Regulating belonging: surveillance, inequality, and the culturalproduction of abjectionTorin Monahan

Department of Communication, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

ABSTRACTConditions of abjection are increasingly viewed as problems to bemanaged with surveillance. Across disparate domains, bodies thatchallenge normalized constructions of responsible neoliberal citizenshipare categorized, monitored, policed, and excluded in dehumanizing andoften violent ways. This paper explores the role of surveillance in suchprocesses. The registers covered include everyday abjection (welfaresystems, battered women’s shelters, and homelessness), criminalizedpoverty (police targeting of the poor and emerging ‘poverty capitalism’arrangements), and the radically adrift (the identification, tracking, andcontainment of refugees). In each of these cases, surveillance is yoked tostructural inequalities and systems of oppression, but it also possesses acultural dimension that thrusts marginalized and dehumanizedsubjectivities upon the abject Other. Therefore, I argue that in order tocritique the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions ofcontemporary surveillance, it is necessary to take seriously themythologies that give meaning to surveillance practices and thesubjectivities that are engendered by them.

ARTICLE HISTORYReceived 26 April 2016Accepted 12 December 2016

KEYWORDSSurveillance; abjection;racism; poverty capitalism;culture

Although there has been renewed critical attention to surveillance in the realms of national securityand corporate data gathering, especially in online contexts, the gendered and racialized dimensionsof contemporary surveillance remain largely underexplored. This appears to be the case especiallywith regards to the treatment of poor and marginalized populations, where conditions of abjectionare increasingly viewed as problems to be managed with surveillance. For instance, the poor on wel-fare submit to scrutiny of their purchases, as they are enmeshed in systems designed to detect trans-gressions and exclude or punish those who are found unworthy. People on probation, especially inthe United States, yield to invasive electronic monitoring for minor infractions and are charged feesfor this ‘service’, which is often outsourced to private companies that profit handsomely from thisform of poverty capitalism. When seeking jobs, the unemployed encounter a battery of surveys,background checks, and drug tests, also frequently at their own expense, in order to qualify forthe possibility of obtaining a job. Homeless people are treated as populations to be managed andtracked through electronic systems deployed at shelters, as their privacy is continuously eroded,their makeshift dwellings dismantled, and their fragile sense of stability undermined. Refugees flee-ing the radical insecurity of civil war are scrutinized as potential health or terrorist threats and forcedto provide biometric data for United Nations tracking systems, paradoxically categorizing refugeesboth as discrete individuals to be sorted and followed and as an undifferentiated mass to be con-tained in camps.

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Torin Monahan torin.monahan@unc.edu

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY, 2017VOL. 10, NO. 2, 191–206http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2016.1273843

Viewing these dynamics through the lens of surveillance can draw attention to the ways in whichunequal control mechanisms define the operations of contemporary institutions and profoundlyshape people’s experiences and life chances. As David Lyon explains, surveillance can be understoodbroadly as ‘the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence,management, protection or direction’ (Lyon 2007, p. 14). Thus, more than simply watching, surveil-lance practices exert influence and reproduce power relations through technological and non-tech-nological means alike. Through the imposition of categories, processes, and differential forms ofexposure, surveillance becomes a project of social ordering and world-making, even if its efficacyat achieving its primary intended goals (e.g. crime control) is limited or inconsistent (Coleman2012). As deployed here, surveillance manifests as a multiplicity of techniques that conjure, coalescearound, and mediate the experiences of abject subjects.

Abjection signifies not only extreme need or destitution, but also a kind of social exclusionwherein the existence of the individual is called into question. Abjection implies a fundamentallack of fit with existing social and spatial orders (Sibley 1995), rendering the abject subject unknow-able and largely invisible, at least as a collective ethical responsibility (Kristeva 1982; Murphy 2006).Further, modern states are constituted in part through the paradox of the socially abject, or the‘inclusive excluding’ of various outcasts within states, justifying the enforcement of border controlsand legitimizing dominant mechanisms for the provision of order (Tyler 2013). As the examplesabove indicate, surveillance plays an important role in policing bodies and maintaining boundariesbetween inside and outside, self and other. Moments of unwanted visibility or presence – of the poor,the homeless, the refugee – seem to compel mechanisms of intensified control. Such control mech-anisms delineate parameters of temporary existence for the compliant, while excluding those markedas dangerous or socially illegible. Therefore, through categorization and sorting, surveillance enactsforms of structural and symbolic violence against marginalized Others.

