boredom is always counter-revolutionary

Because they have taken up so much of my life lately, yet disappear without trace into the dark channels of university procedure after submission, I’m posting up my two most recent term papers. If aspects of the presentation or form seem a little clunky, please bear in mind they are written with consideration of specific marking criterea. Copyleft, or whatever; but, plagiaristic students, please plagiarise for good use rather than wholesale stealing.

“Limitless Postponements”: The Changing Presence Of Control

Introduction

To do philosophy is thus to fabricate concepts in resonance and interference with the arts, past as well as present. It is never simply to apply concepts already supplied by a given theory… For one must always again produce the concepts; and a great critic is not one who comes armed with prior theory, but rather one who helps formulate new problems or suggests new concepts (Rajchman 2000, p115).

This paper will offer itself as an addendum, of sorts, to Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control”[i]. My primary intention is to make explicit something which Deleuze only implies, to reconfigure his argument to place emphasis elsewhere, and then interrogate the effects of this change on broader debates around control, discipline and surveillance. Following the transition from the Foucaultian notion of a Disciplinary Society to a Society of Control which models itself not on the Panopticon but more covert and digitalised forms of dataveillance, this paper shall propose that one characteristic of this new regime of control is a displacement of the here-and-now. For Deleuze’s control model, the dominant logic of power is one of pre-emptivity, as opposed to the post-emptive – or at least real-time – operation of Foucault’s Disciplinary Society. The wider implication is that the type of subjectivity formed by control, rather than discipline, is a mode of existence that prioritises the future and what is yet to happen. Less “live for now”, as “live for tomorrow”.

To offer an addendum to Deleuze’s concept in this way is not to undermine or negate any of its significance, nor is it to propose a new episteme of power relations. Indeed, Deleuze is careful to offer his conceptualisation not as an undermining of Foucault’s observations or a denial of their having existed, but as a continuation, a descendent, and a part of the same lineage. This is in accordance with Foucault’s own insistence on the transience of different regimes of power and the periodicalization of history, with his own Disciplinary Society having replaced a prior Society of Sovereignty. As such, with the Deleuzian Society of Control reconfigured to emphasize this shift in the temporality of existence, I shall be asking how theory and critique are to accommodate this turn towards the as-yet unlived. How can the theorist confront a regime that operates through “limitless postponements” (Deleuze 1992, p5) of the present?

Evidence and évidence

Firstly, however, I should perhaps comment on my more immediate methodology, which, like my argument itself, is a continuation of the Foucault-Deleuze lineage. By this, I mean that there is a difference between Foucault and Deleuze[ii] regarding what they take as evidence and how their philosophical models relate to material realities. Foucault looks to discourse, examining written records relating to “carefully defined institutions” (1982, p222) – in this case, the prison and Bentham’s design for a Panopticon – to draw out the socio-psychological implications and an impression of the type of subjectivity formed through the dominant logic of power. In relation to the Disciplinary Society, briefly, he finds a model for a populace who suspect but cannot verify that they are being watched at any one moment, and so become self-regulatory in living under a relentless disciplinary gaze. Deleuze, on the other hand, is more speculative in identifying how control now differs from discipline, and how the Disciplinary Society has become an outdated model. John Rajchman writes of a Deleuzian “image of thought” that “works from intuitions about problems rather than propositions” (2000, pp.32-33). Deleuze does not give concrete examples or case studies, partly because his conceptualisation of power relations escapes, even more so than Foucault’s model, an identifiable source or host of power. Instead of power residing within an institution or structure that could be interrogated, Deleuze is confronting “the ultrarapid forms of free-flowing control that replaced the old disciplines” (Deleuze 1992, p4).

Similarly, because Deleuze is concerned with a more contemporaneous regime, he does not have historical sources that he can go to, only “analogous models” (p3). The “Postscript on the Societies of Control” is a highly metaphorical piece, not simply due to its author’s literary style. Rather, Deleuze uses metaphor in order to attach a visual representation to this type of power that evades a physical form. He characterises the Disciplinary Society as an “old monetary mole… the animal of the spaces of enclosure” (p5) whilst we are now living with the serpent of control, whose coils “are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill” (p7). Elsewhere, the Society of Control becomes represented by the images of the corporation, the computer and the stock exchange. These images could be pitted against the prison and the CCTV camera as the analogous models of discipline, although that would perhaps establish a reductive binary distinction between discipline and control: Deleuze suggests that we are living in the moment of transition, with the old institutions still present, but in decline. Deleuze is careful to note that his model has not already entirely displaced its disciplinary precedent, “but everyone knows that these [disciplinary] institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods” (p4). So, for example, outdated modes of visual surveillance are still in operation via CCTV, but are being replaced by more efficient, modern and technological forms of dataveillance ushered in by the shift from discipline to control.

