Week 10 - Post-Panopticon, post-spectacle... but is this post-visual? - Core Post 5 (Hyejoo)

All the authors for this week would seem to agree that the Panopticon model of surveillance is no longer the most comprehensive way to understand our current age of big data-driven surveillance. Andrejevic, focusing on the preemptive goals of current surveillance regimes as seen through predictive policing tools, argues that we are now in a “postpanoptic” era where power is not so much about discipline as it is about stopping unwanted things before they even happen (886). Another interesting aspect to this (that I’m loosely focusing on in this post) is Andrejevic’s assertion that postpanoptic also means post-spectacle. The Panopticon was feared for its visually apparent nature, the spectacle of the tower and the power relations that would always be visible within this model (885). But in our current age, drone cameras are remotely controlled, data is automatically collected, and preemptive measures are taken via correlative computations. Both the looming tower and its human surveillor are vacated out of visibility. It is also no longer individuals per se who are disciplined, but populations and patterns. Like the spread of air pollution, surveillance has become dispersed to the point of having “disappeared,” turned “environmental” in that it is now ubiquitous, the “medium through which we move” (890). 

Vaidhyanathan is also on the same page as he describes how surveillance is now in fact opposite of a Panopticon––it’s not about “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” (112).

But does the shift to a post-Panopticon model fully forgo the significance of the visible? Is there, then, really no updated spectacle to contemporary surveillance? I can’t help but suspect something else (that is visual) has replaced the image of the Panopticon’s tower. Is this why, at least in North America, we also ascribe humanoid stand-ins, like the sterile face of Mark Zuckerberg? Or, if surveillance is now truly environmental, dissipated into ubiquitous air so much so that surveillance is now invisible and exclusively affective, maybe visuals like Zuckerberg’s face are red herrings. Nonetheless, even Gaboury states that the NULL marker, a computational form, can be a “tactic of negotiated visibility.” How are we jumping from computation to visibility here? Gaboury’s ideas seem to place final liberatory power within the realm of the visible, attesting to the continued importance of the visual. And, as Simone Browne shows, the visuality of surveillance is not just about what the infrastructures and technologies of the surveillor look like but also what the surveilled human looks like, the colored and marked bodies that represent what surveillable bodies are and themselves become the conduits to communicate that message. 

Lastly, I want to propose an idea in response to what Andrejevic notes on page 891, which is William Bogard’s concept of the “simulation of surveillance,” which I roughly understand to be how post-Panopticon, data-driven surveillance, to enact its power, must essentially create a virtual model of the real environment. For perfect preemptive surveillance, this double must also be infallible, with all the right information, patterns, etc. Could we perhaps say, then, that surveillance also operates in an imaginary register? A virtual register? Preemptive surveillance relies on a double of the society it strives to surveil. Then, if the double is inaccurate, surveillance is ineffective. This is a provocative thought for me as, kind of like Gaboury’s take on the NULL marker, it leads me to consider how something like a “shadow body” (mentioned in Gillespie back in Week 5) has the potential to self-consciously be a double, like playing surveillance in its own simulator game. What if shadow bodies can act perfect? If we see something like the shadow body not as an inevitable shortcoming of the data-fication of everything, but as a “tactic of negotiated visibility” (in the words of Gaboury), I’m really intrigued by the idea of something like an online avatar, persona, double, etc. being a performative tactic that feigns perfect correspondence to the "real" in order to, ultimately, eschew surveillance.