The Mode of Information by Poster Mark

Author:Poster, Mark.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745668215
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Device for segregative observation in the Guidance Nursery of the Yale Psycho-Clinic. The observers (O) sit in an alcove represented by ABCD in the upper diagram and by A in the lower diagram. The infant (/) is on the floor of the nursery ABEF. A 16 mesh wire screen separates O from I. It functions as a visual sieve permitting one-way vision only. (From Arnold Gesell, Infancy and Human Growth, New York: Macmillan, 1928, pp. 32–3.)

Foucault sensed that surveillance in the late twentieth century was something new:

Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.26

Foucault notes the new technology but interprets it as a mere extension of nineteenth-century patterns.

Today’s “circuits of communication” and the databases they generate constitute a Superpanopticon, a system of surveillance without walls, windows, towers or guards. The quantitative advances in the technologies of surveillance result in a qualitative change in the microphysics of power. Technological change, however, is only part of the process. The populace has been disciplined to surveillance and to participating in the process. Social security cards, drivers’ licenses, credit cards, library cards and the like – the individual must apply for them, have them ready at all times, use them continuously. Each transaction is recorded, encoded and added to the databases. Individuals themselves in many cases fill out the forms; they are at once the source of information and the recorder of the information. Home networking constitutes the streamlined culmination of this phenomenon: the consumer, by ordering products through a modem connected to the producer’s database, enters data about himself or herself directly into producer’s database in the very act of purchase. Marx analyzed the reorganization of labor by capital in the industrial revolution, the massive repositioning of bodies from the fields and ateliers of an earlier age to the factories and later assembly lines of modernity. Similarly one may speak of the reorganization of daily life from the 1920s onward in which individuals are constituted as consumers and as participants in the disciplining and surveillance of themselves as consumers. In this way the spread of consumerist activities from a small élite of aristocrats, down through the bourgeoisie and finally to the masses after 1920,27 not as an economic change toward a consumer society, nor as a semiological change toward a world of floating signifiers, but as a political change, as part of the reciprocal control of the population by itself.

In addition to an advanced technology (whose capacities were discussed at the outset of this

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