Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation

Abstract

This paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. As scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance, this literature review can offer much-needed common ground for the debate. We structure surveillance theory in three roughly chronological/thematic phases. The first two conceptualise surveillance through comprehensive theoretical frameworks which are elaborated in the third phase. The first phase, featuring Bentham and Foucault, offers architectural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through (self-) disciplining of the watched subjects. The second phase offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. The third phase of scholarship refines, combines or extends the main conceptual frameworks developed earlier. Surveillance theory branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance and resistance. With the datafication of society, surveillance combines the physical with the digital, government with corporate surveillance and top-down with self-surveillance.

Young people’s uses of wearable healthy lifestyle technologies; surveillance, self-surveillance and resistance

“…As beautifully laid out by Galič, Timan, and Koops (2017), there are different possible routes to go down in order to explore surveillance, self-surveillance and resistance. The basis for our study has been the work of Michel Foucault and his work on surveillance.…”

“…The continual presence of the gaze (in our case the wearable health device and app) together with the regulation of actions, regardless of the actuality of the gaze, is what gives surveillance such deep rooted and enduring influence (Webb & Quennerstedt, 2010). Foucault's Panopticon metaphor has however been criticised as being top-down, hierarchical and mainly focused on disciplinary aspects of surveillance, thus overemphasising surveillance in terms of 'them on us' (Galič et al, 2017;Vaz & Bruno, 2003). Galič et al (2017) also suggest that the metaphor is insufficient when studying technology and digital layers of surveillance.…”

“…Foucault's Panopticon metaphor has however been criticised as being top-down, hierarchical and mainly focused on disciplinary aspects of surveillance, thus overemphasising surveillance in terms of 'them on us' (Galič et al, 2017;Vaz & Bruno, 2003). Galič et al (2017) also suggest that the metaphor is insufficient when studying technology and digital layers of surveillance. In our study, surveillance is therefore used as a tool to explore how power is exercised, but as Gallagher (2010) suggests the metaphor of Panopticon most fruitfully should be seen as a point of departure, something to build on and move beyond.…”

Towards a unified conceptual model for surveillance theories

“…Here we outline why a conceptual modelling approach is appropriate to dene a unied surveillance theory. In their exhaustive review of surveillance theory research, Galič et al [18] present a number of theories that could broadly be described as mid-range grand theories in that they are relatively well developed and used to describe and explain embedded phenomena [21,33].…”

“…Stage 1 (Identify Problem and Motivate) of the adopted DSR approach is achieved through an analysis of existing surveillance theory. The recent review by Galič et al [18] is a useful starting point as their paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. In this section, we introduce the concepts in their basic form.…”