Preliminary Reflections on the Visible, the Invisible and Social Regulation:

Panopticism, Biopolitics, Neoliberalism and Data Consumption

Mike Featherstone
Journal of Critical Studies in Business and Society, 4(1), pp. 6-37.

Abstract
Different types of social structure and media, promote different forms of visibility and
invisibility. Michel Foucault’s influential discussion of the formation of disciplinary
societies highlights the importance of panopticism in which inmates are constantly visible,
subjected to surveillance and control by invisible authority figures. To better understanding
power in today’s neoliberal societies, we should also consider Foucault’s writings on
biopolitics which point to the generation of a new productive form of governance via the
invisible forces running through the living mass of population. The new architecture of
visibility is also evident in the consumer culture spaces, images and screen culture. Today
consumption increasingly takes place in digitalised milieu such as the internet, in which
purchases leave traces and create profiles to enable the accumulation of massive data sets
which can be made productive by business, yet remain invisible to the vast majority of
consumers. At the same time the new digital media such as the internet, also generate a new
architecture of visibility with social media sites such as Facebook working off the fear of
invisibility.

Bio

Mike Featherstone is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is founding editor of

the journal Theory, Culture & Society and the Theory, Culture & Society Book Series. He is editor-in-chief
of the journal Body & Society. Author of Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (2nd edition 2007) and
Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (1995). Co-author of Surviving Middle Age
(1982). Editor of over a dozen books and author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on social
and cultural theory, consumer and global culture, ageing and the body. His books and articles have been
translated into sixteen languages.

Introduction

Sociologists have long been preoccupied with the question of how to conceptualise and
represent social life. Society or social relations are often regarded as too ineffable, extensive
and emergent entities to favour ready observation and description. Unlike the individual
embodied human beings, the various agglomerates and groups, whose existence can be noted
as they move around a given territory, society and social relations tend to be visible in their
consequences. It is the accumulation of consequences of people living together, which makes
social theorists speculate about the forces which appear to compel us. For some theorists,
then, society is something which is more than the sum total of its parts. The Durkheimian
tradition for example highlighted society as a sui generis reality comprised of social things

1
which have a persistence, regularity and facticity which confirmed their operation on a level
above that of human beings. But if society is to be conceived as a thing, how could it be
described, what could be seen? Claiming the existence of ‘social currents’ which operated
behind people’s back to ensure a relatively regular suicide rate over time, would seem to be
too inchoate, too difficult to conceptualise and represent. Collective representations such as
national flags which are held to generated a communal sense of the sacred, are visible entities
which are accorded a good deal of affective power, to the extent that they can command
personal sacrifice. At the same time the ceremonies which generate excitement when people
came together as Durkheim (1965; Thompson, 1998) reported occurred with totemism,
clearly suggest something operating which moves and binds together people in powerful
emotional bonds, yet the forces moving people are invisible, only manifest through symbols
and sacred artefacts, the rock, the mask, the wood carved totem, the painted and marked
body. Some things could be described and represented, a new order of social artefacts used
in practice, but the forces that bind people together remain invisible and in need of theorizing.
Indeed, while one tendency within contemporary cultural social and cultural theory has
sought to reject the notion of society and the social, to rather focus on change, mobility,
movement, emergence and singularities, there still remains the need to consider how to get a
sense of the quality of larger entities, the question of how we make sense of contemporary
social life, to see it as a whole, to focus on totality, even though holistic concepts such as
capitalism, society, modernity are now generally seen as less than adequate descriptors (cf.
Toscano, 2012).

In addition to the aesthetic question of how to represent or conceptualise society, when much
of social life is seemingly invisible, or apparently takes place ‘behind the back’ of individuals
who are subjected to social forces they are often unaware of, there is the related question of
the role of vision and visibility in social life. As embodied sentient beings, humans rely on
their senses to steer them around various social milieu. Given the species evolution of human
beings, sight has become by far the dominant form of sensory perception (Simmel, 1997;
Jütte, 2005).1 One important preliminary distinction is that between visuality and visibility.
The notion of visibility connotes, what can be seen, often drawing on meteorological
terminology referring to the distance we can see, the extent of clear vision, which can be
potentially restricted by fog, mist, pollution etc. Technologies based on the photographic
camera which are central to the mass media provide an apparatus which not only extends the
range of what is visible and can be brought under our gaze, but what can be captured,
recorded, stored and re-viewed at will. The term visibility is widely used in a metaphorical
sense to point to the relative openness of public affairs, the capacity to scrutinise the political
and economic decision-making processes of those in power. The prevalent assumption often
being, that the greater the transparency and public accountability, the greater the collective
social benefits. Visibility, then can take on a strong moral connotation: the dealings everyone
can see, as in the expression ‘above board,’ which is opposed to ‘hidden under the table’ or
‘behind closed doors.’ There is the expectation that certain categories of people, such as
business and political leaders, or professional specialists will employ different levels of
visibility. For those who emphasise open democracy, there is the expectation that dealings in
social life should be as transparent as possible. Others, in particular experienced power-

1
In neurophysiological terms the eyes take up by far the larger part of the brain’s processing power, giving a
physiological basis to the dominance of the ocular dimension in social life. This overreliance on sight has been
designated as ‘occularcentrism’ and generated a good deal of critique (see Jay, 1996; Taussig, 1991). The way
the sense are held to interrelate and questions of ‘synaesthesia ‘or sense differentiation is an important area there
is not the space to go into here; see Crary (1990:27) for a discussion of the separation out of the sense of touch
from vision in the nineteenth century.

2
brokers, are quick to label this position as naïve and dangerous – even impossible - to
implement.2

There is also the possibility that certain social structures may favour certain types of
visibility, that visibility of certain categories of persons may be highly circumscribed with
limitations imposed on who is able to see and when they can be seen. The permission to look
at another, especially those deemed in a higher social category may be denied some people.
Indeed, the very power to look at someone directly, to look them in the eyes is strongly
socially circumscribed; there are historical examples of the severe restriction of the gaze of
certain categories of people deemed the lower parties in binary power relation: women,
blacks, children, commoners, as opposed to men, whites, adults and kings or emperors (Elias,
1994a). The notion of privacy, of setting apart or hiding certain matters or dealings from the
eyes of others, also becomes reinforced with the development of particular forms of spatial
exclusion. The architecture of the house or castle is interesting in this respect with its
transition from a single-room collective dwelling to multiple sets of private quarters such as
bedrooms (cf. Elias, 1994b).

On the other hand, in some situations, a certain type of visibility of superiors, especially
rulers, has historically taken place and can be seen as central to the display and legitimation
of power. This is evident in occasions such as a religious or civil ceremonies (coronations,
national days, religious festivals such as Easter), military display or mass entertainments such
as the Roman coliseum. In such instances architecture is designed to enable the audience to
witness the event. Yet it is also usual for the architecture to provide back-stage areas
(Goffman, 1971) where certain forms of preparation, security and surveillance remain hidden
from the audience. Today, spectacle tends to be broadcast or recorded, with the mass media
spectacle notably addressed in Guy Debord’s (1970) Society of the Spectacle.3 Televised
events, then, offer new form of visibility: different camera angles, close-ups of faces and
editing renders visible previously unnoticed aspects of public performance. Yet at the same
time, television, although now able to provide high definition close-ups and enhanced sound,
often has difficulty in providing or simulating, the strong affective charge experienced by
being there. Actively participating in the audience, is to experience more fully an event
which has the potential to fuse together the separate viewers into an active crowd and
generate powerful emotional and affective forces; something which can also be powerful in
situations of collective television viewing where people watch a live event unfold

