EXPOSURE

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify a construct which may be used to frame the subjective experience of surveillance in contemporary society. The paper's central question concerns whether there is a concept to describe the experience of surveillance which can then inform empirical studies. Surveillance practice has consequences for the individual, yet surveillance studies do not have a particular take on the subject. Building on some preliminary empirical observations from the workplace, the paper suggests that the notion of ‘exposure’ is a useful starting point. The paper explores the range of ways in which subjects can be exposed under surveillance, and theoretically locates the concept in relation to developments in organization theory, new media theory and surveillance theory. Two observations are made which support the centrality of the ‘exposure’ concept within studies of surveillance. The first argument is that the body interior of the surveilled subject is more open to division, classification and scrutiny, because it is seen as a source of truth, the target of public revelation or fetish. There is now a political economy around the revelation of this interiority, which calls for a non-reductive and multi-dimensional approach to the subjective experience of surveillance. The second argument is that the nature and character of exposure are products of institutional configurations, which have consequences at the level of the individual. A research agenda is developed which will frame future work exploring the experience of surveillance.

Keywords:

• surveillance
• subjectivity
• exposure
• publicity
• interiority
• body

Introduction

our society is one … of surveillance, under the surface of images one invests bodies in depth.

(Foucault 1991, p. 217)

Recent debates have established that surveillance practice is present in most areas of everyday life. Heterogeneous arrays of people, technologies and organizations collect, analyse and apply information about individuals and groups towards the end of increased security, decreased risk and the continuing generation of economic value (Ball 2002; Surveillance Studies Network 2006). In the current climate it is tempting to politicize surveillance practice with grand-scale arguments about its impact on society. Technologies, organizations and governments which produce surveillance are portrayed as seamlessly efficient and oppressive, as having the potential to cause harm on a grand scale, and surveillance is portrayed as having aggregated social and ethical consequences. Against this backdrop, surveillance is also portrayed as having profound impacts on the individual and the social relations in which they engage: privacy, liberty, trust, empowerment, mobility, and personal health and well-being are discussed at length. Since the earliest work on the surveillance society it has been suggested that surveillance has consequences for the individual, but surveillance studies still do not subscribe to a particular theory of the subject. Specifically, the experience of surveillance has not yet been addressed in any detail.

This paper aims to make modest inroads into this research problem. It aims to identify a construct which may be used to frame the subjective experience of surveillance in contemporary society. It questions whether there is a concept to describe the experience of surveillance which can then inform future empirical studies. The central argument of the paper is that the concept of ‘Exposure’ is a useful starting point. This concept is theorized using organization theory, new media theory and surveillance theory. Two key observations are made which support the centrality of exposure. First, that the body interior of the surveilled subject is more open to division, classification and scrutiny, because it is seen as a source of truth, the target of public revelation or fetish, which calls for a non-reductive and multi-dimensional approach to the subjective experience of surveillance. The second argument is that the nature and character of exposure are products of contemporary institutional configurations, which have consequences at the level of the individual.

Limited subjectivity

To date, discussions of the surveillance society have assumed a limited range of positions for the surveilled subject, reducing the experience of surveillance to one of oppression, coercion, ambivalence or ignorance. Few studies have suggested to the contrary (Koskela 2004; McGrath 2004). In some circumstances, it is the case that the experience of surveillance features coercion (for example, in the mandatory provision of DNA on arrest in the UK to feed the Police National Computer DNA database), oppression (for example, those whose international mobilities are deemed ‘risky’), ambivalence or ignorance (for example, consumers who are unaware that their data doubles are structuring their access to goods and services), but this is not the whole story. Indeed, if the subject is perfectly docile and compliant, as Foucault predicted, then we have perfect surveillance, which is rarely the case. The fact that individuals sometimes appear to do little to counter surveillance does not mean that surveillance means nothing to them. Surveillance may be tolerated or even sought after because the giving of data satisfies individual anxieties, or may represent patriotic or participative values to the individual. It may also be the case that individuals are ambivalent towards surveillance because there is sometimes no identifiable ‘watcher’ or perceivable ‘control’ being asserted, or because the pleasures of performative display override the scrutinies that come hand-in-hand with self-revelation. It is clear that a more complex take on the experience of surveillance is necessary, incorporating inter alia performativity, embodiment and psychoanalytic dimensions. Moreover, with developments in new media cultures, consumer surveillance, biometrics, workplace surveillance (Ball 2005) and ubiquitous computing indicating that the embodied individual is consistently a surveillance target, the experience of surveillance deserves more detailed consideration. Sustained effort directed towards the tracking of the individual body's whereabouts, the capture and codification of its content as indicative of the subject's legitimacy and appropriateness, the derivation of data about its actions and prediction of its intentions mean that the embodied individual is now a contested site. The next section observes that this contestation of the embodied individual represents a new ‘political economy of interiority’, which centralizes the need for deeper understanding of the experience of surveillance, particularly in terms of the many ways in which it is now ‘exposed’.