Surveillance in this sense is about the maintenance of social order and the production of subjects.As Lisa Nakamura writes, compulsory forms of surveillance increasingly ‘serve two functions: toregulate, define, and control populations; and to create new gendered, racialized, and abled or dis-abled bodies through digital means’ (Nakamura 2015, p. 221). In the first instance, surveillance is amode of ‘social sorting’, of categorizing populations according to perceived risk or value and treatingthose respective groups differently (Gandy 1993; Lyon 2003; Bigo 2006). Such surveillance is funda-mental to how modern organizations operate: identifying, monitoring, analyzing, and sorting in fre-quently automated ways that are ambiguous to those affected by them (Giddens 1990; Thrift &French 2002; Graham &Wood 2003; Gilliom &Monahan 2013). In the second instance, surveillancefuses with existing cultural prejudices to coproduce unequal subjectivities and render them natural.Simone Browne describes this as a process of ‘digital epidermalization’, where surveillance systems‘do the work of alienating the subject by producing a truth about the racial body and one’s identity(or identities) despite the subject’s claims’ (Browne 2015, p. 110). When interpellated by such exer-cises of power, individuals are prone to adapt their sense of self to the discriminatory classificationsand treatments that characterize their lives.

This paper explores the merging of these structural and cultural dimensions of surveillance for theregulation of abject bodies. The field of surveillance studies has been adept at theorizing structuralforms of inequality that are reproduced through surveillance (e.g. Koskela 2000; Rule 2007; Gandy2009; Staples 2014). Classification and social sorting are the primary ways that this occurs, asunequal power relations and political contingencies are masked by processes of technologicalabstraction and mediation (Haggerty & Ericson 2000; Currah & Moore 2009; Guzik 2009; Morozov2013). A cultural turn, however, productively shifts the focus to the mythologies that give meaning tosurveillance practices and the subjectivities that are engendered by them (e.g. Monahan 2010, 2011;Ball 2009; Andrejevic 2013; Browne 2015; Dubrofsky & Magnet 2015; Hall 2015). Such an emphasisis vital in trying to account for the ways that surveillance contributes to gendered, racialized, andclassed violence. For instance, cultural narratives (e.g. about dangerousness or unworthiness) areoften key drivers for the adoption of surveillance systems that in turn reify those discriminatory

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categories and subject positions (Coleman 2012; McCahill 2002). In combination, structural and cul-tural dimensions of surveillance synergize in destructive ways: on one hand, affording a seeminglyapolitical objectification of the disadvantaged, and, on the other hand, providing a cultural scriptfor the dehumanization and demonization of the Other.

In the sections that follow, I analyze three different but overlapping registers of surveillance:everyday abjection of being on welfare, in battered women’s shelters, or homeless, subjected to thepossibility of constant scrutiny and judgment; criminalized poverty, which pulls the poor into extrac-tive and violent relationships, mediated by surveillance, while public and private institutions profit;and the radically adrift, where refugees seeking survival and stability are channeled into regimes ofstate surveillance and control. The concept I build upon for this analysis is that ofmarginalizing sur-veillance (Monahan 2010). Marginalizing surveillance means the production of conditions and sub-jectivities of marginality through the application of surveillance systems.1 For each register analyzed,cultural narratives – from politicians, the mainstream media, or threatened citizens – powerfullyinflect the forms of marginalizing surveillance deployed and the treatment of those under thegaze. While structural and cultural dimensions of surveillance weave together to govern the abjectand make them legible, they simultaneously reproduce forms of violence and exclusion.