2
Debates around Wiki-leaks, or the recent case of Edward Snowden revealing the extent of US CIA Internet
surveillance and other forms of espionage sharpen these issues. Governments often justify spying in terms of
national defence security. Such realpolitik positions as recently endorsed by President Obama, come down
firmly on the side of the need for secrecy. Yet the theoretical issues arising from the contrast between secrecy
and transparency are complex (Birchall, 2011; Phillips, 2011). There are also debates about professional ethics
in relation to how far a person is entitled to have full information about what is happening to them – as for
example with medical disclosure to a terminally ill individual, especially if they are old, very young, or
categorised as less than a fully-fledged person or citizen in some way. Similar ethical questions are evident in
the law and other professions, where visibility and transparency can be sacrificed in a trade-off driven by the
assumption of taking the client’s best interests at heart, in relation to a wider sense of professional
accountability.
3
There is not the space here to discuss the important work of Jonathan Crary (1990) on the way the
development of the spectacle in the early nineteenth century can be related to major changes in techniques of
observation and vision. A perspective which opens up a very different genealogy of the visual to that developed
by Michel Foucault (1979) in his discussion of the role of surveillance; Foucault’s work is discussed in detail
below.

3
(Featherstone, 2007: ch. 8).4 As John B Thompson (2005; Bucher, 2012) points out the
televised public spectacle or television programme provides a different type of mediated
experience. This can be contrasted with our previous age in which print media was
dominant, and worked in ways that provided a carefully managed space of visibility through
editorial practices.

Different media, then promote different forms of visibility and favour different degrees and
modes of disclosure. Today, with the appearance of new digital media such as the internet,
there is a new architecture of visibility. This is not just in terms of access to the virtual space
of connectivity, the capacity of previously excluded or minority groups to promote
themselves and network more extensively to raise their profile and become visible to the
internet public. The architecture of the internet dependence on software: on the range of
sorting and filtering algorithms which determine what users will encounter online (Bucher,
2012; Beer, 2009). The emergence of new forms of social media such as Facebook have
helped the development of new forms of algorithmic architecture which although largely
invisible itself to the vast majority of the public, is designed to promote visibility, in that it
encourages and rewards the participation of users (Cheney-Lippold, 2011; Mackenzie and
Vurdubakis, 2011; Chun, 2011; Munster, 2011). At the same this software architecture
facilitates a form of surveillance and mining of information from respondents which can be
made financially productive by Internet businesses through passing on information to
advertisers and others. Yet this architecture remains invisible and largely unknown to its
mass of participants, who are only made aware of their own positive productive possibilities.
There is little sense, except if users monitor the density of automatically generated responses,
of the algorithm’s inbuilt and emergent channelling, promoting, rewarding and excluding
qualities that amass through their practices over time. The tracking information may be
regarded as confidential and restricted information and seen as the exclusive property of the
digital company who invites users ‘free participation,’ yet at the same time amass large
quantities of time-series data on people’s tastes and choices which can have a certain
productive currency when handed over to other business and marketing entities. This
invisibility to the mass of users, can be seen as the reverse side of the specific algorithmic
software design which reward participants for their greater visibility, the extent to which they
display their activities to others.

The new digital technologies such as Facebook, then, not only involve a new interesting
entwining of visibility and invisibility. They promise more extensive networking and building
new sets of associates and friends offers. This is something which not only has a social
payoff, but can be used to mix business and pleasure and amounts to a new potential to
maximise people’s social and business opportunities: in effect new forms of productivity
(Wittel, 2001). But it also provides the accumulation of data for the internet business entities
involved, which can be made productive in the capacity to dissect, classify and profile the
various elements of the mass of users. It has been suggested that this could amount to a new
form of surveillance and data-gathering which a version of the panopticon described by
Michel Foucault (Bucher, 2012). It therefore, would be useful to examine in more detail
Foucault analysis of visibility and surveillance in the panopticon and assess its usefulness for

4
There is not the space here to discuss the important relationship between visuality and affect (see Papoulias
and Collard, 2010, Featherstone, 2010a), and the way the apparent dominance of the visual through
photographic and moving images in consumer culture is encountered affectively. For an approach which
emphasises the importance of the aesthetic qualities of affective power drawing on the work of Marilyn
Strathern see Copeman and Street (forthcoming). Their discussion of affect also develops a critique of
Foucault’s use of the visual as a technique of governance.

4
understanding the operation of the emerging digital architecture of the internet and other new
media forms. In addition, to enable a better understanding of this process in today’s
neoliberal economies, we could also usefully consider Foucault’s (2008) writings on
biopolitics, population and political economy. Foucault discusses the emergence of a new
regime of power not based on observation, surveillance and visibility, but one which seeks to
know and analyse the tendencies in the living mass of population and economic transactions
which offer a new form of state governance. One which is more indirect and largely invisible
to the mass population concerned, yet one which through the amassing of statistical data,
offers not only a new form of knowledge, but major productive rewards for the social entities
(states, companies or individuals) who can gather, store and analyse it. In effect a new form
of governance of the invisible forces that move through social life and can be known and
made productive. Indeed, one of the watchwords of the new form of governance in its
eighteenth century mode as advocated by political economists was laissez-faire, govern less
and allow the invisible ‘hidden hand’ to do its work for the benefit of all. We will now turn
to an examination of some of Foucault’s writings on visibility and invisibility, before
returning to a discussion of the contemporary neoliberal digital situation.

Visibility and Invisibility in Foucault

In discussions of Michel Foucault’s work, it is generally assumed that the major focus has
been on discursive formation and discourse analysis (Deleuze, 1999; Hook, 2001). Given
this emphasis, the visible is often seen as less important separate domain, which in some
instances was referred to negatively, as ‘non-discursive environments,’ as in the Archaeology
of Knowledge (Foucault, 1972). At the same time, Foucault was well aware that that social
life depended on both language and the visible. This is reinforced by Deleuze (1999:28) who
tells us that it was clear to Foucault that ‘a system of light and a system of language are not
the same form and do not have the same formation.’5 Although there are brief discussions in
Madness and Civilization (Foucault, 1988) and The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault, 1973), the
main book in which visibility is addressed the most directly is Discipline and Punish
(Foucault, 1979). In this book we find Foucault’s well-known depictions of the emergence of
a disciplinary society in which people become confined and subjected to ‘panoptic’
surveillance aimed at producing regulated conduct and docile bodies.

It can be argued that the development of a more concentrated urban society, especially
around the turn of the nineteenth century, made the population, the masses and crowd more
visible. From the point of view of the state authorities, this was in part to do with the risk of
civil insurrection, of large numbers of people in urban areas turning into a riotous mob.
Michel Foucault (1979) opens Discipline and Punish with a graphic description of a public
execution of the regicide Damiens and noted that although this was meant to be a public
spectacle and display of sovereign power which involved the torture and destruction of the
criminal’s body, there was always the danger that the crowd’s emotions would get out of
hand and lead to violence, riot and even rebellion. The visible spectacle of public ceremonies
and executions displayed the power of the monarch, in ways which produced excitement, fear
and other emotional responses. Yet sovereign power, gave way to new regimes designed to
control, confine and regulate bodies and Foucault provides an account of the systematic
5
A good deal has been written on the relationship of language and the visible, image and the word, the visible
and the symbolic and the various ways to think their separations and entwinements ( see for example: Brighenti,
2010; Jimenez and Willersley, 2007; Mirzhoeff, 2007).

