Looking, Observation or Surveillance

When first studying this part of the Course I had difficulties and initially could not understand why other than my usual responses to new material or old material presented in as different way. It could also have been that having many years experience of penal institutions and the very real dangers of isolating anyone from their fellow human beings the ideas of Jeremy Bentham in this area I find abhorrent. I then decided to try and discover the difference between 'looking' and 'seeing'. I came across the following quote:

"When you see something and you do not take much note, but when you look at it you try to analyse it"


http://wiki.answers.com/.  What is the difference between seeing and looking.


 I felt that this explanation stated how I would answer the question. Of course this is the opposite to how the terms are used in the Course material and the vast majority of other work I have read on the subject. However a close reading of this same material in general text shows confusion and overlapping in the way the words are used and they are often interchangeable. I decided that I would go with the majority opinion because as long as we agree how the terms should be used the actual words - the signifiers - are not relevant.


I would argue that 'looking' and 'seeing' are part of a continuum and that there is no specific time when it can be shown that we are doing one or the other. Assuming we are not looking for something specific that would pre-condition us to see and we are simply 'browsing', with no specific subject/object in mind there must be some sort of mental construct created that triggers an action that moves us along the continuum. Something worthy of greater attention must have been noticed, albeit unconsciously, for us to begin the mental activity of seeing.  Presumably there is a decision point or points when we increase the level of activity or dismiss it as not worthy of further attention. In the latter condition we have moved back to looking and it is possible in a some cases that we are unaware of what has just happened unless our interest is piqued again.

Let us consider the scenario where we are looking for something. For example we are visiting an art gallery to look at works of art that are relevant to a concept we have been asked to consider in an educational course such as the depiction of women in paintings through the generations. Amongst the many hundreds of paintings on view in the larger art galleries and museums we cannot afford the time to examine every painting we look at to find out if it meets the criteria. We have some construct in our mind that allows us to filter out those paintings that are not relevant to our purpose. As we walk through the galleries I would suggest we have moved some way along the continuum from looking to seeing but as yet do not see. Something will catch our eye, say a family portrait where the male figures are given dominance over the females, and we will stop and consider the painting further. If the painting offers the insight we are seeking we will study it further i.e. moving further along the continuum to 'seeing'. If not we move on. However this activity of decision making will take a measurable period of time and it would not be possible for an outside observer to know whether at any point we are looking or seeing.

As the main reading of this section of the Course relates to Bentham's ideas of how a prison should be built and operate (in practice this has never happened) I thought it might be useful to use the prison context to examine 'looking', 'seeing' and 'surveillance' as it is an environment and structure that demonstrates how all concerned are the object, subject and surveilled all at the same time.

When prisoners were finally allowed to leave their cells to undertake work with other prisoners almost without exception they were under the direct supervision of a Prison Officer (a Warder up until 1922 when the name was changed but the product remained the same). In the large workshops devoted to coir picking, sewing mail bags by hand or other similar tasks there was placed a Prison Officer whose primary task was to observe the prisoners, ensure that he had an accurate roll count and to respond (usually by summoning assistance) to any incidents. He sat on a chair sufficiently high off the ground to ensure he could see the whole workshop. He was not expected to converse with the prisoners nor interact with them in any other way. So what was he doing?

He (or in the case of female prions she) is observing. For the most part he is scanning the workshop and essentially is looking. It is possible that he may be thinking of many other things either job related or about his domestic life. His attention is not on any particular prisoner nor on any group of prisoners. He may notice a group of prisoners together and providing this is not unusual he will continue to look. However if he notices something out of the ordinary he will begin to analyse the situation. Implicit in this description is that the Officer has a mental picture of what should be happening (I originally wrote "what he should see" which is at odds with my proposition that he is only looking but it is the usual way to describe his actions)  and as long as this picture is not challenged he will continue to look and not see. This latter point is relevant to the behaviour of the subjects' of his looking - the prisoners and I will comment on this later.

Let us suppose that as the Officer is looking around the Workshop he notices a group of prisoners who normally do not congregate together. He will begin the process of seeing -  his senses will be heightened - and he will try and assess the level of threat posed by this new situation. If he quickly notices an Instructor in the midst of the group who is demonstrating some legitimate activity then he will quickly revert to looking. Alternatively if there is no obvious explanation he will continue to analyse the situation 'seeing' more and more until he is satisfied that the threat is real or the group has peacefully returned to their places of work. It is as well to recall that pressure is on the Officer to make a quick decision else he risks the situation getting out of control yet at the same time a false call for assistance will have a deleterious effect upon his reputation and also increase the level of risk in the rest of the prison. [When an alarm bell rings all available Officers respond to the site of the call. If prisoners realise that they can spook an Officer they can use this knowledge to draw staff away from another area where there fellow prisoners are up to no good].

