I propose an analysis of Paine’s The Age of Reason and Emerson’s Nature utilizing a theoretical framework that combines the concept of Foucault’s Panopticon with that of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome. The effort of merging the said concepts as undertaken by
Haggerty and Ericson, and refined by fellow sociologist William Bogard, will serve as the basis of inquiry into the potentials of both poststructuralist concepts. In this section, I first summarize Ericson and Haggerty’s argument regarding the initiation of rhizomatic modes of surveillance on account of the impact of digital technologies on both, the practices of observation and the possibilities of subversion of these practices by the observed. The aspect of resistance will receive further attention in the summary of Bogard’s amplification of the interdependencies of power and opposition presented by Ericson and Haggerty. On this ground, I revisit Deleuze and Guattari as well as Foucault and elaborate on four points that I regard to be addressed in too narrow a scope by the sociologists; these points are the preconditions conceptually facilitating rhizomatic observation, the idea of the human body implied into a system of such observation, the mechanism of the incorporation of implicit imperatives induced in the observed by the experience of the gaze, and finally the nature of the dichotomy of “hierarchical” vs. “level” emphasized by Ericson and Haggerty. Finally, the resulting generalization of what the sociologists refer to as the “surveillant assemblage,”
historically contextualized as starting in the late 20th century, will allow a theorization of the broader concept of “rhizomatic panopticism” as a model for the actualization of the sociopolitical ideals of transparence, reciprocity, and accountability in their contiguity to a normative concept of democracy.
As mentioned, the first prominent and most widely perceived fusion of the concepts of the “rhizome” and “panopticism” was carried out in the year 2000 by Ericson and Haggerty in an essay entitled “The surveillant assemblage.” In their work, the authors re-evaluate the consequences of surveilling practices as depicted by Foucault in Discipline and Punish and George Orwell in the novel 1984 from a vantage point that takes into account the immense proliferation of the virtual means of observation and recording in the 20th century, stating that “familiar theoretical preoccupations” (Ericson and Haggerty 606) regarding the practices of surveillance need to be reassessed. The authors put forward the idea of the
“surveillant assemblage” (ibid.), which is brought about by the union of multiple, formerly disconnected modes of observation whose function and purpose is defined by “abstracting human bodies” (ibid.) in a manner that produces several unconnected streams of information. These streams converge later on into the form of “distinct data doubles,” which is to say virtual copies of the individuals observed, that are made the objects of examination and interference (ibid.). In other words, the authors attribute the becoming rhizomatic of
surveilling practices to the permeation of most ambits of modern life by technologies that facilitate the collection, connection, and evaluation of personalized data. Especially the ever increasing ability to connect and synthesize statistics and figures gathered from different sources of a once non-integrated apparatus of surveillance justifies, according to Ericson and Haggerty, to employ the concept of the “assemblage,” which allows the apparatus to obtain a complete picture of the observed individuals’ habits and behaviors in the virtual form of the said “data double,” making surveillance independent of the observed subjects’ physical bodies and material contexts in a deterritorialized system of references. While this assemblage is not entirely appropriated by a state-owned apparatus or exclusively identifiable with the practices of institutions affiliated with the government, institutional control is easily exercised when it comes to accessing and using the data assembled by independent and private entities (ibid. 617, 618).
The impact of digital technology, however, also opens perspectives of resistance, as some of the said flows of deterritorialization apply their effect on the powerful. This kind of reciprocated surveillance “generally exists as a potentiality of connections of different technologies and institutions” (ibid. 618) and is, therefore, not carried out with the same intent of totalizing control. Situations that serve as examples constitute, according to the authors, the use of “relatively inexpensive video cameras” employed “to tape instances of police brutality,” which illustrates that “no major population groups stand irrefutably above or outside of the surveillant assemblage” (ibid.). As is also underscored, the possibility of this kind of surveillance gives rise to organized “inner-city citizen response teams which monitor police radios and arrive at the scene camera-in-hand to record police behaviour” (ibid.), which points to their perceived potentials to trace and provide evidence for responsibilities in an endeavor to insist on accountability. Hence, the authors assert the partial emergence of a “rhizomatic leveling of the hierarchy of surveillance” (ibid. 606) stating that segments of society that did not experience observation formerly face the possibility of that very condition now. It can well be said that a certain degree of reciprocity and oscillation of surveilling power thus enters the practice of observation, causing the formerly fixed roles of the observers and the observed to alternate under certain conditions.
