The Surveillant Assemblage 외 1

 

Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, "The Surveillant Assemblage", The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Dec., 2000), pp. 605-622.

 

Abstract:
George Orwell's 'Big Brother' and Michel Foucault's 'panopticon' have dominated discussion of contemporary developments in surveillance. While such metaphors draw our attention to important attributes of surveillance, they also miss some recent dynamics in its operation. The work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is used to analyse the convergence of once discrete surveillance systems. The resultant 'surveillant assemblage' operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings, and separating them into a series of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled in different locations as discrete and virtual 'data doubles'. The surveillant assemblage transforms the purposes of surveillance and the hierarchies of surveillance, as well as the institution of privacy.

 

 

Leerom Medovoi, "Global Society Must Be Defended: Biopolitics without Boundaries", Social Text  No. 91, The Ends of War (Summer, 2007), pp. 53-79.

 

Abstract:

This paper historicizes the discourses of war and peace at work in the "war on terror" by tracing a genealogy that begins with the globalism of the Cold War and continues through the “ world peace” declared by Clinton-era proponents of globalization. This paper's goal is therefore to think the relationship between the epochal imaginaries of the last half century from the perspective of power-as-war that Foucault elaborated in his "Society Must Be Defended" lectures. This paper aims to show that the exercise of biopolitics (the regulation of the life and death of the population) has been projected from national space onto the globe, which has become a new arena for both 'peaceful' governmentality and the exercise of war. In all three of the historical moments examined in this paper (Cold War, globalization, War on Terror), the globe operates as a theater of war that bears a displaced relationship to the category of race, which the international order of the post-WWII settlement had allegedly repudiated in texts such as the . While colonial and fascist racism of the recent past were disavowed, the assertion of conflicts between “ways of life” accomplished much of the same rhetorical work previously provided by the concept of “race war." Although this paper stresses continuities, it also argues that crucial differences mark the three moments, most obviously in the intensifying integration of the globe as an imagined space. This integration has allowed the discourse of war to infiltrate ever more deeply into the space of domesticity whose “natural” state is no longer readily assumed to be peaceful and outside a “state of exception.”