A political economy of interiority?

The original impulse to explore the experience of surveillance emerged from some recent empirical work I conducted in two outsourced call centres, one in South Africa and one in the UK. Call centres are often referred to as an exemplar of how organizations surveil employees because workers are subject to constant monitoring of their activity by computer, from the time spent on breaks to the time waiting to take calls, and the time spent emailing and filing after a call has finished. Call centres can either be ‘in-house’ (in other words, be dedicated to handling customer service and sales enquiries for one organization's products) or can operate in a stand-alone capacity, handling many different types of customers for different businesses. Depending on the type of call centre, the type of product and the type of call being handled, employees can also be subject to drug tests, psychometric tests, competency tests, and have their whereabouts tracked and logged by CCTV and RFID implanted access cards as part of stringent internal security arrangements. A more sinister side of call centre work is the now commonly understood requirement for employees to have good social competency and the ability to build up an instant rapport with the customer over the telephone (colloquially known as ‘smiling down the phone’). Each aspect of the call centre agents’ activity is captured and measured, either by the call monitoring system which measures the different activities undertaken or the call recording system which enables supervisors to score the employees’ performance in terms of compliance with company procedures, call scripts and assess their ‘social competency’.

In one sense this could be described as emotional labour1 (Hochschild 2003), but it has wider significance in surveillance terms. In the UK and South African call centres, all aspects of the employees were monitored to a very great extent. Employees engaged in formal ‘self-management’ on the telephone (e.g. only showing particular emotions, and interacting with the customer in a particular way), which has been observed elsewhere (Fleming & Sturdy 2005), but my attention focused on how the employees’ selective identity management occasionally caught them out. In the South African call centre, agents were required to make significant emotional and personal investments in their work, which was the subject of managerial scrutiny. In interviews, employees kept referring to how they were required to open up emotionally to the customer in order to (for example) get a sale and hit targets. Agents were also instructed to blame themselves (not the system, the data or the customer) if they did not hit targets, and to self-motivate to achieve those targets next time. ‘How they were feeling that day’ was nearly always cited to supervisors as the reason for a failure to hit targets. However, and despite the organization's efforts to make the employees individually and personally responsible for their performance, in the interviews, employees repeatedly avoided blaming themselves for any performance failures. The system was slow, the customer data were inaccurate, or they had not been given the right information. They would do anything to avoid the responsibility for poor performance, and if they were made to face that responsibility, many reported it as a personal disaster. Part of improving one's performance involved participating in the psychotherapeutically titled ‘performance counselling scheme’. It seemed to me that the strongly surveillant management process had rendered employees not only highly visible in terms of their performance, but also at times, emotionally vulnerable, and their vulnerabilities were also subject to management scrutiny in the counselling scheme. They were professionally and personally exposed to both the customer and their employer. Employees often managed that exposure to a great effect, performing to the required standard, and managing their personal inputs accordingly, but where this failed, their underlying anxieties were revealed and they were subject to more intense personal scrutiny. As such, in one sense, subject responses to surveillance concern performativity, but underlying that performativity are vulnerabilities which occasionally break the surface and render the subject much more accountable to whoever is watching.

This organization is a fairly extreme example of how a business sought to manipulate its employees emotionally and personally so they got the job done. However, the surveillant capturing of personal vulnerabilities, where emotion, personal flaws and other lived realities are recorded and viewed by others, has arisen in studies of other media, such as news reporting and reality TV. Altheide (2002, p. 108) comments on changes in news reporting which try to capture the most emotional and painful moments to create an ‘authentic’ and hard hitting story: ‘capturing a sob, seeing tears flow down cheeks, looking into the eyes of the interviewee during tight camera shots emerge[d] as critical features of the message …’. And while there are many different kinds of reality TV shows, there is a general observation that the more ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ the experience is depicted to be, the higher the fetish value of the image to the viewer and to the TV company (Koskela 2004). Contestants who emote deeply in front of the camera are hailed as heroic: a brief reflection about the way in which Ellen McArthur, a British yachtswoman who completed a solo circumnavigation of the globe, was portrayed neatly illustrates this point. Skeggs and Wood (2005) who study constructions of class in the ‘self-improvement’ style of reality TV, observe how these kinds of show focus voyeuristically on the personal flaws and insecurities of the contestants. Such flaws, among other things, concern the dress sense of frumpy middle-aged women,2 the parenting skills of those with badly behaved children,3 or the eating habits of overweight people.4 The technique of the camcorder video diary, constructed as a window on the participant's private world, illustrates how they painfully come to terms with disagreeable, problematic or dysfunctional aspects of their characters and their unwitting effects on the people around them.