Based on the suggestions of Ericson and Haggerty, Bogard develops the implications of a becoming rhizomatic of surveillance further by emphasizing this potentiality of opposition. In his essay “Surveillance Assemblages and Lines of Flight,” Bogard agrees with
the conceptualization of the surveillance methods presented by Ericson and Haggerty as
“lines of deterritorialization or ‘flight’” (97), stating that it is the very deterritorialization of different mechanisms of surveillance, which can be understood, in practical terms, as the shift of the place of surveillance from a concrete, limited location to “digital networks”
(ibid.). After, in a similar manner as Ericson and Haggerty, referencing Orwell in order to describe the public perception of such a development as unambiguously curtailing individual freedom and confidentiality, Bogard specifies that these new modes of surveillance effectuate “deterritorialized forms of resistance as a function of their own organization”
(ibid.). He goes on to explain that
[t]here are even good reasons to see prospects for freedom in surveillance assemblages, since networks make it very hard for power to monopolize the machines that identify and track us, or determine the flow and price of information.
Control of information becomes more impossible the closer an information network gets to the model of a “rhizome”, in which every node must connect to every other node in an open structure. (ibid.)
According to Bogard, what has been thought of as a structure suitable to ensure a totality of surveillance mechanisms and efficiency brings the very conditions for the subversion of this totality. Analogous to Ericson and Haggerty, he is convinced of the difficulty, if not unfeasibility, of the full appropriation of the entire apparatus of surveillance by one entity, provided the configuration of this apparatus resembles the structure of a rhizome, distinctly characterized as following the “[p]rinciples of connection and heterogeneity” (A Thousand Plateaus 5). In this manner, what remains a specific example in Ericson and Haggerty’s explications, namely the act of filming the powerful by the less powerful who are equipped with recording devices and sharing the footage thus obtained on digital platforms, is given a generalized, conceptual place in Bogard’s theory of the resistance potentials of rhizomatic surveillance: Not just the Foucauldian premise of the essential unity of power and opposition in their simultaneous occurrence and mutual necessity (Bogard 98) is the ground on which the theorization of the potential of resistance in a system of rhizomatic surveillance is placed; the very construct of the rhizome itself is conducive to actions running counter to the assemblage’s intended function. The above-mentioned “rhizomatic leveling of the
hierarchy of surveillance” (Ericson and Haggerty 606) in its expression of the reciprocating use of the gaze in its potential to demand the visibility of the powerful as well as the visibility of their accountability is thus plausibly shown to be contingent on the theoretical premises of the concept of the “surveillance assemblage.”
Although this conception of the “surveillant assemblage” as formulated by Ericson and Haggerty and enriched by Bogard presents an insightful and comprehensive expansion of Foucault’s as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s original ideas, I shall note four points in which I seek to yet amplify and abstract the sociologist’s conclusions. In order to render the merger of the terms of “the rhizome” and “surveillance” operational for my inquiry into Paine’s The Age of Reason and Emerson’s Nature, the following qualifications are necessary: First, the cause of the conditions that lead to practices and mindsets facilitating the said merger must be examined. Second, the conception of the body entangled in the transformed system of surveillance is to be specified. Third, the incorporation of implied imperatives, which is not explicitly inquired into by either Bogard or Ericson and Haggerty, will be focused upon.
Lastly, the general understanding of the dichotomy of hierarchical vs. level shall be examined in the manifestations that a conceptual union of “the rhizome” and “panopticism”
effectuates. In contrast to the quoted sociologists, my starting point is not the empirical, measurable phenomenon of surveillance and resistance to surveillance in digital networks, but rather the original texts delineating the rhizome and the Panopticon; from the definitions presented in A Thousand Plateaus and Discipline and Punish, respectively, I shall thus infer the conceptual changes of and additions to the terms already introduced in this section.
