Surveillance Studies: A Reader Torin

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SURVEILL ANCE S TUDIES

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SURVEILL ANCE
S TUDIES
A READER

Edited by
Torin Monahan
David Murakami Wood

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1
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(ToCome)
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ISBN 978–​0 –​19–​029781–​7 (hbk.)

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CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables xi

Acknowledgmentsxiii
Rights and Permissions xv
Introduction: Surveillance Studies as a Transdisciplinary Endeavor xix

1 OPENINGS AND DEFINITIONS 1

1 James B. Rule, Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control

in the Computer Age 5
2 Oscar H. Gandy, jr., The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of
Personal Information 9
3 William G. Staples, Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility
in Postmodern Life 14
4 David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview 18
5 Gary T. Marx, What’s New about the “New Surveillance?” Classifying
for Change and Continuity 22

2 SOCIET Y AND SUBJECTIVIT Y 27

6 Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon 31

7 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 36
8 Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control 42
9 Kevin D. Haggert y and Richard V. Ericson,
The Surveillant Assemblage 47

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vi  Contents

10 Thomas Mathiesen, The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s

“Panopticon” Revisited 51
11 David Armstrong, The Rise of Surveillance Medicine 55
12 Irus Braverman, Zooland: The Institution of Captivity 59

3 STATE AND AUTHORIT Y 63

13 Johann Got tlieb Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right 67

14 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-​State and Violence 70
15 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out:
Classification and Its Consequences 75
16 Maria Los, The Technologies of Total Domination 79
17 Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall 83
18 Cindi Katz, The State Goes Home: Local Hyper-​Vigilance
of Children and the Global Retreat from Social Reproduction 88

4 IDENTIT Y AND IDENTIFICATION 93

19 Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception,

and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe 97
20 John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance,
Citizenship, and the State 101
21 Allan Sekula, The Body and the Archive 105
22 Dorothy Nelkin and Lori Andrews, DNA Identification
and Surveillance Creep 111
23 Shoshana Amielle Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race,
and the Technology of Identity 116

5 BORDERS AND MOBILITIES 121

24 Louise Amoore, Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in

the War on Terror 125
25 Mark B. Salter, Passports, Mobility, and Security: How Smart Can
the Border Be? 129
26 Stephen Graham and David Murakami Wood, Digitizing
Surveillance: Categorization, Space, Inequality 133
27 Katja Franko Aas, “Crimmigrant” Bodies and Bona Fide
Travelers: Surveillance, Citizenship, and Global Governance 138
28 Didier Bigo, Security, Exception, Ban, and Surveillance 143

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Contents   vii

6 INTELLIGENCE AND SECURIT Y 147

29 James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security

Agency, America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization 152
30 Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States,
the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State 157
31 Ahmad H. Sa’di, Thorough Surveillance: The Genesis of Israeli
Policies of Population Management, Surveillance, and Political Control
towards the Palestinian Minority 161
32 Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and
the US Surveillance State 166

7 CRIME AND POLICING 173

33 Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong, CCTV and the Social

Structuring of Surveillance 179
34 Mike McCahill, The Surveillance Web: The Rise
of Visual Surveillance in an English City 183
35 Philip Boyle and Kevin D. Haggert y, Spectacular Security: Mega-​
Events and the Security Complex 187
36 Pete Fussey, Jon Coaffee, Gary Armstrong, and Dick Hobbs,
The Regeneration Games: Purity and Security in the Olympic City 191
37 Hille KOSKELA, “The Gaze without Eyes”: Video-​Surveillance and
the Changing Nature of Urban Space 195
38 Andrew John Goldsmith, Policing’s New Visibility 199
39 Torin Monahan and Rodolfo D. Torres, Schools under
Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education 204

8 PRIVACY AND AUTONOMY 209

40 Priscilla M. Regan, Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values,

and Public Policy 213
41 Jean-​F rançois Blanchet te and Deborah G. Johnson, Data
Retention and the Panoptic Society: The Social Benefits of
Forgetfulness 217
42 Helen Fay Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and
the Integrity of Social Life 222
43 Julie E. Cohen, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and
the Play of Everyday Practice 226

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viii  Contents

44 John Gilliom, Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and

the Limits of Privacy 230
45 Colin J. Bennet t, In Defense of Privacy: The Concept and
the Regime 234

9 UBIQUITOUS SURVEILL ANCE 239

46 Roger Clarke, Information Technology and Dataveillance 243

47 Dana Cuff, Immanent Domain: Pervasive Computing and
the Public Realm 248
48 Mike Crang and Stephen Graham, Sentient Cities:
Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space 253
49 Mark Andrejevic, Surveillance in the Big Data Era 257

10 WORK AND ORGANIZATION 261

50 Graham Sewell and Barry Wilkinson, “Someone to Watch over

Me”: Surveillance, Discipline, and the Just-​in-​Time Labour Process 265
51 Kirstie Ball, Workplace Surveillance: An Overview 269
52 Gavin J. D. Smith, Behind the Screens: Examining Constructions
of Deviance and Informal Practices among CCTV Control Room
Operators in the UK 273
53 Christian Fuchs, Web 2.0, Prosumption, and Surveillance 276

11 POLITICAL ECONOMY 281

54 Adam Arvidsson, On the “Pre-​History of the Panoptic Sort”: Mobility

in Market Research 285
55 David Murakami Wood and Kirstie Ball, Brandscapes of Control?
Surveillance, Marketing and the Co-​Construction of Subjectivity and
Space in Neo-​Liberal Capitalism 289
56 Anthony Amicelle, Towards a “New” Political Anatomy of Financial
Surveillance 294
57 Nicole S. Cohen, The Valorization of Surveillance: Towards a Political
Economy of Facebook 298
58 Shoshana Zuboff, Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and
the Prospects of an Information Civilization 302

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Contents   ix

12 PARTICIPATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA 307

59 Mark Andrejevic, The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media

and the Exploitation of Self-​Disclosure 309
60 Hille Koskela, Webcams, TV Shows, and Mobile Phones:
Empowering Exhibitionism 313
61 Anders Albrechtslund, Online Social Networking as Participatory
Surveillance 317
62 Priscilla Regan and Valerie Steeves, Kids R Us: Online Social
Networking and the Potential for Empowerment 321
63 Alice E. Marwick, The Public Domain: Social Surveillance in
Everyday Life 326

13 RESISTANCE AND OPPOSITION 331

64 Colin J. Bennet t, The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of

Surveillance 335
65 Laura Huey, Kevin Walby, and A aron Doyle, Cop Watching in the
Downtown Eastside: Exploring the Use of (Counter)Surveillance as a
Tool of Resistance 339
66 Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, Vernacular Resistance to
Data Collection and Analysis: A Political Theory of Obfuscation 343
67 Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman,
Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for
Data Collection in Surveillance Environments 347
68 Torin Monahan, The Right to Hide? Anti-​Surveillance Camouflage
and the Aestheticization of Resistance 351

14 MARGINALIT Y AND DIFFERENCE 357

69 Oscar H. Gandy, jr., Coming to Terms with Chance: Engaging

Rational Discrimination and Cumulative Disadvantage 361
70 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism
in Queer Times 365
71 Corinne Mason and Shoshana Magnet, Surveillance Studies and
Violence against Women 369
72 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness 373

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15 ART AND CULTURE 377

73 John E. McGrath, Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy,

and Surveillance Space 381
74 David Rosen and A aron Santesso, The Watchman in
Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood 385
75 Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Artveillance: At the Crossroads of Art and
Surveillance 389
76 Mike Nellis, Since Nineteen Eighty Four: Representations of
Surveillance in Literary Fiction 394
77 Catherine Zimmer, Surveillance Cinema 398
78 Jennifer R. Whitson, Gaming the Quantified Self 403

Index 407

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L I S T O F F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E S

Figures

1 Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design, 1791, Willey Reveley. 32

2 Stasi smell samples for dog tracking, undated, John Steer, courtesy of
the Stasi-​Museum, Berlin, ASTAK. 65
3 Plate 41 from Identification anthropométrique, 1893, Alphonse Bertillon. 109
4 AeroVironment Nano-​Hummingbird, 2011, sponsored by US Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 148
5 IXmaps Project tracing Internet routes through NSA servers, 2016,
Andrew Clement. 167
6 Recording the police, 2015, unknown. 201
7 Eavesdropping, 1880, Théodore Jacques Ralli. 211
8 Hyper-​Reality [Augmented reality city of the near future], 2016,
Keiichi Matsuda. 241
9 Modern Times, 1936, Charlie Chaplin. 262
10 One Nation under CCTV, 2008, Banksy. 332
11 Faceless, 2007, Manu Luksch. 392

Table

1 Surveillance Dimensions 25

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was made possible through generous financial assistance from our universities.
The Department of Communic­ation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pro-
vided support through a Kenneth and Mary Lowe Challenge Fund/​Faculty Excellence Grant.
The Department of Sociology and the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University
provided support with the aid of the Canada Research Chairs Program.

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vxi

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v
x
RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS
Section 1: Openings and Definitions
James B. Rule. Private Lives and Public
Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age.
London: Allen Lane, 1973 [19, 22–​23, 37–​40, 350–​
52, 354–​55, 357]. Reprinted with permission.
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. The Panoptic Sort: A Political
Economy of Personal Information. Boulder,
CO: Westview, 1993 [1–​2, 15–​18]. Reprinted with
permission.
William G. Staples. Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance
and Visibility in Postmodern Life. Lanham,
MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2000 [3–​7].
Reprinted with permission.
David Lyon. Surveillance Studies: An Overview.
Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007 [13–​16, 25–​27].
Reprinted with permission.
Gary T. Marx. “What’s New about the ‘New
Surveillance?’: Classifying for Change and
Continuity.” Surveillance and Society 1 (1):9–​29.
2002. Reprinted with permission.
Section 2: Society and Subjectivity
Jeremy Bentham. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol 4.
Edited by J. Bowring. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Library, (1843) 2009 [40–​41, 44–​46].
Reprinted with permission.
Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, translation
copyright © 1977 by Alan Sheridan [200–​209].
Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an
imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group, a division of Penguin Random House
LLC. All rights reserved.
Gilles Deleuze. “Postscript on the Societies of
Control.” October 59:3–​7. 1992 [3–​7]. Reprinted
with permission.
Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson. “The
Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of
Sociology 51 (4):605–​22. 2000 [606, 608–​1 4,
617–​19]. Reprinted with permission.
Thomas Mathiesen. “The Viewer Society: Michel
Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ Revisited.” Theoretical
Criminology 1 (2):215–​35. 1997 [216–​23, 225–​26,
228–​31]. Reprinted with permission.
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David Armstrong. “The Rise of Surveillance
Medicine.” Sociology of Health & Illness 17
(3): 393–​404. 1995 [393–​97, 399–​401, 403].
Reprinted with permission.
Irus Braverman. Zooland: The Institution of Captivity.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013 [75–​79,
82–​83, 86–​90]. Reprinted with the permission.
Section 3: State and Authority
Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Foundations of Natural Right.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Edited by Frederick Neuhouser, translated by
Michael Baur, (1796/​97) 2000 [254, 257–​58, 261–​
63]. Reprinted with permission.
Anthony Giddens. The Nation-​State and Violence
(Critique of Historical Materialism Vol. II).
Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1985 [1, 146, 159, 184–​
85, 189, 192, 311–​13, 327, 345]. Reprinted with
permission.
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star.
Sorting Things Out: Classif ication and Its
Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999 [196–​9 7, 199–​2 01, 212, 225]. Reprinted
with permission.
Maria Los. “The Technologies of Total Domination.”
Surveillance & Society 2 (1):15–​38. 2004. Reprinted
with permission.
Anna Funder. Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin
Wall. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2002 [106–​
110]. Reprinted with permission.
Cindi Katz. “The State Goes Home: Local
Hypervigilance of Children and the Global
Retreat from Social Reproduction.” Social Justice
28 (3):47–​56. 2001 [47–​49, 50–​51, 55]. Reprinted
with permission.
Section 4: Identity and Identification
Valentin Groebner. Who Are You? Identification,
Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern
Europe. Translated by M. Kyburz and J. Peck.
Cambrige, MA: Zone Books, 2007 [25–​27,
200–​202, 218–​19, 257–​58]. Reprinted with
permission.
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xvi
xvi  Rights and Permissions
John C. Torpey. The Invention of the
Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2000 [1, 4, 6–​13, 17]. Reprinted with permission.
Allan Sekula. “The Body and the Archive.” October
39:3–​64. 1986 [5–​7, 10, 16–​19, 62]. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. Reprinted with permission.
Dorothy Nelkin and Lori Andrews. “DNA
Identification and Surveillance Creep.”
Sociology of Health & Illness 21 (5):689–​706.
1999 [689–​99, 701, 703]. Reprinted with
permission.
Shoshana Amielle Magnet. When Biometrics
Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011 [2–​3,
5–​7, 47–​50]. Reprinted with permission.
Section 5: Borders and Mobilities
Louise Amoore. “Biometric Borders: Governing
Mobilities in the War on Terror.” Political
Geography 25 (3):336–​51. 2006 [337–​38, 341–​43].
Reprinted with permission.
Mark B. Salter. “Passports, Mobility, and
Security: How Smart Can the Border Be?”
International Studies Perspectives 5 (1):71–​91. 2004
[78–​80, 85]. Reprinted with permission.
Stephen Graham and David Wood. “Digitizing
Surveillance: Categorization, Space, Inequality.”
Critical Social Policy 23 (2):227–​48. 2003 [228–​
35, 242]. Reprinted with permission.
Katja Franko Aas. “Crimmigrant Bodies and Bona
Fide Travelers: Surveillance, Citizenship and
Global Governance.” Theoretical Criminology
15 (3):331–​46. 2011 [337–​42]. Reprinted with
permission.
Didier Bigo. “Security, Exception, Ban and
Surveillance.” Theorizing Surveillance: The
Panopticon and Beyond, edited by D. Lyon, 46–​
68. Devon: Willan Publishing, 2006 [47–​49,
55, 63]. Reprinted with permission.
Section 6: Intelligence and Security
James Bamford. The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National
Security Agency, America’s Most Secret Intelligence
Organization. Copyright © 1982, 1983 [15–​16, 19,
317–​20, 461–​63, 468–​69, 475–​76]. Reprinted
by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company and Penguin Books. All
rights reserved.
Alfred W. McCoy. Policing America’s Empire: The
United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of
the Surveillance State. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2009 [15–​19]. Reprinted with
permission.
Ahmad H. Sa’di. Thorough Surveillance: The Genesis
of Israeli Policies of Population Management,
Surveillance, and Political Control towards
the Palestinian Minority. Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 2013 [52–​55,
58–​61, 63, 67]. Reprinted with permission.
9780190297817_Book.indb 16
Glenn Greenwald. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden,
the NSA, and the US Surveillance State.
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014 [91–​96, 98–​
101, 118–​19, 151, 153]. Reprinted with permission.
Section 7: Crime and Policing
Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong. “CCTV and
the Social Structuring of Surveillance.” In
Surveillance of Public Space: CCTV, Street
Lighting, and Crime Prevention, edited by Kate
Painter and Nick Tilley, 157–​78. Copyright
© 1999 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
Reprinted with permission.
Mike McCahill. The Surveillance Web: The Rise
of Visual Surveillance in an English City.
Collumpton, Devon, UK: Willan Publishing,
2002 [95–​98]. Reprinted with permission.
Philip Boyle and Kevin D. Haggerty. “Spectacular
Security: Mega-​Events and the Security Complex.”
International Political Sociology 3 (3):257–​74. 2009
[267–​70]. Reprinted with permission.
Pete Fussey, Jon Coaffee, Gary Armstrong, and Dick
Hobbs. “The Regeneration Games: Purity and
Security in the Olympic City.” British Journal of
Sociology 63 (2):260–​84. 2012 [261–​62, 264, 268,
273–​74, 276]. Reprinted with permission.
Hille Koskela. “The Gaze without Eyes: Video
Surveillance and the Changing Nature of
Urban Space.” Progress in Human Geography 24
(2):243–​65. 2000 [246, 248–​50, 255, 258–​59].
Reprinted with permission.
Andrew John Goldsmith. “Policing’s New Visibility.”
British Journal of Criminology 50 (5):914–​34. 2010
[917–​22, 931]. Reprinted with permission.
Torin Monahan and Rodolfo D. Torres. “Introduction.”
In Schools under Surveillance: Cultures of Control
in Public Education, 1–​18. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010 [1–​4 , 6, 13–​1 4].
Reprinted with permission.
Section 8: Privacy and Autonomy
Priscilla M. Regan. Legislating Privacy: Technology,
Social Values, and Public Policy. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995
[212–​21]. Reprinted with permission.
Jean-​François Blachette and Deborah G. Johnson.
“Data Retention and the Panoptic Society: The
Social Benefits of Foregetfulness.” The
Information Society 18 (1):33–​45. 2002 [33–​39, 43].
Reprinted with permission.
Helen Fay Nissenbaum. Privacy in Context: Technology,
Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford,
CA: Stanford Law Books, 2010 [1–​3, 231–​36].
Reprinted with permission.
Julie E. Cohen. Configuring the Networked Self: Law,
Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012 [148–​52].
Reprinted with permission.
John Gilliom. Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance,
Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy.
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xvi
Rights and Permissions   xvii
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001
[2–​7, 9–​10, 43–​4 4, 67–​68]. Reprinted with
permission.
Colin J. Bennett. “In Defense of Privacy: The Concept
and the Regime.” Surveillance and Society 8
(4):485–​96. 2011. Reprinted with permission.
Section 9: Ubiquitous Surveillance
Roger Clarke. “Information Technology and
Dataveillance.” Communications of the ACM 31
(5):498–​512. 1988 [499, 502–​508]. Reprinted with
permission.
Dana Cuff. “Immanent Domain: Pervasive Computing
and the Public Realm.” Journal of Architectural
Education 57 (1):43–​49. 2003 [43–​48]. Reprinted
with permission.
Mike Crang and Stephen Graham. “Sentient
Cities: Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of
Urban Space.” Information, Communication &
Society 10 (6):789–​817. 2007 [791–​97, 811–​1 4].
Reprinted with permission.
Mark Andrejevic. “Surveillance in the Big Data
Era.” In Emerging Pervasive Information and
Communication Technologies (PICT), edited by
K. D. Pimple, 55–​69. New York: Springer, 2014
[58–​64]. Reprinted with permission.
Section 10: Work and Organization
Graham Sewell and Barry Wilkinson. “Someone to
Watch over Me: Surveillance, Discipline, and
the Just-​in-​Time Labour Process.” Sociology 26
(2):271–​89. 1992 [271–​81, 283–​84]. Reprinted with
permission.
Kirstie Ball. “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview.”
Labor History 51 (1):87–​106. 2010 [89, 91–​94, 98–​
101]. Reprinted with permission.
Gavin J. D. Smith. “Behind the Screens: Examining
Constructions of Deviance and Informal
Practices among CCTV Control Room Operators
in the UK.” Surveillance & Society 2 (2/​3):376–​95.
2004. Reprinted with permission.
Christian Fuchs. “Web 2.0, Prosumption, and
Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 8 (3):288–​
309. 2011. Reprinted with permission.
Section 11: Political Economy
Adam Arvidsson. “On the Pre-​History of the Panoptic
Sort: Mobility in Market Research.” Surveillance
& Society 1 (4):456–​74. 2004. Reprinted with
permission.
David Murakami Wood and Kirstie Ball. “Brandscapes
of Control? Surveillance, Marketing and the
Co-​construction of Subjectivity and Space in
Neo-​L iberal Capitalism.” Marketing Theory 13
(1):47–​67. 2013 [47, 49–​52, 54–​55, 57, 60–​62].
Reprinted with permission.
Anthony Amicelle. “Towards a ‘New’ Political Anatomy
of Financial Surveillance.” Security Dialogue 42
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(2):161–​78. 2011 [161–​64, 167–​69]. Reprinted with
permission.
Nicole S. Cohen. “The Valorization of
Surveillance: Towards a Political Economy of
Facebook.” Democratic Communiqué 22 (1):5–​22.
2008 [7–​15, 18]. Reprinted with permission.
Shoshana Zuboff. “Big Other: Surveillance
Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information
Civilization.” Journal of Information Technology
30 (1):75–​89. 2015 [77, 80–​85]. Reprinted with
permission.
Section 12: Participation and
Social Media
Mark Andrejevic. “The Work of Being Watched:
Interactive Media and the Exploitation of
Self-​Disclosure.” Critical Studies in Media
Communication 19 (2):230–​48. 2002 [231–​32,
238–​39, 243–​45]. Reprinted with permission.
Hille Koskela. “Webcams, TV Shows, and Mobile
Phones: Empowering Exhibitionism.”
Surveillance & Society 2 (2/​3):199–​215. 2004.
Reprinted with permission.
Anders Albrechtslund. “Online Social Networking as
Participatory Surveillance.” First Monday 13 (3).
2008. Reprinted with permission.
Priscilla Regan and Valerie Steeves. “Kids R
Us: Online Social Networking and the Potential
for Empowerment.” Surveillance & Society 8
(2):151–​65. 2010. Reprinted with permission.
Alice E. Marwick. “The Public Domain: Social
Surveillance in Everyday Life.” Surveillance
& Society 9 (4):378–​93. 2012. Reprinted with
permission.
Section 13: Resistance and Opposition
Colin J. Bennett. The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the
Spread of Surveillance. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2008 [ix, 199, 210–​1 1, 217, 220–​22, 225].
Reprinted with permission.
Laura Huey, Kevin Walby, and Aaron Doyle.
“Cop Watching in the Downtown
Eastside: Exploring the Use of (Counter)
Surveillance as a Tool of Resistance.” In
Surveillance and Society: Technological Power in
Everyday Life, edited by T. Monahan, 149–​65.
New York: Routledge, 2006 [149–​50, 152–​54,
156–​57, 161–​65]. Reprinted with permission.
Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum. “Vernacular
Resistance to Data Collection and Analysis: A
Political Theory of Obfuscation.” First Monday 16
(5). 2011. Reprinted with permission.
Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman.
“Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable
Computing Devices for Data Collection in
Surveillance Environments.” Surveillance & Society 1
(3):331–​55. 2003. Reprinted with permission.
Torin Monahan. “The Right to Hide? Anti-​
Surveillance Camouflage and the
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xvii

