There are four of us students.
Equipping ourselves with video cameras, we each take a separate corner in a room. The room has a single door serving as entrance/exit. We point the cameras at the center of the room, zoomed out as wide as possible. With all of our cameras, every inch of the room is visible and capable of being recorded – there are no corners out of sight. In the center of the room there is a table. On the table, as the highly visible sign on the outside of the door advertises (“FREE FOOD AND DRINK”), there sits: an industrial sized coffee machine with easy-pour spout; a large, heated container of soup, with a ladle; napkins. One person starts recording. A minute later, another starts, and so on until all 4 of the cameras are rolling. The minute buffer will allow time to change tapes without losing full visibility. When all cameras are rolling, our bouncer (Wendy?) opens the door. A single person is allowed in from the line outside. S/he is handed a single, very small, paper cup – slightly smaller than a Dixie cup, but larger than a thimble. S/he enters and moves quickly to the table in the center of the room. Because of the smallness of her/his cup, s/he is unable to take food/drink and run. While deciding which to sample first, the coffee or the soup, s/he sees the people with the cameras. Let the magic begin.

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Something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while now, but especially since beginning this class, is the way the increasing presence of surveillance technology (or even the possibility of presence, the idea of a camera outside my window, or a recording device on my phone) has influenced my behavior. When I was in middle school a friend and I would sit in his basement with some sort of radio-frequency scanner, listening to, and recording, his neighbor’s telephone calls – anyone with a portable telephone who lived in his subdivision. We didn’t hear anything interesting, really, but the image of two kids sitting in a basement somewhere nearby has infected each phone conversation that I’ve participated in since then. Turns out I was effected more than anyone else.

The feeling seems linked to the issues regarding space that keep appearing in the reading. In my last blog, I talked about the changes in architectural arrangements of space, starting from the privately divided rooms of the bourgeois family household, and moving to the relative union of public/private realms in the city, the apartment complex, the neighborhood, etc. Now, with Foucault’s notion of space as a means for separation, ranking, and observing – of the “segmented, immobile, frozen space” of the plague-ridden town and the panopticon (Discipline and Punish, 195) – something interesting seems to be happening with psychical understandings of spatial divisions. Whereas Habermas’ discussion of the bourg. family seems to maintain an aspect of ranking (father in space designated for head of the household, etc.), the division of the house into separate realms for each individual still had a privatizing effect – the space of the child’s room, for instance, was both a physical and mental separation, offering a sense of seclusion or detachment. With urbanization, individually designated areas become less and less private (thin walls, picture windows, etc.), and separation operates on a purely physical, spatial basis. Like Peter’s apartment in _Office Space_, where a neighbor is constantly within earshot, people speaking through walls rather than walking around them. The spatial arrangement of the city, or of dwellings encouraged within urban environments (shared apartments, strange roommates, houses stacked with only a few feet between them), has an effect similar to that of the panopticon. As Koskela writes, “While the Panopticon ostensibly keeps the body entrapped, it is in fact aimed at the psyche” (“Cam Era”, 299). Which is to say, as my knowledge of methods of surveillance – or of the very “public” qualities/possibilities of my household, my bedroom, my telephone, my email – increases, the mental or psychical qualities I may have once assigned to spatial divisions decreases, leaving space as a solely physical, material measure of distance. A wall is a barrier for matter, but not for sound; a window a barrier for cold air or rain; but not for the lens of a camera.

And with websites ( http://www.terrafly.com/ ) that allow you to view satellite images of any address, anywhere in the world (and because I know Wendy has my home address, seeing as how I wrote it on the questionnaire she handed out and collected during the introductory class), are we ever "entitled to leave" the urban realm of surveillance, as Koskela suggests? (300)

I guess what I’m trying to say is I think we should all go watch Cache this weekend.

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I also found Foucault's use of technological language in the Panopticism interesting. Mechanisms, functions, diagrams, programming, physics - he seems to describe power/control as a mathematical process of input-output, cause-effect. It seems like these moments would be useful in computer/media theory, especially when paired with Koskela's discussion of "data doubles", face-recognition technology, and the computer, not camera, as heralding the "panopticonization of urban space" (304). I'm trying to remember if many of the readings from Media Archaeology, on interface or protocol, for instance, referenced Foucault's Panopticism essay. They must've...

Another question I had regarding Foucault's language stemmed from his discussion of light and visibility in strangely theatrical, or photo/cinematographic terminology. Not so much light as cleanliness, and darkness as danger - which Koskela discusses. Rather, what was interesting was Foucault's discussion of "backlighting", for instance, and the prisoners within the panoptic prison as actors within "so many small theatres" (Discipline, 200). In "The Eye of Power," Foucault talks of the Panopticon's reversal of the dungeon principle, saying, "daylight and the overseer's gaze capture the inmate more effectively than darkness" (95). This notion of light/visibility as capturing seems to tie the work of surveillance cameras, for instance, to Foucault's discussion of recording, writing, and documentation - which i guess Koskela addresses as well, in his discussion of knowledge as created rather than found, or of the "documentary accumulation" of endless vhs tapes, digital representations, and other signs; but I feel like there is more to unpack here.
posted by josh_g at 7:17 PM

A short marker for the readings on Discipline and Surveillance.

In Discipline and Punish Foucault states “Furthermore, the arrangement of this machine is such that its enclosed nature does not preclude a permanent presence from the outside: we have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the functions of surveillance, and that, this being the case, he can gain a clear idea of the way in which surveillance is practiced” (207).
Here we see the connection of Foucault’s discourse on surveillance to Habermas’s on an open liberal public with horizontal access to knowledge that allows critical debate. Foucault highlights the connection further in The Eye of Power: the panopticon serves the “dream of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness, zones established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogatives of some corporation, zones of disorder. It was the dream that each individual, whatever position he occupied, might be able to see the whole of society, that men’s hearts should communicate, their vision be unobstructed by obstacles, and that opinion of all reign over each other” (96). In conception, the panopticon openly produces knowledge for any person and that knowledge can be critically debated. The horizontal access, not determined by position, seems only possible because the panopticon is only “a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels or application, targets; it is a physics or an anatomy of power, a technology” (discipline and punish, 215). It seems to me that Foucault believes the panopticon is an objective technology that can be used by anyone. Its ideal nature attaches it to the ideal liberal public.

Questions: Can the panopticon be an objective technology? Or does it automatically produce kinds of knowledge to which horizontal access can’t be imagined?

To me, the panopticon objective is not to banish, as earlier methods of punishment did, but to control w/ vision that produces knowledge (ie categories). These categories are disseminated and embedded in society and thus maintains subject positions. Positions to which power can be applied. Does this circuit of power-knowledge automatically reproduce itself then? If so, are there ways to resist such a technology of power? Do the surveillance camera players and webcams that koskela cites (306) break the circuit or reinforce positioning within society?
posted by chr15 at 6:59 PM