Everyday abjection

Forms of everyday abjection are often most visible at their institutional interfaces. Such interfacescould include welfare systems, public housing, battered women’s shelters, and homeless shelters,just to name a few – each of which depend on sophisticated surveillance mechanisms to regulatethe practices and subjectivities of the various ‘clients’ they serve. Welfare systems in the US, forexample, mobilize client information systems, health information systems (for those receiving Med-icaid), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ‘food stamp’ systems, and cash benefit systems aspart of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families or Supplemental Security Income (SSI), amongothers. Each of these systems creates data for analysis and assessment, especially of clients’ currentresources, need, and worthiness. As a condition of receiving state assistance, people must submit toheightened scrutiny of their purchases, income-generating activities, job searches, parenting capa-bilities, and more. Obviously there is a moral dimension to such assessments, where the stigma ofbeing on welfare is coupled with suspicion of deficiencies with one’s character.

With welfare, especially in the US, subjectivities of marginality are reproduced through socialstigma, compelled transparency, and the double-bind of needing to prove one’s worthiness whenit is nearly impossible to make ends meet without violating program rules in some way. For instance,while the average monthly food-stamp benefit for a family of four was $459 in 2015 (Center on Bud-get and Policy Priorities 2015), the average amount for a ‘low-cost’meal plan for the same size familywas $859 (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2015). With the increasing privatization of benefits pro-grams, which are run by financial institutions like Citicorp, recipients can also find themselvessaddled with additional service fees for each transaction (Monahan 2006). Given this financiallyunsustainable context, welfare recipients subsist by underreporting income, taking side jobs, enga-ging in barter economies, paying babysitters by letting them use their electronic benefit transfer(EBT) food-stamp cards, and so on (Eubanks 2011; Gilliom 2001). Obviously, such techniques ofeveryday resistance can be affirming too, as ways for individuals to contest the stigmatized subjec-tivities that the state and others force upon them. That said, these and other resistance techniques donot alter the overwhelming power asymmetries of individuals facing merciless mechanisms ofbureaucratic surveillance, which operate alongside biopolitical pressures of self-surveillance (e.g.adhering to program stipulations) to fulfill the neoliberal state’s norms of worthiness (Mason 2016).

Battered women’s shelters introduce a whole other layer of indignities perpetrated through insti-tutional surveillance. Such shelters have been compared to prisons and other ‘total institutions’ fortheir meticulous rules, disciplinary practices, and judgment of character (Wharton 1989; DeWard &Moe 2010; Smith 2015). From the start, workers at such shelters collect detailed information on

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women seeking assistance and screen out those whom they deem problematic or less receptive tomoral reform. Andrea Smith relates:

Many domestic violence shelters screen out women who are not documented, who have criminal histories, whoare sex workers, or who have substance-abuse issues. One advocate told me that her program did backgroundsearches on potential clients and had them arrested if they had any outstanding warrants! This, despite the factthat these women have warrants out for their abusers and are trying to escape abusers who have forced theminto criminal activity. (Smith 2015, p. 33)

Once women have been admitted, they must acquiesce to a wide array or rules and expectations,alongside close monitoring to ensure compliance. These rules can include things like sign-out pol-icies, where residents must list their destinations; prohibitions against drugs and alcohol; require-ments that medicine be managed centrally by staff, letting workers know who is on birth controlpills, for instance; allowing staff to search private rooms at any time; restricting visitors to commonareas, where conversations can be overheard; and compulsory attendance at weekly counseling meet-ings where ‘confessional’ performances are expected (Pitts 1996). The violation of any rule or expec-tation could be grounds for eviction.

Women living at shelters with their children find their parenting skills placed under a microscopetoo. Poor and minority women, in particular, are assumed to possess deficient parenting skills and torequire firm guidance to train them in ‘hegemonic middle-class childrearing strategies’ (Gengler2011, p. 131). Some of the expectations for mothers are that they enforce house curfews, limit chil-dren’s television viewing, eschew all forms of physical punishment, avoid raising their voices whencorrecting children, and engage in ‘shelter-approved positive parenting techniques’, such as redirect-ing kids to acceptable choices, rather than ever saying ‘no’ to them (Gengler 2011, p. 139). Prohibi-tions against physical punishment, such as spanking, are the most strictly enforced, and anyviolations could lead to prompt dismissal. Because there is very little privacy, residents with childrenfind themselves heavily monitored and judged, compelled to embrace the shelter’s normative thera-peutic agenda and demonstrate gratitude (Gengler 2011). If women are found wanting, shelter staffmay recommend that children be placed in protective custody, so the risks for noncompliance areincredibly high.

