Surveillance & Buadrillard's Simulacrum

1. Surveillance in the
Simulacrum
Mathias Klang
@klangable
mklang@fordham.edu

2. The
dominant
narrative
& the gaze

3. Resistance to Power?
1. Classical Liberalism (18th century) Juridical Power (the monarch
decides over right to death)
2. Neo-liberalism power beyond juridical (Measurement & norms)
3. Biopower (statistics & labelling)

4. Power was exercised mainly as a
means of deduction, a subtraction
mechanism, a right to appropriate a
portion of the wealth, a tax of
products, goods and services, labor
and blood, levied on subjects… a right
of seizure… it culminated in the
privilege to seize hold of life in order
to suppress it.
Foucault History of Sexuality v1 p 136

5. Is it art?

6. Diego Velazquez
Las Melinas 1656

7. Thomas Gainsborough
Mr and Mrs Andrews (1750)

8. John Singleton Copley
Portrait of Sam Adams
(1772)

9. Expressionism
Edvard Munch
The Scream (1893)

10. Dadaism
Marcel Duchamp
Fountain

11. Abstract
Expressionism
Jackson Pollock
Number 10 (1949)

12. Pop Art
Andy Warhol
Red Disaster (1973)

14. Without a dominant narrative power
is redefined. Control by desire.
So is Bogard saying that being able to
predict the actions of a population is a
more effective form of control than making
the population think it is constantly being
watched?
Do you believe that people want to be
‘private’ in certain aspects of their life
because of over-surveillance or has there
always been an innate feeling that we are
being watched?
Does constant surveillance morph people’s
personalities over time?
if simulations are truly a way of surveilling,
or something else? Are simulations a
violation of privacy if they are not
technically real?

15. Baudrillard “…asserts that, as simulation ascends
to a dominant position in postmodern societies,
the sign’s traditional function of representation,
i.e. its power to “mirror reality” and separate it
from false appearances, comes to an end, along
with its role in the organization of society.” p34

16. “The utopian goal of simulation…is not to reflect
reality, but to reproduce it as artifice; to “liquidate
all referentials” and replace them with signs of the
real. The truth of the sign henceforth is self-
referential and no longer needs the measure of an
independent reality for its verification.

17. INSERT IDEA CHANEL
How Is Orphan Black An Illustration of the Simulacrum? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios
https://youtu.be/Eg7Z_28Uk6g

18. Baudrillard shares Foucault’s sense
that the panoptic model of enclosure
and its disciplinary logic are
historically finished.

19. The discipline enforced by panoptic surveillance
evolves into a general “system of deterrence,” in
which submission to a centralized gaze becomes a
general codification of experience that allows no
room for deviation from its model. In post-
panoptic society, subjectivity is not produced by
surveillance in the conventional sense of
hierarchical observation, but by codes intended to
reproduce the subject in advance.

20. “…power does not vanish, but
becomes simulated power, no longer
instantiated and invested in the real,
but rather reproduced in codes and
models.”

21. We are not determined by norms.
We are determined by the
repeated performance of norms.
Judith Butler

22. “In a sense, all signification takes
place within the orbit of the
compulsion to repeat; ‘agency’, then,
is to be located within the possibility
of a variation on that repetition.”
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, p 185

23. Surveillance as Biopower
How does personal
technology increase the
constant surveillance of our
bodies?
Is invisibly guiding people towards
information that reinforces their biases
(presumably what they want) a form of
corporate efficiency, informational slavery,
or both?
Does this type of
surveillance bother
us? Why not?
But how can we really
trust algorithms in
surveillance?

24. Labelling is Power
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon,
directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated,
preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured,
commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the
wisdom nor the virtue to do so.” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

25. The new normal
IQ, Standardized testing, BMI…
Meritocracy

26. Security Theatre