5
application of disciplinary techniques to what became known in the nineteenth century as ‘the
dangerous classes.’ Referring to the new panopticon type prison, Foucault (1979:200)
remarks that one object was ‘to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to
be found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described by Howard.’ The
birth of the prison, but also the hospital, school and barracks provided a new architecture of
visibility and differentiation with the individual cell, or desk, or hospital bed, carefully
designed and placed to facilitate the regimes of recording bodies and subjecting bodies to
disciplinary control.

This contrasts markedly with the former practice of treating people as an undifferentiated
mass – often through practices of exile, exclusion or limited confinement. According to
Foucault (1979:201) the major effect of the Panopticon is to make prisoners subjected to a
state of permanent visibility in which the inmates can be separated, numbered, supervised and
observed. This makes the Panopticon a ‘marvellous machine,’ for dissociating the see/being
seen dyad which we are accustomed to in much of everyday life, because those in individual
cells are totally seen, while the guard or authority figure in the central tower ‘can see
everything without ever being seen’ (Foucault: 1979:202). The Panopticon, then, was a
machine of observation to assess individual character and performance; but it was also a
laboratory, a machine for carrying out experiments to alter, train and correct behaviour.

The taming of the unruly bodies of the crowd and the institution of a disciplinary and
surveillance apparatus to train and control people, is often seen as an epochal product of
modernity, something extended to more and more areas of social life to deal with the large
demographic upsurge of the eighteenth century. The spread of disciplinary procedures and
techniques was accompanied by centres of observation which were disseminated throughout
society (Foucault, 1979:212). The formation of the disciplinary society entailed the ordering
and classification and hierarchization of bodies, with the aim to increase the utility of each
element of the multiplicity. It involved collective training, timetables, exercises, surveillance
and registration with view to make the multiplicity more productive. New disciplinary
techniques and procedures were accompanied by new forms of knowledge applied in the
hospital, the school, the workshop and with more formalised studies of clinical medicine,
child psychology, pedagogy, criminology and other empirical sciences developed (Foucault,
1979:226).

In addition to this set of disciplinary technologies to order and control the body, Foucault in
his series of lectures at the Collège de France between 1976 and 1979 identifies the
emergence of a second ‘regulative technology of life,’ whereby people are considered and
analysed at the population level. There are, then, two distinctive technologies of power. As
he remarks

One technique is disciplinary; it centres on the body, produces individualizing effects,

and manipulates the body as a source of forces that have to be rendered both useful
and docile. And we have a second technology which is centred not upon the body but
upon life: a technology which brings together the mass effects characteristic of a
population which tries to control the series of random events that can occur in a living
mass, a technology which tries to predict the probability of those events (by
modifying it, if necessary), or at least to compensate for their effects. (Foucault,
2003:249)

6
This suggests for Foucault (2003:250) that there are two series: ‘the body-organism-
discipline-institutions series’ and the ‘population-biological processes-regulatory
mechanisms-state’ one. The second regulatory technology focuses on the biological or
biosocial processes characteristics of human masses; he remarks ‘Unlike discipline, which is
addressed to bodies, the new non-disciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the
living man, to man-as–living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species(Foucault,
2003:242-3). The second, or biopolitical form, focuses on the discovery of the stable
characteristics of a population mass, the numbers of deaths by different diseases, or suicides
etc., which when recorded in the new form of statistical knowledge appeared to be stable or
follow noticeable trends over time. In the second half of the eighteen century, the birth rate,
the mortality rate, longevity, epidemics etc. became objects of knowledge for the first
demographers who began to measure them in statistical terms. Once the various births,
deaths and other characteristics, which on the individual level have their own aleatory and
unpredictable causes, were recorded and examined on the mass level, as a series over time, it
was possible to detect constancy with the potential to forecast and then modify at a later point
through intervention.6 Life then in the mass could be examined, controlled and regulated; a
particular form of life could be optimized. The previous form of sovereignty, based on the
rule of the monarch had entailed the direct power of the sovereign over his subjects, manifest
in his right to punish, to deal in death. Biopolitics, in contrast involved a new technology of
power over the population, the power to let live. It was a form of power which was embraced
as productive, in the sense that the population, the mass of people became seen as a resource
which could be governed.

There are a number of dynamics to this process and modes of feedback between the
regulation of population and security dynamics and disciplinary technologies which emerged
more clearly in the eighteenth century. The new forms of knowledge that emerged with
Physiocracy and political economy, helped better understand a process and apply knowledge
for further stimulate the advance of trade and the accumulation of people in towns and cities.
This not only made possible increased regulation in terms of the discussion of security (life
and trade circulation) mentioned above, but also on the more granular level new ways for
dealing with the unruly bodies on the street, whose accumulation in the dense ‘cockpits’ and
overcrowded ‘slums,’ provided a new challenge. The response being the new forms of
disciplinary techniques outlined by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, entailing the
construction of the institutional frameworks of the prison, school, barracks, clinic, hospital,
asylum etc. Liberalism, Foucault (2009:67) remarks intensified this process as the motto of
liberalism is ‘live dangerously,’ and he argues ‘There is no liberalism without a culture of
danger.’ Economic freedom and laissez-faire, exacerbated these dangers, but were
themselves incorporated into the security/population/political economy discourse, given one
of the aims was to indicate what interventions were productive and which ones would be
doomed to failure, in terms of the newly discovered economic laws, which became regarded
as a second nature.

The population, then, becomes seen as based on a set of variables that acts like a natural
phenomenon, which follows its own laws and resists the decree of the sovereign. At the same
time, if it is carefully observed and studied, the population can be made accessible to
techniques of transformation. This is something which demanded careful reflection, analysis
6
See more extensive discussion of the discovery of population regularities, such as the establishment of
constant numbers of deaths from various diseases and other regularities in seventeenth century England by John
Graunt and others is in Society, Territory, Population (Foucault, 2007:74ff).

7
and calculation, but above all, as was the case in the early eighteenth century in France
through the research of Quesnay and the Physiocrats, it involved the acknowledgement of the
naturalness of individuals’ desires and pursuit of their own self-interests, which could be
analysed as the collective interest of a population and in turn be subjected to management.
This new form of knowledge laid the foundation for the science of economics. It heralded a
new domain of knowledge, based upon the introduction of population into the field of
economic theory and practice: a new subject-object for the analysis of wealth.7 One of the
central advocates of this new political economy, Quesnay never tired of saying that ‘real
economic government was government that concerned itself with population’ (Foucault,
2007:77).

The sovereign was the person who could say no to any person’s desire, he held the power of
death over his subjects, and this was manifest in the way in which the absolute state had
moved towards a police state controlling the population.8 Yet, now the state was faced with a
different problem: how to say yes to desire, how to encourage self-esteem and desire, because
of their potentially productive beneficial effects. This form of utilitarian philosophy became
the theoretical underpinning for the government of population (Foucault, 2007:74). Saying
yes to desire, also became part of the dynamic which went on to produce mass consumption
and consumer culture, which will be discussed later in the paper.

In the eighteenth century, then, the population became an object of government and the
underpinning for the new science of political economy. The mechanisms political economy
had discovered suggested the operation of a new ‘nature,’ a social nature which had its own
order and could be made intelligible and exploited to further the exercise of governmentality.
Hence the economists explained the movement of population to places where the wages are
highest as a law of nature, a phenomenon which rulers would be unwise to ignore or seek to
countermand. The consequences of actions could now be judged in terms of success or
failure; this was to become central to utilitarian philosophy in the nineteenth century. The
advice to the monarch would now be that governing too much, as we find with the extension
of the absolute state and the emergence of the police state, could be dangerous, raising the
question of the need for the self-limitation of government. The principle of laissez-faire
(laissez-nous faire or ‘leave us alone’) became acknowledged as a new type of rationality
entailing ‘the self-limitation of governmental reason,’ which was the basis of what became
called ‘liberalism’ (Foucault, 2008:20).