In comparing news reporting, reality TV and call centres, there are some differences in the reasons why the subject is under surveillance: as part of the employment contract, as a willing TV participant bent on self-improvement or pure self-publicity, or as a witness or victim in a news story. However in each case, a consequence of their engagement is some representation of a personal reality which is seen as authentic, true, and of economic, cultural, symbolic and informational value. I term this ‘the political economy of interiority’: a process where an aspect of an individual's personal or private world becomes exposed to others, via a process of data representation, interpretation, sharing through intermediaries within a broader surveillance assemblage (Ball 2002). The term ‘political economy’ has been chosen because a variety of institutions associated with technology, media, employment and consumption are implicated in creating demand, or mobilizing resources, for supporting and legitimating the practices briefly described in the preceding paragraphs. The institutional aspects of this argument are discussed in a later section. I refer to interiority because in each example, surveillant activities attempt to capture the hitherto ‘unmarked’ or ‘un-inscribed’ aspects of the subject – either their psychoanalytic state, bodily content or intimate behaviour, as it surfaces and becomes enacted at the body boundary (Ball 2005). In the following section, the issue of interiority is discussed.

Surveillance and interiority

A surveillant focus on the lived body ‘interiority’ – the unmarked aspects of the subject – is worth exploring in more depth as surveillance theory has been reticent and stylized in its articulation of subjectivity to date. This starts to become clear if we consider how the subject appears in the panopticon: as a mere shadow or outline only assumed to be reflexive, internally focused and self-regulating. Progress beyond that shadowy whole alluded to in the panopticon has emerged from new media theory which portrays the surveilled subject as reflexive, psychoanalytic, performative and embodied. Each of these characteristics will be discussed in turn.

Beginning with a reference to viewing/viewed subject in architectural space, Keenan (1993) treats the window as a figurative metaphor instrumental in distinguishing between public and private and in illuminating interiors. Either by the act of looking in, or by looking out, the subject is able to reflect and identify which aspects of the interior are exposed to view, and decide for themselves where the private and unmarked places lie. This may be the case in architectural space, but virtual spaces of surveillance marginalize reflexivity and demand something more complex. We are now in a world where seeing at a distance is commonplace, automated, pan-spectral and instant: no-body is watching, but bodies are watched. Reflexivity, as initially referenced in the panopticon, almost becomes anachronistic. Technical seeing now means that invisible realities, and that which is deliberately hidden or secret can become available to view without our knowledge. Windows on the world become windows on the individual, and the individual is not guaranteed to realize they are on display. Moreover, the means of surveillance is now (unequally) distributed throughout the industrial–state complex, and individual recording and reporting of their realities using (for example) hand-held devices are widespread. Multiple windows on the world are now created, broadcast and consumed. Reflection is momentary, if it happens at all.

Psychoanalytic elements represent a further layer of complexity surrounding the subject. References to psychoanalytic states have started to appear in recent commentaries, which, as an ‘unmarked’ facet of the subject, reflect the power relations inherent in being seen (Weibel 2002). The thrill of watching surveillance footage is viewing someone who is ignorant of being under surveillance, as they behave unself-consciously and spontaneously. Discovering one's involuntary exposure provokes emotional, psychoanalytic and corporeal responses which are sometimes stultifyingly profound. Resonating with developments in reality television and web cams (Koskela 2004), it is argued that processes of voyeurism and exhibitionism have become more commonplace. The opportunity to self-display produces narcissistic identifications with the observer: sadistic pleasures can be found in the controlling gaze or masochistic pleasure in submission to the gaze.5

Psychoanalytic states hence become closely associated with aspects of performative display (McGrath 2004). Focusing on responses to surveillant art installations, and using Gould's (1995) concept of ‘performative uptake’, it is argued that the moment of capture of the subject by surveillance issues a performative challenge. That challenge, which Gould terms ‘perlocution’, concerns whether the subject is to behave in the way that the surveillance system is dictating in that particular space. The subject response, termed ‘illocution’, involves compliance with the performative challenge. The moments between the surveillance system's hailing of the subject, and the subject's response – between perlocution and illocution – are termed the ‘perlocutionary gap’. It is the subject's dilemmas about their impending exposure which creates the experience of surveillance, public selves and unmarked interiors. Any subsequent information captured is then assumed to be ‘authentic’ as the subject complies, or otherwise. The subject is hailed, and has a choice of response, however momentary.

