You Can Run

In the final scene of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), a film that weaves an elaborate skein of paranoiac connections out of the intricacies of electronic surveillance, the central character (played, dazed and haggard, by Gene Hackman) finds that the sinister web of eavesdropping in which he is entangled has finally contracted to the taut space of his own apartment. The oddly named Harry Caul (whose surname, thick spectacles and creepily transparent plastic mac already suggest that he is locked in his own voyeuristic world), having failed to discover the truth about a taped conversation and the malign forces that seem so interested in the recording, becomes convinced that he himself has been subject all along to invisible surveillance. He tears his apartment to pieces trying to find the bug he knows must be there, but fails to find it, and the film ends with him surrounded by shredded furniture and ripped-up floorboards. Something odd, meanwhile, has happened to Coppola's camera: its pans jerkily back and forth across the ruined space, in an impossible imitation of a surveillance camera (if it were really what it seems, Harry would surely have found it). Surveillance, it turns out, has been ever present and wholly invisible.

In the history of efforts to conceptualize the techniques of modern surveillance, The Conversation is a direct descendant of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Purloined Letter (1845), in which a government minister steals a compromising missive from his queen's bedroom and secretes it (so the police are convinced) somewhere in his own apartment.1 Poe's detective Dupin looks on, amused, as the Chief of Police subjects the entire building to the most sensitive scrutiny: slicing open the bindings of books, examining the furniture with a microscope, even probing the moss between the bricks and finding it infuriatingly undisturbed. Eventually Dupin reveals that the letter can only have been 'hidden' in plain view, pinned to a board beneath the noses of the investigating officers. The most effective form of surveillance, it transpires, is not the prying, paranoid eye of the state but the detective's pure imagination: a sort of fatal telepathy between Dupin and his quarry. Vision, Poe implies, is precisely what gets in the way of true surveillance: an intuition recently given credence by the almost supernatural powers of new technolgies like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).

The insights of Poe and Coppola are actually entirely at odds with the way in which we usually imagine the logic of contemporary - especially technological - surveillance. The model that still pervades most attempts to understand or oppose the burgeoning industry in surveillance technologies is derived from the writings of Jeremy Bentham, who in 1787 travelled to Russia where he saw his brother Samuel's design for a factory. In the planned observation of the factory workers Bentham discerned the seed of an extraordinary architecture, a vast spying and eavesdropping device he named the Panopticon.2 In his plans for an edifice that he claimed would function equally well as a prison, a factory, a hospital or a school, Bentham imagined a huge circular building, comprising numerous cells watched over from a central, complicatedly shrouded, vantage point. A single sentinel could conceivably control hundreds of prisoners, each easily visible and utterly detached from adjacent inmates.

Largely thanks to the writings of Michel Foucault, who saw in the Panopticon the image of a whole 'carceral society' that would proliferate in subsequent centuries, Bentham's all-seeing eye, with its strict lines of sight and obsession with the dialectic between invisible viewer and all-too-visible subject, has become the guiding metaphor for intellectual and artistic critiques of surveillance. A recent anthology, Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (2002), traces its history largely in terms of panoptic vision: the endless interconnected array of closed-circuit links and reality TV programmes that seem to suggest we live in a world surveyed precisely by Benthamite optics.3 But another, less visible, more ethereal, mode of surveillance seems to have appeared too: one that demands new (or perhaps venerable but resuscitated) models. Maybe, as Greg Elmer argues in his book Profiling Machines (2004), we need to abandon 'a philosophical tradition overdetermined by questions of vision and light'.4

The technology has shifted elsewhere: into the very air we breathe and the objects we cling to. Most dramatically, the technology of RFID promises a kind of surveillance in which any object or any space is potentially traversed by immaterial but implacable signals. Relying on a minute transmitting tag tracked by a receiving and reading apparatus, RFID is descended from the IFF (Identify: Friend or Foe) system developed to identify Allied aircraft during World War II. Used in the 1960s and '70s to track dangerous nuclear equipment, it later found commercial applications in the observation of farm animals and rolling stock and in the form of Remote Keyless Entry in the car industry. But from such limited origins it has recently threatened to infiltrate every area of private and public life: most obviously as it takes over from ageing barcode technology as a way of tracking commodities (as in recent controversial experiments by Walmart and Tesco). It also provides the means for remote payments; although one such system, the Oyster card currently employed by London Transport, seems to have partly missed the point, requiring a whole new set of public instructions on deploying one's card with the correct gesture, at the right distance from the reader. More alarmingly, a head teacher in Buffalo, New York, has issued his pupils with RFID cards, tracking their attendance, library borrowings and cafeteria purchases with the same system as a Texas jail.

It is as if Bentham's Panopticon has disappeared, evanesced into the ether, only to return as the ghost of panoptic vision, now dispersed into everything we touch. The proper model for thinking about this novel field of surveillance may not be the Panopticon at all, but something closer to Poe's eerie telepathy, or the mystical character of the commodity, of which Marx wrote in Capital: 'as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness [...] it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.'5