The Rationalization Of The Surveillance: From The 'Society Of Normalization' To The Digital Society And Beyond

The authors show that the liberal biopolitics gave a birth to the development of the rationalized surveillance based on power-knowledge as a complex of force relations. Due to formal pragmatism, rational knowledge and the disciplinary technology the 'society of normalization' arose. Its influence spread not only to concrete individuals, but to all the people and was only limited by the nation-state sovereignty and historic time (up to the end of the 20th century). But nowadays there appear such factors as globalization, the rise of the network society, the digitalization that mark the evidence of complexity, non-linear development and the emergence of multiple risks, vulnerabilities, and uncertainties. Under these conditions the traditional biopolitics as the dominant life-administrating power' is not suited for controlling and rationalizing the society. The new realities foster the passover to the digital society and working out innovative approaches to the rationalization of the surveillance. So, there appear new types of surveillance that are analyzed in the article. Among them: a new version of Panopticon as a viewer society in the form of Synopticon, digital and 'liquid' surveillance, 'green Orwellism', practice of surveillance based on post-anthropocentric technologies. All new types of surveillance are ambivalent in their consequences, bringing as advantages as well unpredictable dangers for life-worlds of people and human spirit. The authors argue that the process of `metamorphization of the world' (U. Beck) potentially produces possible hopes, creating unthinkable earlier alternative preconditions for establishing a humanely oriented system of surveillance which is aimed at preventing different catastrophes and crimes.