The first of my qualifications is related to the cause of the phenomena leading to the emergence of the concept of rhizomatic surveillance. The sociologists relate the emergence of rhizomatic surveillance to technological advance. To reiterate their argument it can be said that while the means of surveillance had been available only to the institutions immediately affiliated with the state apparatus in previous decades, these means, and therefore the power of surveillance, have been more widely distributed since the late 20th century: What had been the centers of surveilling power in the past are now but parts of a larger whole and can become objects of surveillance at any moment. All in all, the said authors’ portrayal of the development towards “rhizomatic surveillance” can be classified as contingent upon the development, distribution, and public acceptance of the said means of
surveillance among a society’s different demographics, making the actual manifestation of
“rhizomatic surveillance” a rather accidental by-product of technological advance. In this placement of the conceptual beginning of rhizomatic modes of surveillance in the last decades of the 20th century I disagree with the authors.
As an alternative, I suggest the physical activity of gazing as the appropriate starting point for the conceptual merger: Establishing the first and second principles of the rhizome, namely “connection and heterogeneity,” Deleuze and Guattari postulate that “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (A Thousand Plateaus 5). In this context, the term of the “plateau” as “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end”
(ibid. 22, 23) is of importance, for the rhizome is defined as consisting of such plateaus, connected amongst each other by means of the lines of flight, which on their part facilitate movement between the plateaus (ibid. 22; Kacas 30). Setting these connecting lines of flight as identical with the gaze, not specifically with surveillance through digital media as outlined by Bogard, I seek to relocate the faculty of exercising surveillance in the bodily experience of the individual through the physical activity of gazing. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s explications in Anti-Oedipus, an interpretation of this activity as productive of a seeing machine that is part of a social desiring machine (81) seems plausible. Since, as Dorothea Olkowski explains, the terms of “assemblage” and “machine” are largely conceptually congruent in the works of Deleuze and Guattari (243), the space that incites the production of the desire which calls into being the “surveillant assemblage,” though aided by digital technology, can be viewed as the human body. As Olkowski also remarks, basing her views on Elizabeth Grosz’s contextualization of Deleuze and Guattari in the philosophies of Spinoza and Nietzsche, both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus define desire not as an absence of something wanted, but rather as a function that establishes associations and links, aiming chiefly for its very own extension and increase (56). To put it differently, this specific desire
“is no longer object-oriented” and thus “ceases to be the desire for something and instead becomes a desire of something” (Hofmann 301, emphasis in original), which renders the experience of this very desire’s intensity, rather than the pursuit of pleasure, the focal objective. The intensities generated by the particular desiring machine, or assemblage, of the gaze define the plateaus and affect the lines of flight associating them. From this point of view, both, the specific, observable fact of rhizomatic surveillance brought into effect by a
“surveillant assemblage” today as outlined by the sociologists, as well as the conceptual possibility of a rhizomatic gaze in relation to a bodily experience, can be understood as not primarily the product of technological advance, but of potential intensities and positive desires produced by the gaze’s function.
In order to come back to the conception of the plateaus of intensities constituting the rhizome, considering the construction of the kind of human body involved in a sphere governed by the “surveillant assemblage,” the gaze in this context, is necessary. Ericson and Haggerty state that the increasing vagueness of the demarcation between the human and the machine is both an aid to and an effect of the advancing technological modes of the surveillance of the human body (611). While, materially, such a post-biotic transformation of the body might be necessary to ensure the efficiency of a potentially rhizomatic surveillant assemblage, I propose that, conceptually, it is not. In certain ways, the notion that rhizomatic surveillance transforms the observed into a “cyborg” (ibid.), of sorts, limits the conceptual potential of rhizomatic surveillance, as it chiefly aides an understanding of the monitored individual as subjected to a de-humanization that has the sole purpose and effect of intensifying the one-sided exercise of power. In other words, the potential of achieving reciprocity of the exercise and effects of the gaze is debilitated: As explained before, the reversal of that power relation is then exclusively contingent upon the random distribution of recording and tracking technologies among the monitored, to be used by them in oppositional ways.
