Panoptic Surveillance Research Articles

Proustiansk panoptisme. Om løgn som modstand hos Proust

Synne Ytre Arne: “Proustian Panopticism: On Lying as Resistance in Proust”In La Prisonnière (1923), Marcel Proust’s female protagonist, Albertine Simonet, is depicted as being, by nature, mendacious. This notion, however, risks obscuring what motivates her mendacious attitude. In this article, I claim that the narrator’s attempts to control and surveil Albertine during their cohabitation in Paris can be described as panoptical, and I suggest that we consider her lies as a means of conscious revolt against this panoptical surveillance.

Evaluating a major innovation in hospital design: workforce implications and impact on patient and staff experiences of all single room hospital accommodation

BackgroundNew hospital design includes more single room accommodation but there is scant and ambiguous evidence relating to the impact on patient safety and staff and patient experiences.ObjectivesTo explore the impact of the move to a newly built acute hospital with all single rooms on care delivery, working practices, staff and patient experience, safety outcomes and costs.Design(1) Mixed-methods study to inform a pre-/post-‘move’ comparison within a single hospital, (2) quasi-experimental study in two control hospitals and (3) analysis of capital and operational costs associated with single rooms.SettingFour nested case study wards [postnatal, acute admissions unit (AAU), general surgery and older people’s] within a new hospital with all single rooms. Matched wards in two control hospitals formed the comparator group.Data sourcesTwenty-one stakeholder interviews; 250 hours of observation, 24 staff interviews, 32 patient interviews, staff survey (n = 55) and staff pedometer data (n = 56) in the four case study wards; routinely collected data at ward level in the control hospitals (e.g. infection rates) and costs associated with hospital design (e.g. cleaning and staffing) in the new hospital.Results(1) There was no significant change to the proportion of time spent by nursing staff on different activities. Staff perceived improvements (patient comfort and confidentiality), but thought the new accommodation worse for visibility and surveillance, teamwork, monitoring, safeguarding and remaining close to patients. Giving sufficient time and attention to each patient, locating other staff and discussing care with colleagues proved difficult. Two-thirds of patients expressed a clear preference for single rooms, with the benefits of comfort and control outweighing any disadvantages. Some patients experienced care as task-driven and functional, and interaction with other patients was absent, leading to a sense of isolation. Staff walking distances increased significantly after the move. (2) A temporary increase in falls and medication errors within the AAU was likely to be associated with the need to adjust work patterns rather than associated with single rooms, although staff perceived the loss of panoptic surveillance as the key to increases in falls. Because of the fall in infection rates nationally and the low incidence at our study site and comparator hospitals, it is difficult to conclude from our data that it is the ‘single room’ factor that prevents infection. (3) Building an all single room hospital can cost 5% more but the difference is marginal over time. Housekeeping and cleaning costs are higher.ConclusionsThe nature of tasks undertaken by nurses did not change, but staff needed to adapt their working practices significantly and felt ill prepared for the new ways of working, with potentially significant implications for the nature of teamwork in the longer term. Staff preference remained for a mix of single rooms and bays. Patients preferred single rooms. There was no strong evidence that single rooms had any impact on patient safety but housekeeping and cleaning costs are higher. In terms of future work, patient experience and preferences in hospitals with different proportions of single rooms/designs need to be explored with a larger patient sample. The long-term impact of single room working on the nature of teamwork and informal learning and on clinical/care outcomes should also be explored.FundingThe National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme.

Simone De Beauvoir: Transgressing Immanence, Motherhood And Social Constructs

Abstract The thesis of the present paper is to investigate the reasons why it may become difficult for the 20th century Western woman to avoid feeling trapped within her status of motherhood and to transcend her immanence as a woman. Simone de Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex, Part V, chapter XVII (“The Mother”) that the modern Western woman proves unable to transgress her own immanence. What are the three factors that stand in the way of the woman's existential telos? What is the natural consequence of her Snow White-type of imprisonment? Will she impose the same pattern of panoptic surveillance upon her own offspring?

