KANTUTA QUIROS & ALIOCHA IMHOff - Overlapping Biennial

ABOUT SURVEILLANCE
AND BEING SURVEILLED
MIRjANA pEITLER - CURATOR
In 1785 the philosopher and lawyer Jeremy Bentham, founder of the doctrine of utilitarianism, planned a prison that he termed
panopticon. The signature characteristic of this plan was a central tower, from which all prisoners, those in their cells or out
of them, could be observed, without those in the tower themselves being subject to scrutiny. Since they could never know for
sure whether they were being watched or not, the fact of actual observation was replaced by the possibility of being watched.
Bentham assumed that alone the presence of constant surveillance would lead the prisoners from misbehaving. And in order to
avoid punishment, they would accept and internalize the “disciplinary eye”.
While long the subject of theoretical and political debate, the panopticon was reintroduced into contemporary philosophical and
cultural-sociological discussion in 1975 by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. He saw it as a model of power construction
in contemporary surveillance society, what he called a “disciplinary society.” Another French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze more
or less continued Foucault’s work. In his essay: “Post-script to the control-societies“ Deleuze combines almost manifest-like
the thesis of his colleague into the containment, formulizing the transformations of society from the disciplinary one to the
“society of control”:
“In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while
in the societies of control one is never finished with anything – the corporation, the educational system, the armed services
being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. […] In the societies
of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password,
while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as
from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We
no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data,
markets, or “banks”. 1
Further on, Deleuze describes Felix Guattari’s vision of a city „in which each and everyone can leave their flat, their street, their
neighborhood with the help of an electronic card, a card that opens certain gates. The card though might not be valid at certain
hours. What is of importance are not the barriers themselves but rather the computers that register the position of each person,
whether authorized or not.“ 2
The Austrian prison system appropriated this scary idea in 2006 and began to monitor day release prisoners with the aid of
electronically supervised house arrests (electronic monitoring). A GPS location system controls where a lawbreaker can go and
when. Since then, monitoring, observing and control became part of our lives too. So, what we face in the everyday life now, are
new ways of the self-discipline in the total-transparent, open environment, based on a personal monitoring and punishment.
Thus the “liberal control” turns out as voluntary self-control. This is a fusion, a kind of intertwine of disciplinary and control
society and sometimes it is very difficult to recognize what is what and who controls whom.
Nevertheless we are long not afraid any more from being watched and from privately organized surveillance. It has even
become fashionable, also in the mass media- especially on TV – to become “observed”. “Big Brother” has become popular in
many countries. The term once used to describe state of dictatorial regimes changed to something innovative in the sector of
entertainment.
The phenomenon of Big Brother was an indication for the change of meaning from the originally alegoric version of the Big
Brother after Orwell - as synonym for totalitarian control measures, from which one can never escape - to a completely different
one, where people let themselves be controlled with pleasure and fun. That was finally the victory of Big Brother. The
people had torn themselves to be part of it. The cynicism of the television broadcast was not to be over-bid. But the interest for
the Reality-TV-Shows and similar kind of entertainment decreased and has been replaced by boredom. This collective tired-
1. Gilles Deleuze, L’autre journal, Nr. 1, Mai 1990
2. Ibid.
30