xviii  Rights and Permissions

Aestheticization of Resistance.” Communication Section 15: Art and Culture
and Critical/​Cultural Studies 12 (2):159–​78. 2015
[159–​65, 169–​7 1]. Reprinted with permission. John E. McGrath. Loving Big Brother: Performance,
Privacy, and Surveillance Space. New York:
Routledge, 2004 [2–​3, 5–​7, 10–​1 1, 14, 166–​68].
Section 14: Marginality and Reprinted with permission.
David Rosen and Aaron Santesso. The Watchman
Difference in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal
Personhood. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. Coming to Terms with
2013 [56–​59, 100–​104]. Reprinted with permission.
Chance: Engaging Rational Discrimination
Andrea Mubi Brighenti. “Artveillance: At the
and Cumulative Disadvantage. Burlington,
Crossroads of Art and Surveillance.” Surveillance
VT: Ashgate, 2009 [1–​3, 5, 10–​15]. Reprinted with
& Society 7 (2):137–​48. 2010. Reprinted with
permission.
permission.
Jasbir K. Puar. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism
Mike Nellis. “Since Nineteen Eighty
in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University
Four: Representations of Surveillance in Literary
Press, 2007 [152, 154–​56, 160–​62, 164–​65].
Fiction.” In New Directions in Surveillance and
Reprinted with permission.
Privacy, edited by B. J. Goold and D. Neyland,
Corrine Mason and Shoshana Magnet. “Surveillance
178–​204. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2009
Studies and Violence against Women.”
[178, 197–​200]. Reprinted with permission.
Surveillance & Society 10 (2):105–​18. 2012.
Catherine Zimmer. Surveillance Cinema.
Reprinted with permission.
New York: New York University Press, 2015 [18–​
Simone Browne. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance
24]. Reprinted with permission.
of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University
Jennifer R. Whitson. “Gaming the Quantified Self.”
Press, 2015 [7–​9, 16–​17, 21–​22, 24, 77–​79, 128].
Surveillance & Society 11 (1/​2):163–​76. 2013.
Reprinted with permission.
Reprinted with permission.