Such surveillance and moral management compels a submissive role on the part of women: anacceptance of their subordinate position and conformity to the bureaucratic (and culturally specific)dictates of others. In other words, these practices add layers of symbolic violence, which is a kind ofviolence that leads ‘those who are subordinated to “misrecognize” inequality as the natural order ofthings and to blame themselves for their location in their society’s hierarchies’ (Bourgois and Schon-berg 2009, p. 17). There is a cruel irony in that having fled one controlling and disempoweringenvironment, residents at battered women’s shelters may find themselves in another. Drawingupon ethnographic research, Davis (2006) describes the surveillance performances at shelters as ‘cer-emonies of degradation’. Davis finds that black women especially must prove their worthiness byallowing constant monitoring and ceding control to staff, which produces relationships that struc-turally mirror those that many women had with their abusers.2 At the same time, through self-help focused counseling sessions, women are encouraged to analyze critically their own behaviorsand propensities for landing in abusive relationships. In other words, women must willingly andhumbly submit to invasive forms of surveillance and control, while accepting at least partial respon-sibility for the situations in which they find themselves. While disturbing, these messages reflectdominant conversations about violence against women, which tend to blame the victim ratherthan interrogate root causes of gendered violence (Mason & Magnet 2012).

Another troubling manifestation of everyday abjection is homelessness. Homelessness is a con-dition of unrelenting ontological insecurity. As bodies out of place, moments of stability or predict-ability are typically hard won and fleeting for people operating in the interstices of society. Moreover,the dangers to one’s physical and psychological wellbeing are constant, whether one is on the streetsor in a shelter. The state mobilizes surveillance practices to police homeless populations, usually in

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the service of capitalist interests or to appease middle-class anxieties about exposure to destituteothers. By monitoring and regulating homeless people, the goal seems to be one of invisibilization,of pushing indigent people beyond collective sight and responsibility. The state then turns to crim-inalization and incarceration, as techniques of securing the neoliberal social order, for the homelesswho persist in asserting their visibility. As Loïc Wacquant explains:

When it comes to programs for the poor, devolution implies bureaucratic retrenchment leading to thereduction of services from the social wing of the state, which in turn necessitates an extension of those servicesprovided by its penal wing to ‘mop up’ the ensuing public troubles. (Wacquant 2009, p. 90)

Perhaps the most concentrated organizational contexts for surveillance of the homeless are home-less shelters and food pantries. First, it must be noted that the homeless are routinely turned awayfrom shelters even when they seek them out, as there are vastly more people in need of shelter, food,and transitional beds than there are resources available (Mitchell & Heynen 2009). For those who dogain access to such sites, many of the techniques of observation and control are similar to those ofbattered women’s shelters described above, but these sites are subjected themselves to governmentalscrutiny in the form of audits and data reporting requirements through what is known as the Home-less Management Information Systems (HMIS) program. As Willse (2015) describes the effects ofthe program, shelters are motivated to keep tabs on homeless clients in order to prove compliancewith legal guidelines and qualify for government funding to offset operational costs. The outcome isnot simply a predictable one of enhanced disciplinary control of homeless clients; rather, by respond-ing to the data-generation demands of HMIS, shelters participate in a form of what Michel Foucaultcalled biopolitical power, reducing a population of homeless people to a dehumanized abstraction of‘universal data elements’ to be managed (Willse 2015).