The birth of liberalism meant that the market became presented as the key regime of truth for
the governance of society, with the assumption that it would spread its benefits to all. But to
sustain the market, liberalism must produce and organize freedom, not just the freedom of the
market, the freedom to buy and sell, but the free exercise of property rights, freedom of
discussion etc. Yet to produce the freedom of the internal market, monopolies must be
prevented and at the same time, tariffs established to prevent the national market being
swamped by the goods and economic strategies of more powerful states. Colonialism was an
important part of this process of preferential exploitation, with the graded and circumscribed
application of free market principles within restricted milieu which benefitted the colonizer
and impoverished the colonized (Venn, 2009).

7
See Elias (1984) on the birth of economics as the first social science which made the development of sociology
possible in his paper ‘The Sociogenesis of Sociology,’ (see also discussion in Featherstone, 2007: ch 3).
8
See the extensive discussion of the police state in Foucault (2008, 2007).

8
The two technologies of power disciplinary and biopolitical Foucault (2003:249) refers to are
based on two very different assumptions about visuality. The disciplinary form is based
upon direct surveillance, it places the multiplicity of people in the light so they can be seen,
individualized and recorded; it slows down, separates and orders their bodily movements and
regulates behaviour; it produces a visible subjection of individual bodies to the purposes and
plans of the authorities, be it the authority of the prison guard observing the ordered ranks of
prisoners exercising, the regiment of soldiers rehearing parade under the eyes of the drill
sergeant, or the ranks of school children sitting at their desks writing in silence.

The biopolitical form, on the other hand perceives bodies not in action, moving in front of the
eyes of the observer. Rather, it dwells on the mass effects of population sets, the events they
produce and characteristics they generate and accumulate over time, which can be
documented and recorded, then analysed through statistical techniques to predict the
probability of future events, which in turn could be subjected to modification and
manipulation. The bodies of prisoners in the Panopticon cells are illuminated and are under
the surveillance of unseen guards, yet while the bodies of the population mass cannot be
observed, detailed information about individual characteristics can be amassed and series data
accumulated, classified and put into tabular form to reveal patterned change over time
(numbers of births and deaths, along with data on health, income and other variables). In
addition, data could be captured and recorded concerning the movement of things, the
numbers and volume of carts of corn, or barges of coal entering the city, or cannons cast and
rifles manufactured, the weight of silver imports.

Information which could be used to render the population and its economic transactions
useful for those in power, in terms of planning new roads or canals, the siting of new towns.
Based on a new form of knowledge in which the capacity to accurately record numbers of
objects, their movement in transactions, along with the attributed characteristics of human
beings (gender, age, health, weight, size etc.) could be abstracted in numerical form with
figures and series recorded on the form of statistical tables. The population and economy
could be made more productive from the governmental perspective, in order to increase the
state’s overall power potential, in terms of: total economic wealth, citizens’ well-being, as
well as the military potential for aggression or defence in the struggle with neighbouring
states. The second technique of power Foucault mentions, biopolitics, then, could potentially
fit well with a panopticon society, with top-down authority and control as we find in
twentieth century totalitarian societies, societies in which the endeavour is to regulate all
aspects of life and subject bodies to the pre-ordained state purposes. But it also has its place
in contemporary neoliberal societies, which we will turn to shortly.

It could be tempting to conceptualise different types of societies operating in a developmental

series, each with different modes of visuality: sovereign societies, which operate a version of
the totalizing gaze; followed by panoptic disciplinary societies which provide a more
impersonal and invisible surveillance gaze; and then governmental societies based on
invisibility, in which population and economic processes operate behind our backs and are
best left alone. But Foucault (2007:107-8) is strongly against this over-simplification and
emphasises he does not see a set of stages or clear cut chronological process with clean
breaks; as he remarks ‘So we should not see things as the replacement of a society of
sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then of a society of discipline by a society, say of
government. In fact we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline and governmental
management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its
essential mechanism.’ He adds ‘from the eighteenth century, these three movements –

9
government, population, political economy – form a solid series that has certainly not been
dismantled even today.’

Eighteenth century society, then, operated through different forms of power: sovereign,
discipline and governmental management, each of which employs different techniques and
types of optics. In the case of sovereign power, it is possible to see it as operating through
the visibility of the sovereign, with power invested in the person of the ruler. One of its
strongest forms was the European doctrine of the divine right of kings, with the monarch seen
as God’s appointed steward on earth. Louis XIV of France, the ‘sun-king’ with his remark
‘L’Etat c’est moi,’ captures this sense of absolutism, that the king is the state and has the
divine right to steer it as he sees fit. The state’s power is manifest in the persona of the king
with lavish ceremonials, elaborate costumes and settings on state and other occasions,
designed to display his magnificence. It has been suggested that the assumption of the all-
seeing gaze of the god-like monarch draws its impetus from Christian scheme of pastoral
power.9 Sovereign power is visible, it is manifestly the power of the individual monarch or
his agents operating on particular events. While disciplinary power in the form of the
panopticon operates through the gaze of authorities which can be invisible to those under
surveillance, but is known to operate in potentially totalizing ways. The disciplinary gaze,
therefore, has some similarities with the sovereign gaze, yet it operates in more diffuse and
all-pervasive ways.

As discussed above, the biopolitical or governmental form of power, as manifest in the

development of modern economics is very different, in that it operates through an indirect, or
secondary gaze, based on the accumulation of statistical information about the changing
attributes and characteristics of people (population analysis in the form of demography and
other emergent human sciences) and things (the value of commodities in the market).
Certainly for market transactions, with the operative principle of laissez-faire becoming seen
as the most efficient form of both economic and societal governance, there is a different
attitude towards the state, with the proclamation of non-intervention and the brutal freedom
of people to seize their own possibilities to ‘live dangerously,’ to calculate carefully their
transactions, but also seize the possibilities of the market. Yet the nascent modern liberal
economy of the eighteenth century, was one not held together by divine purposes, sovereign
power or panoptic surveillance, it did not need the gaze of an outside agent to make it
function. Indeed, the opposite was seen to be the case, especially in the view of one of the
key figures of political economy, Adam Smith with his emphasis on ‘the hidden hand.’ The
key point for Foucault about the hidden hand was not that somehow it ties together all the
disperse threads of individual actions, but rather that it has to be invisible because modern
economics depends upon the analysis of an open and unfolding process; it is thus open to a
future, which is not yet visible, but emergent and vulnerable to chance, or to use Foucault’s
term aleatory forces (Foucault, 2008: Siisiainen, unpublished).

9
The assumption being that the all-seeing gaze derives from that of the shepherd whose totalizing gaze comes
from the need to look after the whole flock, to find and save the ‘lost sheep,’ and steer everyone on the road to
salvation. Foucault (XXX STP) discusses this pastoral form of power and pastoral optics. This legacy from
Christianity was influential from the late 16th to 18th century with raison d’Etat and the police seen as
secularization of the pastorate and the model of the convent (Siisiainen, unpublished; Foucault, 2007).

