Surveillance of things historically preceded and enabled surveillance of individuals

Evidence

The first steps taken at Rochefort concerned things rather than men, precious commodities, rather than patients. The arrangements of fiscal and economic supervision preceded the techniques of medical observation: placing of medicines under lock and key, recording their use; a little later, a system was worked out to verify the real number of patients, their identity, the units to which they belonged; then one began to regulate their comings and goings; they were forced to remain in their wards; to each bed was attached the name of its occupant; each individual treated was entered in a register that the doctor had to consult during the visit; later came the isolation of contagious patients and separate beds. Gradually, an administrative and political space was articulated upon a therapeutic space; it tended to individualize bodies, diseases, symptoms, lives and deaths; it constituted a real table of juxtaposed and carefully distinct singularities. Out of discipline, a medically useful space was born. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 223

Categorization

• QUESTION: A striking inversion: at Rochefort, fiscal control over commodities came before medical observation of patients. Does this pattern — surveillance-first over objects/records, then people — generalize to modern data surveillance?
• XREF: Precedent for the claim that surveillance technology (records, registers, identity checks) precedes and enables the disciplining of bodies — relevant to tracking how Oceania’s telescreens supplant older surveillance forms. — connects to: Seventeenth-century plague measures fixed every person in place under surveillance — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 304; Widespread life monitoring grew from the 1980s onward — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 115; Surveillance itself is ancient; data appropriation of life is the novelty — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 151 (+1 more)