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xi
TORIN MONAHAN AND
DAVID MURAKAMI WOOD
I NT R O D U C T I O N
Surveillance Studies as a Transdisciplinary Endeavor
Surveillance studies is a dynamic field of
scholarly inquiry. It emerges, in large part,
from recognition of the ways in which perva-
sive information systems increasingly regu-
late all aspects of social life. Whether with
workplaces monitoring the performance
of employees, social media sites tracking
clicks and uploads, financial institutions
logging transactions, advertisers amassing
fine-​
grained data on customers, or secu-
rity agencies siphoning up everyone’s tel-
ecommunications activities, surveillance
practices—​although often hidden—​have
come to define the way modern institutions
operate. This development indicates more
than just the adoption of information-​based
technological systems by organizations;
rather, it represents a larger transformation
in how people and organizations perceive
and engage with the world. It now seems
completely reasonable and responsible to
collect data by default and base decisions on
those data. It seems rational to use data to
sort people into categories according to their
anticipated risk or value and to treat people
differently based on their categorization.
These are surveillance logics that transcend
any particular technological system, and
indeed they do not require technological
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mediation at all. Face-​to-​face surveillance,
of people watching and controlling others,
is certainly not rendered obsolete by new
technologies.
Although definitions of surveillance
vary, most scholars stress that surveillance
is about more than just watching; it depends
also on some capacity to control, regulate,
or modulate behavior. This reading draws
upon the French origins of the word surveil-
lance, which means “watching from above.”
It implies a power relationship. It is not
just passive looking but is instead a form
of oversight that judges and intervenes to
shape behavior. Importantly, one does not
need to be aware of such control dynamics
for them to be effective; these dynamics
can perhaps have greater force if they are
felt as natural and their politics are hidden.
The excerpts in this book sketch a number
of definitions with different accents and
nuances, but as a starting point, surveil-
lance can be understood as “monitoring
people in order to regulate or govern their
behavior” (Gilliom and Monahan 2013: 2).
While academics may agree, more or less,
with general definitions, the term “surveil-
lance” invites a range of interpretations. For
some it is restricted to specific technologies
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xx  Introduction
or legal designations, whereas for others it
signals any form of systematic monitoring
that exerts an influence or has a tangible
outcome. Additionally, because of its neg-
ative connotations, practitioners on the
ground often disagree about whether sur-
veillance is taking place. For instance, so-
cial scientists who conduct empirical work
with policing agencies have found that
most law-​enforcement personnel do not see
their work in that way, even as they describe
their professional functions in terms that
researchers would label as surveillance.
Surveillance may be ubiquitous, but it
acquires different forms, functions, and
meanings across social settings. Broadly,
one could say that all formations of capital,
nation, and state—​three aspects that consti-
tute the structure of contemporary societies
(Karatani 2014)—​depend on mechanisms
of surveillance to control markets, regulate
bodies, and protect institutions. Recently,
these processes were illuminated in the
arena of national security and state intelli-
gence, where the public gained newfound
awareness of the extent of state surveillance
operations with the trove of US National
Security Agency (NSA) documents released
by Edward Snowden in 2013. Clearly, sur-
veillance flourishes in other spheres too,
beyond explicit state operations or formal
governance structures. For instance, public
interest in surveillance has likewise been
piqued by revelations about peer and corpo-
rate monitoring on social media sites like
Facebook, which are platforms that also en-
gage in the robust collection, analysis, and
sharing of data, sometimes even running
undisclosed “experiments” on users to
see how they respond to different types of
content.
Across domains, from state security
agencies to social media sites, surveil-
lance regulates boundaries and relations.
It reinforces separation and different
treatment along lines of class, race, gender,
sexuality, age, and so on. Regardless of
the context, surveillance is never a neutral
9780190297817_Book.indb 20
process. There are always value judgments
and power imbalances, and they usually
reproduce social inequalities. Because of
growing awareness of the central role of
surveillance in shaping power relations
and knowledge across social and cultural
contexts, scholars from many different ac-
ademic disciplines have gravitated to sur-
veillance studies and contributed to its
solidification as a field.
But academic fields do not develop en-
tirely on their own, just from a set of shared
ideas or concerns. Rather, they depend on
the concerted efforts of individuals to pull
and hold people together, to initiate and
sustain conversations over time, and, ulti-
mately, to institutionalize the field in a set
of organizational practices and artifacts
(Mullins 1972). For surveillance studies,
those practices entailed workshops begin-
ning in the early 1990s and continuing
with greater frequency in the 2000s; the
formation of the international Surveillance
Studies Network (SSN)1 in 2006; and the
hosting of international conferences every
two years, starting in 2004. The artifacts
include numerous edited volumes, many
of them outgrowths of the aforementioned
workshops, and, crucially, the founding of
the open-​access online journal Surveillance
& Society2 in 2002. Many of the people in-
volved in these activities, including the
editors of this Reader, are represented
in this book, but special mention must
be made of sociologist David Lyon, who
was instrumental early on in organizing
workshops and conference panels and
producing edited volumes that drew
scholars into dialogue, thus helping to con-
stitute the field.
Clearly this is an “origin story,” and
such stories are always political: they set
the parameters for who and what counts
or should be counted. As a collection of
curated materials, Readers, such as this
one, are similarly political and necessarily
exclusionary, if only because there simply
is not sufficient room to include everything
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xxi
Introduction   xxi
that one would like to—​ or should—​
include. Although such politics and
exclusions are unavoidable, we choose to
be self-​reflexive about our standpoints and
the choices we are making. We are interdis-
ciplinary scholars with backgrounds and
direct experience in surveillance studies,
science and technology studies (STS), ge-
ography, sociology, communication, and
history. Indirectly, through conferences,
publications, and collaborations, we partici-
pate in many other fields: anthropology, po-
litical science, law and society, criminology,
American studies, gender studies, cultural
studies, and others.
This interdisciplinary orientation inflects
the explicit and implicit arguments of this
Reader. Instead of overemphasizing the
contributions of one discipline, for instance,
we seek to illustrate how different discipli-
nary perspectives bring different concerns,
methods, and theoretical positions to the
study of surveillance in society. We feel that
this is an empirically accurate representa-
tion of the field, as well, in that there are
many voices and disciplines represented
in the conversations of the field, as any pe-
rusal of conference programs will bear out.
More than being a static “snapshot,” how-
ever, there is a deeper and ongoing story
here about a correspondence between the
field’s institutionalization and its increasing
interdisciplinarity. The two have occurred,
and continue to occur, together. Perhaps
the field’s defining feature is its search for
commonalities among tensions in disci-
plinary approaches to surveillance. This
is the reason we prefer to call surveillance
studies a “transdisciplinary field.” It draws
its strength and forms its identity from
shared general concerns and productive
frictions among disciplines, all the while
fostering departures and innovations. It has
achieved cohesion as a bona fide new field
with shared concepts, “citation classics,”
and forms of institutionalization (e.g., a
journal and conferences), but it also invites,
and often seems to embrace, critiques.
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This should not be read as a romanticiza-
tion of the field. Certainly not every sur-
veillance studies scholar welcomes being
challenged from a disciplinary perspective
other than her or his own. That said, as the
field as a whole has been forced to grapple
with such challenges, and continues to do
so, the general tone has not been one of de-
fensiveness but rather appreciation. Not of
exclusion and ostracism, but of inclusion
and acceptance. These are the norms that
characterize the field for many participants,
and they are ones we try to reproduce with
our selection, grouping, and framing of
excerpts in this book.
Histories of Surveillance and
Surveillance Studies
There may be an allure to seeing surveil-
lance as novel, but there are important his-
torical contexts and lineages that inform
and shape the present. Some of the earliest
influential work in the field, by pioneers like
James B. Rule and Michel Foucault, came
out of a 1960s and 1970s context of state
surveillance that included the monitoring,
disruption, and repression of progressive
groups by both totalitarian and democratic
states (Murakami Wood 2009b). At this
time, as is still the case today, state actors
were emboldened by new technologies that
afforded the collection and analysis of infor-
mation on an unprecedented scale. Rule’s
book Private Lives and Public Surveillance
(1973) delved into these trends with a focus
on the implications of government agencies
and corporations adopting new computer
databases as central tools of governance
and customer management. Rule saw these
changes as introducing the threat of a “total
surveillance society” that could lead to di-
minished autonomy, curtailed rights, and
political repression.
Foucault (1977), on the other hand,
cast his eye backward to illustrate how
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xx
ii
xxii  Introduction
surveillance became a central method for
governance and the construction of modern
subjects. Foucault’s observations about the
emergence of distributed methods of rule
and self-​disciplining forms of subjectivity
were incredibly generative and explain
his substantial and sustained influence in
the field, however much scholars might
question the specifics of his historical anal-
ysis or particular aspects of his theory.
Ironically, as Gilles Deleuze (1992) later
pointed out, the combined technological
transformations and sociopolitical crises of
the 1960s and 1970s presaged the end of the
modern surveillance regime described by
Foucault in Discipline and Punish, leading
to today’s more machinic, automated, and
inhuman late-​capitalist regime.
The history of surveillance, of course,
goes back much further. As David Lyon’s The
Electronic Eye (1994) described, surveillance
can be detected in population documents
from ancient Egypt and also in records of
English landholding with the Domesday
Book from 1086. Interestingly, the word
“eavesdrop,” which had its first printed use in
1606, originally referred to someone who lit-
erally stood within the space next to a house
where rainwater dripped from the eaves,
where one could secretly listen to what was
said inside (OED Online 2016). These his-
torical references reveal a mixture of hier-
archical politics, technological affordances
(writing itself and the vernacular architec-
ture of wooden houses, respectively), and
local social practices, which come together
to produce particular forms of surveillance.
It is not accurate in most cases to make an
arbitrary distinction between “technolog-
ical” and “non-​ technological” surveillance.
However, it is certainly true that the earlier
the form of surveillance, the greater and
more obvious the role that people played in
the process. The actual or suspected presence
of spies, informers, watchmen, and guards
looms larger in social imaginaries about sur-
veillance in the premodern and early modern
periods than it does today.
9780190297817_Book.indb 22
The biggest historical transformations
were associated not so much with the de-
velopment of new technologies as they were
with the social functions and goals of sur-
veillance. In early modern Europe, states
sought to discover commonalities in groups
and codify descriptions of them in bureau-
cratic archives, thus creating identities
against which individuals were measured
(Groebner 2007). By the end of the eight-
eenth century, however, rulers became in-
creasingly interested in identifying specific
people, both in nation-​states and their col-
onies, to effectively create “police states”
of well-​governed and transparent societies
(Fichte 2000 [1796/​97]). By the late nine-
teenth century, this identification impera-
tive reached crisis levels, fueled by concerns
about anonymous individuals—​ perhaps
with criminal inclinations—​circulating in
newly industrialized cities and challenging
established social hierarchies (Cole 2001;
Torpey 2000). Identification regimes were
combined with generalized surveillance
and mass enforcement, which were often
supplemented by spectacular and exem-
plary punishments to deter criminal beha-
vior by others.
Modern surveillance also concerned it-
self increasingly with individual subjec-
tivity and the management of populations
in ways that generated compliance, pro-
ductivity, and even health and happiness
(Foucault 1978). In this, surveillance was
always associated with scientific advances,
particularly with the new science of num-
bers, statistics (Hacking 1990; Porter 1995;
Scott 1998). As Ian Hacking shows in The
Taming of Chance (1990), throughout the
nineteenth century, a general belief in de-
terminism gradually gave way to regimes
of probability. The quantification of every-
thing (grain, forests, people, suicides, and
so on) gave rise to statistical bureaus and
allowed states to invoke scientific rationality
in governance decisions.
At the same time, the science of
the body—​ in terms of both the broad
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xx
ii
Introduction   xxiii
picture of biology and evolution and the
development of physiology and kinetics
(movement)—​ was inspired by and pro-
vided the basis for a new kind of efficient
and compliant workforce. Typically, these
efforts mobilized surveillance to extract
as much labor from bodies as was phys-
ically possible. Frederick Winslow Taylor
(1911) is well known in this regard, due to
his efforts to implement a system of “sci-
entific management” of factory workers.
This early form of workplace surveillance
relied on close observation, segmentation
of tasks, and division of labor, all overseen
by a new class of managerial elites whose
technocratic functions would, in Taylor’s
view, advance the social and economic
prosperity of the nation.
Whereas Taylor believed in a voluntary
system where incentives and effective man-
agement would compel heightened pro-
ductivity, brutal forms of involuntary labor
extraction—​as with slavery in the United
States, Brazil, Haiti, and elsewhere—​also
depended on surveillance innovations. As
Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011) explains, state
visuality regimes, including those used in
the institutional management of slaves,
rely on techniques of classification, sep-
aration, and aestheticization, such that
people are reduced to governable units and
represented in bureaucratic systems that
obscure the symbolic and real violence of
dehumanizing complexes. In the case of
slavery in the United States, especially as
the institution started to unravel, surveil-
lance took the form of hot-​iron branding,
slave passes and “lantern laws” to regulate
movement, and wanted posters encour-
aging the apprehension of runaway slaves
(Browne 2015). In her important work
on the surveillance of blackness, Simone
Browne reveals how forms of agency and
resistance were always a part of the slave
experience and that exercises of resistance
continue today in people’s confrontations
with discriminatory and racist surveillance
apparatuses (see Section 14).
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In the late nineteenth century, biological
theories of racial inferiority fused with new
identification techniques like physiognomy,
photography, and fingerprinting—​the early
systems of biometric measurement (Cole
2001; Sekula 1986). These were policing
technologies deployed in an effort to cata-
logue offenders and make criminality leg-
ible, and perhaps even predictable, through
scientific means. In tandem with the rise of
the eugenics movement of the Progressive
Era in the United States, these scientific
schemes drew upon narratives of biolog-
ical difference to justify unequal treatment
of supposedly inferior groups: immigrants,
racial minorities, the poor, the illiterate,
or the cognitively impaired (Kevles 1995).
Behind the facade of objective science, dis-
criminatory practices were institutional-
ized through such identification systems,
and social hierarchies were reinforced in
a time of heightened migration and social
mobility.
The period at the end of the nineteenth
century saw the creation of new rights and
freedoms. The modern legal concept of
privacy arose in the context of polite New
England society and the frustrations of
the American bourgeoisie with an increas-
ingly intrusive media, in particular popular
newspapers in their reporting of society
functions. Louis Brandeis and Samuel
Warren’s (1890) famous line about the
“right to be let alone” comes from this con-
text, where privacy was mobilized as a right
of the privileged. Perhaps awareness of un-
equal access to privacy rights, even during
its emergence as a legal construct over
a century ago, helps explain the general
reservations that many surveillance studies
scholars have about privacy discourses
today. As we develop in Section 8, there
are clearly disciplinary reasons as well for
one’s commitment to—​ or suspicion of—​
privacy protections as responses to surveil-
lance. However, for better or worse, within
policy arenas and liberal academia, privacy
and the “private life” remain both tactically
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x
vxi
xxiv  Introduction
and ideologically the dominant forms of re-
sponse to surveillance. This is true even as
scholars search for more comprehensive,
powerful, and flexible ways of responding
to surveillance encroachments and abuses.
Before the field of surveillance studies
started to coalesce in the late 1990s, scholars
largely followed the thread of the early 1970s
critiques of centralized computer databases,
state surveillance, and policing. For ex-
ample, Gary Marx’s classic book Undercover
(1988) connected the use of older forms of
human surveillance with police informants
and undercover operations to the emer-
gence of new technologies, such as infrared
cameras, that could circumvent privacy ex-
pectations without concomitant increases
in legal protections. Likewise, Roger Clarke
(1988) described dangers brought about by
forms of “dataveillance” that allowed for the
large-​scale combination of data points and
the construction of profiles that could be
used to discriminate against people even
in advance of any wrongdoing. David Lyon
(1988) echoed these anxieties as well in his
first major work to deal with surveillance,
where he concluded by developing the om-
inous figure of the “carceral computer.”
With greater attention to racial inequalities
and corporate profiling of customers, Oscar
Gandy (1993) similarly noted how informa-
tion systems were acting politically to sort
people in unequal ways while obscuring the
inherent biases of the systems in question.
As a culminating point, of sorts, in 1987
a number of significant players in the
emergent field (e.g., Priscilla Regan, Gary
Marx, Andrew Clement, and James Rule)
contributed to an influential report by the
US Office of Technology Assessment (1987)
on workplace surveillance; this report
rearticulated some of the above critiques
but also, perhaps more important for this
discussion of field formation, served as
an early and explicit articulation of shared
concerns.
In the early 1990s, a conceptual
change began with consideration of new
9780190297817_Book.indb 24
technological innovations in conjunction
with popular theorizations about postmod-
ernism. In addition to the aforementioned
Gilles Deleuze (1992) and Oscar Gandy
(1993), Mark Poster (1990) described surveil-
lance operations in new media technologies
and human-​machine interfaces, which si-
multaneously deterritorialized subjectivity
and dispersed control mechanisms. David
Lyon (2001, 1994) synthesized many of
these themes by explicating the ways in
which “information societies” are neces-
sarily “surveillance societies” because the
automatic collection of data by informa-
tion systems affords the classification of
individuals and groups, behaviors and risks,
leading to differential treatment of people.
Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson
(2000) developed these foundations fur-
ther, describing the role of the individual’s
“data double” in a larger “surveillant assem-
blage,” an amorphous network of public
and private systems where individuals have
little recourse to alter or contest the surveil-
lance that is taking place. More than that,
almost all organizations engage in such acts
of data collection, analysis, and intervention
(Staples 2000), meaning—​ among other
things—​that surveillance has become one
of the dominant modes of ordering in the
postmodern era.
Conceptual Challenges
As scholars from a variety of disciplines
engaged with surveillance studies, they
relied upon a common set of concepts to
advance collective knowledge. In partic-
ular, Foucault’s interpretation of Jeremy
Bentham’s Panopticon, the legal and moral
concept of privacy, and George Orwell’s
figure of Big Brother were quite produc-
tive in sparking analysis. Over time, how-
ever, these concepts became strained and
seemed dissonant with the empirical
conditions described by researchers or the
field’s growing theoretical interests.
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v
x
Introduction   xxv
To start with, the allure of Foucault’s
(1977) writings on Bentham’s Panopticon
prison design was that he transformed it into
a powerful metaphor for the ways in which
institutions could provide scripts for people
to internalize the surveillant gaze and po-
lice themselves into social conformity (see
Section 2). There has been increasing dissat-
isfaction with the concept, though, perhaps
because of the way people feel compelled to
modify it and devise clunky spin-​off terms
(e.g., “superpanopticon,” “synopticon,”
“ban-​ opticon”) to match new phenomena
rather than invent something altogether
new. Foucault intended the Panopticon to
serve as an illustration of a particular histor-
ical moment in the development of modern
thinking about subjectivity and social con-
trol (Murakami Wood 2009), but it has be-
come an almost hegemonic construct in the
field. It is often applied or intoned as if it has
some kind of universal explanatory value but,
if used this way, it lacks empirical validity.
Rather than being rational, centralized, and
totalizing, surveillance is more often par-
ticularistic, multi-​sited, and highly special-
ized, leading Bruno Latour (2005) to refer to
contemporary surveillance—​using another
derivative neologism—​as oligoptic, that is,
narrow and focused rather than broad and
distributed. Of course, the focus and inten-
sity is not random. It varies according to
one’s social address (Monahan 2010) and is
more likely to sort, exclude, and marginalize
populations, not homogenize people and
shape them into uniform docile bodies (see
Section 14).
The concept of privacy remains salient
in the field, as well as in legal, policy, and
popular discourses. Along with data pro-
tection concerns, privacy resonates deeply
with many people and provides something
to organize around. That said, whereas the
concept’s universalizing and individualizing
tendencies undoubtedly lend it force in
legal and policymaking arenas, these have
been seen as deficiencies as well, espe-
cially by academics trained to be suspicious
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or critical of such discourses. We have al-
ready observed, for example, that although
perceived threats to privacy may be a
clarion call to arms for civil-​society groups
and progressives more generally (Bennett
2008; Regan 1995), whether in its origins
or today, privacy has never truly been a
universal human right. Some other limita-
tions of the concept might be its difficulty
in overcoming the individualistic frame to
assist with understanding encroachments
on social groups or public spaces (Patton
2000); tensions between its presentation as
an easily identifiable universal value and its
remarkable messiness in practice (Nippert-​
Eng 2010); or the empirical reality that
some of the targets of the most intrusive
forms of surveillance are more concerned
with issues of domination and power, not
abstract notions like privacy (Gilliom 2001).
Finally, George Orwell’s (1949) exceed-
ingly disturbing fictional portrayal of a to-
talitarian society (in Nineteen Eighty-​Four),
with the human face forever crushed
under the boot of Big Brother, has simi-
larly made it difficult to escape motifs of
all-​powerful, centralized state surveillance.
Notwithstanding the resilience of the Big
Brother figure in the media or common
parlance, the field continues to stress the
heterogeneous mix of surveillance flows,
even with state surveillance (e.g., Guzik
2016; Hayes 2009; Monahan and Regan
2012; Walby and Monaghan 2011). Edward
Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveil-
lance programs, for instance, reveal that
private companies are the source of much
data analyzed by state agencies and that
private contractors, just as Snowden was,
are essential to the state surveillance ap-
paratus. In other words, state surveillance
is only part of the picture. Across many
arenas, the blend of state, corporate, and
social surveillance shapes life chances
in concrete ways: whether someone gets
health insurance or a bank loan, gets
fired because of a Facebook posting or
discriminated against because of their
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xvi

xxvi  Introduction

credit score, gets targeted for police scru- into sections based on historical periods, ge-
tiny because she lives in a crime “hot spot,” ographical focus, conceptual frameworks,
or spied upon as a potential “terrorist” be- topical areas, or disciplinary perspectives,
cause he protests environmental polluters. among other options. Following from our
Thus, even within surveillant assemblages, earlier observation that surveillance studies
as Sean Hier and Josh Greenberg (2009) is a transdisciplinary field defined by its
note, hierarchies of visibility persist, such search for commonalities among tensions
that descriptions of exposure alone are in- in disciplinary approaches to surveillance,
sufficient to account for the uneven politics we have chosen a hybrid organizational
of surveillance. approach that seeks to triangulate, some-
On the other end of the spectrum, what loosely, topical areas, disciplinary
many people would find Orwell’s dysto- perspectives, and the field’s chronological de-
pian vision bizarre today because they see velopment. Thus, each section concentrates
surveillance—​ especially social networking primarily on a topical area, but this often
and media-​based surveillance—​as fun, con- reflects disciplinary preferences, and those
venient, or inconsequential (Albrechtslund preferences have changed over time as
2008; Ellerbrok 2011; McGrath 2004). It is scholars from different disciplines have
worth mentioning here that scholars doing joined the conversation. So, by reading the
literary analyses of surveillance have long sections in order, one can also get a sense of
observed that Orwell’s vision was highly how the field has mutated over time.
derivative of earlier writing by the Russian Emphatically, the order of sections
author Yevgeny Zamyatin (1972 [1921]). It does not represent a neat evolutionary
also seems that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New development but instead a fascinating it-
World (1932)—​in which control is exercised erative process, where scholars studying
through a combination of eugenics, in one area are oftentimes influenced by
pleasure, drugs, and peer ​ pressure—​ the contributions of those in an entirely
provides a far more convincing set of different area, leading to recombinant
metaphors for the contemporary situation knowledge for the collective advancement
(Marks 2005; Murakami Wood 2009a). of the field. For instance, while crimino-
With the exception of the concept of logical studies of police video surveillance
privacy, which remains central for many were some of the earliest and most for-
scholars in surveillance studies, the field mative empirical projects in surveillance
has largely departed from these genera- studies, researchers did not cease to inves-
tive concepts. Nonetheless, they have pro- tigate police video surveillance once others
foundly shaped the field’s discourses and drew the field toward explorations of resist-
remain useful as symbols of the extremes ance, ubiquitous surveillance, or the polit-
of universal or totalizing forms of surveil- ical economy; instead, scholars folded these
lance. As the next section will show, the lines of inquiry into their projects, making
field’s topical and conceptual apparatuses their findings both unpredictable and re-
have exploded as the field has grown, freshing, all the while furthering the dia-
adding complexity, nuance, and renewed logue with others (e.g., Coaffee and Fussey
vigor to what came before. 2015; McCahill and Finn 2014; Smith 2015).
Likewise, world events can suddenly re-
kindle interest in older areas of investi-
gation, as can be observed with terrorist
Book Overview attacks drawing attention back to national
security, Snowden’s leaks foregrounding
There are many possible ways to organize a state intelligence operations, or police
Reader such as this one. It could be divided killing of unarmed black men raising