10
From Liberalism to Neoliberalism

When we turn to contemporary neoliberalism, which has become the dominant global
economic force since the 1980s, it is clear there are many continuities here with liberal
economics. But one of the big differences is the role of the state. With neoliberalism, which
according to Foucault (2008; Terranova, 2009) originates with the German Ordoliberals in
the 1930s, but can be traced back to the earlier interwar writings of von Mises and Hayek
(Gane, forthcoming), the state is given an active role to break down monopolies to ensure that
the process of open competition works as well as possible. Here,Foucault emphasises the
‘shift from exchange to competition in the principle of the market,’ adding that ‘It is the
problem of competition and monopoly, much more than that of value and equivalence, that
forms the essential armature of a theory of the market’ (Foucault, 2009:119). In this the
Ordoliberals in Germany in the 1930s and the neoliberals in the United States in the post-war
era, have been following the development of liberal economic thought from the late
nineteenth century which accepted that the most important thing about the market was
competition – not equivalence and exchange, rather the need for inequality. This is where the
Ordoliberals break with traditional eighteenth century and nineteenth century liberalism in
arguing that laissez-faire cannot be the principle of competition and the organizing form of
the market.

The implication as Foucault (2009:121) puts it is that from now on ‘One must govern for the
market, rather than because of the market...’ which means that an active governmentality was
needed to produce and sustain pure competition. Indeed, American neoliberalism has sought
to extend market criteria to many parts of society such as the family and birth rate,
delinquency and penal policy. Whereas in eighteenth century liberalism, the theory of the
invisible hand put forward by Adam Smith indirectly linked together the pursuit of self-
interest by homo economicus with the general interest of society, in twentieth century
neoliberalism, the market ceases to be seen as a place of exchange, but as only viable and
productive when based on competition. In order to reap the benefits of the market in terms of
efficiency and the lowering prices, competition had to be sustained with the elimination of
tendencies towards monopolization, even if this new intervention form could not be justified
on the natural economic grounds of eighteenth century liberalism, and had to be artificially
constructed through governmental action. Competition then, required constant activity,
vigilance and intervention. Yet the intervention also involved a critique of any residual
ambitions to accumulate knowledge of everything and present it to the sovereign who could
potentially control the economic process. This had been an ambition of the Physiocrats,
which was criticised by Adam Smith who held such absolute knowledge to be impossible;
(Foucault, 2008:285). This critique of totality with its ‘visual excess,’ was also central to
Hayek and other proponents of neoliberalism (Gane, forthcoming).

The other thing to note is that the benefits of the liberal and subsequently neoliberal
economies are presented in terms of efficiency, which points to a process of the accumulation
of value. This can be translated into the money form which can be re-invested in the
production process to purchase new plant, equipment, technical and scientific knowledge. Or
it can be turned into higher wages for the workforce, which results in increased levels of
consumption. In one sense the goal of all production is consumption. Either directly, or
indirectly via the amassing of capital equipment and plant, along with technical knowledge;
all these gains feed into greater productive accumulation and wealth, which in turn offer great
possibilities for consumption. But the consumption side of the equation has generally been

11
assumed to be unproblematic. People will necessarily want fine things and luxuries given the
opportunity. Yet historically, religious and moral prohibitions often hedged in the
consumption of luxuries. In the eighteenth century the luxury debates resulted in a victory
for the perspective or Adam Smith, Mandeville, Hume and others on the acceptance that
‘vices,’ or the consumption of wasteful or morally inappropriate things, themselves
contributed to the general economic good. This reinforced laissez-faire and the de-
moralization of economic life.

Consumption, then began to be seen in a more positive light, as stimulating the economy and
resulting in a more satisfied population able to enjoy what became eventually known as ‘a
high standard of living’ and ‘better quality of life.’ Yet, it is possible to see the line between
consumption and production becoming even more blurred under neoliberalism. Foucault
(2008:226) argues that neoliberalism seeking to foster the type of person who is ‘an
entrepreneur of himself.’ He goes on to suggest that this means a person being for ‘himself
his own producer’ and the sources of his earnings. There are two ramifications here Foucault
makes which are interesting. The first is to suggest that we should follow Gary Becker to
explore this mode of analysis not just in production but consumption and think of
consumption as enterprise activity, in which the consumer should be seen as a producer, one
whose activity is geared to producing her or his own satisfaction. The notion of enterprising
consumption, the consumer as an active lifestyle innovator and investor in her or his self, is a
long way from the alleged passive consumer manipulated by advertising and culture
industries who spends free time in standardized and regimented pursuits.10

Foucault’s second point draws on the work of Gary Becker and other theorists of human
capital, to explore the argument that income is allocated on the basis of human capital, which
is comprised of innate (hereditary, embodied) and acquired elements. The latter are formed
over the lifespan and involve activities such as parental time spent in feeding, training and
giving affection to their children as well as educational investments, professional training,
health care and investments in mobility (the ability to migrate). Human capital investment,
then, is seen as a key element in the self-development and growth of the individual, but also
for nation-states.11 The enterprising consumer, then ideally is involved in investment,
consumption is not just non-productive waste-making – as for example in the consumption of
food, alcohol and other pleasures. It can result in profitable investment, in the accumulation
of resources which work for the individual, as for example in house purchase. The
expectation, especially up to the subprime mortgage crisis, was that house prices would
steadily increase. Yet the over-availability of cheap credit, which brought on the banking
crisis of 2007 and long recession, has seen a massive increase in debt. The economic crash
has exacerbated the trend in neoliberal society to strip down welfare state the support
systems. Ordinary people may still be encouraged to become entrepreneurs of their selves, to

10
This argument is usually ascribed to critical theory and elements of it can be found in the writings of
Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), Marcuse (1964), C Wright Mills (1956) and others. See the discussion of
consumption in relation to mass society in Featherstone (2013c).
11
Foucault (2008:232) discusses the neoliberal take up of the problem of innovation and the view that the
growth of Western countries and Japan since the 1930s has depended on the ways in which human capital has
been formed, augmented and invested in. Likewise the economic take-off of the West since the sixteenth
century and the problems of Third World economies in the late twentieth century are seen in terms of human
capital accumulation. The extent to which Foucault position was close to and sympathetic to human capital
theories of neoliberalism is a highly contentious question. François Ewald and Gary Becker in a May 2012
symposium ‘American Neoliberalism: Michel Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics Lectures,’ at the University of
Chicago, were content to explore communalities (see http://vimeo.com/43984248 ); others might find this more
difficult to assimilate.

12
invest in the stock market, to buy homes speculatively, yet the actual experience in many
cases has been the accumulation of high levels of private debt (Lazzarato, 2012; Graeber,
2011). At the same time to encourage austerity and relinquishing debt have their political and
economic drawbacks; given the high dependence of contemporary economies on
consumption, the most favoured way out of the crisis has been ‘quantitative easing,’ the
increase in the money supply with the aim of stimulating consumption.12

Ubiquitous Consumption

Contemporary neoliberal economies have, therefore, managed to positively link together the
encouragement of enterprise and ‘productive consumption.’13 While Foucault, seems to have
had little direct interest in consumption or consumer culture,14 and also did not directly use
the term lifestyle, his focus on the significance of the person who is an ‘entrepreneur of
himself,’ or ‘enterprising self’ and positive remarks above about ‘the man of consumption’
seeking to produces his own satisfactions, would suggest that the topic is worthy of
investigation.15 Foucault became more interested in questions of active self-construction and
inventiveness in his later writings, where he focused on the care of the self and the
development of an aesthetics of existence, or art of living.16 Yet there is little in Foucault on
actual consumption, on how people seek to produce and satisfy their desires through the
market. Despite the focus on the birth of biopolitics and the establishment of the new science
of political economy, there seems to be little attention given in his writings to what has been
characterised as ‘the birth of the consumer society,’ which occurred in eighteenth century
England (McKendrick et al, 1982). Especially as the expansion of colonialism, the new exotic
imports and manufacture of consumer goods and the development of the science of
economics, would seem to be connected (Venn, 2009). The growth of enterprise and the

