‘Control Space?: Cinematic Representations of Surveillance Space between Discipline and Control’

Abstract

Recent developments in surveillance practices and their related technologies suggest that the heretofore dominant Foucauldian paradigm of discipline, with its sites of confinement in which space is “segmented, immobile [and] frozen”, may no longer be an adequate theoretical framework in which to discuss space within surveillance studies (Foucault, 1995: 195). In his essay Postscript on Control Societies, Gilles Deleuze claims that these sites are in the midst of widespread breakdown, leading to a fundamental shift in the notion of space, characterised by the term ‘modulation’ (Deleuze, 1990: 178-179). In the control model, urban surveillance can be said to be characterised by an emphasis on the use of digital surveillance practices, leading to a view of urban space and the city, as well as its inhabitants, which largely resides within a computer mainframe. This raises the question: if the surveillance carried out within this conception of urban space can be described as concentrated, hidden, passive, functional, mobile, and varied, how can these changes be communicated cinematically since there is an obvious problem of representation; when much of the surveillance technology is computer and digital in form, how does cinema make visible the potentially invisible? In considering the question of how film engages with urban space between the paradigms of discipline and control, two cinematic views of the (informational) city will be discussed by considering three scenes from Erasing David (2009) and Minority Report (2002) in order to identify some of the cinematic strategies used in communicating contemporary surveillance practices increasingly characterised as invisible and immaterial.