Surveillant Assemblage

The surveillant assemblage is primarily inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari but brought to conceptual fruition by Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson. It is an essential aspect of the transition from disciplinary society to control society as theorized by Deleuze. The surveillant assemblage is a concept meant to capture the convergence and integration of what were once discrete systems of surveillance, an integration facilitated by digitization. The surveillant assemblage works by abstracting human bodies from their spatial and temporal context and separating their component parts into discrete information flows. Access to these information flows tends to be restricted, but for those with access to the surveillant assemblage, data can be repurposed and reassembled, in forms such as “data-doubles” and predictive analytics, ...