12
The significance of consumption to the global economy is underlined by the recent figures that 70percent of
US GDP is now based on consumption. The consumer goods produced in China and other places increasingly
end up not only in Europe and North America, but many parts of Asia and the emergent BRIC countries (Brazil,
Russia, India, China) and more recently the emergent tiers of countries just behind (Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt etc.).
13
See also the debates around active/ inactive, productive/ non-productive consumption by Toffler, Ritzer and
others,’ especially the discussion of the ‘prosumer’ (Ritzer and Jurgensen, 2012; Beer and Burrows, 2012).
14
It may be the case that although Foucault was very interested in techniques of normalization and control of
transgression, those who some deem normal, or ordinary people and the workings of mundane everyday life,
offered little interest when compared to the those who displayed stubbornness, inventiveness as in his discussion
of the ‘lives of infamous men,’ (Foucault, 2002). It would seem his sympathies both practically and
theoretically lay with outsider groups and the victims of injustice, be it individuals in sovereign societies, or
those subjected to panopticism by emerging state governmentality. He would seem to have had a general
interest, without using the term in lifestyle construction, ‘self-invention,’ the ‘care of the self’ and developing an
‘aesthetics of existence,’ and ‘art of living,’ but seemingly little concern for the fate of ordinary people with
conventional values. Part of what some would see as Foucault’s ambivalence towards neoliberalism could be
located in its advocacy of enterprise and the way it built on liberalism’s advocacy of ‘living dangerously’ in a
society in which the state rolled back panoptic controls in favour of the market. Although as we have seen
above, he decidedly resisted any attempt to dichotomise panopticism and biopolitics, or view them in a
historical series.
15
Since the 1980s with the take up of neoliberal ideas in the West, the programme of investment in enterprise
has grown markedly with terms such as ‘the enterprise society,’ ‘creatives,’ ‘creative cities,’ ‘cultural
entrepreneurs,’ ‘creative industries,’ ‘the creative class,’ being taken up by policy makers, politicians and others
as part of a series of strategies designed to promote an expansion of the cultural sector, along with arts-led social
regeneration and a closer relationship between business and the arts (Raunig et al, 2011; Gill and Pratt, 2008).
16
Foucault’s (2005, 2010, 2011) final writings on Ancient Greece focused on the government of the self,
aestheticization of life, the art of living and ‘artistic parrhesia (truth-telling); see also Brigstocke (2013).

13
advocacy of greater freedom for the market, then, also entailed the capacity for larger
numbers of people to go to actual markets and purchase an expanding range of consumer
goods, to sample exotica and newly designed artefacts, to explore new types of social
relationships mediated by consumption, to decide how to react to and judge the pursuit of
new sensations and luxuries by the nouveau riche (Berg and Eger, 2003; Berg and Clifford,
2003; Sekora, 1977).

As noted above Adam Smith, Mandeville and Hume in the eighteenth century luxury debates
had adopted a sanguine attitude towards the pursuit of new sensations and ‘vices,’ arguing
that if the market is an efficient social mechanism deciding success and failure, it will work
far better if it is de-regulated. The corollary is that consumption too would also work better
without moral laws and prohibitions: let people consume luxuries for they too will stimulate
trade and create employment (see Featherstone, 2013c; Secord, 1977). Market society, then
encouraged enterprise, and as Adam Smith held, it effectively encouraged everyone to
become a merchant, concerned to pursue their own self-interest and widen their network of
interdependencies. It would thereby extend freedom, wealth and opulence to all people and
result in the ‘betterment of all’ (Berry, 1994). Luxury and excessive consumption ceased to
be associated with a decadent aristocracy, but now became seen as something socially
beneficial, as encouraging innovation and promoting trade.

The case for the historical role of luxury in the formation of capitalism was argued by
Werner Sombart (1967) whose emphasis upon the significance of consumption in court
societies provides an influential counter argument to Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis.
Courts were centres of luxury and consumption, with court societies such as Louis XIV’s
Versailles one of the best examples (Elias, 1982). Despite their aristocratic exclusivity and
distinctiveness and often ruinous competitive consumption, court societies helped to
stimulate consumption in the middle classes and lower orders (Elias, 1982; Featherstone,
2013c).17 Court modes of extravagant consumption became a referent point for rising
merchant groups to emulate, but the middle classes also developed their own cultures and as
financial and trade intermediaries were at the centre of the provision of new exotic goods,
fashions and styles (Goody, 1986; Featherstone, 2009b).18 The advocacy of the positive
effects of luxury by Adam Smith and others, then, resonated with the increased pursuit of
fashion, display and more conspicuous forms of consumption occurring in the middle
classes in eighteenth century England and points to significant links between liberalism,
political economy and rising consumption.

17
Royalty, as Foucault (1979) and others have argued, regularly sought to display their sovereign power
through public visible ceremonial such as executions (cf. the execution of the Regicide Damiens, with which the
book Discipline and Punish opens). They likewise demanded splendour on formal court ceremonial occasions,
which required carefully arranged sumptuous settings, opulence and luxury, to impress people with the
monarch’s magnificence. In effect, they valued the display of spectacle and aestheticization. All this public and
semi-public display of sovereign power on the part of the monarch required training and the accumulation of a
series of body competences, performative skills and controls. The power of the sovereign because it generally
(as in the divine right of kings’ doctrine) was assumed to embody special qualities and charisma, was such that
it had to be displayed, performed and demonstrated. The prime mode of power in society had to be made visible
in a way which was not the case with biopolitics, political economy and neoliberalism.
18
It is interesting to note that changes in merchant consumption in China and Japan paralleled those of Western
Europe with upper class homes in Ming Dynasty China (1368-1644) full of luxury items such as paintings,
sculpture and fine furniture etc. (Burke, 1993; Clunas, 1991; Featherstone, 2007: ch. 11). In both Western
Europe and East Asia consumption increased as sumptuary laws gave way to fashion systems with a more rapid
turnover of new fashionable goods for the middle classes and lower orders (Berg and Clifford, 1999; Berg and
Eger, 2003).

14
 In the nineteenth century there was a greater extension of consumer culture and the
democratization of luxury. New consumption spaces such as the department stores which
emerged in England, France and the United States, referred to as ‘dream worlds,’ by Walter
Benjamin (2000) were established in the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of
the twentieth century (Miller, 1981; Nava 2002; Tamari, 2006; Williams, 1982).
Department stores not only displayed fashionable and luxurious goods, they also provided
opulent and luxurious surroundings, evident in the use of carefully designed window and
floor displays which provided aestheticized and glamorous settings for goods. There was
also the additional capacity to not just look, but touch, to walk around, handle and try-on
goods and clothing. The tendency to accentuate the visual was heightened in the twentieth
century through the development of the cinema, television and advertising. The
Hollywood films which became a global force in the 1920s, and television which began to
dominate in the post-war era, increased the interest in lifestyle, in part through the publicity
given to the lavish lifestyles of stars and celebrities, featuring their homes, cars, swimming-
pools, fashionable clothing and accessories. The expanding consumer culture in the
twentieth century, then, provided a proliferation of images which fostered dreams of
luxurious consumption and fulfilling lifestyles (Ewen, 1976; Featherstone, 2007).
Consumer culture also provided new opulent and luxurious settings through the growth of
sites for shopping, entertainment and leisure (department stores, hotels, dance-halls, resorts),
which offered increased opportunities for pleasurable viewing, inspection and purchase.
Both the ready availability of images along with the new sites of consumption, stimulated
dreams of the consumer culture good life lived amidst luxurious abundance and style, rare
and beautiful things and people.

