Surveillance controls populations chiefly through internalized self-policing

Evidence

In the late eighteenth century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a prison structure that would allow for constant surveillance of prisoners. Bentham labeled this semicircular prison structure the panopticon. It allowed for the control of prisoners because guards were able to constantly watch them and prisoners were aware they were constantly being watched (Lyon 1994). In Discipline and Punish, Foucault built on Bentham’s panopticon and developed the concept of panopticism, which is the process wherein certain populations are subjected to constant surveillance and discipline, highlighting relationships of power in society: “The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it, produces homogenous effects of power” (1995: 202). For Foucault, the structure of the prison is no longer physically necessary for social control because individuals are aware of their visibility and internalize their own subjection: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (1995: 203). The power of surveillance is not just in the state’s ability to surveil but in the self-surveillance of a society’s population. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 44

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes panopticism/Foucault’s framework that the whole book applies to Muslim Americans — the theoretical engine for how surveillance produces racialized suspects.
• XREF: The self-surveillance mechanism connects directly to the reader’s mapped slot on internalized suspicion; also evokes the surveillance-to-self-discipline dynamic in Zamyatin’s We. — connects to: Control shifts from external surveillance to a deterrence system internalized as the self. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 108; Surveillance harms by invading the self’s space on another’s behalf. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 471; As citizens become more legible, the monitoring institutions themselves grow opaque. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 391 (+9 more)