The aesthetic and practical fields of excrementality of L’boulevard festival

The revolutionary aspect of performance is given ample room in this article. “Conflict” deserves a renewed importance, because it places the term “transgression” in relation to festivals as sites for the embodiment of social struggles. We will hone in on L’boulevard festival, which not only participates in a dialogue with social conflicts, but also epitomises them through an ambivalent theatricality that merges the real with the unreal. As festival agents identify their marginal place in relation to the body of the system – generally present in the festival through panoptical surveillance, badges, barriers and an entire discourse of social categorisation, and as they are cognisant of the festival as possibly an empowering threshold, a place for no system other than that chosen by the theatres of roleplaying, they activate their excrementality, a mentality which, in its ideological framing, creates and innovates, inspired by excrement, its functionality and symbolism. Excreta-mental types would perform the very khsoriya (vulgarity) expected of them, by performing their marginality (their becoming central), among other things, through art.

Panoptic, synoptic, and omnoptic surveillance

We are generating more and more data through our digital devices and services, both educational and otherwise. These data are automatically logged in our device and service providers’ databases and...

Visual Impersonation — Population Registration, Reference Books and Identification in the Eastern Cape, 1950s–1960s

AbstractThe paper looks at the population registration and issuing of reference books in the Transkei in the 1950s and 1960s. Thedompasbecame the iconic object of apartheid policing within the logic of urban racial segregation and capitalist labour exploitation. The analysis proposed here investigates population registration through the lens of materiality and visuality. It sketches the visual economies that facilitated the scheme in a rural area and explores the role of photography in one of apartheid’s most notorious administrative schemes. Along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on technological mediation the paper retraces how thedompasas an image/object oscillated between panoptic surveillance and subaltern contestation.

Auditing within service-oriented architecture: the Dutch experience

SOA is an unsolved problem for IT infrastructures yet its treatment in mainstream accounting literature is very problematic. Demand for new competitive pressures and service-oriented, knowledge-based economy mean ‘manual auditing’ is becoming a diminishing option for successful auditors. Associated with the view that IT auditing is the dominant training issue amongst most auditors, SOA environment has added an influential conceptual vocabulary to analyse auditing strategies. This research found such approaches being criticised for underestimating the complex relations between ‘interests of ownership’ and ‘quality of audit’. Interviewers for this qualitative research uncovered that contemporary locus of auditors have become personalised rather than generalised, through the spread of corporate cultures, panoptic surveillance, and self-discipline. Evidence here shows auditors are experiencing considerable problems with audit quality within an SOA environment.

A Technology-Centered Approach to Quantitative Privacy

We are at the cusp of a historic shift in our conceptions of the Fourth Amendment driven by dramatic advances in technologies that continuously track and aggregate information about our daily activities. The Fourth Amendment tipping point was marked this term by United States v. Jones. There, law enforcement officers used a GPS device attached to Jones’s car to follow his movements for four weeks. Although Jones was resolved on narrow grounds, five justices signed concurring opinions defending a revolutionary proposition: that citizens have Fourth Amendment interests in substantial quantities of information about their public or shared activities, even if they lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in each of the constitutive particulars. This quantitative approach to the Fourth Amendment has since been the focus of considerable debate. Among the most compelling challenges are identifying its Fourth Amendment pedigree, describing a workable test for deciding how much information is enough to trigger Fourth Amendment interests, and explaining the doctrinal consequences. This Article takes up these challenges.Our analysis and proposal draw upon insights from information privacy law. Although information privacy law and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence share a fundamental interest in protecting privacy interests, these conversations have been treated as theoretically and practically discrete. This Article ends that isolation and the mutual exceptionalism that it implies. As information privacy scholarship suggests, technology can permit government to know us in unprecedented and totalizing ways at great cost to personal development and democratic institutions. We argue that these concerns about panoptic surveillance lie at the heart of the Fourth Amendment as well. We therefore propose a technology-centered approach to measuring and protecting Fourth Amendment interests in quantitative privacy. As opposed to proposals for case-by-case assessments of information “mosaics,” which have so far dominated the debate, we argue that government access to technologies capable of facilitating broad programs of continuous and indiscriminate monitoring should be subject to the same Fourth Amendment limitations applied to physical searches.