Nonetheless, what the methodologies of Foucault and Deleuze have in common, and which I shall also take up, is a concern for what is taken as common sense, internalised and normalised logic: the self-evident. Foucault begins from this self-evidence – in this case, the “‘self-evident’ character of the prison” (Foucault 1977, p232) – and traces it back to more concrete foundations, the institutional discourses and practices that have formed the era’s common sense. As Rajchman observes: “Where there is self-evidence, [Foucault] tried to uncover the singular formation of an event unseen” (1988, p94). This is a search for how status quo subjectivities are formed, and where they come from, particularly in relation to authoritarian power. “Self-evidence” is here the English translation of the French term évidence, which itself comes from the Latin verb videre, “to see” (Rabinow 1988, p93; and Jay 1993, p389). Foucault’s concerns relate to “how thing were made visible” (Rajchman 1988, p91) at different historical moments. Following this, power relations as defined by Foucault are made physically manifest, put into operation via visible and identifiable structures, such as the Panoptic tower or the CCTV camera. Whilst these structures are not power incarnate, or powerful in themselves, their visibility is necessary for the operation of power.

To Deleuze, however, évidence takes a different form. “To see” would seemingly not be limited to sight. His is the more discursive and less literal usage of “to see” as “to experience”, or even “to understand”. He is still concerned with contemporary forms of self-evidence, but with less analysis of the more empirical event or formative processes behind that dominant logic: rather than going backwards from the self-evident to its roots and foundations, he goes forwards and outwards to its more immediate implications. As such, he can talk about what he sees within society – for example, the “young people [who] strangely boast of being ‘motivated’” (1992, p7) – without citing concrete examples. We can relate because we, it is assumed, have seen or experienced these phenomena also. Later in this paper, as mentioned, I shall be asking where theoreticians are now to find new types of évidence as control begins to displace the realms of sight and experience.

The Changing Presence of Power

Whilst I don’t need to recapitulate the entire differences between Deleuze’s Society of Control and Foucault’s Disciplinary Society, it will be beneficial to focus on those characteristics that suggest a possible displacement of the present in favour of a speculative future. One of my tasks is to mould a concern for the visual into a concern for the temporal; or at least to demonstrate how, as discipline becomes control, concerns around visuality become concerns about the moment. The first step is to acknowledge a different temporality between the operation of the mechanism of power between the two regimes. By this, I mean that the panoptic system of surveillance is post-emptive, whilst the dataveillance form of control is pre-emptive.

However, to make this characterisation, a necessary distinction must also be made within Foucault’s presentation of the Disciplinary Society, between its theoretical operation, and its operation in practice in contemporary society. The idealised logic of discipline is that “inspection functions ceaselessly [and] the gaze is alert everywhere” (Foucault 1977, p195). In theory, the disciplinary gaze is constant, omnipresent and internalised. Perhaps at specific historical moments this model has been put directly into practice via panoptic architecture and has functioned in exactly this manner[iii]: however, if we look at the present society, we do not exist in panoptic structures, carceral or confined environments. The model is mediated in various ways, most notably in the form of the CCTV camera, into something more akin to “the minute disciplines, the panopticisms of everyday… below the level of the great apparatuses and the great political struggles” (Foucault 1977, p223).

Hille Koskela makes the assumption that CCTV is directly equatable to the panoptic principle, and as such recommends taking “a walk with Foucault” around “any major city in the Western world” to see that “the Panopticon is present nearly everywhere” (2003, pp.294-295). CCTV and public security cameras are taken to be the realisation of the panoptic principle, and they certainly fit the mould of a constant, invasive, visible but unverifiable form of surveillance. Whether these cameras should be operated by the state or by private groups is in many ways irrelevant, as Foucault tells us that discipline is a “modality” (1977, p216) for the exercise of power, and not restricted or inherent to the governing body. In other words, power is external to any governing body, and the panoptic principle could be utilised by the police, a private security firm or an individual with special interests. Nonetheless, to speak of power in public society, the dominant bodies and institutions necessarily wield more influence and attract more critical attention. As such, public CCTV surveillance is taken in this paper to be operated, directly or indirectly, by the governing body for the ostensible purpose of upholding law, with the added Foucaultian effect of maintaining docile and submissive subjects.

