fail to explain adequately how social order is maintained in nominally democratic, non-authoritarian societies. Also, Foucault did not necessarily see power as a negative force in society; it could also be productive. Furthermore, by recognising the dispersal of power, he opened up the possibility that multiple sites of resistance to power might develop. However, the problem with Foucault’s conception of power is that it goes too far in depersonalising and decentralising power, in that it is everywhere and nowhere: this makes power infinitely more difficult to challenge. It also tends to ignore the ideological purposes of surveillance as a means of controlling those rendered surplus by neoliberal capitalism. This is not to say that Foucault did not have a concept of resistance; for him, resistance became possible only if one recognised the interests embedded in a variety of social practices. Simply pointing fingers at a single authority such as a government did not help one to understand how modern social orders actually worked.10
Another issue that Foucault’s conception of surveillance tends to ignore is that the surveillance capacities of the state have not necessarily replaced more overt forms of repression: on the contrary, at times both have been rolled out together and in fact they complement one another.11 Surveillance may be used to identify populations that need to be contained by the use of more overt methods; for instance, policing decisions about protests may be either facilitative or militarised depending on the extent of the threat that the police identify through surveillance.12
THE POSTMODERN TURN IN SURVEILLANCE STUDIES
There are others who have argued that the panopticon is not an appropriate metaphor for contemporary societies. Drawing on the insights of postmodern studies – which problematise theories that advance one-sided narratives of how societies function – some theorists have pointed out that surveillance now takes place on a much more distributed basis than in the past, and that a state-centric approach to surveillance studies is no longer appropriate in societies where there is a huge diversity of surveillance actors. In fact, Kevin Haggerty has argued that the panopticon has been overused in surveillance studies, and has even called for the panopticon to be demolished metaphorically, to remove its grip on the field. He has pointed out that since Foucault’s groundbreaking book, surveillance has come to serve a variety of different functions, not just to police the activities of problem subjects. Surveillance is being used in education and medical treatment, too, so it cannot be said that surveillance serves the single purpose of social control. This means that a less negative, more neutral definition of surveillance is now required.
Surveillance is not necessarily directed at the poor or marginalised to maintain social hierarchies, either; it has become much more widespread. Surveillance is also being directed at non-human subjects, a development that unsettles the control argument, and this form of surveillance has even brought social benefits. Different social actors are also using surveillance, not just the state. The democratisation of surveillance technologies has also meant that ordinary citizens can use inverse surveillance, turning these technologies against the powerful and exposing their abuses of power: practices that have become known as ‘sousveillance’.13 Protesters, for instance, can use video cameras to record police violence. These capacities, when put in the hand of citizens, problematise the view that all surveillance is necessarily bad. Other examples of neutral definitions abound in surveillance literature.14 Haggerty has argued that surveillance scholars tend to avoid studying positive examples of surveillance, as their immersion in critique makes them blind to these phenomena.15
Different and even alternative metaphors to the panopticon have also been offered, based on the argument that Foucault did not foresee computerisation and the rise of consumerism, which have greatly expanded the scope for surveillance.16 These developments mean that there is not one single point where surveillance takes place, but multiple points. Thomas Mathiesen’s term ‘the synopticon’ – where the many watch the few by using the mass media – has become popular in surveillance studies, as it recognises these more recent developments. In other words, mass audiences are able to peer into the lives of celebrities and other public figures, placing them under unprecedented levels of scrutiny to which audiences themselves are not subjected.17 However, Mathiesen did not necessarily propose the synopticon as an alternative to the panopticon; in fact, the two are interlinked in that both are still structures of domination, and he was not necessarily optimistic about the mass media’s effects in society.
Surveillance in contemporary society has even been described as a surveillant assemblage, where surveillance practices do not take place in one part of society only, but where information is gleaned from multiple sources and locations.18 Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson have argued that discrete surveillance systems have converged, leading to a rhizomic levelling of surveillance. No longer is it conducted on a top-down basis and primarily by states – as the panoptic metaphor suggests – but diverse media can be connected to pursue surveillance for multiple purposes, and human surveillance efforts can be augmented by computers. Scattered centres of calculation, from police stations to banks, undertake surveillance, and as a result surveillance transcends the boundaries of separate institutions.19 Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon have termed such surveillance ‘liquid surveillance’, or a form of surveillance that relies on the body being encoded by data and tracked through multiple data flows.20 Deleuze himself recognised the fact that surveillance practices had changed from the early modern period about which Foucault wrote, in that computerisation had made constant surveillance possible at a reduced cost, allowing for continuous control rather than periodic examination. As a result, Deleuze argued, contemporary societies should not be described as disciplinary societies, but as societies of control.21 In other words, power over individuals is not necessarily exercised through fixed institutional structures, but through mobile and rapid ICTs, which enable control ‘on the go’: a form of control that is perfectly suited to societies defined by flexibility. At the same time, electronic tagging still allows surveillance to take place, to ensure that individuals are in a permissible place.22
Other theorists have argued that Foucault’s ideas still remain highly relevant to today’s surveillance society, and that he would not have been surprised by recent attempts to universalise surveillance using the internet and other technologies. Far from being a technology linked to societies of control – which, according to Deleuze, have replaced disciplinary societies – the cellphone can be understood as a portable panopticon, in that it allows users to be tracked and monitored invisibly.23 In fact, the Snowden revelations have brought Foucault back to the fore, with an emerging group of scholars arguing for his continued relevance. They maintain that there has been an unfair dismissal of his work, even though the panopticon may not describe the functioning of the internet with precision.24 For instance, Gilbert Caluya has argued that what he terms the Deleuzian turn in surveillance studies – with its influential metaphor of the rhizomic surveillant assemblage – does not necessarily represent a significant break from Foucault, who recognised that a myriad forms of surveillance characterised modern society and rejected state-centric conceptions of power.25 Furthermore, while the internet is a distributed medium, it is inherently surveillant in that in its current state it allows for the invisible filtering of information as an exercise of power. Its surveillant potential enables governments to shift their interventions from direct enforcement of the law to more invisible, decentralised, technologically based forms of enforcement. This fits Foucault’s conception of power very well. However, contemporary surveillance operates vertically, horizontally and diagonally, and people also participate in their own surveillance. This added dimension has led David Lyon to insist that researchers should take the cultures of surveillance seriously, as they need to understand the circumstances under which people willingly participate in surveillance activities through their social media and internet usage.26
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND MARXIST THEORIES OF SURVEILLANCE
Political economy theorists have also argued that while contemporary surveillance takes place undeniably on a far more distributed basis than in the period Foucault wrote about, the means of surveillance