McGrath uses a variety of illustrations from the standard example of CCTV aimed at reducing crime to scenarios where exposure is actively sought, and is an object of fantasy and desire. He explores voyeuristic gay subcultures, webcams and disabled sexuality as examples of addictive, thrilling and empowering exposure. Critically, he draws parallels between Williams’ (1989) analysis of the ‘money shot’ of the ejaculating penis and the screaming orgasmic female in pornography, and the production and consumption of surveillance images. Williams argues that the former are highly valued object representations of interiority. McGrath suggests that as in pornography, heavy investments in surveillance of the body, from biometric measures to reality TV, has placed a generic high value on the capture of authentic embodied experiences in a range of settings. The strength of McGrath's analysis is also its weakness: it assumes that the subject is aware of surveillance, which does not translate well into scenarios such as ubiquitous computing or consumer surveillance where the subject is not necessarily made aware of it in an instantaneous way, or in a way in which its response is a considered one and the performative challenge is taken up.

McGrath, however, makes several major contributions. First, he highlights how, in certain settings the unwatched interiority, and the capture and representation of it ‘in action’ has enormous political–economic value. Second, that the greater the ‘authenticity’ of the captured experience, the more valid the results of surveillance. It brings a new significance to the pain and frustration of talent-show contestants, represented by their tears and uncontrolled emotional outbursts; the faecophilic exploits of Dr Gillian McKeith on ‘You Are What You Eat’; the soothing empathetic voices of call centre employees as they are monitored and recorded for ‘training purposes’. In each case body interiority – the voice, the tears, the emotions, the faeces – becomes inscribed, valued, observed and judged by the political economies which produce it.

As such, a final layer of complexity to consider is the embodied interface between the subject and the social world. Crossley (2001), for example, establishes that human embodiment is central to the constitution of the social world, since social interactions are sensuous, i.e. of the senses. Social interaction depends on the public availability of ‘mental states’, which necessitates their embodiment. It is intersubjective processes which establish embodiment, described thus:

We are never in complete possession of ourselves … our perceptible being is captured in schemas of collective representation … our anatomical state and embodied visibility are made to signify social meanings and we, accordingly, are positioned in social space … we only come to have ourselves by first enjoining this intersubjective order and learning to see ourselves from the outside, as ‘other’.

(Crossley 2001, p. 141)

The work of Hayles (1999) is also reminiscent of these arguments. She introduces two simultaneous notions which have consequences at the level of the body subject: inscription and incorporation practices. Use and interaction with technology incorporates the body as a material entity, but also inscribes it: marks, records and traces its actions in other textual and material media, which abstract from the body, mark and govern it, but do not essentialize it. Most significantly, Grosz (1994) characterizes the body as having inner and outer analytical surfaces using the mathematical notion of the möbius6 strip, a twisting connection between the body's inner and outer analytical surfaces, to describe the continuous nature of embodied existence. She argues for the continuous conception of inner/outer of the body, because it enables a more singular interface with political economy, historical and technological dimensions of embodied experience.

In summary, developments in employment, new media and other biometric surveillance practices have produced a political economy of interiority which values the capture and coding of the embodied, lived realities of surveillance subjects. The corollary of this is that the surveilled subject needs to be thought of at the very least in reflective, embodied, psychoanalytic and performative terms. It is as if surveillance practices freeze-frame Grosz's mobius strip at the twist: where the body's interior and exterior surfaces coincide to expose different elements of the subject: emotionality, vulnerability, corporeality and personal flaws. While this is a helpful development, subject awareness is a severe limitation to the analysis in the face of surveillance techniques which are silent and covert in their operation. If the political economy of interiority, coupled with the literature discussed, is to be used to move the field of surveillance studies forward, a more generic idea which simultaneously references institutions, individuals, embodied experience and surveillance needs to be developed. In the next section, I suggest that this idea is the notion of exposure, and discuss the means by which individuals become exposed.

Framing exposure

Marx (2007, p. 47), in a commentary on the growth of volunteerism in the provision of personal information, argues that ‘a central issue is … what exposure means in an age of sense enhancing (and often covertly and remotely applied) surveillance devices, which may, or may not, be widely known about or in common use’ (original emphasis). There are a number of facets to exposure. First, what is exposed will depend upon the relative invasiveness of the data collection method, which is made problematic by remote and silent data collection. Second, it will depend upon the subjects’ prior knowledge of the data collection process, and, by inference, its consequences. It is the experience of this exposure which is of interest in this paper and it is necessary to consider the dimensions of the concept.