Majid Yar is a little more sceptical than Koskela, and evaluates how far we can really consider public surveillance through CCTV technology to be a contemporary, realised form of panopticism. He finds a range of qualified adoptions of the panoptic principle, ultimately commenting on the inefficiency of CCTV as measured against Foucault’s standards, particularly the assertion that the strength of the Panopticon is that “the constant pressure acts even before the offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed” (Foucault 1977, p206). In effect, CCTV cannot match its panoptic intentions because people are either not aware that they are under surveillance, or because the awareness of being surveilled does not actually affect their behaviour: Yar finds that the question “are you aware this area is subject to CCTV surveillance?” is treated with the same dismissive logic as “are you aware that smoking causes cancer and heart disease?” (2003, p262). A visit to any British city centre on a Saturday night will demonstrate also that more cameras does not necessarily correlate to less crime or unruly behaviour. Official figures suggest something similar: Britain has around 4.2million CCTV cameras[iv] – one for every 14 people – yet still struggles with high crime rates compared to Europe and other developed countries[v], particularly in urban centres which have the highest density of CCTV surveillance[vi]. In this sense of law-enforcement, we can take public visual surveillance as having a predominantly post-emptive mode of operation: it may not always stop the crime or misdemeanour, but it will record it and the criminal can be caught later[vii]. Perhaps, following news events such as the revelation that many speed cameras are not loaded with film[viii], the possibility that one is not being watched is enough to render the presence of the camera obsolete. The flaw is that the panoptic tower may well be empty.

Similarly, the societal and architectural enclosure necessary for discipline is unecessary following the transition from discipline to control. Even though power, according to Foucault, is an “action upon an action” (1982, p220) and power relations are thus “rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure” (p222), they are still put into operation via “blocks” (p218 ) and institutions that require a physical presence in the here-and-now. Although there may well be no-one inside the panoptic tower or behind the CCTV camera, the visible structures are still necessary for the functioning of power. Control, however, is even deeper in the social nexus and its operation doesn’t require this level of physical representation. To (mis)quote Marx (and reposition Marshall Berman): “All that is solid melts into air” (Marx 1985, p83). As the old institutions fall deeper into crisis, Deleuze identifies how control begins to infiltrates our very bodies, via “the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations” (1992, p4).

Deleuze’s conceptualisation represents a far more malevolent form of power, moving from superficial surveillance to invasive governance. Whilst discipline is imperfectly realised in the closed-circuit television camera, control is an open-circuit, endlessly networked and free-floating. Mark Poster argues that “today’s ‘circuits of communication’ and the databases they generate constitute a Superpanopticon, a system of surveillance without walls, windows, towers or guards” (1990, p93). Control does not require the privileged presence of a representative of power. Instead, “what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation” (Deleuze 1992, p7). This forms a far more acute approach to self-regulation on behalf of the populace, who innocently contribute to the workings of power through their use of the numerous sources of dataveillance, the databasing of information collected from cash machines, internet usage, mobile communications technology, all sites that network everyday life to wider spheres beyond the reach of the individual citizen. Discipline functioned through segregation and individual observation, with the mechanisms of power “disposed around the abnormal individual” (Foucault 1977, p199). Self-regulation was internalised, it became second nature. Control, conversely, produces a form of self-regulation that is external to the body, working from vast yet unseen databases that threaten the sovereignty of the individual citizen. Control produces norms and aggregates: “Individuals have become ‘dividuals‘, and masses, samples, data, markets or ‘banks‘” (Deleuze 1992, p5). This mechanism of power is thus pre-emptive because it can use this data to produce an unindividuated, model citizen, against which all actions can be judged. The operation of power is taken to be beyond the here-and-now, one step ahead. Control colonises the future. The new power relations exit not in the present, but in potential.