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xxivi
Introduction   xxvii
interest in the documentary evidence that
video surveillance might provide, albeit
with an emphasis on police accountability,
not citizen wrongdoing. This iterative
process is represented within most of the
sections too, where we include excerpts
from older and newer explorations of the
area and note the influences in our section
introductions so that these iterations and
cross-​fertilizations can be appreciated.
It should be mentioned that some of the
excerpts are by scholars who would not nec-
essarily identify with the field of surveil-
lance studies. This is to be expected with
foundational theoretical works that pre-
date the formation of the field, but there
are other instances of more contemporary
selections by people working in aligned
fields. We chose to include such pieces if
they were exemplary works in new areas or
they challenged the status quo in ways we
found productive. Given that we valorize
the relative porousness and inclusiveness
of the field, it seemed appropriate that we
would not exclude significant publications
simply because of how an author positioned
themself.
The Reader’s first content section,
“Openings and Definitions,” offers a pre-
sentation of originary works that helped
constitute surveillance studies. The authors
wrestle with different definitions of surveil-
lance, illustrating a lack of consensus at the
incipient stages of the field. Some position
the target of surveillance as an individual
person whose freedoms are infringed upon,
while others question the larger effects on
subject populations or society as a whole.
There is general agreement, however, that
surveillance is widespread, facilitated by in-
formation systems used by most organiza-
tions, and permeating down to the capillary
level of society—​that is, on the level of eve-
ryday interactions in most arenas of public
and private life. This movement between
the macro and the micro is indicative of
authors working to develop what C. Wright
Mills (1959) called “the sociological imagi-
nation,” situating everyday practices within
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larger systems of power and influence. This
makes sense given that with the exception
of Oscar Gandy, who is a communication
scholar, each of the other authors in this
section would identify as a sociologist.
Section 2, “Society and Subjectivity,”
provides excerpts from some of the key
theoretical texts that shaped the field.
These include Bentham’s and Foucault’s
writings on the Panopticon prison design,
Deleuze’s delineations of the emergence
of control dynamics replacing the disci-
plinary ones outlined by Foucault, and
others exploring how such control might
manifest in decentralized networks or ar-
ticulate with powerful media institutions
that are characterized more by the many
watching the few. Because the emphasis
is on how subjectivity is produced through
exposure to surveillance, especially in or by
institutions, we also include selections that
illustrate how public health campaigns in-
form medical imaginaries and surveillance-​
based zoo designs cultivate conservationist
values in zoogoers.
The next two sections, “State and
Authority” (Section 3) and “Identity and
Identification” (Section 4), explore the ways
in which surveillance was a critical part
of the rise of the modern nation-​state, es-
pecially pertaining to the identification
and governance of people at borders and
within state territories. The authors an-
alyze incarnations of state surveillance
in the service of totalitarian and postcolo-
nial regimes, such as Cold War–​era East
Germany and apartheid-​era South Africa,
respectively, and question the extent to
which totalitarian tendencies are present in
all modern nation-​states. When states de-
fine themselves by territorial demarcations,
then the regulation of movement, through
passports or other identity documents, ef-
fectively conjures “citizens” into being as
identifiable representatives of the state.
Unfortunately, identification efforts cannot
be divorced from the prejudices of their cul-
tural contexts, so they usually reproduce
those prejudices in technological form.
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xx
iivi
xxviii  Introduction
The section on “Borders and Mobilities”
(Section 5) picks up these themes and
places them within more of a contemporary
national-​security context. The identifica-
tion and sorting of populations is increas-
ingly embedded in computer algorithms,
facilitating social exclusion through au-
tomated means. This is perhaps most
apparent with border control systems that
are effectively distributed across geographic
territories and temporalities, as anywhere
or anytime that someone is identified and
assessed against software-​ encoded risk
profiles. As a few of the excerpts in this
section reveal, these functions are delegated
not only to computer systems, but also to in-
dividual travelers and the general public,
who are responsibilized to submit volun-
tarily to security demands and inform on
others who seem suspicious in some way,
usually due to their racial or ethnic iden-
tity markers. Given this focus on terri-
tory, mobility, and risk management, it is
not surprising that the main disciplines
represented in this section are geography,
political science, and criminology.
National security and policing are two
of the most prevalent areas of concern in
non-​academic discussions of surveillance.
The sections on “Intelligence and Security”
(Section 6) and “Crime and Policing”
(Section 7) offer a sampling of critical aca-
demic and journalistic works in these areas.
Some of it details the mind-​boggling extent
of the NSA’s telecommunications surveil-
lance systems, while other pieces allow us
to situate these intelligence practices in a
longer history of state overreach, with illegal
targeted spying on activists, journalists, in-
ternational allies, and others. Importantly,
as other excerpts show, internal state sur-
veillance is almost always coupled with and
informed by similar applications in distant
war zones and occupied territories.
When it comes to domestic policing
(Section 7), video surveillance—​or closed-​
circuit television (CCTV)—​ is the most
obvious focal point. Criminologists, who
9780190297817_Book.indb 28
conducted the first empirical research on
police video surveillance, largely found
that it was not effective at preventing most
crimes, just for displacing criminal activity
to areas under less overt observation or, at
best, assisting with the identification of
suspects after the fact. While not entirely
absent from these criminological accounts,
other excerpts advance an explicit gender
critique of surveillance, seeing technolog-
ical systems as potentially adding layers
of harassment while not mitigating vio-
lence against women. Additional pieces
investigate the ways in which police and
security schemes connect to the political
economy—​ securing places of commerce,
advancing the security industry, and
enforcing an actuarial form of risk man-
agement that invariably punishes poor and
racialized populations. Of course, with the
spread of camera-​equipped mobile phones,
the power dynamics between the police
and the public may be open, at least par-
tially, to renegotiation.
We turn next to “Privacy and Autonomy”
(Section 8), with a number of treatments
that address the field’s apprehensions with
the privacy concept. These selections add
complexity to the concept, showing both
how it is a dynamic social norm and how
theorizations of it have advanced well be-
yond many of the depictions of its critics.
Technological developments seem to pro-
duce the greatest threats to privacy, at
least from the perspective of surveillance
studies, especially as information gath-
ering and sharing become routine. Privacy
scholars—​ who tend to come from the
disciplines of political science, philosophy,
and legal studies—​point out that as long as
privacy is presented solely as an individual
good, it is destined to be compromised
and eroded in policy realms that, fairly or
not, tend to view any other concerns as
advancing public interests. Thus, persua-
sive arguments are needed about the social
good provided by privacy protections. A few
of the excerpts offer just such arguments,
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xxi

Introduction   xxix

while others concentrate on the impor- self-​discipline on the part of workers, for
tance of respecting the context of infor- instance through team-​ based projects
mation generation or of safeguarding where peers depend on one’s reliability.
opportunities for boundary negotiation Information technologies facilitate the
between individuals and information sys- reach of workplace surveillance too. On
tems. Finally, to flesh out the surveillance-​ one hand, mobile technologies lead to a
studies debate a bit further, we offer both a condition that Melissa Gregg (2011) refers
critique of privacy and a more general re- to as “presence bleed,” where one is ex-
sponse in defense of the concept. pected to be always available to work and to
Privacy concerns are so pressing, in part, be monitored, even at home. On the other
because surveillance is becoming routine, hand, the very systems of commerce or
pervasive, and increasingly hidden. The communication (e.g., cashier checkout sys-
next section, “Ubiquitous Surveillance” tems or social media sites) are fundamen-
(Section 9), brings together insights from tally ones of surveillance: either of employee
scholars with backgrounds in informa- performance or of user activity, where, in
tion studies, communication, geography, the case of social media, users effectively
and architecture to document this move engage in “free labor” to generate value
toward invisible, automated control in for companies. Then again, it is impor-
built environments and data practices. tant to remember that those charged with
The excerpts show how information-​ surveilling others are themselves engaged
rich environments—​ characterized by in mostly tedious and unrewarding work.
embedded sensors, mobile computing, and This brings us to closer scrutiny of the
algorithmic processes—​ are fundamen- relationship between surveillance and the
tally surveillant. Their logic is that all data political economy (Section 11). In the service
elements (objects, people, conditions) must of company profits, customer surveillance
be “addressable” and subject to remote or takes many forms, ranging from the devel-
automated management. This can be seen opment of customer categories to facilitate
with what has been called the “Internet of effective advertising throughout the twen-
things,” with networked appliances like tieth century to the hidden screening of
refrigerators or with “smart cities” that use customers by financial industries charged
embedded sensors and other technologies with implementing risk-​ management
to regulate transportation systems, elec- techniques to block potential money
tricity usage, and sewage treatment in “real launderers or terrorists. The emphasis on
time.” Whether integrated with urban in- company brands also compels technolog-
frastructure or occurring in abstract “big ical innovations in surreptitiously “reading”
data” practices, ubiquitous surveillance customers’ physiological responses to
depends on decisions about data priorities products and shaping their affective
and values that are clearly political in their attachment to brands. Finally, several
effects. excerpts enumerate the ways that Internet
The next two sections, “Work and giants such as Facebook and Google have
Organization” (Section 10) and “Political made value extraction through information
Economy” (Section 11), are closely related, systems a science, creating new information
as two sides of the same coin. From a ecologies that threaten to become totalizing
largely sociological perspective, analyses systems of control. In these selections, one
of workplace surveillance show how early can see the convergence of historical, soci-
techniques of scientific management and ological, criminological, and communica-
performance monitoring have mutated tion approaches to the political economy of
into managerial strategies to cultivate surveillance.

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xxx  Introduction
Operating in more of a communication
and media studies register, the next section,
“Participation and Social Media” (Section
12), problematizes the dominant surveil-
lance-​studies paradigm of top-​ down con-
trol by institutions or institutional actors.
On the whole, the excerpts recognize that
such institutional surveillance persists in
online environments, but rather than jump
to quick conclusions about the totalizing
capacities of Internet platforms, they pose
questions about the cultural meanings or
practices that exceed those systems of con-
trol. Perhaps forms of peer​or lateral ​sur-
veillance (e.g., social media users following
each other’s posts or profiles) introduce the
possibility for empowerment by fostering
experimentation with self-​ presentation or
developing relationships of trust and inti-
macy. Then again, these exchanges could
trap individuals in what Mark Andrejevic
(2007) has called “digital enclosures,”
where people derive social value but can
never achieve robust forms of democratic
empowerment. These two conclusions are
not mutually exclusive, of course. Vitally,
the questions posed by the excerpts in this
section invite the field to reconsider funda-
mentally its understandings of and value
judgments about surveillance.
Section 13, “Resistance and Opposition,”
presents excerpts from scholars intrigued
by the potentials for contesting surveil-
lance, for “fighting back” in some way.
These selections offer a diverse array of
disciplinary perspectives, informed by po-
litical science, criminology, information
studies, engineering, philosophy, and cul-
tural studies. Some countersurveillance
techniques covered here include attempts
to turn surveillance against institutional
agents, such as the police, by filming their
activities; organizing through coalitions
of civil society groups, policymakers, and
activists to implement or maintain pri-
vacy protections; or using technological
tools or masking techniques to obfus-
cate and temporarily evade surveillance
9780190297817_Book.indb 30
systems. With perhaps the exception of
Steve Mann’s work on sousveillance, or sur-
veillance from “below,” the work in this
area is generally measured and pragmatic.
On one hand, it is eager to find solutions
to power asymmetries, but, on the other, it
recognizes the limitations and sometimes
even the dangers (or risks to others) of
trying to do so.
The next section, “Marginality and
Difference” (Section 14), turns further to-
ward humanities-​ inflected critiques of
surveillance. The selections highlight
how surveillance imbricates with inter-
sectional forms of oppression, exposing
marginalized populations to differential
and often augmented forms of violence
and control. This can manifest in abstract
ways, such as with discriminatory actu-
arial assessments by financial institutions,
contributing to tangible “cumulative dis-
advantage” (Gandy Jr. 2009) for poor and
racialized groups. It could also take the
form of violent encounters with armed
police, stalkers and domestic partners, or
racist citizens concerned about terrorist
threats. In order to confront surveillance
that materializes or reinforces unequal
conditions of marginality, one must come
to terms with the fact that “threatening”
racialized bodies are always constructed in
opposition to normative “white” bodies that
are seen as symbolically stable, compliant,
and transparent (Hall 2015). If the history
of surveillance is inseparable from the his-
tory of racism, as Simone Browne (2015)
contends, then exposure to surveillance can
never be neutral and scholarship on sur-
veillance should reject, once and for all, any
universalist claims about it.
The final section in the Reader, “Art
and Culture” (Section 15), emphasizes per-
formance theory, literary analysis, visual
studies, and game studies in its consid-
eration of surveillance-​ themed cultural
products and practices. Representations of
surveillance in literature and film, for in-
stance, are hugely influential in shaping
12-Jul-18 3:28:26 PM