Hybridization, Youth Subculture, and the Self-making of Senior Muslim Students in a Philippine Public High School

Public schools are spaces for producing self-disciplined “pedagogized” bodies. But they are also a niche for students to create various subcultures that are different from the official school culture. When Muslim students enroll in public schools, they are positioned within these heterogenous spaces, yet as the present study shows, following the Foucauldian approach that ties culture to power and resistance, Muslim students are also able to create their own “techniques” of self-making that allow them to avoid the panoptic surveillance of the school while also blending, though not completely, with the mainstream culture of the students. This study, by focusing on senior Muslim students, maps out the various subcultural styles within the Makabayan school by relying exclusively on the emic categories of the students.

Visual surveillance and the prevention of terrorism: What about the checks and balances?

Visual surveillance has become a key technological tool in the prevention of terrorism and other serious crimes. From a human rights perspective, however, its use requires proper checks and balances, especially because there is a risk that – quoting Mathiesen on Foucault – panoptic surveillance, where the few view the many, develops. Furthermore, when public authorities use visual surveillance in an excessive or arbitrary fashion, they alienate citizens and reduce opportunities for effective co-operation. Henceforth, the need for proper checks and balances for visual surveillance is maintained in this article, which focuses on the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, as both countries have experience with preventing ‘home grown’ terrorism and with visual surveillance in public spaces.

Resistance through re-narration: Fanon on de-constructing racialized subjectivities

Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty's overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted ‘blackness’. Through a re-telling of his own experiences of racism, Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the ‘white gaze’. In this essay I bring Fanon's insights into conversation with Foucault's discussion of panoptic surveillance. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of ‘blackness’ and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. Lastly, I discuss Fanon's historically attuned ‘new humanism’, once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners.

Seeing, Showing Off and Being Seen: On the Ramifications of Panoptical Surveillance in Contemporary Society

Surveillance is often considered as a hallmark of today’s society. This paper examines how professionals and professional service firms react to increased formalization of surveillance mechanisms, and discusses implications ensuing from their reactions. To carry out the investigation we rely on data gathered in two distinct empirical settings: the use of a knowledge management system in a law firm; and the imposition of a regulatory requirement on public accounting firms. Our analysis stresses that targets of surveillance are not docile bodies. They can divert and circumvent surveillance mechanisms in unpredictable ways but can also, paradoxically, actively participate in the structuring of their own surveillance. Broadly speaking, this research points to the need to consider the notion of panoptical surveillance from angles that recognize the ambiguities, complexities, and unpredictability of human institutions. Important implications arise from the unpredictable ramifications of panoptic control, from a societal as well as from a research viewpoint.

The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800–1917 by Alex Marshall (review)

449 Ab Imperio, 3/2008 From a technical-editorial point of view, this edition achieves the high standards of contemporary Russian document publications. The documents are well-annotated and a concise biographical index contributes to usability. Only the lack of a subject index, a list of archives or a bibliography can be considered a minus, apart from some flaws in the annotation of foreign-language terms (for example, on P. 139, the German “gratuliere” is annotated as being French, and the French “aidememoire ” on P. 294 is declared Latin). In its thematic spectrum, the edition is absolutely essential. Not only does it illuminate thematic subissues like the ones outlined above, but with its multitude of layers and perspectives, it gives a dense picture of Lithuanian-Soviet relations on the eve of Lithuania’s annexation. It would be extremely important to popularize the edition in Russia, where it could help to fight imperial stereotypes and historiographical taboos that dominate public discourse. Andrew GENTES Alex Marshall, The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800-1917 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). xii+274 pp. Tables, Figures, Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 0-41535561 -3. The topic covered in this book is of potential interest to specialists in military affairs, foreign policy, imperialism, and international relations . As of 1800 the empire had annexed most of its Asian territory, though significant expansion would continue with acquisition of the Caucasus, the so-called “stans,” the Amur Territory (which had been ceded to China in 1689), and Sakhalin Island. This Drang nach Osten brought within the realm peoples of various languages, ethnicities, and cultures; significantly lengthened the border with China; and made next-door neighbours of Ottoman Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, and Japan. In addition to provoking imperial competition with the latter it also heightened rivalry with Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. It conditioned Russians’Weltanschauungen and influenced domestic policies including the decisions to build the Trans-Siberian railroad and to deport convicts to Sakhalin. Understanding the motivations and methods behind this expansion is 450 Рецензии/Reviews underestimated the Japanese while overestimating the threat from Central Asian Muslims. Also questionable is Marshall’s brief discussion of Foucault. He argues that the general staff’s socalled Asiatic Departments at least superficially “performed… a panoptic surveillance function akin to that attributed by Foucault to the modern state in general” (P. 177). Marshall refers to Jeremy Bentham’s ideal prison, which he claims was inspired by his tour of Nicholas I’s Russia. Actually, plans for the Panopticon were inspired by Jeremy’s brother Samuel, who during the 1780s developed techniques to better manage the English and Scottish craftsmen working under him at Potemkin’s Krichev estate. Similar to his treatment of Said, Marshall distorts Foucault’s ideas, in part by coining the term “panoptic knowledge” (P. 180), which I have never come across and which seems to conflate two different foci of Foucault’s thinking , the first being a disciplinary method of surveillance, the second being the general discursive production of knowledges with the goal of instrumentalizing subjects. Both are strategies of power, but each is distinct from the other. The Panopticon ’s ability to make a subject discipline himself by internalizing an external gaze was what made it crucial to understanding Russia itself during this period. Alex Marshall begins his study with an engaging anecdote about his youthful fascination with the paintings of Vasilii Vereshchagin, whose depictions of lands and peoples dominated by tsarist forces both romanticized and critiqued imperialism. This invocation of Vereshchagin reasonably leads the reader to expect a Saidean analysis that will illuminate Orientalism’s influence upon the general staff. However, Marshall rejects such a reading, arguing that “Said’s thesis of an instinctively racialist and blinkered orientalism” does not pertain in this case, because the “military vostokovedy were primarily concerned with the contemporary situation in Asiatic states” and did not share a view of Asia as “unchanging and backward” (P. 185). This formulation distorts Said’s theory, however, for in his book Orientalism British and French imperialists’ views of the Orientalized Other are described as complex and involving both praise and belittlement; and, in any case, such views turned upon discursive constructions whose functional intent...