In its least intrusive guise, this pre-emptive shift can be demonstrated in online tailored marketing: “You might also like…” or “Others who viewed this product also bought…” A more invasive function of this type of dataveillance, however, is that deviation from the norm can be flagged as potentially unlawful, constituting what many would rally against as an invasion of privacy. What dataveillance promises is to be able to step in before a crime happens, to pre-empt misdemeanour. The politics of this approach have invariably been aided by the post 9/11 paranoia regarding terrorist activity, especially in regard to the promise of monitoring suspect financial activity and the sale of specific products. This form of control is made more effective through its invisibility, through moving away from precisely the characteristic than the Panopticon relied upon, a presence in the visual realm.

Visibility, in relation to Foucault and Deleuze, has become a highy interrogated topic. Within the argument particular to this paper, the movement away from the present towards an imagined future as a part of the workings of power is paralleled by a retreat from visibility to invisibility in the mechanism of power. Martin Jay speaks of the “hegemony of the eye” (1993, p384) as identified by Foucault, yet also of an “ocularcentrism” (p384) within French Twentieth Century philosophy. This ocularcentrism, it is suggested, has made issues of visibility particularly vulnerable to critique and scrutiny. It is this logic which produces the ID card, as a recourse to discipline, a vestige of visuality when the real operation of power has become invisible. Deleuze, in this case, can either be regarded as moving with this current, or against it: the mechanisms power are moving away from the realm of the visual, but they are still measured in terms of their visibility and their spatial and material presence, or lack of.

Economic Efficiency

For the most part, rather than being a radical rehaul, control is simply an improvement of the weaknesses of discipline, an increased efficiency in the mechanisms of power associated with a more widespread move towards digital and computerised forms. Pre-emptive surveillance – with its connotations of an overly administered, non-accountable central authority and official prescription of correct behaviour – is likewise a move towards efficiency. However, it is a move too far, straying into excessive political rationality, which Foucault warns against: “the role of philosophy is also to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality” (1982, p210). In more material terms, control is an economic improvement of the disciplinary regime. This is particularly pertinent to Foucault’s insistence upon economic efficiency as a driving force that propelled the development of the disciplines: “an increasingly better process of adjustment has been sought after – more and more rational and economic” (1982, p219), with “the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost” (1977, p218).

Deleuze speaks of how the corporation of control differs in its financial operation to the factory of discipline. The factory maintains “its internal forces at a level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages” (1992, p4) whilst corporations exist “in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions” (p4). The worker in the factory, then, knows what he must do and what he will be paid, and he is kept working through a coercive awareness of the boss in his office above the factory floor. It is an experience rooted to the present moment and specific to the building in which he is put to work. The worker for the corporation, on the other hand, is told that he exists in a meritocracy: if he works hard now, at the end of the month or the quarter or the year he will be paid more. He is not observed in the present, but he is encouraged to think of the future. Whilst the panoptic model prided itself upon the economic efficiency of requiring only one man to watch over many others, this incentive model is even cheaper to operate, as it doesn’t require its own architecture or watchman figure.

From See to Foresee

Where the mechanisms of power are changing presence in this way, existing in potentia rather than in the present, the subjectivity associated with control follows suit. The controlled citizen is encouraged not to see, but to foresee: to live with an ever-conscious awareness of the future at the expense of the present. This is not to say that people live in the future, so much as they live for the future. Although Deleuze never states this, he displays an awareness of a mode of existence that puts the subject into a purgatorial non-realm. For example, he says that, “just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination” (p5, Deleuze’s emphases). This is a turn that, just like the wider shift from discipline to control, has as its cause a “mutation of capitalism” (p6). This turn toward the future is indeed most beneficial to the financial industries, specifically in terms of personal insurance, investment and saving. Planning ahead, investing in your future, thinking about tomorrow: these are all terms acquired from institutional discourse and appropriated into everyday life. Whilst the disciplined subject was forced to “act normally” through the presence of surveillance and the threat of segregation, the subject of control is encouraged to act normally so that he or she can reap the benefits promised for the future. A future, of course, that one never actually arrives at:

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything (Deleuze 1992, p5).

The term “investing in the future” can be taken to represent this ideology. It is used in the promotional rhetoric for financial institutions, educational initiatives, service and utility provision. It is the tagline for numerous sources of advice, invariably originating in state-authorized initiatives, as well as for charitable organisations and ecological and green movements.[ix] Likewise, advertising constantly tells – perhaps warns – the consumer to think of the future. We are told to hold off now, to be careful, save money, work hard, stay in line; and we will reap the benefits later. “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” (p6).

