Surveillance, Normalisation, and Repression (original) (raw)

Surveillance, normalisation, and repression. Original French version also available

European Journal of Turkish Studies Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey, 2014

One of the most fertile developments in contemporary thought has been to place the production of individuals at the heart of its enquiries, thus breaking with philosophical currents positing an a-historical individual. The aim of this special issue 1 is to enquire into how exactly this process transpires within organisations that normalise, repress, and conduct surveillance of individuals who are either part of an institution or else the object of their operations. The work carried out by institutions using techniques 'relating to the surveillance, diagnosis, and possible transformation of individuals' (Foucault 2004: 7) studied here is intended to halt or prevent deviant behaviour, in the sense used by Howard Becker for whom 'deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an "offender"' (Becker 1963: 9; italics in the original). 2 The diverse nature of the institutions analysed here (the army, the police, a political organisation, and a consulate), all within a 'Turkish context', 2 is heuristic insofar as it is thus possible to compare different levels of coercion and test more general hypotheses relating to the similarity of practices and their transfer between institutions. Some are institutions of the sovereign State (the police, the army, and a consulate), whilst others are illegal (the PKK); some are open and exert weak coercive power (the consulate) whilst others are total (the army and PKK), that is to say 'cut off from wider society for

The Sticky-Stalker State Subject: Surveillance of Dissent in Turkey

Criminalisation of Dissent in Times of Crisis , 2024

Despite the emergence of high-tech surveillance tools, conventional forms of undercover surveillance have not become obsolete. In this chapter, drawing on an ethnographic case study from Turkey and addressing the ever-increasing deployment of undercover police surveillance and informant activities in policing dissent, I ask: Why in an era of unprecedented development in digital surveillance technologies, undercover police activities are still employed? Building upon the existing body of literature that illuminates the role of undercover policing in controlling and manipulating dissidents, I argue that another crucial aspect of undercover policing is its capacity to transform the state—a sociological abstraction—into a tangible, material entity, albeit one that is deeply unsettling and menacing, within the daily lives of targeted populations. Through insidious undercover policing practices, the state emerges as an adhesive, predatory presence that sticks to the body and infiltrates the mind, depriving its targets of a feeling of freedom.

Beyond Common Sense: Surveillance Societies

Criminal Justice and Security in Central and Eastern Europe (eds. Mesko Gorazd, Branko Lobnikar, Kaja Prislan, Rok Hacin) University of Maribor Press : Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security (2018) , pp 30-41, 978-961-286-176-6 , 2018

This paper highlights some questions that stand at the heart of current police policy, eg. the consequences of the transformation thesis, the militarization of police, as well as the 'pluralisation of policing'. The relentless emphasis on security, the media focus on violence, the need to find returning investment forms after the collapse of the bipolar world order, and the political necessity of making people feel safe — creates policing practice similar to the military experience. The concept of police as 'servants of the state' lacks the notion of the relative autonomy of the state and the relative autonomy of the police. There is a general disagreement on what the police are guarding, and whether the work of privately employed guards might also be considered as policing. An emerging surveillance state raises the question of whether the private security organs can be judged as a kind of refeudalization, a privilege that violates the right to equality.

Surveillance and the transformation of public sphere in the Ottoman Empire

Metu Studies in Development, 2008

This article aims to historicize the transformation of the public sphere in the late Ottoman Empire as an unintended consequence of the surveillance practices of the state. This transformation is explained with reference to two crucial large scale processes: state-making and capitalism. It takes the police and policing practices of the state as an arena within which the struggle over the control of the public sphere was waged. By analyzing those practices especially in relation to two different social groups-vagrants and workers-the article aims to show how the penetration of the state into the daily lives of the people and the intrusion of capitalism into the relations in the work place effect the transformation of what is "private" and what is "public". The story of this transformation in the Ottoman Empire is the story of the dissolution of the traditional social control systems, such as guilds, neighborhood and family.

Cut off the Head of the King: Contemporary Surveillance Analysis and the Society of Control

The panoptic architecture described by Michel Foucault in, Discipline and Punish (1976), has been a dominant paradigm in surveillance studies since its inception as an organized field of inquiry in the 1970s. However, over the last decade this paradigm has come under increasing criticism. As Kevin Haggerty (2006) states: “Foucault continues to reign supreme in surveillance studies and it is perhaps time to cut off the head of the king.” An increasing number of commentators argue that the model of the panopticon fails to account for the programmed character of smart surveillance technology. They argue that these technologies do not seek to discipline behaviors as much as they aim to route bodies through different surveillance environments by events of in and exclusion on the basis of massive searches of databases. Seeking a paradigm better able to account for the relationship between software algorithms with big data, some commentators have turned to Deleuze and his 1992 critique of Foucault in the, “Postscript on Societies of Control”. They frequently adopt Deleuze’s notion of the rhizomatically structured, surveillant assemblage, as a model better adapted than the panopticon to account for the capabilities of today’s digital networks. In this paper I argue that Deleuze’s notion of the surveillant assemblage may in fact be better adapted to account for the networked character of electronic surveillance than Foucault’s panopticon. However, I argue that Foucault himself was very aware of the limits of panopticism and that his contribution to surveillance studies must not be limited to that model alone. During his 1978 lectures, Sécurité Territoire Population, Foucault introduced a new paradigm – les dispositifs de sécurité. This paradigm exceeds the panoptic paradigm and overlaps with Deleuze’s model in four important ways: 1) security mechanisms operate at the level of populations (both human and non-human) and do not depend on closed spaces like the prison, classroom and barracks in order to function. 2) Security mechanisms function in tandem with disciplinary regimes. This allows Foucault to account for the fact that the disruptive effects of electronic surveillance networks do not replace disciplinary spaces. In fact they capture disciplined bodies in the process of virtualizing them. 3) The security mechanism is a non-hierarchical form of governance. Those engaged in the activity of electronic surveillance are as much subject to surveillance as those whom they observe. 4) For Foucault and Deleuze, the ‘meaning’ of the security mechanism is a function of both the intended and the unintended effects of the system. This gives the paradigm the flexibility to explain the significance of both false positives and false negatives in the routine functioning of surveillance networks.

Surveillance of Culture, Culture of Surveillance

East Central Europe

The chiasmus in our title ("surveillance of culture, culture of surveillance") was not meant as a frivolous, would-be elegant catchphrase: it is rife with meaning.1 The rhetorical figure of chiasmus involves the notion of reciprocity (Forsyth 2013), implying that the second arm of the formula is an unavoidable consequence of the first. It is precisely this reciprocity that is at the heart of our special issue of East Central Europe. Indeed, we mean to indicate that the surveillance of culture in a police regime does result in a culture of surveillance. Hence we chose here to study surveillance as a self-standing culture of its own. In fact we extended our reflection on surveillance all the way to our present democracies, as we took into account the current development of mass surveillance via the internet. Work Group 1, "Culture Under Surveillance," chaired by Muriel Blaive and James Kapaló, was one of six groups within the cost project New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent, led in 2017-2022 by Maciej Maryl and Piotr Wciślik. The aim of the project was to study the cultures of dissent under socialism in a transnational and multidisciplinary perspective. The narrower aim of Work Group 1 was to "explore the effects of the