Page 218 - Cultural Studies Dictionary
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SURVEILLANCE
simply a negative mechanism of control but is productive of the self. The disciplinary
power of schools, work organizations, prisons, hospitals, asylums and the
proliferating discourses of sexuality produce subjectivity by bringing individuals
into view. They achieve this by categorizing, naming and fixing subjects in writing 195
via the discourses of, for example, medicine.
Foucault’s account of subjectivity has been of concern to a number of cultural
writers because it appears to rob subjects of agency. Thus, if subjects are docile
bodies generated by discursive practices then how can we conceive of persons as
able to act since subjects appear to be ‘products’ rather than ‘producers’. However,
agency can be said to be a subject position within discourse, that is, the capacity for
agency is discursively determined and as such is best understood as the socially
constructed capacity to act.
Foucault attacks what he calls the ‘great myth of the interior’ and adopts an anti-
essentialist position in which the subject is not unified but fractured. The
Enlightenment or Cartesian subject as understood through the work of Descartes
has grasped persons as unique unified agents endowed with the capacities of reason,
consciousness and action. Thus Descartes’ formulation ‘I think, therefore I am’
places the rational, conscious individual subject at the heart of Western philosophy.
By contrast the so-called fractured or postmodern subject conceives of the subject
in terms of discursively constructed shifting, fragmented and multiple identities.
Persons are composed not of one but of several, sometimes contradictory, identities
because they have been subjected to and formed as subjects by a variety of
discourses located in a range of social spaces. If we feel that we have a single identity
it is because we have constructed a unifying narrative of the self.
Links Agency, discourse, identity, self-identity, structuration, subject position
Surveillance The process of surveillance involves the monitoring and collection of
information about subject populations with an eye to the supervision and
regulation of activities. Thus the idea of surveillance refers to the collection, storage
and retrieval of information as well as to the direct supervision of activities and the
use of information to monitor subject populations. It is widely argued that while
modernity did not invent surveillance per se it did introduce new, more complex
and extensive forms of surveillance. These included shifts from personal to
impersonal control as marked by the bureaucratization, rationalization and
professionalization that form the core institutional configurations of modernity.
In particular, the rise of modernity is associated with organizations intrinsic to
which are attempts to regularize control of social relations across time and space.
For example, the emergence of the industrial labour process included an increase in
the size and division of labour in tandem with the mechanization and
intensification of work. The workshop and factory were then utilized as a means of
exerting discipline and the creation of new work habits. That is, they marked new
forms of surveillance.
In the current period increased social and institutional reflexivity is manifested
in the desire of institutions to know more about their workforce, customers and