Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 118

monitoring of the inmates, the major effect of the Panopticon is “to
induce in the inmates a state of conscious and permanent visibility
that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, 1977 :
201). According to Foucault, this kind of disciplinary power origi-
nated in prisons, asylums and the like, but subsequently migrated and
penetrated into other spheres of daily life outside these restricted and
guarded geographical locations (hospitals, schools, enterprises, etc.),
eventually pervading the entire modern, contemporary society. With
Foucault, monitoring and surveillance are evaluated in terms of power
and control of institutions of the state and the economy over individual
citizen-consumers.
Foucault's analysis of surveillance, power and control has been criti-
cised for its emphasis on technocratic and monopolistic monitoring and
surveillance. The construction and operation of monitoring or surveil-
lance systems requires certain privileges, be they political or financial,
and surveillance and disciplinary power therefore not only construct
(unequal) relations of power, but are at the same time the product of
these relations. Foucault has paid little attention to the question of
how surveillance and discipline are linked to, for example, class strug-
gle and the technical conditions of modernity. “The whole question
of the relationship between interests and the disciplinary structures is
pushed to the margins of Foucault's concerns” (Dandeker, 1990 : 28).
A second point of critique is concerned with the rather deterministic
outlook of Foucault's work. Whereas the basic principle of the Panop-
ticon is that 'the few see the many', there has always been a strong
countertendency “including the development of unique and extensive
systems enabling the many to see the few” (Mathiesen, 1997 : 219);
both panopticism and synopticism are characteristics of our society.
The development of mass media and the networks of civil society
(whether related to environment, labour, human rights or other) are
prime examples of synopticism, enabling the many to follow - to some
extent at least - the actions and whereabouts of the few, of the elite.
The fact that surveillance has now become so widespread, involving so
many actors, also means that “surveillance has become rhizomatic, it
has transformed hierarchies of observation, and allows for the scrutiny
of the powerful by both institutions and the general population”
(Haggerty and Ericson, 2000 : 617). Although surveillance still takes
place in an unequal world, no major population group or institution
stands “irrefutably above or outside of the surveillant assemblage”