The Culture of Surveillance

摘要

Postmodern cultural theory after Foucault, Debord, and Baudrillard has tended to indict surveillance as a disciplinary apparatus, producing a society that is both “carceral” and increasingly virtual. At the same time, social critics like Lasch have decried the growth of narcissism amid the failure of liberalism. This essay aims to complicate both of these perspectives by examining the contradictory desire for surveillance in popular media like “reality TV” and in the social sciences themselves. It may be that the desire to watch and be watched is a more deeply rooted element of the liberal democratic impulse than we normally care to admit.