'Regulating belonging: surveillance, inequality, and
the cultural production of abjection' by Torin Monahan in (2017) 10(2)
Journal of Cultural Economy 191-206 comments
Conditions of abjection are increasingly viewed as problems to be
managed with surveillance. Across disparate domains, bodies that
challenge normalized constructions of responsible neoliberal citizenship
are categorized, monitored, policed, and excluded in dehumanizing and
often violent ways. This paper explores the role of surveillance in such
processes. The registers covered include everyday abjection (welfare
systems, battered women’s shelters, and homelessness), criminalized
poverty (police targeting of the poor and emerging ‘poverty capitalism’
arrangements), and the radically adrift (the identification, tracking, and
containment of refugees). In each of these cases, surveillance is yoked to
structural inequalities and systems of oppression, but it also possesses a
cultural dimension that thrusts marginalized and dehumanized
subjectivities upon the abject Other. Therefore, I argue that in order to
critique the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of
contemporary surveillance, it is necessary to take seriously the
mythologies that give meaning to surveillance practices and the
subjectivities that are engendered by them.
Monahan argues
Although there has been renewed critical attention to surveillance in the realms of national security
and corporate data gathering, especially in online contexts, the gendered and racialized dimensions
of contemporary surveillance remain largely underexplored. This appears to be the case especially
with regards to the treatment of poor and marginalized populations, where conditions of abjection
are increasingly viewed as problems to be managed with surveillance. For instance, the poor on welfare submit to scrutiny of their purchases, as they are enmeshed in systems designed to detect transgressions and exclude or punish those who are found unworthy. People on probation, especially in
the United States, yield to invasive electronic monitoring for minor infractions and are charged fees
for this ‘service’, which is often outsourced to private companies that profit handsomely from this
form of poverty capitalism. When seeking jobs, the unemployed encounter a battery of surveys,
background checks, and drug tests, also frequently at their own expense, in order to qualify for
the possibility of obtaining a job. Homeless people are treated as populations to be managed and
tracked through electronic systems deployed at shelters, as their privacy is continuously eroded,
their makeshift dwellings dismantled, and their fragile sense of stability undermined. Refugees fleeing the radical insecurity of civil war are scrutinized as potential health or terrorist threats and forced to provide biometric data for United Nations tracking systems, paradoxically categorizing refugees
both as discrete individuals to be sorted and followed and as an undifferentiated mass to be contained in camps.
Viewing these dynamics through the lens of surveillance can draw attention to the ways in which
unequal control mechanisms define the operations of contemporary institutions and profoundly
shape people’s experiences and life chances. As David Lyon explains, surveillance can be understood
broadly as ‘the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence,
management, protection or direction’ (Lyon 2007, p. 14). Thus, more than simply watching, surveillance practices exert influence and reproduce power relations through technological and non-technological means alike. Through the imposition of categories, processes, and differential forms of
exposure, surveillance becomes a project of social ordering and world-making, even if its efficacy
at achieving its primary intended goals (e.g. crime control) is limited or inconsistent (Coleman
2012). As deployed here, surveillance manifests as a multiplicity of techniques that conjure, coalesce
around, and mediate the experiences of abject subjects.
Abjection signifies not only extreme need or destitution, but also a kind of social exclusion
wherein the existence of the individual is called into question. Abjection implies a fundamental
lack of fit with existing social and spatial orders (Sibley 1995), rendering the abject subject unknowable and largely invisible, at least as a collective ethical responsibility (Kristeva 1982; Murphy 2006).
Further, modern states are constituted in part through the paradox of the socially abject, or the
‘inclusive excluding’ of various outcasts within states, justifying the enforcement of border controls
and legitimizing dominant mechanisms for the provision of order (Tyler 2013). As the examples
above indicate, surveillance plays an important role in policing bodies and maintaining boundaries
between inside and outside, self and other. Moments of unwanted visibility or presence – of the poor,
the homeless, the refugee – seem to compel mechanisms of intensified control. Such control mechanisms delineate parameters of temporary existence for the compliant, while excluding those marked
as dangerous or socially illegible. Therefore, through categorization and sorting, surveillance enacts
forms of structural and symbolic violence against marginalized Others.
Surveillance in this sense is about the maintenance of social order and the production of subjects.
As Lisa Nakamura writes, compulsory forms of surveillance increasingly ‘serve two functions: to
regulate, define, and control populations; and to create new gendered, racialized, and abled or disabled bodies through digital means’ (Nakamura 2015, p. 221). In the first instance, surveillance is a
mode of ‘social sorting’, of categorizing populations according to perceived risk or value and treating
those respective groups differently (Gandy 1993; Lyon 2003; Bigo 2006). Such surveillance is fundamental to how modern organizations operate: identifying, monitoring, analyzing, and sorting in frequently automated ways that are ambiguous to those affected by them (Giddens 1990; Thrift and French 2002; Graham and Wood 2003; Gilliom and Monahan 2013). In the second instance, surveillance
fuses with existing cultural prejudices to coproduce unequal subjectivities and render them natural.
Simone Browne describes this as a process of ‘digital epidermalization’, where surveillance systems
‘do the work of alienating the subject by producing a truth about the racial body and one’s identity
(or identities) despite the subject’s claims’ (Browne 2015, p. 110). When interpellated by such exercises of power, individuals are prone to adapt their sense of self to the discriminatory classifications
and treatments that characterize their lives.
This paper explores the merging of these structural and cultural dimensions of surveillance for the
regulation of abject bodies. The field of surveillance studies has been adept at theorizing structural
forms of inequality that are reproduced through surveillance (e.g. Koskela 2000; Rule 2007; Gandy
2009; Staples 2014). Classification and social sorting are the primary ways that this occurs, as
unequal power relations and political contingencies are masked by processes of technological
abstraction and mediation (Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Currah and Moore 2009; Guzik 2009; Morozov
2013). A cultural turn, however, productively shifts the focus to the mythologies that give meaning to
surveillance practices and the subjectivities that are engendered by them (e.g. Monahan 2010, 2011;
Ball 2009; Andrejevic 2013; Browne 2015; Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015; Hall 2015). Such an emphasis
is vital in trying to account for the ways that surveillance contributes to gendered, racialized, and
classed violence. For instance, cultural narratives (e.g. about dangerousness or unworthiness) are
often key drivers for the adoption of surveillance systems that in turn reify those discriminatory categories and subject positions (Coleman 2012; McCahill 2002). In combination, structural and cultural dimensions of surveillance synergize in destructive ways: on one hand, affording a seemingly
apolitical objectification of the disadvantaged, and, on the other hand, providing a cultural script
for the dehumanization and demonization of the Other.
In the sections that follow, I analyze three different but overlapping registers of surveillance:
everyday abjection of being on welfare, in battered women’s shelters, or homeless, subjected to the
possibility of constant scrutiny and judgment; criminalized poverty, which pulls the poor into extractive and violent relationships, mediated by surveillance, while public and private institutions profit;
and the radically adrift, where refugees seeking survival and stability are channeled into regimes of
state surveillance and control. The concept I build upon for this analysis is that of marginalizing surveillance (Monahan 2010). Marginalizing surveillance means the production of conditions and subjectivities of marginality through the application of surveillance systems.1 For each register analyzed,
cultural narratives – from politicians, the mainstream media, or threatened citizens – powerfully
inflect the forms of marginalizing surveillance deployed and the treatment of those under the
gaze. While structural and cultural dimensions of surveillance weave together to govern the abject
and make them legible, they simultaneously reproduce forms of violence and exclusion.
