Jordan Crandall recently posted some interesting notes on nettime from his presentation at the “Everyday Life of Surveillance” seminar in Durham.
Crandall talks about the “tracking apparatus” – new methods of data collection, analysis and prediction which the canonical concepts of the panopticon and the carceral fail to comprehend. Instead, he develops his concept of the assemblage, which encompasses a new modality of power:
It is not “control” as such: When a degree of stabilization is reached (as enacted in practice), or a certain materialization threshold crossed, effects can be produced. In this way actors can become functional, operational. But not necessarily. To act as an agent of control, there is a balance to be achieved between stabilization and destabilization. A certain degree of reliability, but not rigidity. It is a fine line, a precarious zone.
Crandall develops some interesting thoughts on the nature of tracking and prediction and on the way these phenomena can be understood – not merely in terms of surveillance but also as a way to “guide disorder” by means of “statistical inclinations”. In my view, the text offers a range of viable options for surveillance studies to move forward into more organisational, dispersed and networked conceptual frameworks.
One thing that left me wondering, though, is if he actually endorses Chris Anderson’s view that scientific method has become obsolete. (Which has been thoroughly and rightfully criticised by Bernhard Rieder.) On the one hand, he affirmatively quotes Anderson on data mining: “We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.” On the other hand he says: “When we track — when we study how something or someone is moving in order to predict its future location or orientation — we subject everything to the classifying schemes available to us. We fasten our objects (and subjects) onto a classifying grid or database-driven identity assessment.”
Interesting read, in any case.
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