Legal, spatial, and technological regimes conspire to regulate and exclude the homeless. Apartfrom urban design innovations to deter sleeping or loitering in public, the law seems to be the tech-nology of choice for criminalizing homelessness, indirectly, by proscribing activities fundamental tosurvival. Don Mitchell and Nik Heynen explain:

Laws (or increased policing) that make sleeping more difficult and dangerous, panhandling riskier, and tendingto bodily needs all but impossible, push the homeless as well as the housed poor more deeply into the urbanshadows, the hidden abodes of poverty that continue to mark every North American city, no matter howshiny its gentrified appearance. (Mitchell & Heynen 2009, p. 613)

For instance, inadequate access to public bathrooms, coupled with laws against public urination ordefecation, give the homeless no choice but to break the law (Amster 2003). Similarly, dumpster div-ing and other forms of ‘urban foraging’ are made illegal and reinforced via technological means, suchas barbed wire and video surveillance (Ferrell 2006; Mitchell & Heynen 2009). Some cities, like LasVegas, have made it illegal to share food in public parks, effectively criminalizing humanitarianefforts to provide sustenance to the hungry (Mitchell & Heynen 2009). Sleeping is also increasinglyprohibited in parks or on sidewalks (Mitchell & Heynen 2009), and such prohibitions have spread toquasi-public places such as train stations (Doherty et al. 2008), making them accessible, in practice,only to potential consumers.

Facing monumental challenges to maintaining privacy and dignity, surveillance – whether tech-nologically mediated or not – threatens to expose homeless people to violence. Ironically, as the statetries to invisibilize the homelessness problem, many forms of violence come from being too visible.There are threats of theft, harassment, or assault, including the possibility of brutal beatings and kill-ings of homeless people (Huey 2012). Then there are complaints to the police from residents, con-sumers, businesses, or tourists, which can lead to police intervention (e.g. citations and arrests).Video surveillance, while it may have the effect of making some homeless people feel safer (Huey2010), is also used as a detection tool to spot prohibited behaviors and alert security or police per-sonnel (Norris & Armstrong 1999; Dubbeld 2005; Doherty et al. 2008). Surveillance of the homeless,on the whole, contributes to the further marginalization of the neediest people in society.

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The cultural narratives surrounding everyday abjection tend to mark marginalized subjects asresponsible for their own plights, or sometimes even as manipulative or dangerous threats tosociety as a whole. First, in the case of welfare, stigma persists despite widespread use, wherein the US more than 20% of the population drew upon public assistance programs in 2012, asthe country continued to struggle economically in the wake of the Great Recession (Elliott2016). A sort of misrecognition occurs where personal experience of accessing welfare can beseen as exceptional and temporary, whereas depersonalized others on welfare can be paintedas irresponsible, exploitative, and morally deficient (e.g. ‘welfare queens’). The inherent racismin such narratives is not difficult to detect. One prevalent Internet meme, for instance, depictsa close-up photograph of a puffin bird stomping on green grass, as bold text reads, ‘Welfareis stopping natural selection’ (Memegen 2016). Invoking neo-Malthusian perspectives, the impliedpolicy recommendation with this meme would be one of eugenics: of eliminating state assistance(with food, shelter, or healthcare) in order to eradicate ‘weak’ members of society for the greatersocial good.

Second, concerning violence against women, postfeminist narratives encourage the responsibili-zation of women for landing in – and contending with – abusive relationships. Celebrity cultureoffers one influential lens for perceiving these dynamics. For instance, in the well-documented abu-sive relationship between Rihanna and Chris Brown, where photographs circulated of Rihanna’s bea-ten face after being assaulted by Brown, she contested the ‘victim’ framing, shifting the media focusto her actions and decisions, and away from Brown’s violence (Galla 2013).3 As Natasha Pattersonand Camilla Sears argue:

Rihanna’s experiences can be interpreted as a postfeminist narrative conveying the idea that she is a ‘can-do’ girlwho takes responsibility for the abuse by monitoring her actions and being careful not to be viewed or framed asa victim… Consequently, celebrity culture, as part of a postfeminist media culture, helps promote ideas ofchoice and individual responsibility in relation to issues such as domestic violence, and assists in the surveil-lance and regulation of women’s actions. (Patterson and Sears 2011, p. 1)

Similarly, in the aftermath of football player Ray Rice punching his fiancé Janay Palmer uncon-scious and then dragging her out of an elevator (which were actions captured by video surveil-lance), ESPN commentator Stephen Smith cautioned women to watch their behavior and not doanything to ‘provoke’ men into assault (Nguyen 2014). So whereas the media’s gaze in celebritycases could be thought of as having the potential to punish or deter would-be abusers, this doesnot appear to be the norm. Rather, in cases of violence against women, surveillance is moreabout self-monitoring by potential victims, as well as the cruel scrutiny and judgment victimsmight receive from others (Mason and Magnet 2012; Sweet 2014; Thapar-Björkert & Morgan2010).