Contesting Control

Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an ‘agonism’ – of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyses both sides than a permanent provocation (Foucault 1982, p222)

An important characteristic of the Panopticon is that the fate of the overseer in the central tower is necessarily bound in with the success of the whole structure. Similarly, discipline is always locked into confrontation with freedom, to the extent that “power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (1982, p221). As such, Disciplinary Society is agonistic, and the disciplinary gaze can be challenged or even undermined, as demonstrated by Majid Yar (2003, pp.265-266), moving beyond Foucault’s analysis[x]. There is something tantalisingly democratic in this two-sidedness, even though Foucault doesn’t make it explicit in this writing. Martin Jay notes that,

As de Certeau has pointed out, Foucault may have focused so insistently on the dangers of panopticism that he remained blind to the other micropractices of everyday life that subvert power (1993, p415)

Nonetheless, Foucault’s model is a binary one, working via watched-and-watcher, us-and-them, subject-and-power distinctions. Deleuze, on the other hand, allows for a broader spectrum of roles in relation to power, emphasizing a fluid societal structure with relentless internal adjustment. With the mechanism of power retracted so far from the individual citizen – yet also informed by the citizens’ actions, consumptions, transactions and so on – then it becomes very difficult to establish exactly who is “behind” the operation of power.

As such, one opponent within the agonism disappears – the source of power is concealed and made unrecognisable – and so the balance is broken. The Society of Control is evasive, in terms of both the physical presence of power and its temporal existence. Unlike the panoptic structure, the representative of power in the Society of Control is entirely external to the workings of power, held back at a safe distance. Whilst Disciplinary Society is held in a balance through mutually identifiable – if not mutually powerful – opposing bodies, the Society of Control is unbalanced; it exerts power from everywhere and nowhere, offering no site to resist against.

Consider, for example, online social networking sites as a demonstration of the unseen operations of control, through concealed dataveillance that disguises the workings of power. The user may suspect that it will somehow be detrimental to publicise or even simply input personal information into these media, yet often does so because it seems so abstract to associate this innocuous gesture with wider networks of power relations. It is becoming increasingly apparent that received legalities – often received from disciplinary eras – are unsuitable for contemporary forms of communicative technology[xi]. As the various networks of power become increasingly interlinked and the workings of power move further from the realm of visibility, Deleuze’s predictions become more prophetic than paranoid, more correct than conspiracy: “control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit” (1992, p6). In this example, it is no longer unthinkable that our usage of these seemingly innocent social networks is feeding into wider databases and networks that are themselves being put to more pernicious or oppressive ends.

Despite the post-modern implications of this move away from directly lived experience – from a visual modernity to a digitalised post-modernity – I do not wish to align the pre-emptive function of control with, say, Baudrillard’s “precession of simulacra” and notions of hyperreality. For Baudrillard, material reality is experienced secondarily to representation, which comes to replace the real: “the territory no longer precedes the map” (1994, p1) and “the real is no longer real” (p13). Martin Jay even finds in Baudrillard a denial of the real, whereby “what had really degenerated was spontaneous, lived experience” (Jay 1993, p434). Control, on the other hand, never brings the representation so close that it could replace everyday reality. Lived experience is never denied, but its full realisation is postponed. The future is held in front of the citizen like a carrot on a stick.

Reappraising the Role of the Critic

To think back to the quotation that opened this paper, throughout both Deleuze and Foucault, alongside their more immediate questions of how power relations exist in society we find a relentless and self-reflexive questioning of what it is to “do” philosophy, particularly when it concerns the everyday operation of power. As such, interweaved into both “The Subject and Power” and “Postscript on the Societies of Control” is a constant justification of method in relation to content: both Foucault and Deleuze explain what they have done and what must continue to be done, positing their own efforts within ever-shifting philosophical currents that must always parallel the changing presence of power. Foucault attests to the necessity of this constant adaptation of critical methodology:

… I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the “agonism” between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence. (1982, p223)

More immediately, Foucault also speaks of the need for “new tools of study” (p209) for untangling and examining power relations, and it is precisely this issue that Deleuze seems to have picked up on. Echoing Foucault, Deleuze says that as the old regime of power morphs into the new form of control, “there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” (1992, p4). His methodology, speculative and even a little aphoristic, is an attempt to grasp what evades capture, the elusive serpent of control. He ends on a note that he can only go so far: that it will be up to future generations to “discover what they’re made to serve, just as their elders did” (p7).