Exposure has been variously defined as follows:7 the act of subjecting someone to an influencing experience; abandoning without shelter or protection; presentation to view in an open or public manner; the act of exposing film to light; a picture of a person or scene in the form of a print or transparent slide; recorded by a camera on light-sensitive material; vulnerability to the elements; to the action of heat or cold or wind or rain; aspect regarding light or wind; the disclosure of something secret; the intensity of light falling on a photographic film or plate; the state of being vulnerable or exposed.

Central to these definitions are ideas which are highly relevant to practices of surveillance. Notions of vulnerability bring to mind the urban female subject under CCTV, or the RFID-chipped octogenarian with senile dementia, or indeed any of the examples discussed in the previous section. Notions of danger remind us of the application of surveillance to counter all levels of threat, for example to increase security arrangements as ‘potential terrorists’ are screened at national borders. Acknowledging public visibility as part of surveillance signals the exhibitionist reality TV contestant, actively participating in a media surveillance assemblage for personal gain and audience entertainment, or the sub-cultural webcam dweller (Koskela 2004). Exposure has the potential to thrill. Photographic notions of the intensity of light or illumination remind us of the subject in the panopticon, framed as a self-disciplining shadow by the falling of light on, and through, blinds. Finally, influencing experiences remind us of the most broad definition of surveillance as ‘any collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered’ (Lyon 2001, p. 2).

These definitions of exposure appear to frame the embodied person in whole or in part, in a manner similar to the characters explored by McGrath (2004), or the personal processes explored by Weibel (2002) and Keenan (1993) discussed earlier. The critical question at this point, however, is ‘framed in relation to what’? When one is exposed, one is exposed to something. Clearly, for our purposes, the exposure is to surveillance, but what kind of surveillance and for what purpose? Earlier in the paper it was argued that institutions associated with technology, employment media and consumption produced a political economy around the exposure of various aspects of the subject. In this section, the institutional dimension is explored in more detail. It is commonly acknowledged in surveillance studies that institutional ‘dispositifs’8 which conduct surveillance do so for different reasons, and aim to capture different aspects of the subject and position them accordingly. Because many private acts are now potentially an object of value, institutional configurations produce incentives to expose, subjects personally invest in their exposure, or at the very least tolerate it, and production–consumption intermediaries perpetuate it.

Institutions, surveillance and the subject

The relationship between institutional conditions, surveillance and the subject is currently rather ambiguous. In taking a very broad view of institutions, Lianos (2003) suggests that addressing institutions adds little to our understanding of the experience of surveillance. Instead he argues that the ‘control’ they produce is often a by-product of technocentric managerial processes which are not dependent upon or acknowledging of any intersubjective or social factors. According to Lianos, users of technological devices within a surveillance dispositif (for example, supermarket customers, or reality TV participants) are the subject of a generalized institutional projection. That projection invokes upon users a general threat, the nature of which is that users, by their activities, pose a potential risk to the institution and hence need to be controlled. These projections ensure that those subject to institutional control exhibit anticipatory conformity (Zuboff 1988), expect to be under surveillance and behave accordingly. However, in spite of the obvious normativity of what he describes, Lianos argues that institutional surveillance dispositifs do not intend to produce any cognitive and moral effects on subjects, and the experience and volition of subjects are of no consequence to the institution.

Recent articulations of institutional theory by organization theorists take a somewhat different view, although the discussion primarily relates to work organizations. Organization theorists are concerned with institutionalization processes and hence view institutions as mutable: Lianos does not problematize institutions in this way. The institutionalization process embeds meanings, notions about organizing and the like into the routines of the institution through progressively closer coding (Hasslebladh & Kallinikos 2000). Thus, ideas become institutionalized through writing strategies, the close linguistic specification of roles and the standardization of measurement systems as embodied in technological control devices and algorithms. So, a reality TV production assemblage embeds ideas about how subjects should be portrayed and captured, how the audience should be manipulated and ‘won over’, and configures its organizational socio-technical systems accordingly. Outsourced call centre assemblages which capture agent activity embed ideas about what emotions agents can and cannot introduce into the production process, and implement reporting systems, client contracts and infrastructures to ensure this happens. The international news media assemblage embeds ideas about how, for example, victims of war should be portrayed. Keenan (2004) explains how media portrayals of the Kosovo conflict in ‘humanitarian’ terms legitimated reporting teams staking out towns and villages with cameras in the hope that they might catch a ‘live death’ or other atrocity. With the piercing of bodies with bullets being the ultimate in disrupting interiority, Kosovans reported feeling like they were in a zoo, while the constant gaze of the world's media did little to halt the conflict. As such the consumption and production of exposed subjectivities is the modus operandi of these dispositifs. Subject compliance is central, and (again) by default, what the subject thinks, does or believes about their relative exposure is relevant to the control-based consequences of institutional activities.