It has become a truism, then, to say that consumer culture has helped to stimulate visuality
and favours occularcentrism through the massive proliferation of images. Increasingly high
resolution colour images have also helped foster the aestheticization of everyday life. Media
have become mobile and ubiquitous, with the proliferation of screens on mobile devices such
as portable computers, tablets and mobile ‘phones; this has further increased the number and
availability of sophistication static and moving images (Featherstone, 2009a). Consumer
culture had become no longer exclusively dependent on an expanding world of goods made
available in city centre department stores or out of town malls, the new shopping spaces were
now increasingly provided in the virtual world of the Internet and ubiquitous screens through
‘click and purchase.’ Yet whether in the windows and displays of city centre stores or malls,
or Internet shopping, consumer culture features a profusion of photographic images of bodies,
cut up and edited in a bewildering variety of ways (Featherstone, 1982; 2010a). Body images
invite us to make comparisons to review who we are not and who we would like to be. While
the consumer culture body maintenance, cosmetic, fashion and advice industries provide
images of beautiful people enjoying the good life, the promise of transformation has become
central, with ‘before and after’ images demonstrating proof of the value of the time, money
and energy expended. The new body and ‘look’ is extolled as the passport to a more positive
self-image, exciting lifestyle and better quality of life. It is therefore possible to trace back
some of genealogies of contemporary consumer culture to the display of luxury in court
societies, which stimulated trade and colonialism and middle class merchant
entrepreneurialism. There are some continuities between the court display of luxurious
consumption and the display of wealth and excessive lifestyles on the part of contemporary
celebrities and the super-rich (Featherstone, 2013a, 2013c). At the same time there is an
important affective dimension to the way in which images are encountered in consumer
culture which provides an alternative powerful current to the rationalistic impetus of
consumer culture advertising with its appeals to the before/after logic of transformation.

15
Within consumer culture people have to learn to switch between careful scrutiny of the body
as an alleged object and see themselves clearly and coldly as a lifestyle expert might do, and
the affective body that moves through everyday life, which does not see in the same way and
has far less concern for ‘the look’ and impression management.

Consuming and Governing Data

Yet for all the consumer culture advice and advertising rhetoric on transformation of
appearance to reinforce the ‘if you look good you feel good’ formula, for all the display of
goods and possessions, to provide ‘evidence’ of the worthiness of the self, there is still the
question of the calculus in the act of purchase. Shopping may well involve impulse buying,
affective responses (Coleman, 2012), the dominance of drives over desire through the
technical manipulation of neuromarketing (Stiegler, 2013; Barker, 2009). At the same time,
consumption, as Foucault reminds us, can also be understood as enterprise activity, with
consumers actively engaged in seeking to increase their own satisfaction. As part of this
enterprising and maximising activity, it could be ventured that consumers are also
encouraged to review their purchases in relation to their longer term investments in their own
human capital. Consumer culture is not just a mindless hedonism, or dictated solely by
impulse and desire, but also requires a calculating hedonism in which credit-rating, levels of
debt and levels of satisfaction gained from particular purchases can be taken into account and
evaluated. Consumption generates a good deal of waste and fleeting satisfactions as critics
have long indicated,19 but it also leads to the accumulation of things, which can demand care,
maintenance and disposal - and in addition time-money calculation in assessing their sense of
value to us (Miller, 2008a, 2008b; Featherstone, 2013c).

At the same time very few people subject all their purchases to regular systematic review,
evaluation and cost-benefit analysis. There are some who log all their purchases on their
personal computer, yet this is currently considered to be eccentric behaviour. But the
feasibility of this type of analysis is increasing with the greater availability of internet
banking and shopping (not just buying consumer goods, but paying for vacations, air tickets,
utilities and other regular bills). It is also increasing through the use of smart phones and
other devices for ‘contactless payment,’ or credit card purchases via electronic scanning of
bar code, QR code and other formats. Business enterprises, of course are constantly
reviewing and evaluating the mass of data they accumulate on purchase patterns of materials,
products, supply-chains along with evaluation of existing markets and emergent innovation
and their own employees. Indeed it is possible in today’s digital world to accumulate detailed
metrics on all aspects of business life. The consumer is, albeit more slowly, being
encouraged to move down the same route.

19
Critics of the dangers of luxury and over-consumption have occupied a central position in the Jewish and
Christina religious thought. There were strong critiques of luxury and excessive consumption in the ancient
work in the writings of Plato, Socrates, Diogenes, Cicero, St Augustine and many others (Sekora, 1977). It was
only in the eighteenth century with the writings of Mandeville, Hume and Adam Smith that we find a more
positive attitude towards luxury as encouraging emulation and industriousness. One of the central figures in the
foundation of sociology, Emile Durkheim, was also strongly critical of the pursuit of consumer pleasures and
happiness as leading to anomie. Today over-consumption is additionally linked to climate change and planetary
destruction (Urry, 2010). For a discussion of ethical consumption see Featherstone (2010c).

16
Consumption then leaves traces. It entails recordings and the accumulation of data. The
mass of production and transactional data can be broken down so that it is possible to follow
the fate of particular batches of goods to know when, where and by whom they are bought,
consumed and disposed of. In the supermarket or department store shelf-life of particular
products can be noted. For those goods which are tagged electronically, which is
increasingly the case via barcode, QR code and RFIDs (Hayles, 2009) not just time spent in
the store or on shelves can be recorded, but even whether the goods have been speculatively
lifted up, looked at and put back. This enables sophisticated comparisons and evaluation of
similar or rival sets of goods, or individual items in a set. Patterns become evident through
analysis of large sets and time series data, in similar ways to the earlier discussion of the
eighteenth century birth of biopolitics addressed by Foucault (2008). The consumer world of
goods, then, is itself a mass, a multiplicity which can be progressively known and made
productive.20 It produces data which can be recorded, analysed and then re-organized and
governed in a similar way to any other population set. This then is the reverse side to the
visibility of goods, bodies and fashions and their endless duplication through images, as it
amounts to a new world of invisibility: one whose parameters are in the process of
elaboration and discovery.21
Today consumption takes place in a milieu which is increasingly digitalised, but this does not
mean home internet shopping is completely destroying city centre stores. Sophisticated
digital devices are also being installed in the high streets and malls which offer a range of
new experiences and facilities via screen connectivity. Rebecca Coleman (2012) has
discussed the use of digital screen/mirrors in changing cubicles which enable women to see
not only the dress they are wearing, but their previous saved collection of items on the stores
website, with an additional Facebook link to enable them to post the composite digital images
to solicit the views of friends and family. Again we have the coupling of visibility and digital
network invisibility, in this case designed to provide extra affective benefits (the enhanced
experience of shopping as enjoyable entertainment) with internet data back-up in the form of
one’s own personal set of images and price-comparison databases available through the

20
Attempts to explore and harness the productive potential of masses continue apace. Scientific digital devices
have become increasingly used to grapple with large-scale multiples – of molecules, species, particles and
people – which they see to measure, count and classify (Mackenzie and McNally, 2012). Also important is the
analysis of populations not just as a ‘biological multiplicity,’ (an aggregate with a pulse) as Foucault advocated,
but on the chemical multiplicity, with the current focus on new forms of reproduction such as cloning which
facilitate ‘fissiparous’ reproductions and the non-genealogical copy (Hayden, 2012). This process also leads to
the multiplication of methods which in turn make reality itself appear to multiply into different sets and worlds
along with a focus on the singularity of each case. This suggests research into masses of various types, offers
interesting insight into the perennial struggle to decide what is identity and difference, singularity and
multiplicity, the specific and the generic.
21
This is similar to the problem of pinning down and making more productive our knowledge of a multiplicity
identified by Foucault (2008). At one point he captured the need to conceptualise this newly discovered aspect
of social life that emerged in the eighteenth century, by suggesting that it amounted to the discovery of ‘a new
body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot
necessarily be counted’ (Foucault 2004: 245). Today the object of government for political economy continues
to shift away from the economy conceived as a specific domain of nation-states, as the population mass which is
relevant for the working of any economy is increasingly deterritorialized, as we find in the current phase of
globalization in which the financial markets and new information technologies such as the Internet link together
people and technologies into a new mass. The neoliberal integration of the global markets in the late twentieth
century initiated a new era with a rapid increase in the size and volume of trading. The proliferation of ratings
agencies using sophisticated digital technologies and metrics is an important part of this process, which can be
used to govern and discipline nation-states. The impulse to measure and evaluate performance, to manage risk,
is evident in the invention of new types of financial instruments such as derivatives, hedge funds, short-selling,
etc., which have flourished with the globalization and computerization of the financial markets (Knorr-Cetina &
Bruegger 2002; MacKenzie 2008; Davies, 2013).