xxi
Introduction   xxxi
popular perceptions and understandings
of surveillance, yet until recently there has
been surprisingly little sustained academic
discussion of them in the field. This is rap-
idly changing with a flurry of new books
on these and related subjects (e.g., Lefait
2013; Rosen and Santesso 2013; Wise 2016;
Zimmer 2015). The excerpts in this section
offer sophisticated critical interpretations of
various cultural works, thereby correcting
deficiencies in the field and suggesting
directions for future investigation.
Conclusion
The thing that holds most of surveillance
studies’ areas together is a general agree-
ment that surveillance is central to the
functioning of contemporary societies, from
the level of state practices all the way down
to interpersonal exchanges among family
members and friends. While some may
not agree that surveillance is the most im-
portant social process or cultural logic, it is
difficult to contest its pervasiveness and in-
fluence. It is how organizations and people
make sense of and manage the world. It is
also how power relations are established
and reproduced. For scholars, surveillance
offers a rich approach to investigating social
and cultural phenomena and detecting the
power relations inherent in them.
As represented in the organization of this
Reader’s sections, the field started out with
more of an institutional focus, questioning
the increasing influence of state and corpo-
rate actors over others. Technology was cen-
tral in facilitating this influence, whether
with architectural embodiments of control
with panoptic designs or with databases and
video-​camera systems. The early institu-
tional focus makes sense in that hierarchical
relationships and power differentials—​ the
roots of surveillance—​ are more apparent
when there are extreme disparities between
parties, such as between institutions and
individuals. Moreover, this initial framing of
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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Thu Jul 12 2018, NEWGEN
the problems of surveillance reflects classic
sociological concerns about the place of
individuals in society and the relationship of
structure to agency. As others sought to flesh
out these concerns, they did so with empir-
ical research on people in context, classically
of workplaces or police departments, where
the latest surveillance systems, such as com-
puter keystroke tracking or CCTV, were used
to monitor others from a distance. Such so-
ciological and criminological framings were
formative for the field, establishing the ini-
tial parameters for the study of surveillance,
and because these framings resonate with
conventional understandings of surveillance
(e.g., Big Brother), they continue to exert a
force on new scholarship. This can be seen,
for instance, with the impulse of scholars to
study the next big organizational incarna-
tion of surveillance (e.g., Google, Uber, the
Department of Homeland Security), what-
ever it might be.
As the field expanded, this interest in
institutions and technological systems
persisted, but it shifted to reflect a wider range
of disciplinary concerns and approaches.
Privacy scholars, for instance, framed the
issues in terms of rights, values, and legis-
lative processes. The focus remained on in-
stitutional abuses facilitated by technology,
but privacy scholars also outlined pragmatic
solutions that might be achieved through
legislative changes or technological designs
(e.g., with encryption). Geographers stressed
how the integration of surveillance systems
into urban infrastructure was actualizing
new regimes of governance and fueling
neoliberal capitalism, which benefited
corporations and the military but aggravated
social inequalities. Communication scholars
similarly situated surveillant media sys-
tems in the context of the political economy,
describing how large media and technology
companies shape ideologies while profiting
from the labor of viewers or users.
The latest “cultural turn” in surveillance
studies is significant in that it largely breaks
from the institutional framework, at least as
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xxixi
xxxii  Introduction
a necessary element, in order to trace power
relations in the production and circulation
of cultural meanings, many of which rely
on representations of people and narratives
about their identities (Monahan 2011). Thus,
feminist studies, queer studies, and critical
race studies scholars might draw attention to
depictions of threats or worthiness, showing
how those markers are encoded in surveil-
lance systems and practices, propagating vi-
olence against marginalized groups. Those
studying cinema, literature, media, or art
often highlight the ways in which cultural
products form perception and a sense of per-
sonhood, normalizing the idea of being a
surveillance subject, while also presenting
avenues for resistance and critique.
Performance studies scholars interrogate and
contest, sometimes through performance,
the meaning and politics of the many sur-
veillance routines that characterize daily life.
Finally, communication scholars and others
seek to understand the participatory trend in
self-​and peer-​surveillance (e.g., through the
“Quantified Self” movement or social media
use), often by starting from the perspective of
users themselves.3
This Reader provides one possible
mapping of the field of surveillance studies.
We take our inspiration from the field’s
many generous participants—​our mentors,
colleagues, and students—​ who have
brought, and continue to bring, this vibrant
field into being. Importantly, this book does
not aspire to be a final representation of
what the field is or what counts in it, but in-
stead a provisional sketch of a dynamic and
exciting process of mutation. Foremost, it
is an invitation for others to explore, delve
deeper into full texts that are only partially
reproduced here, and participate in the on-
going conversations and debates.
notes
1. http://​w ww.surveillance-​studies.net/​.
2. http://​w ww.surveillance-​and-​society.org/​.
9780190297817_Book.indb 32
3. Obviously, these are broad brushstrokes that
occlude much of the nuance and do not represent
all contributions to the field. The aim of this
summary is to offer a general sense of the arc of
the field’s development.
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Andrejevic, Mark. 2007. iSpy: Surveillance and Power
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Bennett, Colin J. 2008. The Privacy Advocates:
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Brandeis, Louis D., and Samuel D. Warren. 1890. The
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Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance
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Groebner, Valentin. 2007. Who Are You? Identification,
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Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. 2000.
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Hall, Rachel. 2015. The Transparent Traveler: The
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Hayes, Ben. 2009. Neoconopticon: The EU
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Kevles, Daniel J. 1995. In the Name of
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Lyon, David. 1988. The Information Society: Issues and
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—​—​—​. 1994. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of
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Minnesota Press.
—​—​—​. 2001. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday
Life. Buckingham, UK: Open University.
Marks, Peter. 2005. Imagining Surveillance: Utopian
Visions and Surveillance Studies. Surveillance &
Society 3 (2/​3):222–​39.
Marx, Gary T. 1988. Undercover: Police Surveillance
in America. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
McCahill, Michael, and Rachel L. Finn. 2014.
Surveillance, Capital, and Resistance: Theorizing
the Surveillance Subject. New York: Routledge.
McGrath, John E. 2004. Loving Big
Brother: Performance, Privacy, and Surveillance
Space. New York: Routledge.
Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination.
New York: Oxford University Press.
9780190297817_Book.indb 33
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Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A
Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Monahan, Torin. 2010. Surveillance in the Time
of Insecurity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
—​—​—​. 2011. Surveillance as Cultural Practice. The
Sociological Quarterly 52 (4):495–​508.
Monahan, Torin, and Priscilla M. Regan. 2012. Zones
of Opacity: Data Fusion in Post-​9/​1 1 Security
Organizations. Canadian Journal of Law and
Society 27 (3):301–​17.
Mullins, Nicholas C. 1972. The Development of a
Scientific Specialty: The Phage Group and the
Origins of Molecular Biology. Minerva 10:52–​82.
Murakami Wood, David. 2009a. Can a Scanner See
the Soul? Philip K. Dick against the Surveillance
Society. Review of International American Studies
3 (3)–​4 (1):46–​59.
—​—​—​. 2009b. The ‘Surveillance Society’: Questions
of History, Place and Culture. European Journal of
Criminology 6 (2):179–​94.
Nippert-​Eng, Christena E. 2010. Islands of Privacy.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
OED Online. 2016. “eavesdrop, v.” Available from
http://​w ww.oed.com/​v iew/​Entry/​59159?rskey=elS
7Jf&result=2&isAdvanced=false [accessed August
19, 2016].
Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-​Four.
Centennial ed. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Patton, Jason W. 2000. Protecting Privacy in
Public?: Surveillance Technologies and the
Value of Public Places. Ethics and Information
Technology 2:181–​87.
Porter, Theodore M. 1995. Trust in Numbers: The
Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Poster, Mark. 1990. The Mode of
Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Regan, Priscilla M. 1995. Legislating Privacy:
Technology, Social Values, and Public Policy.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
Rosen, David, and Aaron Santesso. 2013. The
Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature,
and Liberal Personhood. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Rule, James B. 1973. Private Lives and Public
Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age.
London: Allen Lane.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain
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Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sekula, Allan. 1986. The Body and the Archive.
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Smith, Gavin J. D. 2015. Opening the Black Box: The
Work of Watching. New York: Routledge.
Staples, William G. 2000. Everyday
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Postmodern Life. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
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Taylor, Frederick Winslow. 1911. The Principles of
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vxxi
xxxiv  Introduction
Torpey, John C. 2000. The Invention of the
Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State.
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Walby, Kevin, and Jeffrey Monaghan. 2011. Private
Eyes and Public Order: Policing and Surveillance
9780190297817_Book.indb 34
in the Suppression of Animal Rights Activists in
Canada. Social Movement Studies 10 (1):21–​37.
Wise, J. Macgregor. 2016. Surveillance and Film.
New York: Bloomsbury.
Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 1972 [1921]. We. Translated by
M. Ginsburg. New York: Viking.
Zimmer, Catherine. 2015. Surveillance Cinema.
New York: New York University Press.
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 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Thu Jul 12 2018, NEWGEN
Section 1
OPENINGS AND DEFINITIONS
H ow one defines surveillance is vital.
Definitions inform the types of research
one does and claims one can make. Although
it may be true that the specific interests
of scholars, which are disciplinarily condi-
tioned, lead them to prefer some definitions
over others, the early years of the field saw
greater variation in definitions than is typi-
cally the case today. This is probably because
scholars were dispersed and mostly working
in separate areas with few opportunities to
form a consensus about key definitions or
concepts. With a few exceptions, though,
participants in the field quickly agreed that
surveillance signified more than passive
observation; it was instead, or additionally,
about the production of power relations.
One of the first scholars to consider sur-
veillance as a singular phenomenon was
James B. Rule (excerpted in Chapter 1). He
and his colleagues defined surveillance as
“any systematic attention to a person’s life
aimed at exerting influence over it” (Rule
et al. 1983: 223). This sociologically inflected
definition depends on a liberal conception
of personhood that sees individuals as sov-
ereign agents shaped by external influences
and interactions. Concerns emerge when
these external forces might be destructive,
unwanted, or unaccountable—​as with the
bureaucratic surveillance analyzed by Rule.
Because this definition derives its potency
from a view of individuals’ essential rights
9780190297817_Book.indb 1
under attack, this framing logically leads to
appeals to the law to mitigate such harms.
The modifications that have been made
to this type of definition have been predomi-
nately influenced by a Foucauldian concep-
tion of power that decenters the individual
and emphasizes the ways in which all people
are caught in webs of power relations. So, in-
stead of placing the individual human subject
at the center, the focus of analysis could be on
groups, societies, or even nonhumans. The in-
troduction of the possibility of the nonhuman
subject of surveillance has several implications.
The first is that nonhuman creatures might be
under surveillance, which has been considered
at greater length by both Irus Braverman (see
Section 2) and Kevin Haggerty and Daniel
Trottier (2015). The second implication is that
it might not be human beings directly who
are under surveillance, but rather situations,
events, or a person’s indirect traces in data,
which are the details of one’s “life” in Rule’s
sense. This attention to information and
personal data is at the heart of Rule’s book
Private Lives and Public Surveillance, which
was published in 1973—​ a few years before
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish—​at the begin-
ning of what was then being called the “data-
base society,” so clearly Rule was negotiating
a few different approaches to power. Scholars
such as Roger Clarke (see Section 9) and
Oscar Gandy (excerpted in Chapter 2) would
later pick up this focus on surveillance through
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2   Surveillance Studies: A Reader
data (or “dataveillance”) and develop it further.
Even today, information and data remain cen-
tral to most contemporary definitions of sur-
veillance and to the field more broadly, as the
selections in this reader testify.
By crafting definitions to emphasize
populations or groups as the targets, one
can focus analytic attention on issues of gov-
ernance. For instance, in his influential book
Surveillance, Power, and Modernity (1990),
Christopher Dandeker defines surveillance as
“the gathering of information about and the
supervision of subject populations in organi-
zations” (Dandeker 1990: vii). This definition
seems to offer a rather wider sense of who or
what is under surveillance—​the term “subject
populations” both strips out the requirement
for the subject of surveillance to be an indi-
vidual or even to be human at all. Through its
explicit reference to subjection, it also draws
attention to power, and with the last phrase
of the definition, “in organizations,” provides
an institutional framework for that power. In
some ways, one could argue that surveillance
is about making and remaking both subject
populations and organizations, often at the
same time. William Staples (excerpted in
Chapter 3) emphasizes this co-​ constitutive
relationship in his investigation and theoriza-
tion of “everyday surveillance.”
Likewise, David Lyon’s oft-​quoted definition
of surveillance—​as “the focused, systematic
and routine attention to personal details for
purposes of influence, management, protec-
tion or direction” (excerpted in Chapter 4)—​
retains a focus on the person, but his analysis
is further concerned with “sites” of surveil-
lance (both actual and metaphorical) and with
processes. Beyond simply “watching,” Lyon’s
definition explicitly considers the purposes
and qualities of attention that are needed for
something to be “surveillance.” One of the
dangers inherent in a new transdisciplinary
9780190297817_Book.indb 2
field like surveillance studies is the “imperial
urge” to redefine everything as surveillance,
and while some, like Gary Marx (2016), do
indeed argue for a maximalist definition that
recasts casual observation or just “looking” as
somewhere on a continuum of surveillance, a
primary purpose of definitions is to clarify the
object of study, as well as its social context.
Lyon’s highlighting of the “focused, systematic
and routine” nature of surveillance separates
out surveillance from other, more casual, oc-
casional, and disorganized forms of attention.
It does not, of course, say anything about the
social significance or morality of either, merely
that they are not the same. Gary Marx’s own
modus operandi, as demonstrated by his ex-
cerpt in this section, is to produce compre-
hensive lists of features and characteristics of
surveillance, against which any particular thing
can be assessed. He stresses key differences
between earlier modes of surveillance and
“new” digital surveillance.
These definitions offer different prisms
for thinking about the various sites, forms,
targets, and functions of surveillance. Some
mechanism of control or regulation may
be seen as necessary for surveillance to
be taking place, but the theoretical frames
adopted by scholars color their views of
what else matters most (e.g., individuals,
groups, contexts). While the goals of those
implementing surveillance systems may
seem like an obvious focal point, for some
time the field has been concentrating in-
stead on conditions, contexts, experiences,
and negotiations of surveillance (e.g., Ball
2009; McCahill and Finn 2014; Saulnier
2016). Perhaps with the advent of big data
and automated analytics, definitions will
have to shift to emphasize the construction
of emergent purposes in a society in which
surveillance is ubiquitous and all data are
collected as a matter of course.
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Introduction to Section 1: Openings and Definitions   3
References
Ball, Kirstie S. 2009. Exposure: Exploring the Subject
of Surveillance. Information, Communication &
Society 12 (5):639–​57.
Dandeker, Christopher. 1990. Surveillance, Power,
and Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline from
1700 to the Present Day. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Haggerty, Kevin D., and Daniel Trottier. 2015.
Surveillance and/​of Nature: Monitoring beyond
the Human. Society & Animals 23 (4):400–​20.
Marx, Gary T. 2016. Windows into the Soul: Surveillance
and Society in an Age of High Technology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
9780190297817_Book.indb 3
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Thu Jul 12 2018, NEWGEN
McCahill, Michael, and Rachel L. Finn. 2014.
Surveillance, Capital, and Resistance: Theorizing
the Surveillance Subject. New York: Routledge.
Rule, James B., Douglas McAdam, Linda Stearns, and
David Uglow. 1983. Documentary identification
and mass surveillance in the United States.
Social Problems 31 (2):222–​34.
Saulnier, Alana. 2016. Surveillance Studies and
the Surveilled Subject. Doctoral dissertation,
Department of Sociology, Queen’s University,
Kingston, ON.
12-Jul-18 3:28:26 PM
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9780190297817_Book.indb 4 12-Jul-18 3:28:26 PM

 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Thu Jul 12 2018, NEWGEN

JAMES B. RULE
P R I V AT E L I V E S A N D
PUBLIC SURVEILL ANCE
Social Control in the Computer Age

In a work that predates Foucault’s recasting of Bentham’s Panopticon, James Rule

anticipates a comprehensive system of surveillance that amasses data on all individuals,
stores those data indefinitely, has predictive capabilities for advance intervention, and
fosters social control by eliminating possibilities for disobedience. He calls this system
a “total surveillance society.” While Rule is explicit in mobilizing the concept of a total
surveillance society as a heuristic for analysis—​against which to compare existing sur-
veillance systems—​and as a cautionary figure, today’s emerging capabilities in predictive
analytics and data fusion show just how prescient he was.
***
Why do we find the world of 1984 so Those who seek to maintain social con-
harrowing? Certainly one reason is its trol must accomplish two sorts of things.
vision of life totally robbed of personal pri- First, they must maintain what one might
vacy, but there is more to it than that. For call powers of control. This means, for one
the ugliest and most frightening thing thing, that they need to be able to apply
about that world was its vision of total con- sanctions, or inducements sufficient to
trol of men’s lives by a monolithic, author- discourage the sanctioned person from re-
itarian state. Indeed, the destruction of peating his disobedient acts. . . . Second, if
privacy was a means to this end, a tool for the system is not to rely only on reward or
enforcing instant obedience to the dictates punishment after the fact, it must possess
of the authorities. means of excluding would-​be rule-​breakers
And yet, such thoroughgoing, relentless from the opportunity to disobey, for ex-
social control represents nothing other than ample, by refusing in some way to deal with
an extreme manifestation of one of the ubiq- them. . . .
uitous processes of social life. Ubiquitous, Neither of these two powers does any
and actually vital. . . . good, however, without . . . a system of

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 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Thu Jul 12 2018, NEWGEN
6   Surveillance Studies: A Reader
surveillance. In the first place, surveillance
entails a means of knowing when rules are
being obeyed, when they are broken, and,
most importantly, who is responsible for
which. In some instances these things may
be easy to accomplish, e.g., a flagrant armed
robbery by notorious criminals. In the case
of other forms of disobedience, such as in-
come tax evasion, it may be extremely diffi-
cult. A second element of surveillance, also
indispensable, is the ability to locate and
identify those responsible for misdeeds of
some kind. Again, this may be simple in
many cases . . . however, it may be the most
difficult condition of all to fulfil.
In practice, it is often very difficult to
draw boundaries between processes of sur-
veillance and the application of what has
been termed the powers of control . . . the
same people and the same bodies are
often engaged in the collection of infor-
mation and in the application of sanctions.
Nevertheless, when I want to emphasize
those activities having to do with collecting
and maintaining information, I speak of
systems of surveillance. Where the concern
lies more with the actual management of
behaviour, through sanctioning or exclu-
sion, I refer to systems of control. . . .
[L]‌et me sketch a model of the most ex-
treme possible development of mass sur-
veillance, an ideal type of a social order
resembling the one portrayed by Orwell,
though perhaps even more extreme. This
I call a total surveillance society.
In such a world, first of all, there would
be but a single system of surveillance and
control, and its clientele would consist of
everyone. This system would work to en-
force compliance with a uniform set of
norms governing every aspect of everyone’s
behaviour. Every action of every client would
be scrutinized, recorded and evaluated,
both at the moment of occurrence and for
ever afterwards. The system would collate
all information at a single point, making
it impossible for anyone to evade responsi-
bility for his past by fleeing from the scene
9780190297817_Book.indb 6
of earlier behaviour. Nor would the single
master agency compartmentalize informa-
tion which it collected, keeping certain data
for use only in certain kinds of decisions.
Instead, it would bring the whole fund
of its information to bear on every deci-
sion it made about everyone. Any sign of
disobedience—​ present or anticipated—​
would result in corrective action. The fact
that the system kept everyone under con-
stant monitoring would mean that, in the
event of misbehaviour, apprehension and
sanctioning would occur immediately. By
making detection and retaliation inevitable,
such a system would make disobedience al-
most unthinkable.
One should never expect to encounter a
real system like the one just described. That
is just the point. The only usefulness of this
paradigm is as a foil for comparison to real
systems, as a case guaranteed to be more ex-
treme than the real world could ever produce.
True, some agencies may develop something
like systems of total surveillance over very
limited numbers of people, for short periods
of time. Police may keep constant watch over
a small group of conspirators, or the staff
of a hospital may exercise something like
total surveillance over those in the intensive
care ward. But difficulties of staging, and
especially prohibitive costs, rule out such
techniques for larger clienteles over longer
periods of time. No, the usefulness of the
paradigm lies in its making it possible to
compare systems of surveillance and control
now in existence to this theoretical extreme
and to one another in terms of their prox-
imity to this extreme. . . .
[A]‌ny real surveillance system is limited
in size. This means, for one thing, limita-
tion to the numbers of persons whom it can
depict in its files. Second, there is always
a limitation in the amount of information
with which a system can cope, the amount
which it can meaningfully use in its deci-
sion-​making on each person. Indeed, . . . the
amount of usable information is often less
than that which is theoretically available on
12-Jul-18 3:28:26 PM