Third, homelessness can also engender views of self-responsibility and self-blame, where theempirical fact of widespread downward economic mobility and precarity cannot mesh easilywith dominant cultural narratives of entrepreneurial possibility (Monahan & Fisher 2015; Willse2015). Perhaps more pernicious than this are characterizations of homeless people as dirty ordangerous bodies out of place, in need of monitoring and removal. For instance, in her ethno-graphic research on homeless populations in Ventura, California, Mokos (2016) found that localgovernments and community groups would target removal of the bamboo-like plant Arundoalong waterways as a way of dislocating homeless people who used the dense plant croppingfor privacy and shelter. In rationalizing such ‘cleanup’ efforts as forms of conservation, bothplants and homeless bodies were treated as ‘invasive species’ whose eradication was necessaryto recapture the mythic purity of untainted ecosystems. This discursive move affords dehumani-zation and displacement of homeless people under the seemingly progressive guise of restoringnatural ecosystems for collective access and enjoyment. Thus, across these examples, cultural nar-ratives infuse understandings of abject bodies, marking them as in need of regulation – and poss-ibly reform – through surveillance.

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Criminalized poverty

As hyper-incarceration in the US becomes increasingly untenable and unaffordable, reformersembrace the decriminalization of misdemeanor offenses as a seemingly progressive and practicalresponse to the crisis (Gottschalk 2010; Roberts 2013). Such offenses might include things likepublic intoxication, possession of marijuana, or driving with a suspended license. This class ofoffenses has served as the core target for a ‘broken windows’ theory of policing, which positsthat by mitigating lifestyle offenses, the police could proactively alter social environments to pre-vent more serious crimes (Wilson & Kelling 1982). Critics have challenged the efficacy of such anapproach, even on its own terms, but have also called attention to the ways in which these poli-cing practices unfairly target poor and racialized communities, infringe upon the constitutionalrights of individuals (e.g. through stop-and-frisk searches), create antagonistic relationshipsbetween minority communities and the police, and fuel the hyper-incarceration epidemic (Har-court 2001; Wacquant 2009).

However, misdemeanor decriminalization, as a corrective to ‘broken windows’ policing, fuseswith a neoliberal market economy to enmesh the poor in punitive debtscapes of control. As Alexan-dra Natapoff explains:

Decriminalization has a little-known dark side. Unlike full legalization, decriminalization preserves many of thepunitive features and collateral consequences of the criminal misdemeanor experience, even as it strips defen-dants of counsel and other procedural protections. It actually expands the reach of the criminal apparatus bymaking it easier – both logistically and normatively – to impose fines and supervision on an ever-wideningpopulation, a population that ironically often ends up incarcerated anyway when they cannot afford fines orcomply with supervisory conditions. (Natapoff 2015, p. 1055)

Thus, misdemeanor decriminalization should not be interpreted as ‘legalization’ in any real sense,because it merely reduces the chance of immediate incarceration for activities that remain illegal(Natapoff 2015). This is especially true in the context of income and employment inequalities. Bysubstituting things like fines, community service, electronic monitoring, ‘house arrest’ arrangements,and compulsory drug testing for incarceration, decriminalization supports an exploitative mode of‘poverty capitalism’ that depends fundamentally upon surveillance and can lead to further disen-franchisement and state violence.

Poverty capitalism can be understood as the financial exploitation of the poor through neoliberalarrangements, such as privatizing government services and charging the poor for them (Edsall 2014).For example, courts in the US are outsourcing to private companies the tasks of electronic monitor-ing and fee collection. Rather than charging local governments, offenders on probation, parole, or inpretrial confinement are charged up to $100 a month for this surveillance service (Edsall 2014). Suchnon-incarceration arrangements typically include compulsory drug testing too, even if the originaloffense was not drug-related. According to one report, ‘Companies now charge about $25 per[drug] test, meaning that a person serving a year-long probation sentence is likely to be saddledwith a $1,250 drug-testing bill’ (Schenwar 2015). If individuals fail to pay electronic-monitoringor drug-testing fees on time, they are charged late fees and eventually imprisoned. With roughly9 million people currently on probation in the US, the private market for ‘offender-funded proba-tion’ services is vast (Geller & Cohen 2016).

