Surveillant Assemblage

Surveillance does not always occur from a top-down central big brother that watches in a defined panopticon. Surveillant assemblage describes the collection of information or "data" about us from various places like social media, online shopping, police reports, or other personal details about people or their habits. It uses "techniques derived from military, administrative, employment, policing and marketing practices" (Lyon, 2007, p. 95). This information eventually is assembled which creates a personal profile. According to Gilliom and Monahan (2013), "The central idea is that there is no central force. There is no Big Brother, no panopticon, but a shifting, moving observation, presentation, and regulation of the self by countless measures in countless locations" (p. 22).

Surveillance integrates seemingly disparate systems into a larger whole, and assemblages are a patchwork of objects which are unified by their aggregate (Haggerty & Ericson, p. 610). The body is one of the pieces assembled together. It is separated from its actual environment and reassembled for whatever the needed purpose, and these reassembled seemingly opaque "data flows" such as audio, smell, chemical, visual, and ultraviolet information become a virtual (as in computerized) "data double" (p. 611) which can be governed, commercialized, and controlled (p. 613). This makes information about the body standardized, pure information that is "mobile and comparable" (p. 613). Centers of calculation are thus "forensic laboratories, statistical institutions, police stations, financial institutions, and corporate and military headquarters" (p. 613). These data doubles are "markers for access to resources, services and power in ways which are often unknown to its referent" (p. 613). They are comprised of information which are ranked according to how useful they are in allowing institutions to discriminate (p. 614).

According to Haggerty and Ericson (2000), Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use the idea of rhizomes to describe assemblage and its interconnected gathering of different forms of information. Rhizomes are "plants which grow in surface extensions through interconnected vertical root systems" (p. 614), and rhizomatic surveillance is a the idea that surveillance is a series of "interconnected roots which throw up shoots in different locations" (p. 614). Surveillance technologies like cameras can be placed all around a city but all feed to one location. Thus, there is an assemblage of seemingly unity technologies which align "computers, cameras, people and telecommunications" (p. 614). Due to participatory culture in which the public can post their own videos on topics such as police brutality (i.e., Eric Garner), rhizomatic surveillance is not limited to a hierarchy of power (such as those suggested by Foucault and Orwell), and the gaze can focus on anyone. According to Haggerty and Ericson, "No major population groups stand irrefutable above or outside surveillant assemblage" (p. 618).

In order to differentiate between these multiple origins of information flows, organizations attempt to create credentials to raise institutional reputations. However, since these institutions essentially don't know their subjects (as opposed to an old format where the small-town shoppkeeper knows their customers), they break the person down into "flows for purposes of management, profit, and entertainment" (Haggerty & Ericson, p. 619). These flows and data doubles signify the "disappearance of disappearance" (p. 619).

References:

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Print.

Gilliom, J., & Monahan T. (2013). SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society. Chicago: U of Chicago. Print.

Haggerty, K.D., & Ericson, R. (2000). The Surveillant Assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), 605-622.