Rule: Private Lives and Public Surveillance   7
file. And such limitations on the amount
of usable data kept per person correspond
in turn to limitations in the amount of the
subject’s life depicted in the files. Third,
surveillance systems also face limitations
in what one might term the subtlety of their
decision-​making based on filed data. In the
world of 1984 the authorities seemed to use
information cunningly enough to know
what their people were going to do even be-
fore they themselves did. . . .
Second, real surveillance systems
are limited in the centralization of their
files . . . some are more centralized than
others. Centralization of data is extremely
important in the staging of social control,
in that it prevents clients from escaping the
effects of their past by moving from one
place to another. If the single central record
can be applied wherever the fugitive goes,
such movement does no good. Thus, to be
fully effective, any system of surveillance
should be able to collect information on a
person’s behaviour from any point in a so-
ciety, and use it to enact measures of control
on the same person at any other point.
Third, real systems fall short of the
total surveillance extreme, and vary con-
siderably among themselves, in terms of
the speed of information-​flow and decision-​
making which they exhibit. In Orwell’s
world, all misbehaviour presumably was
registered with the authorities immedi-
ately, and resulted in immediate retribution
when necessary. The systems studied here,
by contrast, are not nearly so sophisticated.
They are slow, for one thing, in their in-
take of information: relevant facts may be
available for some time before the system
can bestir itself to incorporate them in us-
able form. Moreover, these systems vary in
the speed of movement of data once it is in-
corporated in their files, and in the applica-
tion of such data to decision-​making about
people. Limitations like these make it easier
for the individual to escape the effects of his
past, for example, in cases where the agency
of surveillance and control cannot bring its
9780190297817_Book.indb 7
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Thu Jul 12 2018, NEWGEN
data to bear on a client quickly enough to
act against him.
Fourth, and finally, real systems of
mass surveillance and control are limited
to varying degrees in what I term their
points of contact with their clienteles. This
again involves several things. First, ex-
isting systems are limited in the numbers
of points at which they can incorporate in-
formation on the people with whom they
must deal. Whereas in 1984 the authorities
could ‘tune in’ on virtually every moment
of every person’s life, real surveillance sys-
tems restrict themselves to limited points
of intake—​for example, through the courts
and a few other junctures in the case of
police surveillance, and through credit-​
granting institutions, in the instance of
consumer credit reporting. Similarly, ex-
isting systems are limited in terms of their
ability to ‘get back at’—​ to locate, accost
and apprehend—​ those who have broken
the rules. Unlike Orwell’s world, modern
societies provide many opportunities for
those who wish to avoid the attention of the
authorities simply to drop out of sight. To
be sure, systems of mass control have their
own ways of countervailing against these
opportunities. . . .
A final and equally important element of
contact between system and clientele is the
ability of the former to identify individual
clients. . . . [T]‌he position of the agency of
control suffers unless it can quickly and un-
erringly link any single client to his record.
Since clients themselves often wish to avoid
such linkage, the strength of identification
systems represents one of the important
elements of the hold of the system on those
with whom it deals. . . .
There are several distinct reasons for
mistrusting the continuing growth of mass
surveillance. One is simply the repres-
sive potential which they confer upon the
corporate agencies maintaining the sur-
veillance, or upon whoever controls those
agencies . . . any over-​all response to these
systems must take into account not only
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8   Surveillance Studies: A Reader
their present impact, but also their future
prospects. And this means accepting the
possibility that, in the course of other po-
litical changes, the intent and political dis-
position of those who control these systems
may change. . . .
Another objection to the extension even
of ‘just’ discrimination based on mass
surveillance has to do with their effects on
those discriminated against. The object of
discriminations like those discussed here,
after all, is to achieve the cheapest possible
identification of those who have not or will
not obey the rules. Often the idea is to ex-
clude these people in advance. . . . [W]‌ith
sophisticated manipulations of aggre-
gate data, even tiny and seemingly ir-
relevant facts can represent significant
predictors. The use of such discrimina-
tion procedures thus raises the question
of what sorts of data should legitimately
be usable in decision-​making which may,
after all, weigh very heavily upon the
clients concerned. . . .
What if, by collecting data on some ex-
tremely private area of people’s behaviour,
one could predict with virtual certainty the
likelihood of their causing a fatal traffic ac-
cident in the near future? The predictive
behaviour, presumably, would involve no di-
rect and obvious connection with motoring,
and obviously would not itself represent an
infraction against motoring laws. To this
extent, one would be inclined to resist com-
pulsory surveillance over the behaviour in
question. On the other hand, if prediction
were really virtually perfect, the cost of
forgoing it, in terms of lives, would be ex-
cruciatingly obvious. At present such dis-
crimination represents nothing more than
9780190297817_Book.indb 8
another heuristic, hypothetical case. But
there is no guarantee that this will always
be true. The growing sophistication of pre-
dictive techniques promises to make the
choices implicit in these situations increas-
ingly dramatic and difficult. . . .
There is a final reservation about the
growth of mass surveillance, more subtle
than the preceding ones, but no less com-
pelling. It has to do with the inherent
value of choice in responding to the
strictures of control imposed by the social
world. . . . Total surveillance could theoret-
ically provide limitless benefits in the way
of compliance, but only at the expense of
watching and controlling people so closely
and constantly as to render misbehaviour
out of the question. . . . Corporate participa-
tion in every moment of every individual’s
life, no matter how fair or how discreet or
how benign, is simply too great a price to
pay for obedience. Life in a highly imper-
fect social world is still infinitely preferable
to life in a world offering no opportunities
for imperfection. . . .
Because of the beguiling appeal of
fine-​grained decision-​making, it is hard
to hope for any sweeping curtailment of
mass surveillance and control. Certainly
it is reasonable to expect public opinion
to oppose measures seen as repressive
or coercive towards the public at large.
Certainly, too, one can realistically hope
for the acceptance of reform measures
like those already proposed, to make mass
surveillance more open, accountable and
just. Whether one can expect people to re-
nounce altogether the benefit of practices
felt to provide essential personal services
is another matter.
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 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Thu Jul 12 2018, NEWGEN

OSCAR H. GANDY, JR.

THE PANOP TIC SOR T
A Political Economy of Personal Information

Oscar Gandy’s lifework has been in understanding systems of sorting and classification,
particularly in regard to racial and other inequalities. He is one of the few scholars from
whom we have two excerpts in this Reader because his work is both foundational and of
direct ongoing contemporary relevance. This excerpt is from The Panoptic Sort, one of the
books that defined what surveillance studies was to become both in its objects of study
(the social and political consequences of contemporary systems of data gathering and anal-
ysis) and its theoretical influences, combining political economy (Marx), sociology (Weber,
Giddens), the history of ideas (Foucault), and critical approaches to technology (Ellul).
***
In 1934, the Spiegel corporation was an evidence is clear that a similar discrimina-
industry leader in the development of a tory process that sorts individuals on the
pointing system, which it used to evaluate basis of their estimated value or worth has
applications for credit. Spiegel developed become even more important today and
what it called the “vital question system,” reaches into every aspect of individuals
which gathered data in four critical areas lives in their roles as citizens, employees,
that were then used as the primary factors and consumers.
in the decision to grant credit. The four I refer to this process as the “panoptic
questions were (1) amount of the order, sort,” the all-​seeing eye of the difference
(2) occupation of the applicant, (3) marital machine that guides the global capitalist
status, and (4) race of the applicant. Other system. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster
data gathered in the rating process included have coined the phrase “cybernetic cap-
an assessment of the importance of the ge- italism” to underscore the nature of the
ographic territory to the overall marketing totalizing system of social control that
plan. Although race and marital status are depends on the ability of state and corporate
no longer legally permissible components bureaucracies to collect, process, and share
of the credit authorization process, the massive amounts of personal information

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 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Thu Jul 12 2018, NEWGEN
01
10   Surveillance Studies: A Reader
to track, command, coordinate, and control
each and every one of us to an extent we
would not have considered possible. Other
descriptive terms appeared over the years
as I have gathered examples and insights
about the nature of this process. One that
still holds an attraction is the notion of
triage. The popular understanding of the
term is that associated with medical de-
cision making: “the sorting and alloca-
tion of treatment to patients, especially
battle and disaster victims, according to a
system of priorities designed to maximize
the number of survivors.” The original
meaning of the term, however, is derived
from the French trier, meaning to pick or to
cull, but the word emerged into the English
language as having to do with the “grading
of marketable produce,” and more specifi-
cally, referring to “the lowest grade of coffee
berries, consisting of broken material.”
Although some metaphors speak for them-
selves, let me be clear. I see the panoptic
sort as a kind of high-​tech, cybernetic triage
through which individuals and groups of
people are being sorted according to their
presumed economic or political value. The
poor, especially poor people of color, are
increasingly being treated as broken mate-
rial or damaged goods to be discarded or
sold at bargain prices to scavengers in the
marketplace. . . .
In my view, this sorting mechanism
cannot help but exacerbate the massive and
destructive inequalities that characterize
the U.S. political economy as it moves for-
ward into the information age. It is a pro-
cess that feeds on itself. Although there are
already some signs of resistance that have
emerged in some quarters, the response of
the panoptic system is very much like that
of a child’s straw finger puzzle: Once you
have placed your fingers in either end of
the tube, the more you struggle to escape,
the more it tightens its grip. I would like to
suggest that these inequalities are emerging
in an area that is critical to the maintenance
of a democratic polity and to the operation
9780190297817_Book.indb 10
of an efficient market. These inequalities
have to do with differential access to infor-
mation that is necessary for informed deci-
sion making.
The operation of the panoptic sort
increases the ability of organized interests,
whether they are selling shoes, toothpaste,
or political platforms, to identify, iso-
late, and communicate differentially with
individuals in order to increase their influ-
ence over how consumers make selections
among these options. At the same time
that the panoptic sort operates to increase
the precision with which individuals are
classified according to their perceived value
in the marketplace and their susceptibility
to particular appeals, the commoditization
of information increases the dependence of
these interests on subsidized information.
To the extent that the panoptic sort, as an
extension of technical rationalization into
the social realm of consumer and political
behavior, depends on a reduction of the
skills of individuals in the same way that
automation reduces the skills of laborers in
the factory or the modern office, the market
and the political or public sphere as we un-
derstand them are transformed and are
placed at risk.
As the panoptic sort matures and
increases in scale and scope, a number of
contradictory developments seem likely.
First, because the sorting mechanism
utilizes data about past behaviors, it tends
to limit the options that are presented for
individuals to choose. When the options
concern choices about information, this
tendency has the potential to increase the
knowledge and information gap between
the haves and the have nots. Also, to the
extent that these conservative models
aim at the lowest common denominator,
the panoptic sort will contribute to a
generalized lowering of the average level
of public understanding. Second, because
the sorting mechanism is based on theo-
retical models that reflect quite transitory
fads or trends in social, economic, and
12-Jul-18 3:28:26 PM

Gandy: The Panoptic Sort   11
political thought, increasing instability
in markets and political action will be-
come the rule rather than the exception.
Third, as people’s awareness of the pan-
optic machine grows, some will find ways
to resist, and others will attempt to with-
draw. Both responses will invite further
attempts at inclusion and containment
within the panoptic sphere. The same
technology that threatens the autonomy of
the individual seems destined to frustrate
attempts to reestablish community and
shared responsibility because it destroys
the essential components of trust and
accountability. . . .
The panoptic sort is the name I have
assigned to the complex technology that
involves the collection, processing, and
sharing of information about individuals
and groups that is generated through their
daily lives as citizens, employees, and
consumers and is used to coordinate and
control their access to the goods and serv-
ices that define life in the modern capitalist
economy.
The panoptic sort is a system of disci-
plinary surveillance that is widespread
but continues to expand its reach. The op-
eration of the panoptic system is guided
by a generalized concern with ration-
alization of social, economic, and po-
litical systems. The panoptic sort is a
difference machine that sorts individuals
into categories and classes on the basis of
routine measurements. It is a discrimina-
tory technology that allocates options and
opportunities on the basis of those meas-
ures and the administrative models that
they inform. The panoptic sort has been
institutionalized. It is standard operating
procedure. It is expected. It has its place.
Its operation is even required by law. And
where it is not, people call out for its in-
stallation. Its work is never done. Each
use generates new uses. Each application
justifies another. It is efficient, having
largely been automated. Like a voice-​
activated recorder, it moves into action
9780190297817_Book.indb 11
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Thu Jul 12 2018, NEWGEN
solely in response to an action by the object
of its control. The panoptic sort is a system
of actions that governs other actions. The
panoptic sort is a system of power.
Identification
The panoptic sort can be understood
to involve three integrated functions or
processes: identification, classification,
and assessment. Although its operation
is by no means limited to identifiable
individuals, it depends to a large part on
the ability of its users to reliably identify
the objects to be controlled. The identifi-
cation will never move to the level of per-
sonhood as we may understand the person
as the subject of religion, philosophy, and
idealized systems of justice. The attention
of the panoptic sort moves only to levels of
identification that have administrative and
instrumental relevance. Here we refer to
the identification of persons with histories,
records, and resources when those persons
or agents of those persons present a card,
form, signature, claim, or response, or
when they present themselves at a partic-
ular place or time. Identification is associ-
ated with authorization and authentication
of claims. Identification is associated with
the assumption of responsibility for actions,
transactions, interactions, and reactions,
which may be recorded by the panoptic
system. The level of identification required
by the panoptic system is indicated by the
importance of the transaction that is about
to take place. As the level of risk increases,
more sophisticated technologies are called
into play. The signature gives way to the
physical description, which gives way to the
photograph, which gives way to the finger-
print, or the voice print, or the retinal scan.
But that is not enough.
The panoptic sort frequently requires
third-​party validation. You may be who you
say you are, but we need verification that you
12-Jul-18 3:28:27 PM
Another random document with
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afraid? Hear my crying, O Lord; incline thine ear to my calling, my
King and my God, for unto Thee do I make my prayer.’ With these
and other verses of the Psalms the enemy was at length put to flight;
Albinus completed his prayer and went to rest.[64] At that time only
one of his disciples, Waltdramn by name, who is still alive, was
watching with him; he saw all this from a place of concealment, a
witness of this thing that took place.”
St. Martin himself once had a meeting with the devil[65]. There
came into his cell a purple light, and one stood in the midst thereof
clad in a royal robe, having on his head a diadem of gold and
precious stones, his shoes overlaid with gold, his countenance
serene, his face full of joy, looking like anything but the devil. The
devil spoke first. “Know, Martin, whom you behold. I am Christ. I am
about to descend from heaven to the world. I willed first to manifest
myself to thee.” Martin held his tongue. “Why dost thou doubt,
Martin, whom thou seest? I am Christ.” Then the Spirit revealed that
this was the devil, not God, and he answered, “The Lord Jesus did
not predict that He would come again resplendent with purple and
diadem. I will not believe that Christ has come, except in the form in
which He suffered, bearing the stigmata of the Cross.” Thereupon
the apparition vanished like smoke, leaving so very bad a smell that
there was no doubt it was the devil. “This account I had from the
mouth of Martin himself,” Sulpicius adds.
“The father used a little wine, in accordance with the apostle’s
precept, not for the pleasure of the palate, but by reason of his bodily
weakness.[66] In every kind of way he avoided idleness; either he
read, or he wrote, or he taught his disciples, or he gave himself to
prayer and the chanting of Psalms, yielding only to unavoidable
necessities of the body. He was a father to the poor, more humble
than the humble, an inviter to piety of the rich, lofty to the proud, a
discerner of all, and a marvellous comforter. He celebrated every day
many solemnities of masses[67] with honourable diligence, having
proper masses deputed for each day of the week. Moreover, on the
Lord’s day, never at any time after the light of dawn began to appear
did he allow himself to slumber, but swiftly preparing himself as
deacon with his own priest Sigulf he performed the solemnities of
special masses till the third hour, and then with very great reverence
he went to the public mass. His disciples, when they were in other
places, especially when they assisted ad opus Dei, carefully studied
that no cause of blame be seen in them by him.
“The time had come when Albinus had a desire to depart and be
with Christ. He prayed with all his will that if it might be, he should
pass from the world on the day on which the Holy Spirit was seen to
come upon the apostles in tongues of fire, and filled their hearts.
Saying for himself the vesper office, in the place which he had
chosen as his resting-place after death, namely, near the Church of
St. Martin, he sang through the evangelic hymn of the holy Mary with
this antiphon[68], ‘O Key of David, and sceptre of the house of Israel,
who openest and none shutteth, shuttest and none openeth, come
and lead forth from the house of his prison this fettered one, sitting in
darkness and the shadow of death.’ Then he said the Lord’s Prayer.
Then several Psalms—Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks. O
how amiable are Thy dwellings, Thou Lord of hosts. Blessed are
they that dwell in Thy house. Unto Thee lift I up mine eyes. One
thing I have desired of the Lord. Unto Thee, O Lord, will I lift up my
soul.
“He spent the season of Lent, according to his custom, in the most
worthy manner, with all contrition of flesh and spirit and purifying of
habit. Every night he visited the basilicas of the saints which are
within the monastery of St. Martin,[69] washing himself clean of his
sins with heavy groans. When the solemnity of the Resurrection of
the Lord was accomplished, on the night of the Ascension he fell on
his bed, oppressed with languor even unto death, and could not
speak. On the third day before his departure he sang with exultant
voice his favourite antiphon, ‘O key of David,’ and recited the verses
mentioned above. On the day of Pentecost, the matin office having
been performed, at the very hour at which he had been accustomed
to attend masses, at opening dawn, the holy soul of Albinus is[70]
released from the body, and by the ministry of the celestial deacons,
having with them the first martyr Stephen and the archdeacon
Laurence, with an army of angels, he is led to Christ, whom he
loved, whom he sought; and in the bliss of heaven he has for ever
the fruition of the glory of Him whom in this world he so faithfully
served.”
The Annals of Pettau enable us to fill in some details of Alcuin’s
death. Pettau was not far from Salzburg, and therefore the
monastery was likely to be well informed. Arno of Salzburg, Alcuin’s
great admiration and his devoted personal friend, would see to it that
in his neighbourhood all ecclesiastics knew the details. The seizure
on the occasion of his falling on his bed was a paralytic stroke. It
occurred, according to the Annals from which we are quoting, on the
fifth day of the week on the eighth of the Ides of May, that is, on May
8; but in that year, 804, Ascension Day fell on May 9, so that for the
eighth of the Ides we must read the seventh of the Ides. The seizure
took place at vesper tide, after sunset. He lived on till May 19,
Whitsunday, on which day he died, just as the day broke.
“On that night,” to return to the Life, “above the church of the holy
Martin there was seen an inestimable clearness of splendour, so that
to persons at a distance it seemed that the whole was on fire. By
some, that splendour was seen through the whole night, to others it
appeared three times in the night. Joseph the Archbishop of Tours
testified that he and his companions saw this throughout the night.
Many that are still sound in body testify the same. To more persons,
however, this brightness appeared in the same manner, not on that
but on a former night, namely, on the night of the first Sunday after
the Ascension.
“At that same hour there was displayed to a certain hermit in Italy
the army of the heavenly deacons, sounding forth the ineffable
praises of Christ in the air; in the midst of whom Alchuin[71] stood,
clothed with a most splendid dalmatic, entering with them into
heaven to minister with perennial joy to the Eternal Pontiff. This
hermit on that same day of Pentecost told what he had seen to one
of the brethren of Tours, who was making his accustomed way to
visit the thresholds of the Apostles.[72] The hermit asked him these
questions,—‘Who is that Abbat that lives at Tours, in the monastery
of the holy Martin? By what name is he called? And was he well in
body when you left?’ The brother replied, ‘He is called Alchuin, and
he is the best teacher in all France. When I started on my way hither,
I left him well.’ The solitary made rejoinder, with tears, that he was
indeed enjoying the very happiest health; and he told him what he
had seen at day-break that day. When the brother got back to Tours,
he related what he had heard.
“Father Sigulf, with certain others, washed the body of the father
with all honour, and placed it on a bier. Now Sigulf had at the time a
great pain in the head, but being by faith sound in mind, he found a
ready cure for his head. Raising his eyes above the couch of the
master, he saw the comb[73] with which he was wont to comb his
head. Taking it in his hands he said, ‘I believe, Lord Jesus, that if I
combed my head with this my master’s comb, my head would at
once be cured by his merits.’ The moment he drew the comb across
his head, that part of the head which it touched was immediately
cured, and thus by combing his head all round he lost the pain
completely. Another of his disciples, Eangist by name, was
grievously afflicted with immense pain in his teeth. By Sigulf’s advice
he touched his teeth with the comb, and forthwith, because he did it
in faith, he received a cure by the merits of Alchuin.
“When Joseph, the bishop of the city of Tours, a man good and
beloved of God, heard that the blessed Alchuin was dead, he came
to the spot immediately with his clerks, and washing Alchuin’s eyes
with his tears, he kissed him frequently. He advised, moreover, using
wise counsel, that he should not be buried outside, in the place
where the father himself had willed, but with all possible honour
within the basilica of the holy Martin, that the bodies of those whose
souls are united in heaven should on earth lie in one home. And thus
it was done. Above his tomb was placed, as he had directed, a title
which he had dictated in his lifetime, engraved on a plate of bronze
let into the wall.”[74]
The simple epitaph, apart from the title, ran thus:—
“Here doth rest the lord Alchuuin the Abbat, who died in peace on
the fourteenth of the Kalends of June. When you read, O all ye who
pass by, pray for him and say, The Lord grant unto him eternal rest.”
 CHAPTER III
The large bulk of Alcuin’s letters and other writings.—The main dates of his life.
—Bede’s advice to Ecgbert.—Careless lives of bishops.—No parochial system.—
Inadequacy of the bishops’ oversight.—Great monasteries to be used as sees for
new bishoprics, and evil monasteries to be suppressed.—Election of abbats and
hereditary descent.—Evils of pilgrimages.—Daily Eucharists.

