The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

I Am a Videocam
an informatic bunker. Both wings have compelling reasons for fearing the
“surveillance society,” if it has not yet arrived, and resisting it if it has.
Yet resistance is low, for reasons that are clear. The Right sees that
watched workers, watched consumers, stay in line. For the Left, after
decades of fighting closed social systems (the patriarchal family, privatization,
cocooning, and so on), it feels perverse to argue against transparency,
electronic or otherwise. Besides, surveillance protects the vulnerable: rape is
statistically less frequent in glass-sided elevators than in opaque ones. 6
But there are less reasoned motives for not wholeheartedly resisting
surveillance. The algebra of surveillance structures the reveries of
voyeurism, exhibitionism, and narcissism. To make love in a glass-walled
elevator, for instance—moving and open to public gaze—is, I am told, a
common fantasy. The disembodied eye of surveillance thrills our dreams.
THE EYE
The video camera is that eye. The single-eyed giants, the Cyclopes (in
Greek, literally “the circle-eyed”), were the first technologists, master
smiths. They invented the technologies of force and antisurveillance to help
Zeus crush the first rebellion, that of the Titans. For Zeus they forged the
thunderbolt, for Poseidon the trident, and for Hades the helmet of darkness
and invisibility. Later Polyphemus and the others used their single eyes to
oversee and control sheep. 7
THE CARWASH
The videocam is also a carwash. Augustinian Christianity saw the insomniac
gaze of God as a flood of light in which believers were drowned—but emerged
cleansed and secure, having submitted themselves to fatherly authority. 8
The unbelieving Bentham used biblical texts ironically to present
his Panopticon as the secular equivalent of divine surveillance—omniscient,
ubiquitous, and invisible. 9 The inmates, flooded in light, cannot see
the overseers, who are masked in the dark center of their universe. It is a confessional
with one-way glass. Fearing punishment but never knowing when
they are overseen, if at all, the inmates internalize their surveillance, repent,
and become virtuous. They are cleansed by light: seen is clean.
The panoptic mechanism echoes that whereby, it is supposed, each
child internalizes the prohibitions of his elders by developing a superego or
conscience. Behavior originally avoided for fear of an angry parent later in
life arouses a different emotion, shame. 10 Who, smuggling nothing through
customs past those one-way mirrors, has not felt guilty? Surveillance, then,