The notion that institutional arrangements embed particular meaning systems is crucial. Participation in an institution means that there is a defining relation between the subject and the institution. Ideas about surveillance subjects as ‘carriers’ of the surveillance institution (Westphal & Zajac 2001; Phillips et al. 2004) mean that subjects may use different institutional meaning systems (i) to define the boundary between what they believe is public and private in their worlds (Keenan 1993), (ii) to identify and comply with the power relations in that world (Weibel 2002) and (iii) to display a relatively appropriate or inappropriate response (McGrath 2004). This is particularly that case if, as Lianos argues, outside the dispositif the subject is at relative liberty. The subject's reasons to become exposed are of particular interest, and as a dimension of this, issues of desire, seduction, confession, anxiety, self-improvement and judgement arise.

Legitimating exposure

The final strand of this argument attempts to identify whether personal exposure has become legitimated by particular institutions. Where is the notion that personal exposure and the capturing of ever more private aspects of the self is desirable, normal and harmless, located? Three recent commentaries shed some light on this question. The first commentary by Marx (2007) points out that ‘soft surveillance’, which is a less intrusive means of personal data collection, makes the giving of body data less controversial, when couched in particular languages and a particular media and cultural climate. Aspects of this climate are examined by Furedi (2004) who argues that a rise in ‘Therapy Culture’ normalizes public displays of vulnerability. And Dean (2002) argues that the need to be informed in the climate of endless amounts of information catapults the repeated exposure and disclosure of secrets into the public domain.

The desire to participate and volunteer information is examined by Marx (2007) as he attributes the rise of soft surveillance as an explanation for the increase in voluntary submission of personal data. Soft surveillance is surveillance which gains compliance by persuasion, rather than coercion, but still denies the individual any meaningful choice in the matter,9 emphasizes the needs of the community rather than the rights of the individual and scans at a distance rather than crossing intimate body borders.10 A number of cultural and technological forces are argued to promulgate this state of affairs. The first is a commodification of privacy as something that can be traded for a little more security, in a risk averse, consumer-oriented society. This is further fuelled by the mass media's depiction of public fear and perceptions of crises. Second, with a glut of searchable information, individuals are driven to find out the ‘truth’ for themselves, using powerful information search engines to confirm their suspicions and spy on others. Allied to this, Marx also identifies a cultural sub-theme involving the ‘willing and gleeful exposure of private information’ to the end of some kind of narcissistic psychological gratification at the individual level. Two further pieces of work elaborate this point.

The first piece of work reflects earlier observations made about the relevance of psychoanalytic states. Furedi's (2004) insight into what he terms ‘therapy culture’ concerns the growth in cultural values surrounding the practice of therapy. He states ‘… with the rise of the confessional mode, the blurring of the line between the private and public and the powerful affirmation for emotionalism, there is little doubt that is has become a formidable cultural force’ (p. 17). The latter point is of particular relevance for surveillance. Therapy culture legitimates the public expression of emotions which are usually expressed within the realm of the private, and it has a general unease towards the private sphere. Within therapy culture, however, ‘private’ is construed as pertaining to family life. Families are said to be the realm of abuse, where dysfunctional relationships and skewed emotions are said to flourish. And, when exposed in the public arena, such issues become a caricature, a fetish item and a consumable object. Rebranding or repositioning the private subject as ‘in need of self-improvement’ effectively means that the population as a whole is turned into a potential therapy case, with overt behaviours covered by a blanket suspicion of the evaluative therapists’ gaze. Informal networks which surround the private world – pertaining to kinship and friendship – become the object of organization, classification and division.

The second piece of work is that of Dean (2002) who contextualizes exposure in the information economy and technoculture. As technoculture revolves around the production and publicity of better, faster and cheaper information, a primary opposition is created between what is hidden and what is revealed. Publicity is hence its organizing principle, built on the ‘public's right to know’ and the ‘right to be informed’. This wider availability of information produces a concomitant exteriorization of belief in technologies of dissemination, representation and surveillance. Dean's critique locates legitimation for ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ – a common misconception in the surveillance society. Anything which is not public knowledge constitutes something which is withheld or denied. Suspicion compels subjects to search, find and link information for themselves. Some individuals explicitly perceive themselves as surveillance targets, required to reveal more about themselves in order to avoid further scrutiny or to promote their own ‘truths’. As she argues:

Technoculture materialises the belief that the key to democracy can be found in uncovering secrets. Even if nobody really believes, satellites, the internet and surveillance cameras believe for us … The secret motivates continued efforts on publicity's behalf … Include just a few more people, a few more facts; uncover those denied details, those repressed desires; do this and there will be justice.

