Credit: Kyle Glenn (via Unsplash)

Ideas

The pleasures of surveillance: Re-reading Marwick through Foucault

By Richard Gall / November 18, 2021 5:36 pm

Alice Marwick’s conception of social surveillance (Marwick, 2012) builds heavily on Foucault’s notion of “capillaries of power” in which power ‘flows’ between individuals in day-to-day life. “In this model,” Marwick writes, “power is ever-present, fluid, and at work in the mundane day-to-day activities that make up human life.” It’s a compelling argument given the quotidian nature of online activities today, but Marwick neglects an important aspect of both the experience of social media surveillance (and Foucault’s theoretical thinking): pleasure. In other words, she doesn’t take the fact that so many people enjoy looking at people on social media seriously enough.

Indeed, Marwick discounts the idea that surveillance can offer some kind of pleasure or joy. She rejects Anders Albrechtslund’s 2008 article in which Albrechtslund seeks to “develop the social and playful aspects of surveillance,” and instead argues that social surveillance builds on “models of hierarchy that incorporate very real power differentials that exist beyond state/subject or corporation/consumer, based on social status, race, class, gender, social roles and so forth.”

This isn’t to say that Marwick is wrong to argue against Albrechtslund. Albrechtsund writes as if social media is simply a playing field for patterns of observation and performance (Albrechtsund, 2008). The fact he uses the word “empower” more than “power” throughout the essay is an indication of the way his argument is more interested in the participation of users than the way this participation is structured by the design and economics of social media. But what Marwick doesn’t do is interrogate surveillance in broader terms of social knowledge.

While her example of Facebook stalking is useful in demonstrating the ways in which social knowledge is a tool for violence or control – Marwick writes that it “enables users to assert power over others by gaining a greater picture of their actions and identities” – this very specific example – in which power relations are already problematic and strained – can’t account for the more banal ways in which individuals watch each other on social media.

The only way we can do that is by thinking about social knowledge in terms of pleasure. For this, it’s worth turning to the Foucault of The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. While the book is ultimately an examination of power in the development of legal and medical discourses in the nineteenth century, the way it treats pleasure almost as power’s unconscious or underbelly is interesting in the context of the way we use social media and in the way it fuels ostensibly ‘addictive’ behaviours. Foucault writes of:

The pleasure that comes from exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. (Foucault, 1978, p.45.)

It’s not hard to see how this parallels the nature of social surveillance today. Indeed, Foucault’s argument can be used to provide a further dimension through which we can read a number of Marwick’s ethnographic examples.

Take, for example, Madison and her group of friends who ‘stalk’ a “group of really pretty senior girls” on Facebook and “talk about their pictures and how pretty they are and all that and being jealous of them.” (Marwick, 2012, p. 388.) Marwick doesn’t seem to be able to draw out what’s actually going on here, writing only of the “power differential” and suggesting that it highlights how “social surveillance both reinforces and compensates for the ebb and flow of power between individuals.” However, if read through Foucault’s notion of this persistent cycle of pleasure and power, we can see how social surveillance can be a source of pleasure, a way of Madison and her friends to observe and comment on the way in which the ‘popular girls’ present and broadcast themselves. Perhaps the act of observation even subverts the power differential at play. While that might be a stretch (after all, have power dynamics actually changed?), the practice of social surveillance nevertheless creates social moments in which Madison and her friends can negotiate and explore their individual and collective subjectivity both as a group of friends and as members of a wider student body.

Towards the end of the essay Marwick notes that social surveillance is reciprocal. “People create content with the expectation that other people will view it, whether that means editing their own self-presentation to appeal to an audience, or doing something controversial to gain attention. But in order to best be seen, the users in this section must monitor the information of others to create the right context.” (Marwick, 2012, p.390.)

This is astute, but it can be better understood by bringing pleasure into the frame. When Marwick writes that “the reciprocity of social surveillance engenders both disclosure and concealment,” (Marwick, 2012, p.390) it’s hard not to think of the importance of confession in The History of Sexuality, where Foucault presents it as a primary mechanism for producing discourses on sexuality and desire. In the context of social media, we can see the back and forth of observation and self-fashioning (or more specifically the performance of self-fashioning) operating as a kind of constant dialogue of ‘confessions.’ (Foucault, 1978, p.44.) Here, we need to recognise the capillaries of pleasure as well as power.

Of course, the use of Foucault’s thinking complicates a number of issues here. Foucault was, after all, writing about a period in which certain institutions were becoming more deeply woven into the fabric of society. In the context of social media, however, institutional power is seemingly supplanted by the individual. Similarly, what happens when discourses of the self emerge across multiple different media, not simply through speech?

Those are questions for another post – but what the Foucault of The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 offers us is an additional dimension to social surveillance that sharpens Marwick’s concept and allows us to recognise the dialectics of discipline and pleasure that social media platforms exploit.

References

You may also like