We in the diocese of Bristol have a special right to study and to

make much of the letters of Alcuin. Our own great historian, William
of Malmesbury, had in the library of Malmesbury from the year 1100
and onwards an important collection of these letters, from which he
quotes frequently in support of the historical statements which he
makes. More than that, we know of some of the letters of Alcuin only
from the quotations from them thus made by William in this diocese
some 800 years ago. This is specially stated by Abbat Froben, of
Ratisbon, who edited the letters of Alcuin 140 years ago.
The letters of Alcuin are addressed to an emperor, to kings,
queens, popes, patriarchs, archbishops, dukes, and others; so that
of Alcuin’s political importance there can be no question. As to his
learning, William of Malmesbury pays him the great compliment of
naming him along with our own Aldhelm and with Bede. “Of all the
Angles,” he says,[75] “of whom I have read, Alcuin was, next to the
holy Aldhelm and Bede, certainly the most learned.”
Alcuin was born in Northumbria in or about the year 735. He left
England to live in France in 782, returned for a time in 792, and left
finally in 793. He died in 804. We can thus see how he stands in
regard of date to those with whom we have dealt in former lectures.
Aldhelm and Wilfrith died in 709, only about a quarter of a century
before Alcuin’s birth. Bede died, according to the usual statement[76],
in 735, the year of Alcuin’s birth. Boniface was martyred in Holland in
755, when Alcuin was twenty years old.
 As in the case of Gregory and of Boniface, who have been the
subjects of the last two courses of lectures, the letters of Alcuin are
the most important—or among the most important—sources of
information for the history of the times. The letters are 236 in
number, and they fill 373 columns of close small print in the large
volumes of Migne’s series. The letters of Boniface are not half so
numerous, and they occupy considerably less than one-third of the
space in the same print.
The letters of Alcuin, great as is their number and reach, form but
a small part of his writings. His collected works are six times as large
as his letters. His commentaries and treatises on the Holy Scriptures
are much more lengthy than his collected letters, more than two-
thirds as long again. His dogmatic writings are not far from half as
long again as his letters. His book on Sacraments and kindred
subjects is about two-thirds as long as his letters. His biographies of
saints, his poems, his treatises on teaching and learning, are all
together nearly as long as the letters; and there is almost the same
bulk of works which are attributed to him on evidence of a less
conclusive character.
Put briefly, this was his life. He was a boy at my own school, the
Cathedral School of York, a school which had the credit of educating,
800 years later, another boy who made a mark on history, Guy
Fawkes. The head master in Alcuin’s time was Ecgbert, Archbishop
of York and brother of the reigning king of Northumbria; and the
second master was Albert, Ecgbert’s cousin, and eventually his
successor in the chief mastership and in the archbishopric. Alcuin
succeeded to the practical part of the mastership on Ecgbert’s death
in 766, the new archbishop, Albert, retaining the government of the
school and the chief part of the religious teaching. In 778 Alcuin
became in all respects the head master of the school, and in the end
of 780 Albert died, leaving to Alcuin the great collection of books
which formed the famous library of York.
Alcuin had for some years travelled much on the continent of
Europe, and he was well acquainted with its principal scholars. They
were relatively few in number, learning having sunk very low on the
continent, while in Northumbria it had been and still was at a very
high level. Alcuin had also made acquaintance with Karl, not yet
known as Karl der Grosse, Carolus Magnus, Charlemagne, the son
of Pepin, king as yet of the Franks, emperor in the year 800, a man
about seven years younger than Alcuin. On a visit to the continent in
781 he again met Karl, who proposed to him that he should enter his
service as master of the school of his palace, and practically minister
of education for all parts of the vast empire over which Karl ruled. In
782 he joined Karl, having obtained leave of absence from the
Northumbrian king Alfweald, Archbishop Ecgbert’s great-nephew,
and from the new archbishop, Eanbald I. From that time onwards he
was Karl’s right-hand man, in matters theological as well as
educational; and in some matters of supreme political importance
too. The leave of absence lasted some nine or ten years; at the end
of that time Alcuin came back for a short time, but he soon after
terminated his official connexion with York, and spent the rest of his
life in the dominions of Karl.
Archbishop Ecgbert, Alcuin’s master, had been a friend of the
venerable Bede. The only occasion on which we know that Bede left
his cloister was that of a visit to Ecgbert at York, shortly before
Bede’s death, if he died in 735. We have it from Bede himself that he
had promised another visit to York in the following year, but was too
ill to carry out his promise. Failing the opportunity of long
conversations on the state of the Province of York, which
corresponded to the bishoprics of York, Lindisfarne, Hexham, and
Whithern, Bede set down his thoughts on parchment or tablets, and
sent them to his friend. This Letter of Bede to Ecgbert is by very far
the most important document of those times which has come down
to us; both because of the remarkable mass of information contained
in it, which we get from no other source, and because of the large
and broad views of ecclesiastical policy which it sets forth. It was no
doubt the advice and warnings of Bede that led Ecgbert to create the
educational conditions which developed the intellect of the most
intellectual man of his times, the subject of these lectures. Inasmuch
as it seems probable—indeed, is practically certain—that the
distressful state of Northumbria was the final cause of Alcuin’s
abandonment of his native land, it will be well to summarize the main
points of Bede’s dirge. We should bear in mind the fact that we are
reading a description by an ecclesiastic, a man keenly devoted to the
monastic life; and that the date is that of the year of Alcuin’s birth. It
tells us, therefore, something of the setting in which Alcuin found
himself in early boyhood.
Ecgbert had only become Bishop of York in the year of Bede’s visit
to him, 734. York was not as yet an Archbishopric; it was raised to
that dignity in Ecgbert’s time. Some writers call Paulinus Archbishop,
because a pall was sent to him by Gregory; but the pall did not reach
England till after Paulinus had run away from York.
Bede thinks it necessary to urge Ecgbert very earnestly to be
careful in his talk. He does not suppose that Ecgbert sins in this
respect, but it is matter of common report that some bishops do; that
they have no men of religion or continence with them, but rather
such as indulge in laughter and jests, in revellings, drunkenness, and
other pleasures of loose life; men who feast daily in rich banquets,
and neglect to feed their minds on the heavenly sacrifice.
There were in 735 sixteen bishops’ sees in England, held in the
south by Tatuin of Canterbury, Ingwald of London, Daniel of
Winchester, Aldwin of Lichfield, Alwig of Lindsey, Forthere of
Sherborn, Ethelfrith of Elmham[77], Wilfrid of Worcester, Wahlstod of
Hereford, Sigga of Selsey, Eadulf of Rochester; and in the north by
Ecgbert of York, Ethelwold of Lindisfarne, Frithobert of Hexham, and
Frithwald of Whithern. We may, probably, narrow Bede’s censure to
Lindisfarne and Hexham, if he really did, as some assume, refer to
his own parts. As a Northumbrian myself, I think that a long-headed
man like Bede, a Northumbrian by birth, more probably referred to
bishops of the parts which we now know as the Southern Province.
Alcuin’s letters, however, show that in his time there was much that
needed improvement in the case of northern bishops as well as
southern.
A bishop in those days had to do the main part of the teaching,
and preaching, and ministering the Sacraments, throughout the
diocese. Bede points out that Ecgbert’s diocese was much too large
for one man to cover it properly with ministrations. He must,
therefore, ordain priests, and appoint teachers to preach the Word of
God in each of the villages; to celebrate the heavenly mysteries; and
especially to attend to sacred baptism[78]. The persons so appointed
must make it their essential business to root deep in the memory of
the people that Catholic Faith which is contained in the Apostles’
Creed, and in like manner the Lord’s Prayer. Those of the people
who do not know Latin are to say the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer
over and over again in their native tongue; and this rule is not for the
laity only, but also for clergy and monks who do not know Latin. For
this purpose, Bede says he has often given translations of these two
into English to uneducated priests; for St. Ambrose declared that all
the faithful should say the Creed every morning, and the English
practice was to chant the Lord’s Prayer very often. How much we of
to-day would give for just one copy of Bede’s Creed and Lord’s
Prayer in English![79]
Ecgbert’s position in the sight of God, Bede says, will be very
serious if he neglects to do as he advises, especially if he takes
temporal gifts or payments from those to whom he does not give
heavenly gifts. This last point Bede presses home with affectionate
earnestness upon the “most beloved Prelate”. “We have heard it
reported,” he says, “that there are many villages and dwellings, on
inaccessible hills and in deep forests, where for many years no
bishop has been seen, no bishop has ministered; and yet no single
person has been free from the payment of tribute to the bishop; and
that although not only has he never come to confirm those who have
been baptized, but there has been no teacher to instruct them in the
faith or show them the difference between good and evil. And if we
believe and confess,” he continues, “that in the laying on of hands
the Holy Spirit is received, it is clear that that gift is absent from
those who have not been confirmed. When a bishop has, from love
of money, taken nominally under his government a larger part of the
population than he can by any means visit with his ministrations in
one whole year, the peril is great for himself, and great for those to
whom he claims to be overseer while he is unable to oversee them.”
Ecgbert has, Bede tells him, a most ready coadjutor in the King of
Northumbria, Ceolwulf, Ecgbert’s near relative, his first cousin, whom
Ecgbert’s brother succeeded. The [arch]bishop should advise the
King to place the ecclesiastical arrangements of the Northumbrian
nation on a better footing. This would best be done by the
appointment of more bishops. Pope Gregory had bidden Augustine
to arrange for twelve bishops in the Northern Province, the Bishop of
York to receive the pall as Metropolitan. Ecgbert should aim at that
number. It may here be noted that in this year of grace 1908 there
are still only nine diocesan bishops in the Northern Province, besides
the archbishop, and five of these nine have been created in the
lifetime of some of us. Bristol knows to its heavy cost that Ripon was
the first of the five.
But Bede points out, and here we come to very interesting matter,
that the negligence of some former kings, and the foolish gifts of
others, had left it very difficult to find a suitable see for a new bishop.
The monasteries were in possession everywhere. It may be
remarked in passing that all over the Christian parts of the world
monasteries existed, even in those early times, in very large
numbers. We know the names, and the dates or periods of
foundation, of no less than 1481 founded before the year 814, in
various parts of the world; and the actual number was very much
larger than that, from what we know of the facts, especially in the
East. In the time of Henry VIII, besides the monasteries which had
been suppressed by Wolsey, Fisher, and others, as also the large
number of alien priories suppressed at an earlier date, and besides
all the ecclesiastical foundations called hospitals and colleges, more
than 600 monasteries remained in this land to be suppressed.
There being, then, no lands left to endow bishoprics, there was, in
Bede’s opinion, only one remedy; that was, the summoning of a
Greater Council, at which an edict should be issued, by pontifical
and royal consent, fixing upon some great monastery for a new
episcopal seat. To conciliate the abbat and monks, the election of the
bishop-abbat should be left to them. If it should prove necessary to
provide more property still for the bishop, Bede pointed out that there
were many establishments calling themselves monasteries which
were not worthy of the name. He would like to see some of these
transferred by synodical authority for the further maintenance of the
newly-created see, so that money which now went in luxury, vanity,
and intemperance in meat and drink, might be used to further the
cause of chastity, temperance, and piety. Here in Bristol, with
Gloucester close at hand, we need no reminder of the closeness of
the parallel between Bede’s advice in 735 to King Ceolwulf and the
actual course taken in 1535 by King Henry, and carried to completion
by him in 1540-2, in the foundation of six new bishoprics on the
spoils of as many great monasteries. Nor need it be pointed out that
Bede’s proposal to suppress small and ill-conditioned monasteries
was a forecast of the original proposal of Henry VIII.
Bede then proceeds to speak with extreme severity of false
monasteries. It appears that men bribed kings to make them grants
of lands—professedly for monasteries—in hereditary possession,
and paid moneys to bishops, abbats, and secular authorities, to ratify
the grants by their signatures; and then they made them the
dwellings of licentiousness and excess of all kinds. The men’s wives
set up corresponding establishments. Bede urged the annulment of
all grants thus misused: again we seem to hear a note prophetic of
eight hundred years later. To so great a pitch had this gone, that
there were no lands left for grants to discharged soldiers, sons of
nobles, and others. Thus it came to pass that such men either went
beyond sea and abandoned their own country, for which they ought
to fight, or else they lived as they could at home, not able to marry,
and living unseemly lives. If this was allowed to go on, the land
would be unable to defend itself against the inroads of the
barbarians. Bede’s prophecy to that effect came crushingly true in
Alcuin’s time, not fifty years after it was written. And here again we
have a remarkable forecast of Henry VIII’s avowed purpose in the
suppression of monasteries, that he must have means to defend his
land against invasion. Thus the three arguments of Henry VIII,
namely, that lands and money were needed for more soldiers and
sailors, that lands and money were needed for more bishoprics, and
that many of the religious houses did not deserve that name, were
carefully set out by one whom we may call a High-Church
ecclesiastic, eight hundred years before Henry.
On two of the points mentioned by Bede in connexion with
monasteries, it may be well to say a little more by way of illustration.
The two points are, the hereditary descent of monasteries, and the
principle on which the election of the abbat should proceed. To take
the second first,—Bede is very precise on this point. He says that
when a monastery is to be taken as the seat of a bishop, licence
should be given to the monks to elect one of themselves to fill the
double office of abbat and bishop, and to rule the monastery in the
one character and the adjacent diocese in the other. We should have
thought it would have been better to leave them free to elect some
prominent churchman from the outside, than to limit their choice to
one of themselves. And the exception for which arrangement was
made points in the same direction of limitation. If they have not the
right man in their own monastery, at least they must choose one
from their own family, or order, to preside over them, in accordance
with the decrees of the Canons. This strictness was traditional in
Northumbria. The great founder of monastic institutions in the
Northern Church, Benedict Biscop, who founded Monk Wearmouth
in 674 and Jarrow in 685, was very decided about it. He would not
have an abbat brought in from another monastery. The duty of the
brethren, he said, when speaking to his monks on his own imminent
decease, was, in accordance with the rule of Abbat Benedict the
Great, and in accordance with the statutes of their own monastery of
Wearmouth—which he had himself drawn up after consideration of
the various rules on the Continent from the statutes of the seventeen
monasteries which he liked best of all that he had seen—to inquire
carefully who of themselves was best fitted for the post, and, after
due election, have him confirmed as abbat by the benediction of the
bishop. There is a great deal to be said in favour of this course, and
there is a great deal to be said for more freedom of election. The
case which comes nearest to it in our English life of to-day is that of
the election of the Master of a College in one of the two Universities.
In Cambridge the election—in two cases the appointment—is in
every case open, in the sense that it is not confined to the Fellows of
the College, and in very recent times there have been several cases
of the election of a prominent man from another College, to the great
advantage of the College thus electing.
The other point is of much wider importance, namely, the
hereditary descent of monasteries and of their headship. Our
Northumbrian abbat Benedict was very decided here also. The
brethren must not elect his successor on account of his birth. There
must be no claim of next of kin. He was specially anxious that his
own brother after the flesh should not be elected to succeed him. He
would rather his monastery became a wilderness than have this man
as his successor, for they all knew that he did not walk in the way of
truth. Benedict evidently feared that a practice of hereditary
succession to ecclesiastical office might spring up. No doubt he had
seen at least the beginning of this in foreign parts. It was no
visionary fear, for in times rather later we have examples of
ecclesiastical benefices, and even bishoprics, going from father to
son, and that in days of supposed celibacy. We have plenty of
examples of monasteries descending from mother to daughter later
on in England; and in Bede’s own time he mentions without adverse
remark that the Abbess of Wetadun (Watton, in East Yorkshire)
persuaded Bishop John of Hexham to cure of an illness her
daughter, whom she proposed to make abbess in her stead. Alcuin
himself, as we have seen,[80] tells us quite as a matter of ordinary
occurrence, not calling for any remark, that he himself succeeded
hereditarily to the first monastery which he ruled, situated on Spurn
Point, the southern promontory of Yorkshire. We cannot doubt that
the evils naturally arising, in some cases at least, from hereditary
succession to spiritual positions, had much to do with the
intemperate suppression of the secular clergy and the enforcement
of clerical celibacy. In considering the question as it concerned the
times of Alcuin, we must bear in mind that we are dealing with times
very long before the development of the idea of feudal succession.
It is interesting to note that the earliest manuscripts of the Rule of
St. Benedict which are known to exist do not definitely lay down the
precise rule that the person elected to an abbacy must be a member
of the abbey or at least of the same order. The Rule was first printed
in 1659 by a monk of Monte Cassino; and this print was carefully
collated throughout with a manuscript of the thirteenth century at Fort
Augustus for the edition published by Burns and Oates in 1886.
Chapter 64 is as follows, taking the translation annexed to the Latin
in that edition, though it does not in all cases give quite the force of
the original.
“In the appointing[81] of an abbot, let this principle always be
observed, that he be made abbot whom all the brethren with one
consent in the fear of God, or even a small part of the community
with more wholesome counsel, shall elect. Let him who is to be
appointed be chosen for the merit of his life and the wisdom of his
doctrine, even though he should be the last of the community. But if
all the brethren with one accord (which God forbid) should elect a
man willing to acquiesce in their evil habits, and these in some way
come to the knowledge of the bishop to whose diocese that place
belongs, or of the abbots or neighbouring Christians, let them not
suffer the consent of these wicked men to prevail, but appoint[82] a
worthy steward over the house of God, knowing that for this they
shall receive a good reward, if they do it with a pure intention and for
the love of God, as, on the other hand, they will sin if they neglect it.”
We hear a good deal in our early history of kings and great men
renouncing the world and entering the cloister. Bede shows us the
darker side of this practice. Ever since king Aldfrith died, he says,
some thirty years before, there has not been one chief minister of
state who has not provided himself while in office with a so-called
monastery of this false kind, and his wife with another. The layman
then is tonsured, and becomes not a monk but an abbat, knowing
nothing of the monastic rule. And the bishops, who ought to restrain
them by regular discipline, or else expel them from Holy Church, are
eager to confirm the unrighteous decrees for the sake of the fees
they receive for their signatures. Against this poison of covetousness
Bede inveighs bitterly; and then he declares that if he were to treat in
like manner of drunkenness, gluttony, sensuality, and like evils, his
letter would extend to an immense length.
It may be well to mention here another religious practice which
had two sides to it, the practice of going on pilgrimage. Anglo-Saxon
men and women had a passion for visiting the tombs of the two
princes of the Apostles, Peter, whose connexion with Rome is so
shadowy up to the time of his death there, and Paul, their own
Apostle, the teacher of the Gentiles, whose connexion with Rome is
so solid a fact in the New Testament and in Church history. Bede
tells us that in his times many of the English, noble and ignoble,
laymen and clerics, men and women, did this. As a result of the
relaxed discipline of mixed travel, a complaint came to England,
soon after, that the promiscuous journeyings on pilgrimage led to
much immorality, so that there was scarcely a town on the route in
which there were not English women leading immoral lives.
There is one striking passage in Bede’s unique letter which shows
us how great were the demands of the early Church upon the
religious observances of the lay people; while it shows with equal
clearness the inadequacy of the response made by the English of
the time. The passage will complete our knowledge of the state of
religion among our Anglian forefathers towards the end of Bede’s
life. It refers to the bishop’s work among the people of the world,
outside the monastic institutions. The bishop must furnish them with
competent teachers, who shall show them how to fortify themselves
and all they have against the continual plots of unclean spirits, by the
frequent use of the sign of the Cross, and by frequent joining in Holy
Communion. “It is salutary,” he says to Ecgbert, “for all classes of
Christians to participate daily in the Body and Blood of the Lord, as
you well know is done by the Church of Christ throughout Italy, Gaul,
Africa, Greece, and the whole of the East. This religious exercise,
this devoted sanctification, has, through the neglect of the teachers,
been so long abandoned by almost all the lay persons of the
province of Northumbria, that even the more religious among them
only communicate at Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter. And yet,” he
continues, “there are innumerable persons, innocent and of most
chaste conversation, boys and girls, young men and virgins, old men
and old women, who without any controversy could communicate on
every Lord’s Day, and indeed on the birthdays of the holy apostles
and martyrs, as you have seen done in the holy Roman and
Apostolic Church.” The Church History of early times has a great
deal of practical teaching for the church people of to-day.
If the life of religious people in the monasteries and in the world
was thus tainted and slack, we can imagine what the ordinary
secular life was likely to be. There was terrible force in Bede’s
suggestion that a nation so rotten could never withstand a hostile
attack of any importance. Archbishop Ecgbert certainly did all that he
could to bring things into order; and he wisely determined that the
very best thing he could do to pull things round was to get hold of the
youth of the nation, and train them with the utmost care in the way
that they should go. This leads us on to the rise or revival of the
Cathedral School of York.
 CHAPTER IV
The school of York.—Alcuin’s poem on the Bishops and Saints of the Church of
York.—The destruction of the Britons by the Saxons.—Description of Wilfrith II,
Ecgbert, Albert, of York.—Balther and Eata.—Church building in York.—The
Library of York.

