Being Watched Watching Watchers Watch: Determining the Digitized Future While Profitably Modulating Preemption (at the Airport)

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Matthew P. Tiessen

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze once wrote in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1992) that in the future (our present) our societies would be controlled or “disciplined” using subtly unobtrusive and strategically applied forms of “modulation.” That is, the rigid physical enclosures of Foucault’s disciplinary society would inevitably yield to more flexible, immaterial, and imperceptible forms of modulation that continually respond and adapt to life’s unpredictability. In this paper I describe how the use of naked body scanners at today’s airport is a most suitable expression of this dematerialized form of discipline, seeming at the same moment to both threaten and protect privacy, to be both non-intrusive and invasive, to both prepare for and determine seemingly unknowable but inevitable futures.

 

The flying public, meanwhile, is caught in the confusing middle, not knowing what to believe. They find themselves trapped in an undefined surveillance grid that both threatens and protects their freedoms. Will the scanners see through clothing and catch underwear-bombs, or won’t they? Will security agents scan, save, and distribute their naked images or won’t they? The public is left with questions rather than answers. This whole (visual) apparatus which was designed to create clarity and transparency seems opaque.

 

I suggest, then, that the opacity both of the issues at stake as well as of the scanned images of our naked bodies, confounds our categories and challenges long taken for granted social conventions about, for example, habeas corpus, privacy, security, the present, the future, potentiality, etc. Appearances, it seems, are still deceiving – even if what’s being made to appear are high-resolution scans of our naked bodies.

 

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Author Biography

Matthew P. Tiessen, <p>SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow</p><p>Infoscape Research Lab</p><p>Faculty of Communication and Design</p><p>Ryerson University</p>

Dr. Matthew Tiessen is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Infoscape Research Lab in the Faculty of Communication and Design at Ryerson University. He teaches and publishes in the area of technology studies, digital culture, and visual culture. His writing has been featured in such publications as: CTheory, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Space and Culture, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, What Is a City? Rethinking the Urban after Hurricane Katrina (2008, University of Georgia Press), and Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope (2010, Wilfrid Laurier University Press).

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