the design of the Panopticon goes beyond just the presence of a centralized gaze – the internalization of that gaze, the sense of being watched and being surveilled, is an important component of the surveillance model. Even if there is no one physically attendant in the prison's central tower, the very idea of being watched has disciplining effects on the surveilled subject. This is why Vaidhyanatha’s example of reality television’s observatory effect on the eccentricities of the gazed-at subjects’ behaviors fell short: scholars like Anna McCarthy have described reality television as “a Neoliberal Theater of Suffering” that puts into circulation idealized citizen subjectivities and templates for citizenship that complement the privatization of public life. (McCarthy, 17) A new, liberalist logic of state-building disperses the Panoptic gaze in less perceptible but equally internalizable and visual forms into our everyday. Indeed, as Browne argues, if the Panoptic power of surveillance precedes the actual design of the Panopticon and was already observed in the mobile forms of Transatlantic slave ships, as well as remains in emergent logics of racializing technology, how can we discard the utility of Foucault’s Panopticon altogether? This is one of the reasons for Browne's fascination and focus on the visual, aesthetic, and creative practices of Black subjects. The ontology of Blackness and the lived experience of Blackness are still very much predicated on visibility. Visual aesthetics and creative practices still mediate surveillance against and sousveillance performed by Black subjects.

Taking seriously the dominance of the liberalist structure of modernity, I found compelling Browne and Gaboury’s grappling with negotiated agency within it. For Browne, this structure would be one governed by the white seeing eye (quoted from Johh Fiske, Browne, 17) and over-defined category of the human which renders the “lived experience of the Black” determined by the terms of the white others, a la Frantz Fanon. For Gaboury, it would be one of (re-)productive heteronormativity. As Gaboury describes the peculiar positionality of queerness and queer theory, the slipperiness of the queer and NULL subject is due to its being refused and at the same time being made legible by the system it is in. This is an important component of the logic of liberalist state-building: inclusion through exclusion. Writers like Sylvia Wynter and Lisa Lowe have made their critique of the progressionist and (re-)production-oriented liberalist logic of state-building that over-determines the normative subject, and in turn, determines the design of surveillance that disciplines those considered unfit to govern themselves as modern citizens. Liberalist logic of citizenship demonstrates this well: canonical theorists of the tradition such as Hegel have discussed the Aufhebung or sublation (Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History) of those unfit to be included into the social contract (i.e., colonized subjects from ‘backwards’ societies such as African, Indian, Chinese, etc.) through violent and disciplining technologies of surveillance such as census or bodily demarcation. This liberalist structure continues on to this day, albeit in different and more technologically-diverse forms. 

The ontologies of Blackness and queerity are very much tied to the structure and the category of the over-determined human it was beget in. And in such structure that makes possible simultaneous visibility/invisibility, legibility/illegibility, and representation/capturing, Browne and Gaboury's recognition of dark sousveillance or NULL subjectivity as demonstration of negotiated agency seems like a powerful move. As Gaboury quotes the disruptive utterance of “I would prefer not to,” Browne similarly discusses the power of micro-resistance to managerial control through sick leave, expressing boredom on the job, arriving late, etc.: the power of doing the bare minimum. This contesting of surveillance and intentional unproductivity are, even though it is located within the structure that defines its forms and ontology, strategic and negotiated modes of resistance.