Surveillance & Panopticism/ Updating 1984 with The Circle (1/2)

Intro

Anxieties about surveillance lurks in the background of our everyday lives. The idea of being watched by opaque actors for unclear reasons makes many of us act out in vaguely informed ways, such as blocking webcams and turning off location-tracking on our devices. This unarticulated, intuitive, and pervasive sensibility has been called paranoia.

Paranoia is a persistent theme in twentieth-century fictions, famously expressed by writers such as Franz Kafka, whose 1925 novel, The Trial, is still considered to be the standard for paranoia fiction.[i] Here a defining feature of paranoia fiction is the staging of the main, identifying character as the target of unjust or unclear prosecutions by an omnipresent and omniscient authority. This prosecution-complex could either be imagined or proven real, sometimes a surreal mixture of both. 24 years after The Trial, George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four. This work, amongst other things, still represents the dystopian subgenre of science fiction that has mass surveillance as its primary setting-element and prosecution its core theme. For this video, I’ll label this subgenre as surveillance paranoia fiction.

Today in 2020, seventy years after Nineteen Eighty-Four, our technological environment has seen some changes. Here, many[ii]/[iii]have pointed to Dave Egger’s 2013 novel, The Circle, as an update of Orwell’s surveillance paranoia fiction. Despite issues in writing and world-building, The Circle is a straight-forward expression of a kind of paranoia that many may have in the present moment. In this two-part video, I’d first recap on Nineteen Eighty-Four, then discuss The Circle, and finally present some theories on how we could understand what surveillance means. As usual, without discussing-thus-spoiling the story elements, this video directs attention to the novums, that is, the speculative technologies or practices.

Telescreen and the Surveillance Camera

The novums of Nineteen Eighty-Four are now quite well known and have become a part of our common vocabulary. Such as the “Telescreen,” “Newspeak,” “Thought Crime,” “2+2=5,” and so on. The surveillance apparatus of the setting involves both soft and hard infrastructures. Simply put, soft infrastructures are the entrenched concepts and practices; such as the Thought-Police, an organization tasked to identify and arrest people on the basis of having beliefs deviating from Ingsoc (the state-ideology). Hard infrastructures, on the other hand, are the material technologies necessary for certain soft infrastructures to operate. Here I’d isolate one such technology to represent the surveillance apparatus of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four — the telescreen.

The telescreen is a media that serves at once as a surveillance camera with a microphone, a television, and a one-way broadcast speaker. The telescreens are installed in public spaces and in the homes of the party members, including our protagonist Winston. It displays a constant stream of propaganda, and cannot be turned off. As a surveillance tool, the telescreen is monitored by the Thought-Police. Even though it doesn’t have night vision capacities, its equipped with a microphone sensitive enough to pick up the human heartbeat, therefore one is not outside of surveillance even in the dark. Noone could know when a telescreen is being watched by the Thought Police at any given time, but anyone within its view is preconsciously aware that they could be watched at all times.

In real life, what’s commonly known as the surveillance camera, or closed-circuit television (CCTV) is the historical precursor of Orwell’s fictional telescreen. Some had argued that the first was designed by the Russian polymath, Leon Theremin,[iv] in 1927. Its development was limited, and was installed only in the Kremlin courtyard. The first commercial CCTV system, Vericon, appeared in the US in 1949, it was then called the “television camera.” Twenty years later, Olean, a city in New York was the first recorded city in the US to have installed camera-systems in public spaces for fighting crime.[v] Today, it seems banal to say that the camera-system is a pervasive fixture in public and private spaces.

The Panopticon

But if we want to identify the origins of the more abstract design logic of visual surveillance, we could trace to the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon, which was visualized in 1791,[vi] nearly two centuries before first publicly installed CCTV system. As an architectural model, the Panopticon was designed in a way in which the prison subjects would be aware of an invisible inspector and their own constant potential of being watched, which in effect move them to self-regulate their own behaviors to avoid punishment.

Here, the philosopher Michel Foucault famously argued that this ‘panoptic logic’ was a common model of governance for the social institutions that were steadily emerging in Europe since the 18th Century.[vii] Various forms of such institutions — such as factories, prisons, schools, and asylums — are managed through an underlying philosophy of panopticism. Which is a combination of being seen by the unseen authority, punishment avoidance, and self-discipline — a set-up aimed to produce docile bodies, that is, people who have been trained to intuitively act and think in specific ways within a given institution.

In the case of schools for example, this means keeping silence in the classroom, talk only when you’re given permission to, admitting the teachers as the authority for the measure of your worth, and so on. These habits are trained or internalized through spending years in such environments, under the surveilling gaze of the teachers, the superintendents, and sometimes, the police. To the effect that once people graduate from such settings, they would still act and think in disciplined ways without the presence of surveillance. This is, in Foucault term, the main feature of the Disciplinary Society — a panopticon internalized, in the societal-scale unconscious.

Conclusion

Now, where does The Circle come in? I’ll get into that in the second part of this two-parter. For now, I’ll mention that the real-life security-camera systems and 1984’s telescreens are what you would call: stationary sensing systems. That is, their sensing capacities are limited by their situation in space: at a street corner, by the traffic intersections, in the workplace, in one’s home and so on. And like the supervisors of the panopticon: the teachers, the cops, and the managers are all spatially located. The Circle, on the other hand, represents an updated picture that reflects today’s less spatially bounded, more liquid surveillance paradigm, and its related, more ambient form of surveillance paranoia. Namely in our age of ubiquitous computing — as composed of smart devices and big platforms.

[i] Spurr, David. 2011. “Paranoid Modernism in Joyce and Kafka.” Journal of modern literature 34(2):178–191.

[ii] Lyon, David. 2018. The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.

[iii] Jarvis, Brian. 2019. “Surveillance and Spectacle Inside The Circle.” Pp. 275–294. in Surveillance, Architecture, and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture, edited by S. Flynn and A. Mackay. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

[iv] Glinsky, Albert. 2000. Theremin : ether music and espionage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

[v] Robb, Gary C. 1980. “Police Use of CCTV Surveillance: Constitutional Implications and Proposed Regulations.” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 13(3):571–602.

[vi] Gold, Joel and Ian Gold. 2015. Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness. New York: Free Press.

[vii] Foucault, Michel. [1975] 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York, US: Vintage Books.