In terms of Doug's recent post on surveillance, discipline and Foucault/Bentham (and suggestions that it may D&P be as useful to Marxists as is Cap.)... If I remember right (and it has been a couple of years since I read _Disc and Pun._), Foucault makes the point that it is not necessarily the _use_ of the technology (here meaning machinery and technique of control) that is crucial for the metaphor (he speaks of it literally and then in terms of metaphorical variety:"why is it that the factory resembles the school and the..." stuff)of the panopticon. The panopticon also functioned on the snowballing paranoia that you _could_ be being watched and listened to but there was no way of knowing. It's sound-sensitive tubes could pick up your rustling and insurgent language; its tower provided a view of your movements, but not vice-versa. What disiciplined bodies or encouraged subjects to discipline themselves in accordance with the wishes of certain interests/powers was precisely the fact that they might get caught because the technology to surveille was always there. And this is Foucault's point that critical social theory picks up as an advance: that power (s)_produces_ "right" or "desirable" (from its point of view, of course, though it is not static, homogenous, unporous) conduct before it _represses_. There are, of course, many varieties of this "production" of behavior, one of which closely ressembles the Althusserian notion of ideology as "common sense" produced from our "day ones" in this world by the ISAs. But this aspect of power and the panopticon above is a different way of policing and disciplining "bad" subjects into conformity precisely by making them aware that they "can" be policed. The panoptic technology or technique of power has lots of contemporary variants. Some see it in ways of docilizing illegal immigrant labor (so they may not make claims on the state and capital) through Prop 187s, etc. In fact most laws work through this logic, don't they? You will be punished if you're caught, even though we can't catch everybody--why risk deviance?
So, regarding the reservations Curtiss rightly and quite
understandably has below about the actual practicality of policing everyone
at the same time, without missing anything--at least from the Foucauldean
perspective, that is not a problem at all. The point is not that everyone
can be policed at once...BUT that it could be you who is being policed, so
behave. At least that's the way I'm reading it, so I thought I might at
least share that view while I have a minute. As always, open to all your
learned attempts to help me modify, correct, or strengthen my view with
yours.
back to my willing academic subjection,
Jayson
>John Kawakami writes:
>
>> Put another computer on the job, and you can scan those recordings for
>> key words, like "hash" or "got the stuff" or "beat up". You can monitor
>> conversations in real-time these days. I'll assume that PC can handle
>> the full load, working 24 hours a day. This computer is responsible for
>> flagging potentially important messages and copying them for a monitoring
>> employee.
>> Let's say that there are N interesting messages flagged per day, per 70
>> people. Assume messages are 5 minutes long, or 12 messages per person
>> per day.
>> Let's say that there are N interesting messages flagged per day, per 70
>> people. Assume messages are 5 minutes long, or 12 messages per person
>> per day.
>> One agent, working 8 hours monitoring people, can monitor 72 messages.
>
>Assuming the computer could handle the processing load you describe
>(storage being another matter -- see below), I think you're underestimating
>greatly the time required for analysis. For someone working 8 hours to
>analyze 72 messages, they have only just under 7 minutes for each message,
>or less than two minutes for analysis once playback time is subtracted.
>Now consider that people in talking on the phone won't be completely
>explicit when referring to people, places, and events (I'm more likely to
>say "Remember the fucked up thing that happened a couple of weeks ago with
>Mary and whats-his-name?" instead of "Remember when Joe Smith insulted Mary
>Jones in our company at the Brass Rail on December 17th?") and I think
>you'll agree that analysis has to be a very time consuming process;
>analysis times will likely be at least twice the length of the message
>itself, and that's probably a best, not an average, case.
>
>Another problem that comes to mind is the storage capacity needed for
>surveillance on this scale. Speech falls within a narrower bandwidth than
>the sounds in general so some savings could be achieved there, and data
>compression could help more, but I have the sneaking suspicion that the
>amount of opitical or magnetic storage needed to hold a large city's voice
>messages over the course of a month would probably be some fantasically
>huge number.
>
>--
>Curtiss Leung
-- jayson perry harsin Dept. of Communication Studies Northwestern University j-harsin at nwu.edu (773)508-4062 WNUR's Southbound Train 89.3 fm Sundays 9:00-11:00 p.m. (listen on the Net at www.wnur.org)
http://www.wnur.org/southbound/ Who are you indeed who would talk
or sing to America? Have you studied out the land,
its idioms and men[sic]?--Walt Whitman