17
store’s internet website and Facebook links. In response to the expansion of internet
shopping from the home, department stores and others are responding by enticing shoppers to
their stores to use their own digital screens (iPhones, iPads etc.), as well as to use the store’s
additional digital resources such as the full-length smart digital mirror/screen, and to see this
as part of a new enhanced shopping experience. Younger people especially are enthusiastic
about the hybrid city/screen world involving multi-tasking. A world which increasingly has
embedded digital devices which can provide extra information about a restaurant or urban
locale which comes immediately to hand on the screen of the digital device as one walks past,
or within one’s potential field of vision as is the case with Google Glass and other forms of
wearable augmented reality technology.22

Yet there is another side to this process. Mobile devices such as digital phones are not just
communicative devices for us, they are enabled to facilitate the constant tracking of our
movement in space and time and also carry information about who we call or text and for
how long. In addition, objects are also becoming more trackable. This is evident in the
increasing use of RFIDs (radio-frequency identification devices) which were first attached to
containers, and are now attached to more and more consumer items (Hayles, 2009). They
send back information to their home base about their present location and state of affairs – for
example, whether a wine bottle is in the supermarket, at home on the shelf, has been put in
the garbage, or is in the rubbish dump. As the unit cost diminishes this type of computer chip
is becoming ubiquitous – every object will have a trackable digital identity and can interact
with, or ‘talk to’ other devices and the urban infrastructure. Increasingly RFID tags are
becoming embedded into personal items and identity documents, including office key cards,
school IDs, credit cards, passports, driver's licenses, clothing, phones, groceries, transport and
toll passes. The use of biometrics also means chips are inserted into pets and human bodies.
Such information helps agencies to better understand mobility patterns to enable cities plan
their transport infrastructure and surveillance needs (Crandall 2010).

At the same time it is not just local city or state authorities who gather the information. This
is something which is being carried out by numerous private businesses and global
corporations. The internet in particular is a rich site for data gathering and there are a
growing number of web analytics firms that amass information on Internet website users via
computer algorithms. In effect categories of identity are being inferred and individual profiles
created, stored and analysed in real time, based upon their web use.
Through the use of software algorithms, commonalities between data patterns are identified
to enable real-time access and matching (Cheney-Lippold 2011). Users’ profiles can be
continually updated as with each piece of information on new preferences or changing tastes
and the set of recommended purchases altered accordingly (cf. Amazon Books). It is clear
that there now exists a new social life of methods outside the academy, with social science
quantitate data techniques such as sampling and census surveys seen as far inferior in terms
of energy expended, completeness of data sets and a host of other factors (Ruppert et al,
2013). Many of these databases are now vastly superior to those constructed by social
science research in terms of their extent, scope and real-time updating, and provide much
more fine-grained information about the consumption, lifestyle and cultural values of
different groups (Burrows and Gane, 2006; Beer and Burrows, 2013).

22
This is not far from the science fiction world described by William Gibson in his Neuromancer novel series
which stimulated a good deal of speculative interest about cyberspace in the 1990s (see Featherstone and
Burrows, 1996).

18
In terms of visibility and invisibility, it is possible to see the new Internet medium as
favouring deregulation and the open capacity to exploit the digital field in a similar way to
that described by Foucault with reference to eighteenth century biopolitics and the birth of
economics. Certainly there are many aspects of the internet which fit the model of opening
up a new competitive market, in which businesses compete and strive to amass data sets
about different populations and make these productive for their own ends. Increasingly, it
would seem that it is not only the state that is interested in making mass populations
productive, but corporations and other private bodies that engage in ‘data-mining.’ Some
would see this as evidence that we are moving from disciplinary societies to ‘societies of
control’ (Deleuze, 1992), in which control ceases to be primarily normative, inculcated
through disciplining the body through lengthy education processes and panoptic surveillance,
but occurs through more open mechanisms, in which our fragmented virtual identities
constructed in the digital databases become assimilated into categorical groupings through
statistical regulation. Yet the data would seem to be producing, or is based on, a more
complex taxonomy of tastes and lifestyle differences than previously thought, to produce a
more complex patchwork.

Yet does this mean there has been a switch in the mode of the regulation and move from
disciplinary normalising techniques inscribed onto bodies, to more open forms of control
through the modulation of digital identities in databases, which operate modes of inclusion
and exclusion, through tagging and tracking, enabling governance at a distance? Such large
descriptors can be suggestive, but often lack purchase when put against the complexities of
social and digital life. It would seem that the architectural possibilities of the internet could
favour new forms of panoptic control and discipline. This has been suggested to occur in the
case of social media networking sites such as Facebook and this can provide an interesting
insight into the discussions of visibility and invisibility. Bucher (2012) argues that Foucault’s
panoptic architecture with its emphasis on the visibility of the incarcerated and the invisibility
of the supervisor or guard, has effectively been reversed in the new forms of visibility
encouraged by the internet. With Web 2.0, what can be seen largely becomes a function of
the filtering and sorting capacities of algorithms which determine what each individual user
will encounter online (Beer, 2009). One influential source is Google’s PageRank algorithm,
which rank orders the things we search for in terms of the amount of incoming links by other
websites along with their perceived authority. Likewise Facebook’s News Feed feature
operates with a particular algorithm which favours and weights certain type of activities.

Under panopticism, as discussed above, the architecture of buildings such as prisons, schools
and hospitals was constructed to ensure that then inmates were under permanent visibility and
surveillance, which forced them to develop the awareness and attentiveness to the constant
possibility of inspection. In the Facebook News Feed, it is not the threat of visibility, but
rather the threat of invisibility which is to be feared and consequently governs the actions of
subjects (Bucher, 2012:1171). It is not the possibility of constantly being observed, but of
permanently disappearing which becomes the fear built into the architecture. But this
visibility-invisibility dynamic, operates in ways which are not totally transparent to users.
Inscribed into the algorithm logic of the Facebook News Feed is the idea that visibility
functions as a reward for providing the type of news items favoured and relates to having a
large number of friends commenting that the like a particular post. In effect there is a
disciplining process which makes subjects monitor their own behaviour and train themselves
to perform as required. From the Facebook perspective a useful individual is seen as one
who ‘participates, communicates and interacts,’ with the big danger being the threat of
invisibility (Bucher, 2012: 1175). Yet the flexible processual and interactive algorithmic

19
logic used in the internet creates modes of visibility that are modulated and temporary, that
oscillate between making people appear and disappear, adding to the uncertainty and thereby
demanding attentiveness from users.

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