Surveillant Assemblage

Haggerty, K. D. & Ericson, R. V. (2000). The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4). 605-622. DOI: 10.1080/00071310020015280

After building a theoretical framework of survelliance based on the notions of the “telescreen” described in Orwell’s 1984 and Foucault’s discussion of the panopticon, the authors connect those thoughts with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages to document the attributes of what they call the “surveillant assemblage.”  As an assemblage, contemporary surveillance is made up of a wide variety of technologies and institutions. Surveillance is directed toward a person’s body (itself an assemblage with a variety of “flows”) with the goal of turning it into pure information.  Like rhizomes, the connections of various surveillance tools allow for rapid and non-linear growth. In contrast to the traditional top-down version of surveillance, the contemporary model also illustrates how the general public has been able to monitor the elite. In the end, the new surveillant assemblage has led to the disappearance of disappearance; it is nearly impossible to leave the grid.

This article clearly applies the concepts of the Deleuze and Guattari to a contemporary issue and illustrate how thinking through this lens reveals interesting things that may have been missed before. Written a decade ago, it integrates many of the features of the information age, but as online and virtual presences have been increased in the last few years it only points to the growth of surveillant assemblage.