By far the largest number of individuals in the Workshop will be prisoners. It is a mistake to assume that they will naturally act jointly and it was not uncommon for prisoners to come to the aid of staff. If the Officer is looking/observing the prisoners there can be little doubt that they are observing him. This is particularly true if he is an unknown quantity. It is important to them to assess what is likely to happen in any given situation and his likely response to being approached. Here I would suggest that some will have moved from looking to seeing either for their own individual reasons or for a collective reason. Initially it will be at the higher level of seeing as they examine his body language, how he scans the workshop and whether he is craftily reading the Times or Telegraph or Page 3. I referred earlier to the Officer's tendency to match the actuality of what he sees to his mental construct and if there remains a match he is much less likely to change from looking to seeing. It is therefore in the prisoners' interests to present this picture as consistently as possible whilst cutting the bars to facilitate an escape.

What relevance does this have to the rest of us? Although this sort of looking/seeing is unknown to most of us I would argue that we are all involved in the same process all the time (apart from sleeping and not dreaming). It is a necessary part of survival. We have to continually assess the environment for potential danger (think about driving whilst talking on the telephone (hands free of course!) when we are engaged in holding a conversation and may even be mentally visualising something that is being described to us or the person at the other end but at the same time safely negotiating traffic and avoiding hazards) or be on the look out for something/someone. There is no time when we are only looking i.e. not seeing albeit our level of seeing is very low.

The desire to be noticed and possibly photographed so prevalent in 'celebrities' would appear to be the opposite to the panopticon world described by Foucault. The whole purpose of the central tower is that the observer of the prison population cannot be observed by those in the cells. The prisoners would also have a strong desire to remain unnoticed because only in that way can they avoid possible repercussions for behaviour deemed to unacceptable. However the only way that the prisoner can retain any sense of his own identity is through some sort of interaction with another human being. (It was this lack of interaction that led to a noticeable increase in prisoner insanity at Pentonville that whilst not built on the panopticon design did physically separate the prisoner from all contact with fellow prisoners and had very limited contact with the prison staff). One way of generating this interaction would be to act outside the accepted norm that would force staff to respond. In terms of the celebrity the only way to retain the status of celebrity is to be treated like one. To be ignored by the paparazzi is the equivalent of celebrity death so that they desire the very thing that they claim not to want - the want to be seen.

Those who fear or reject social interaction are the equivalent of the prisoner who sits/stands in the same attitude all the time knowing that only in this way can he avoid being noticed and having his tightly controlled world disturbed or even shattered. Even in modern prisons that allow some interaction such as general exercise or the collection of meals some prisoners find ways to minimise this to the absolute minimum. The prisoner who seeks some form of solitary confinement or locks himself into his own mental world is a common sight.

'Surveillance' although often used loosely to describe someone looking at a person or a group of people has a specific meaning:

"close observation or supervision maintained over a person, group etc. esp. one in custody or under suspicion" [Collins English Dictionary  Harper-Collins Publishers 1995]

Although this would appear to include the scenario in prison described above it would be unusual for prison staff to have any individual  or group under surveillance. In the prison world all prisoners are under suspicion and whilst the general behaviour patterns in prison may be seen as a possible threat in the outside world they are so much the 'norm' that they do not raise the alarm. This is not to say that at specific times and acting on intelligence the individual or group of prisoners are not made subject to surveillance for a period of time.

It has been said the Great Britain is one of the most surveilled people in the world because of the wide use of CCTV. However in the vast majority of cases they are 'seen' as a small part of the scene that passes in front of the operator in a constant flow. There is no real difference between what the operator is doing and that described above for the Prison Officer in the workshop. Staff in control rooms are presented with a series of images with which they quickly become familiar. For the most part they are looking and only start to 'see' if something out of the ordinary appears on the screen. Their reaction times become slower and slower as their time on shift gets longer. Personal experience suggests that the event has to become more and more extreme to be noticed as the time spent watching the screens increases.

In conclusion it is my argument that 'looking' and 'seeing' are the two ends of a continuum and it is only by the physical actions of the person can it be deduced whether they are looking or seeing. I would further argue that to observe someone is of the same genre of looking and seeing and that surveillance is of the same ilk. Observation and surveillance are targeted but what the observer or surveiller is doing is no different than looking or seeing.

I will pursue this further in the next blog.