The problem, of course, will be to find new forms of evidence on which to base critical models which account for a regime of power that escapes not only visibility, but the present moment. The new regime distances itself, likewise, from history, disabling a Foucaultian approach that generates an “historical awareness of our present circumstance” (Foucault 1982, p209). How does theory confront a regime of power that places itself one step ahead at all times? The new forms of evidence must move even further away from contemporary notions of empiricism and évidence as derived from sight and seeing. To my mind, Deleuze offers both a model of contemporary power relations, and a methodology towards accounting for this new regime. He welcomes speculation and projection. Guesswork will probably be involved, as well as a willingness to make decisions based on a generalised sense of what is felt, rather than what can be historically or empirically proven.

Importantly, although somewhat vaguely, we can also take from Deleuze a call to unbalance time: if power tries to root its subjects into an oppressive present moment through the heavy weight of a promised future, then we are to respond by moving outside of the present moment ourselves. In an interview about experiencing cinema, following a return to his emphasis on the molecularity of existence – “The brain is the unity. The brain is the screen…Thought is molecular” (Flaxman ed. 2000, p366) – Deleuze speaks of how cinema and the image are not necessarily rooted to the present moment. The assumption that what we see is “a natural given” of the present is a “completely ready-made and false concept, a kind of false evidence” (p372). Deleuze goes no further than to speak of the “complex relations of time” (p372) unique to Robbe-Grillet as a model for future conceptions of how the moment is experienced, but what we can take from this is a sense of rearranging our own notions of the assumed link between what is visible and the present moment. To react against an authoritarian power that makes an instrumental divide between the present and the future – and, of course, it is assumed within both Foucault and Deleuze that we want to react against the dominant logic of power – we must unsettle the distinction between present and future, presumably the past too. We must designate the terrain of existence for ourselves.

[i] This article first appeared in L’Autre Journal 1 (May 1990). This paper cites the text as reprinted in October 59 (Winter 1992), although it has also been included in various readers and collections and features on a number of libertarian/anarchist websites. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Deleuze’s essay’s origins is that it was written in 1990, before many of the computerised and digital practices that we now take for granted were widespread within everyday life.

[ii] I am referring here specifically to their writings on control and discipline, drawing from Discipline and Punish (1977) and “The Subject and Power” (1982) by Foucault, and Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1992).

[iii] The Panopticon was never built by Jeremy Bentham, although numerous prisons built since have been modelled on his design.

[iv] From a report produced in 2006 by the Surveillance Studies Network, reported at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm [accessed 5/4/2008].

[v] For reports on Britain’s comparatively high crime rates, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/feb/06/ukcrime.prisonsandprobation, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/01/ncrime01.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/12/01/ixhome.html,

and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/06/ncrime06.xml [all accessed 5/4/2008].

[vi] I appreciate that there are all sorts of factors that this type of data does not account for, and I make this reference only to demonstrate that a general increase in public visual surveillance has not corresponded with a decrease in crime figures.

[vii] To stay closer to the present moment of transition, we could perhaps say instead that CCTV operates in a “real-time” – as an active, “rolling text” (Walsh 2005, p194) – that is also eradicated in the shift to control.

[viii] This type of news story recurs, but an example can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1485734.stm [accessed 5/4/2008]

[ix] At the time of writing, variations of the line “investing in the future” are used in promotional campaigns for Thames Water Utilities (http://www.thameswater.co.uk/UK/region/en_gb/content/Section_Homepages/Section_Homepage_000686.jsp), Bradford and Bingley (http://www.bradford-bingley.co.uk/wealth/future/index.asp), Harper Adams University College (http://www.harper-adams.ac.uk/press/article.cfm?ID=2820) as well as others. An internet search for the term will bring up more examples, or simply watch some adverts on television.

[x] The example that Yar gives is of the “New York Surveillance Camera Players”, who perform for CCTV cameras, thus undermining and returning its gaze.

[xi] An example would be the Facebook Beacon, an application to the popular Facebook social networking site which, it was claimed, collected personal information for commercial use, constituting an invasion of privacy. More information is available at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/21/facebook_moveon_privacy_beacon/ [accessed5/4/2008].