Following the re-localization of the gaze in the physical experience of desire and intensity, I suggest conceptualizing the body entangled in the sphere of the rhizomatic gaze as a “Body without Organs,” outlined in Deleuze and Guattari’s propositions. Deleuze and Guattari state that “[e]very BwO [Body without Organs] is itself a plateau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency,” which is created and determined by the line of flight and desire (A Thousand Plateaus 183). To put differently, a “Body without Organs” constitutes a “node” (Bogard 97) in the network of the rhizome and is composed by agglomerations of intensities; it is also connected to other “nodes” through lines of flight produced by the “seeing machine,” or the desire and intensity of gazing. At the same time, the structure and experiences of the “Body without Organs” is not dominated by “that organization of the organs called the organism,” but engaged in a process of re-arrangement and re-assessment of these organs and their functions (A Thousand Plateaus 184); finally,
the “Body without Organs” represents, according to Grosz, “a body without psychical or secret interior” (qtd. in Olkowski 57), becoming a passageway for intensities, for example the intensity of the gaze.
Examining the architectural and conceptual structure of the Panopticon and its possible transformations under the premises of the rhizome is necessary for further specifying the position of the “Body without Organs” in a sphere of the rhizomatic gaze. For example, the above-mentioned principle of the rhizome’s connection speaks against maintaining the centered, “arborescent” (A Thousand Plateaus 15) structure of Bentham’s construction, of which the said conceptualization of the human being as quasi-cyborg is indicative since it maintains an essentially one-sided exercise of the gaze. While the Panopticon’s midpoint is defined through the concentration of the power to connect to the subjects arranged on the side-lines by means of the gaze, the subjects on these side-lines are effectively kept from developing any kind of “horizontal conjunctions” (Foucault 219) through the imposition of “procedures of partitioning” (ibid. 220), leaving those fixed on the side-lines always in the role of “the object of information, never a subject in communication”
(ibid. 200). Foucault summarizes this construction as follows:
The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen. (202)
Applying the rhizome’s principle of connection to this edifice, I suggest re-associating the dyad by replacing the “peripheric ring” with centers of supervision similar to “the central tower,” establishing thus a network connected by the gaze. Since, in a sphere characterized by a rhizomatic distribution of panoptic centers, these centers are defined by their potential of exercising the gaze and their connectedness to other centers by that very line of flight, they can be set to identify the specific kind of “Bodies without Organs” that consist of the intensities created by the gaze. At the same time, a conception of a rhizomatic arrangement of these foci of intensity renders the term “center” and its hierarchical connotation inappropriate and hints towards a consideration of multiplicity, which is the third principle defining a rhizome according to Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus 7).
In a conceptual space defined as rhizomatically panoptic, the mechanism of exercising power through the gaze deserves further inquiry. Bogard as well as Ericson and Haggerty focus on the aspect of surveillance in its function of actual observation and scrutiny; however, they do not elaborate on the specifically rhizomatic transformation of the aspect of the observed individual’s incorporation of implicit expectations towards him or her, to which the observer’s gaze obliges. While they are aware of the centrality of this very process of “a productive soul training which encourages inmates to reflect upon the minutia of their own behavior in subtle and ongoing efforts to transform their selves” (Ericson and Haggerty 607) to Foucault’s original conceptualization of the gaze’s operation in prisons, a consideration of this effect in a rhizomatically structured space of observation is not specifically and explicitly expounded. In other words, the question whether and to which extent the powerful segments of society now subject to public, “synoptic” scrutiny (ibid.
618) alter their behavior according to the implicit demands of the observers remains unvoiced and unanswered. Explaining the incorporation of these imperatives into the conduct of the observed, Foucault notes that
[h]e who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he
[h]e who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he