The Technological Gaze

The Technological Gaze

NGOs and Monitoring Genocide: The Benefits and Limits to Human Rights Panopticism

In this paper we use the concept of a global Panopticon to interpret the promotion and protection of Western-informed human rights. We use the Panopticon as a metaphor to illustrate how a system of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can work in concert with hegemonic states to decrease future occurrences of serious human rights abuses. Like previous authors who use the concept of the Panopticon in this context, we see the current global human rights regime connected to, and benefiting, current hegemonic power structures. But unlike previous authors we find normative benefits to this Panoptic surveillance, even if such benefits result, and thus cannot be separated from, the power structures in which they develop. We consider why hegemons would promote the activity of NGOs when the latter are often critical of the former's foreign policy practices. We then look at two humanitarian crises as case studies to determine the role NGOs played in their outcomes.

A Comparative Analysis of Opinions of Americans, Australians and Malaysians on the Use of Biometric Devices in Workplaces for Security and Monitoring of Worker Productivity

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, the use of biometric devices such as fingerprint scans, retina and iris scans and facial recognition in everyday situations for national security and border control, have become commonplace. This has resulted in the biometric industry moving from being a niche technology to one that is ubiquitous. As a result. more and more employers are using biometrics to secure staff access to their facilities as well as for tracking staff work hours, maintaining 'discipline' and carry out surveillance against thefts. detecting work hour abuses and fraud. However, the data thus collected and the technologies themselves are feared of having the potential for and actually being misused - both in terms of the violating staff privacy and discrimination and oppression of targeted workers. This paper examines the issue of using biometric devices in organisational settings their advantages, disadvantages and actual and potential abuses from the point of view of critical theory. From the perspectives of Panoptic surveillance and hegemonic organisational control, the paper examines the issues related to privacy and identification, biometrics and privacy, biometrics and the 'body', and surveillance and modernity. The paper also examines the findings ofa survey carried out in Australia. Malaysia and the USA on respondents' opinions on the use of biometric devices in everyday life including at workplaces. The paper concludes that along with their applications in border control and national security, the use of biometric devices should be covered by relevant laws and regulations. guidelines and codes of practice. in order to balance the rights to privacy and civil liberties of workers with employers' need for improved productivity, reduced costs, safeguards related to occupational health and safety, equal opportunity, and workplace harassment of staff and other matters, that employers are legally responsible for.