(Dean 2001, p. 646)

Dean provides a convincing explanation as to how industrial–state arrangements have produced the institutional conditions which promote revelation and self-exposure. Wide public suspicion of interactive media ‘versions’ of events, the compulsion to disclose and the drive to surveil make the personal political. Dean urges us to reconsider the boundaries of the unmarked subject in relation to surveillance systems.

Research agenda and conclusions

The question of the individual and surveillance is hence complex and evolving, characterized by theoretical uncertainties as well as practical and empirical developments. In this paper I have combined specific work on surveillance from media theory, and more general arguments from organization theory and surveillance theory to frame it. By concentrating on how the subject is ‘positioned’ under surveillance, ‘exposure’ is potentially useful as a concept because it applies to subjects in various domains of surveillance and interpolates not only surveillance practices which render the subject visible, but also the different elements of the subject which are exposed. Previous analyses suggest that there are layers to the surveilled subject: performativities which directly respond to surveillance imperatives, and deeper personal investments which occasionally break the surface and are afforded great value when captured. In the final section of this paper, I make a number of suggestions as to what should be done next.

The main suggestion is to take a non-reductive multi-dimensional view of the subject. This means that there are a number of aspects of the subject which are all relevant to surveillance, which should be equally emphasized. There are three advantages to taking such a view. The first is simply pragmatic, and is connected to how public debates around privacy and surveillance are currently constructed in simplistic terms. Individual accounts, where they occur, usually relate to a scandalous, extreme or unjust form of exposure. Revealing the complexities of surveillance for the subject might help inform these debates. Moreover, the apparent lack of protest against surveillance on the part of the general public does not mean that it is universally accepted. It also does not mean that the question of being exposed does not raise dilemmas or difficulties for the individual. How those dilemmas and difficulties are uncovered and expressed are primarily an issue for the designers of research. Uncovering the nature of individual reaction to surveillance, and variations in awareness thereof may help to inform organizations and governments about modes of surveillance which are socially and ethically responsible.

The second advantage is that we lose something analytically if we focus on just, for example, a discursive notion of the subject. While others have argued that surveillance systems reduces the body ontology to one of information (Van Der Ploeg 2002), the reality of that lived body in relation to surveillance is a far more complex issue. Conceptualizing surveillance subjects as (for example) ‘positioned within a discourse about exposure’ might tell us something about the existence of an institutional discourse but tells us little about what subjects invest in sustaining those positions (or otherwise) and why (Hollway & Jefferson 2005). The intersubjectivity so overlooked by institutions is central to uncovering these investments, and hence goes beyond first, cognitively driven rational choice-based models of the individual, and second, models which assume that the inner and outer worlds are mere reflections of each other. Given the requirements of different surveillance dispositifs for subjects to be ever more personal and emotionally revealing, something more is required. In the only piece of published research to date which documents and demonstrates this method, Hollway and Jefferson (2005) have managed to show that in addition to social and discursive explanations of subjectivity, exploring subject histories and biographical evidence revealed that key subject identifications either with family members (such as mother/father) or with moralities (e.g. honest/dishonest) explained why individuals place themselves in potentially difficult situations. This is potentially of great value to surveillance studies; where to be exposed, observed and judged under surveillance is frequently a disconcerting and uncomfortable experience, which may give rise to all manner of anxieties but simultaneously be of benefit to the subject.

The third advantage is that this view identifies new possibilities for resistance. If the preceding analysis is correct, then it is true that surveillance dispositifs are becoming more focused on the unmarked interiors of subjects as authenticators of all kinds of things. However if Dean's (2002) commentary holds, then the secret ‘authentic’ interior of the subject is by definition always beyond the reach of surveillance. In effect, this politicizes the decision to comply with or perform a surveillance request. Koskela (2004) makes similar arguments, suggesting that in a new ‘confessional society’ exhibitionism becomes empowering. The complete exposure of oneself, leaving nothing hidden or secret overwhelms the surveillance assemblage, and hence could be construed as resistant. Further understanding of the perlocutionary gap, moments of identification and reflections on exposure will further articulate what those resistant possibilities might be. An added complication is that sometimes the subject is not aware of being under surveillance but has been exposed by it anyway. With the growth in ubiquitous computing this becomes an even more salient issue to be addressed by theorists. Answers may lie in a number of areas: a consideration of the effects of chains of intermediaries (Ball 2002) on the surveilled in terms of where ‘exposure’ occurs and whether it is coincidental with data capture; extending the temporalities and spatialities of exposure beyond that of immediate data capture, suggesting that exposure is not always directly mediated by surveillance technology. Awareness of surveillance may arise far away from the domain of data capture, yet that awareness may be as profound is if one was staring into the empty black lens of a security camera, or submitting a urine sample for a drug test. Spaces for reflection are still relevant, even if these spaces do not emerge while the subject is under surveillance.