The US South, with its history of racial exploitation and violence, is home to most of the country’sfor-profit probation arrangements. In Georgia, for instance, private companies handle 80% of itsroughly 182,000 misdemeanor probation cases, netting a total of $40 million per year (Geller &Cohen 2016; Albin-Lackey 2014). For-profit probation companies in Georgia have even createdcompetitions that grant cash bonuses to its staff for exceeding fee-collection quotas (Geller &Cohen 2016). Apart from outsourcing schemes, courts and local governments are also increasinglyrelying on offender-funded probation arrangements to remain fiscally solvent in a time of reducedpublic funding for government agencies and services (Albin-Lackey 2014). Because misdemeanorfines are more easily paid by the relatively affluent, if such people are even targeted in the first

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place, the result is a ‘kind of regressive tax, turning the poorest populations into funding fodder forthe judiciary and other government budgets’ (Natapoff 2015).

Surveillance imbricates with poverty capitalism, reifying states of abjection through the unequalapplication of monitoring and enforcement systems. Those under house arrest may be subjected toGPS-embedded ankle bracelets that signal to authorities if they cross a dictated spatial perimeter;breathalyzers to check for alcohol consumption; voice- or face-recognition systems to verify a per-son’s identity at a certain place and time; and routine drug tests to confirm that the person is abstain-ing from illicit substances. These surveillance mechanisms clearly perform a normative function:they assume the subject can be reformed, or at least controlled, through constant monitoring andthe threat of punishment. As Coleman and McCahill (2011, p. 115) observe: ‘While the “new surveil-lance” is often said to indicate a shift away from the old “normalising” strategies of social control,many of these [electronic monitoring] practices are pervasive and retain an emphasis on transform-ing the behaviour of individual offenders’ (see also Nellis 2007; Norris 2007; Paterson 2007). Margin-alizing surveillance presupposes, as an initial condition, the untrustworthiness of subjects, which is aform of judgment delegated to (and imposed by) the technological systems in question. The verypresence – and coercive acceptance – of electronic-monitoring systems works to legitimate theforms of judgment they tacitly assert.

The various systems of monitoring the crimes and debts of the poor are forms of marginaliz-ing surveillance with potentially devastating effects. For instance, take the 2015 shooting death ofWalter Scott by Officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina. The killing was cap-tured by a citizen’s mobile phone recording, which showed Scott, who was African American,being shot multiple times in the back as he fled from the white officer (Shoichet & Friedman2016). The exercise of racialized state violence is fairly clear, but less obvious is the way that pov-erty capitalism inflected the police encounter, giving Scott a compelling reason to flee. Scott wastrapped in a vicious cycle of falling behind on child support payments, being fined and impri-soned, and then losing his jobs because he was jailed (Hitt 2015). He was trapped in povertycapitalism, and, in effect, he ran from the bill collector dressed in a police uniform. Thus,these particular systems of economic inequality aggravate tensions with the police, such thatpolice surveillance (e.g. locating individuals with warrants) and violence become tools of capitalistexploitation and punishment of the poor.

Far from being a structural problem only, however, surveillance and poverty capitalism are firmlyrooted in US cultures of antiblack racism. Narratives of racial inferiority, irresponsibility, and threatprovide guiding rationales for the existence of surveillance and policing practices directed at theracialized poor. Thus, it is telling that in the wake of Walter Scott’s death, some organizationsreferred to him as a ‘deadbeat dad,’ as if that were an accurate, neutral label and that this assessmentof his character should somehow shift a portion of the blame to Scott for his own death. For example,the Council of Conservative Citizens stated:

For days, every media outlet in the nation has been screaming ‘white officer charged with murdering unarmedblack father.’ Walter Scott was a habitual deadbeat dad that had an outstanding warrant for non-payment ofchild support. The media clearly is pushing an agenda. Every day white people are murdered by blacks andnone of them are national news stories and usually race is never mentioned. (Council of Conservative Citizens2015)