P2P Networks and the Verizon v. RIAA Case: Implications for Personal Privacy and Intellectual Property

In this paper, we examine some ethical implications of a controversial court decision in the United States involving Verizon (an Internet Service Provider or ISP) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). In particular, we analyze the impacts this decision has for personal privacy and intellectual property. We begin with a brief description of the controversies and rulings in this case. This is followed by a look at some of the challenges that peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, used to share digital information, pose for our legal and moral systems. We then examine the concept of privacy to better understand how the privacy of Internet users participating in P2P file-sharing practices is threatened under certain interpretations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States. In particular, we examine the implications of this act for a new form of "panoptic surveillance" that can be carried out by organizations such as the RIAA. We next consider the tension between privacy and property-right interests that emerges in the Verizon case, and we examine a model proposed by Jessica Litman for distributing information over the Internet in a way that respects both privacy and property rights. We conclude by arguing that in the Verizon case, we should presume in favor of privacy as the default position, and we defend the view that a presumption should be made in favor of sharing (rather than hoarding) digital information. We also conclude that in the Verizon case, a presumption in favor of property would have undesirable effects and would further legitimize the commodification of digital information --- a recent trend that is reinforced by certain interpretations of the DMCA on the part of lawmakers and by aggressive tactics used by the RIAA.

Changing the Subject: Conversation in Supermax

-From a poem by a long-term supermax prisoner Supermaximum prisons are designed to produce a profound social exclusion, both within prison systems and in relation to the outside world. Prisoners in these facilities are held in single, sometimes windowless cells for 23 or more hours a day. They are fed through a hole in the door and taken out, under guard, only for showers or brief exercise in yards. Sophisticated technologies of control, including intensive panoptical surveillance, keep human contact to the barest minimum. This form of confinement is generally considered to be solitary and is widely criticized for its deleterious effects on the mental condition of prisoners. In this article, I explore a paradoxical effect of supermax confinement: in many of these prisons inmates can talk with their immediate neighbors and even hold shouted discussions with others held nearby. Using the work of the social

From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization

Michel Foucault was the great theorist of the fordist mode of social regulation. Writing at the zenith of the postwar Keynesian welfare state, he taught us to see the dark underside of even its most vaunted achievements. Viewed through his eyes, social services became disciplinary apparatuses, humanist reforms became panoptical surveillance regimes, public health measures became deployments of biopower, and therapeutic practices became vehicles of subjection. From his perspective, the components of the postwar social state constituted a carceral archipelago of disciplinary domination, all the more insidious because self-imposed. Granted, Foucault did not himself understand his project as an anatomy of fordist regulation. Positing a greater scope for his diagnosis, he preferred to associate disciplinary power with “modernity” simpliciter. And most of his readers, including me, followed suit. As a result, the ensuing debates turned on whether the Foucauldian picture of modernity was too dark and one-sided, neglecting the latter’s emancipatory tendencies. 1 Today, however, circumstances warrant a narrower reading. If we now see ourselves as standing on the brink of a new, postfordist epoch of globalization, then we should reread Foucault in that light. No longer an interpreter of modernity per se, he becomes a theorist of the fordist mode of social regulation, grasping its inner logic, like the Owl of Minerva, at the moment of its historical waning. From this perspective, it is significant that his great works of social analysis – Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, volume one – were written in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the OECD countries abandoned Bretton Woods, the international financial framework that undergirded national Keynesianism and thus made possible the welfare state. In other words, Foucault mapped the contours of the disciplinary society just as the ground was being cut out from under it. And although it is only now with hindsight becoming clear, this was also the moment at which discipline’s successor was struggling to be born. The irony is plain: whether we call it postindustrial society or neoliberal globalization, a new regime oriented to “deregulation” and “flexibilization” was about to take shape just as Foucault was conceptualizing disciplinary normalization. Of course, to read Foucault in this way is to problematize his relevance to the present. If he theorized fordist regulation, then how does his diagnosis relate to

A Diagram of Panoptic Surveillance

This article critiques a number of recent attempts to outline a contemporary theory of panoptic surveillance. It argues that an updated Foucaultian thesis must take into consideration the decentered and networked aspects of information technologies in an attempt to explain how consumer `choice' is shaped by both rewards and punishments. Drawing upon the work of Foucault, Varela, Deleuze and Guattari, a diagrammatic theory of surveillance is developed, one that questions the interconnection between consumer, sales, distribution, and production data.