Electronic Journal of Sociology ( 2007 ) ISSN : 1198 3655 Surveillance and Biopolitics

The paper addresses the relationship between contemporary modes of surveillance and biopolitics in terms of border management. It is suggested that the shift from disciplinary society (panopticism) to control society (postpanopticism) is a problematic one in that the two modalities of power (discipline and control) are not mutually exclusive but coexist within the working of biopolitics and through the hybridisation of management techniques as is the case at the borders. With the increasing uncertainties of post-September 11 world, the issue of surveillance is given renewed importance through the discourses surrounding the proliferation of ‘control’ technologies and the rhetoric of (in)security pervading contemporary politics. Electronic technologies, in particular, are seen to be intensifying the ‘capacity’ and ‘ubiquity’ of surveillance, creating ‘new’ forms of social control. Not that the newness of the current modes of surveillance is to be regarded from a merely ontological vantage point and especially not as ‘a shift to a new type of society’ (Rose, 1999: 237) per se. But more so from the epistemic informatisation and hybridisation of control and monitoring facilitated by the spread of digital technologies which lend to the emerging trends of surveillance their label of newness while sustaining the existing status quo of society. Examples of these technologies include DNA fingerprinting, electronic tagging, drug testing, health scans, biometric ID cards and passports, smart closed circuit television, etc., all of which rely on algorithmic techniques as well as ‘body parts’ in order to perform their function of surveillance. Whilst there is a myriad of issues pertaining to the phenomenon of surveillance, each of which deserve a thorough examination both theoretically and empirically, this paper focuses on a specific aspect of surveillance and its relation to biopolitics; on the ways in which surveillance is emblematic of the magnitude and dimension of that which constitutes the management of life and death. In so doing, the ‘border’ is invoked as the principal example of the interwoven relationship between surveillance and biopolitics while drawing upon the work of Foucault and others in order to elucidate the theoretical foundations of this relationship as well as the existing juxtaposition of bodies and technologies at the border. To begin with, and as proposed by Michel Foucault (2003 [1976]), the concept of biopolitics entails the notion of biopower which, unlike the theory of sovereign right (‘to take life or let live’), is not concerned with the practice of power over the individual body but acts at the level of massification instead of individualisation (ibid., 243). It takes as its project the management of the population in its multiplicity, overriding (or at least supplementing) the old right of sovereignty with that of ‘to make live and let die’. What characterises biopower is not so much discipline directed at ‘man-as-body’, as was the case in disciplinary society, but the will to control and regulate ‘man-as-species’ in a preventative way so much so that