It is usual to reckon the year 735 as the beginning of the great

School of York, and Archbishop—or rather, as he then was, Bishop
—Ecgbert as its originator. But it seems clear that we must carry its
beginnings further back, and count as its originator a man who filled
a much larger place in the world than even Ecgbert, archbishop as
he became, and brother of the king as he was. When Wilfrith, the
first Englishman to appeal to Rome, was put into the see of York by
Theodore of Canterbury in 669, his chaplain and biographer,
Stephen Eddi, tells of four principal works which, between that year
and 678, his chief accomplished. The first was the restoration of the
Cathedral Church of York, which had fallen into decay during the
time when Lindisfarne was the seat of the Bishop of Northumbria.
The second was the building of a noble church at Ripon for the
people of the kingdom of Elmete, which Edwin, the first Christian
king of Northumbria, had conquered from the Romano-Britons;
corresponding to the West Riding of Yorkshire and parts of
Lancashire, a portion of the great British kingdom of Rheged, at the
court of which the bard Taliessin had sung. The fourth was the
building of a still more noble church at Hexham, to be the
ecclesiastical centre of the northern part of Northumbria, replacing
Lindisfarne in that character. And the third in order was the
establishment of a School, no doubt at York, as that was his
episcopal seat, and he himself was the chief teacher. The world
credits William of Wickham with the invention of the idea of a public
school in the modern sense of the word; but seven hundred[83] years
before him Wilfrith had grasped the idea and put it into practice at
York. This is what his chaplain tells us. The secular chiefs, the
noblemen, sent their sons to him to be so taught that when the time
of choice came they would be found fit to serve God in the ministry, if
that was their choice, or to serve the king in arms if they preferred
that career. We must certainly reckon the year 676, or thereabouts,
as the date of foundation of the school at York, Wilfrith as its founder,
and its principle that of the modern public school, which is supposed
to give an education so liberal that whatever career its alumnus
prefers he will be found fitted for it. The first scholars of the school of
York entered, some of them, the ministry, as learned clerks; others,
the army, as fit to be soldiers. It was still so when I went to that
school sixty-four years ago. The school is older than Winchester by
seven hundred years, and older than Eton by seven hundred and
sixty-five.[84] Bede’s strong appeal to Ecgbert led to the revival of the
school after the natural decay from which good institutions suffer in
times of ecclesiastical and civil disorder, and we date the continuous
life of the school from him. It was an interesting coincidence, that
men saw in the year 735 the revival of the school and the birth of its
most famous pupil, assistant master, and head master. We may now
turn to that man, whose early lot was cast in a state of society, lay
and clerical, such as that described in scathing terms by Bede; and
who was the first-fruits of the remedy which Bede had suggested. As
a link between Bede and Alcuin we may have in mind a pretty little
story about Bede which we find in a letter of Alcuin’s some fifty or
sixty years after Bede’s death.
Alcuin is writing to the monks of Wearmouth. He Ep. 274. Before
tells them how well he remembers what he saw at a.d. 793.
Wearmouth long years ago, and how much he was
pleased with everything he saw. He encourages them to continue in
the right way by reminding them of the virtues of their founders. “It is
certain,” he writes, “that your founders very often visit the place of
your dwelling. They rejoice with all whom they find keeping their
statutes and living right lives; and they cease not to intercede for
such with the pious judge. Nor is it doubtful that visitations of angels
frequent holy places; for it is reported that our master and your
patron the blessed Bede said, ‘I know that angels visit the canonical
hours and the congregations of the brethren. What if they should not
find me among the brethren? Would they not have to say, Where is
Bede? Why does he not come with the brethren to the appointed
prayers?’”
To us in England, and especially to those of us who are North-
countrymen, nothing that Alcuin wrote has a higher interest than his
poem in Latin hexameters on the Bishops and Saints of the Church
of York. By the Church of York Alcuin evidently meant the Church of
Northumbria, although his account of the prelates dwells chiefly on
the archbishops of his time. Considering his long sojourn in France,
it was fitting that the manuscript of this famous poem should be
discovered at a monastery near Reims, the monastery of St.
Theodoric, or Thierry according to the later spelling. A great part of
the poem is in the main a versification of Bede’s prose history of the
conversion of the North to Christianity, and an adaptation of Bede’s
metrical life of St. Cuthbert. On this account the French transcriber
from the original omitted about 1100 of the 1657 lines of which the
poem consists, and only about 550 lines were originally printed by
Mabillon in the Acta Sanctorum. When our own Gale was preparing
to publish it, he got the missing verses both from the St. Theodoric
MS. and also from a MS. at Reims itself. Both manuscripts
disappeared long ago, probably in the devastations of the French
Revolution[85].
The poem describes the importance of York in the time of the
Roman occupation of Britain, the residence, as Alcuin tells us, of the
dukes of Britain, and of sovereigns of Rome. York was, in fact, the
imperial city; it shared with Trèves the honour of being the only
imperial cities north of the Alps. He speaks eloquently of its beautiful
surroundings, its flowery fields, its noble edifices, its fertility, its
charm as a home. This part of the poem inclines the reader to settle
in favour of York the uncertainty as to the place of Alcuin’s birth. One
graphic touch, and the use of a special Latin name for the river Ouse
which flows through the middle of the city, goes to the heart of those
who in their youth have fished in that river—

Hanc piscosa suis undis interluit Usa.

 He goes on to speak of the persistent inroads of the Picts after the
withdrawal of the Roman troops. Inasmuch as the sixth legion was
quartered at York, and all of the other three legions in Britain were
withdrawn before the sixth, it may be claimed that York was the last
place effectively occupied by the Roman troops. This indeed is in
itself probable, since York was in the best position for checking the
attempts of the Picts to reach the central and southern parts of
Britain. He describes how the leaders of the Britons sent large bribes
to a warlike race, to bring them over to protect the land, a race, he
says, called from their hardness Saxi, as though Saxons meant
stones.[86] The eventual conquest of the Britons by the Saxons
evidently had Alcuin’s full sympathy. The Britons were lazy; worse
than that, they were wicked; for their sins they were rightly driven
out, and a better race entered into possession of their cities. We
would give a great deal to have had from Alcuin a few words of
tradition about some details of the occupation of York by the Angles,
and of the fate of the British inhabitants. Alcuin’s words would
suggest that their fate was a cruel one, but we do not know anything
of it from any source whatsoever. One of his remarks strikes us as
curious, considering that the Britons were Christians and their
conquerors were pagan: the expulsion, he says, was the work of
God, that a race might enter into possession who should keep the
precepts of the Lord. Clearly Alcuin held a brief for his ancestors of
some five generations before his birth. He writes also in a rather
lordly way of the kingdom of Kent, as though Northumbria was the
really important province in the time of King Edwin, as indeed it
unquestionably was. Edwin was the most prominent personage in
England, the Bretwalda, at the time of the conversion of
Northumbria. All that Alcuin says of Edwin’s young wife Ethelburga,
and of the kingdom of Kent whence she came, is this: “He took from
the southern parts a faithful wife, of excellent disposition, of
illustrious origin, endowed with all the virtues of the holy faith.” We
shall have, at a later stage, to remark upon the silence with which
Wessex also was treated by Alcuin.
It is quite true that the facts of the greater part of the poem are
taken from Bede. But it is of much interest to note the selection