As such, documenting the experience of surveillance in terms of exposure is not likely to be a simple, quick or easy task. However, there are various issues that could become objects of study:

• An identification of the range of exposures to surveillance and their documentation from the subject's point of view, considering what is exposed, why and how.

• The origin, nature and coherence of institutional values, technologies and practices which produce the political economy of interiority, and the intentionality of that production.

• The coincidence of these values with individual experience.

• The relative importance of reflective, psychoanalytic and performative factors in a surveillance encounter.

• The elements of the subject which produce the most varied response to surveillance.

• Temporalities and spatialities where exposure occurs, and its relative proximity to data collection.

• Chains of intermediaries and the relative location of ‘watching’ as coincidental with data capture.

• The operation of boundaries around and between surveillance encounters.

• Strategies and tactics of resistance.

• The contextual importance of digital media and the impact of the networked society.

This paper started with a simple research problem: that the surveillance society is said to have impacts on the individual, but surveillance studies have not yet developed a take on the surveilled subject. It then attempted to offer a modest response to the question of whether it was possible to develop a transdisciplinary concept which enabled the experience of surveillance to be understood. Through a discussion of current media and workplace practices, it was established that growing value is attached to intimate portrayals of the lived, unmarked body interior, which was termed ‘the political economy of interiority’. By connecting commentaries in new media and surveillance theory, it was established that surveilled subjectivities are characterized by a series of complex layers, each of which has equal importance, and can be exposed by surveillance. Of critical importance is the institutional dimension of the political economy of interiority, particularly the extent to which institutional surveillance practices prompt different responses from the subject, and which elements of the subject they focus on and why. Specific developments around soft surveillance, therapy culture and technoculture were suggested to be contemporary legitimating forces around the close exposure of private aspects of the person. The ultimate aim of this paper is to stimulate future research on the experience of surveillance. To this end, it has argued for multi-dimensional and non-reductive approaches, which take the whole of the surveillance assemblage into account.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Wendy Chun, Stephen Graham, Kevin Haggerty, Clive Norris, members of The Surveillance Project and The Sarai Centre for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

The author would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding research which contributed to the production of this paper.

Notes

Hochschild defines emotional labour as ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display [which] is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value’.

What Not To Wear (BBC, UK).

Who Rules the Roost (Channel 4, UK).

You Are What You Eat (Channel 4, UK).

Sociology has, of late, also taken a psychoanalytic turn, which is timely for our purposes. Psychoanalytic sociology acknowledges the affective, or emotional element of subjectivity: powerful affective forces and embodied visceral phenomena which occur intersubjectively, and through mediated intersubjectivity (i.e. re-presentation in other media). In psychoanalysis the emotions are not confined to either the purely mental or biological realm, but exist in the frontier between the conscious/unconscious mind and the frontier between minds. Aspects of mind, body, conscious and unconscious communication, transitional phenomena (how we learn to negotiate the relationship between our inner and outer worlds) and discourse are all of interest. Indeed Clarke (2003) suggests that introducing psychoanalysis gives a more holistic approach to embodied subjectivity, encompassing sociality, corporeality and mind.

A mobius strip is a continuous closed surface with only one side; formed from a rectangular strip by rotating one end 180 degrees and joining it with the other end.

http://www.wordreference.com/definition/exposure [Accessed 9 August 2007].

The word ‘dispositif’ has no single English equivalent, but can mean the ‘socio-technical system’, ‘network’, ‘device’, ‘mechanism’ or ‘social apparatus’. Foucault defined ‘dispositif’ in Foucault (1980).

Marx gives the examples of a justice department ‘watch your car’ scheme, in which a citizen places a sticker in the window informing police that they can stop and search car under any circumstances. Or organizations who state to their employees ‘we don't require anyone to take a drug test, only those who choose to work here’.

For example, technologies of consumption which profile individuals as they shop, or non-invasive DNA sampling which can now be taken from saliva or hair strands.