Surveillance

Surveillance is the practice of watching over a given terrain, its inhabitants, and their relations, commonly for the purpose of exercising instrumental control over that which is being watched. As such, surveillance is central to the establishment and maintenance of “scopic regimes” that enact power to order the world. From its inception as a discipline, and indeed even prior to its attainment of disciplinary status, geography has engaged with surveillance as both participant and observer.

Observing the distribution of human and natural variation across the surface of the Earth, and reporting on that variation, has been a key geographical practice from the times of Strabo through those of Ibn Battuta, John Mandeville, Xu Xiake, and beyond. Such accounts tend to be cartographical exercises conjoined to richly descriptive, and sometimes apocryphal, travelogues. A subset of these, however, serves the additional purpose of providing rulers and their administrative bureaucracies information on the presence and distribution of resources in given territories. Such information, in turn, informs the policies and actions by means of which rule may be imposed on the ground.

But the rise of the European empires, and the corollary entrance into an “age of reconnaissance,” required an unprecedented demarcation of new territories and the cataloguing of their contents. This not only heightened the prominence of expeditionary surveys but was, to no small extent, dependent on them too. Geographers and their explorations, as, for instance, those of Alexander von Humboldt, Richard Francis Burton, and Piotr Kropotkin, were at least initially charged with and supported by the task of seeing for empire building. Empires in turn claimed and asserted, however incompletely in practice, a mastery over all that they saw in no small part through the lenses of such expeditions. This process contributed centrally to both the legitimization and the elaboration of geography as a discipline.

The role of surveillance to fix things in space was complemented by the fixing of attributes to things—the application of categories to that which was surveyed and the ascription of fixed attributes to these categories. Thus, the expeditionary practice of geography did not merely undertake surveillance but created surveillability, rendering that which was seen recognizable within a disciplined system of spaces understood as both substrate and container. Outgrowths of this process ranged from intricate and intimate catalogs of a given locale's vegetal and mineral resources to cut-and-dried global mappings of the distribution of the world's putative races.

Although it was developed and deployed most extensively at and beyond colonized peripheries, intensive geographical surveillance was quickly repatriated back to core territories and, most prominently, to the metropolis. With the rise of the modern state, surveillance was key to the concomitant transformation of subjects into manageable, governable populations. This was accomplished through the innovation of initially geographical sciences, such as demography and its allied statistics, and their implementation through a range of practices, such as the mandatory assignation and stabilization of surnames conjoined to the conduct of increasingly regular censuses. Nor did these innovations remain conceptual abstractions or occasional events. Rather, they were palpably and even immutably materialized on the ground to facilitate state functions such as policing and fire suppression, as with the 19th-century parcelization of Berlin into courtyard apartments or the still extant ward system of Edo (now Tokyo).

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