In addition to demonizing Scott, this position also projects a threat to white supremacy and security,which is a threat – as the authors imply – that the mainstream media are complicit in advancing.Widely circulating Internet memes further stoke racism through such messages of blaming the vic-tim. For example, one reads: ‘Nearly every instance of a black man getting killed by police… Theblack man was doing something wrong to begin with’ (NIGHTWOLF 2015). Even opinion piecesin the so-called mainstream media, as represented by CNN, tempered condemnation of Scott’s kill-ing with asides about ‘deadbeat dads’: ‘Deadbeat and absent dads are one of the most serious andoften overlooked threats to our collective well-being today. Forget the school-to-prison-pipeline.

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Lousy parents are the prison pipeline; particularly symptomatic of this problem are absent and dead-beat dads’ (Cevallos 2015).

These few examples underscore the importance of cultural context in shaping interpretations andexperiences of surveillance and violence. Just as structural conditions, such as poverty and socialinequality, profoundly shape the application of surveillance and its differential ramifications uponpopulations, so too does a pernicious culture of antiblack racism inflect police encounters, mediarepresentations, and public policy. Poverty capitalism catalyzes new developments in the surveillanceof the poor, new innovations in state and corporate debt creation and debt collection. Poverty capit-alism is not so much a departure from hyper-incarceration as it is an explicit fusing of its racial andpenal logics with capitalist imperatives, which are then reticulated across a wider social terrain.

Radically adrift

The current refugee crisis sweeping across North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe is fundamen-tally about the poor, vulnerable, and radically adrift. As a result of the ongoing civil war in Syria, adocumented 4.6 million displaced Syrians alone have been registered as refugees in Jordan, Turkey,Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq (Kerwin 2016). In 2015, Europe was confronted with over 1.3 million asy-lum claims and over one million new refugees crossing its borders, presenting a monumental huma-nitarian and political challenge for destination countries (BBC 2016). The crisis also presents amassive surveillance and logistics problem for countries and aid organizations trying to predictflows and routes of refugees, identify and track individuals, provide medical screening and care,ensure safety, and expedite asylum and immigration processes.4

The United Nations, in its attempt to rationalize the chaos of refugee management, has partneredwith Microsoft to implement what they call the ‘ProGres’ database to register and track refugees. Thesystem involves the use of a proprietary platform from another company, IrisGuard, to capture bio-metric data (iris scans) from refugees and create unique profiles for each individual. The data col-lected from individuals are detailed and potentially expansive, including, but not limited to,‘personal details, plus time of arrival, place of origin, occupation, education, family members, contactinformation, and permission to share information’ (Favell 2015). Personal and biometric data arefurther entered into an internationally shared system, but also encoded onto vouchers or cardsfor aid distribution at stores, banks, or other locations. Importantly, the data records for individualsare dynamic, such that they can be updated on an ongoing basis by a host of European agencies orrelief organizations; the digital dossier follows the individual and accretes fine-grained detail alongthe way. Registered individuals are further granted priority access to humanitarian aid and asylumreview (Marr 2015). By 2015, IrisGuard claimed that 1.6 million Syrian refugees had been registeredthrough its system (Computer Weekly 2015).

Despite concerns that similar refugee and migrant management systems fail to meet privacy anddata protection safeguards required under European law (La Fors-Owczynik 2016), it is not surpris-ing that individuals fleeing civil war and the threat of torture or death would willingly submit toregistration in these electronic systems. It is interesting, however, the ways in which authority is del-egated to the ProGres system to designate abject, liminal bodies as ‘refugees’, as people deserving ofentry into a larger bureaucratic system for eventual triage or placement. Legally speaking, ‘Untilregistered, they are not officially a refugee, thus not entitled to protection or eligible for aid – shelter,food, money, healthcare, education – from other UN agencies or the NGOs which fulfil day-to-dayoperation’ (Computer Weekly 2015). Enrollment in ProGres, then, transforms an undifferentiated,precarious mass of humanity into individual ‘refugees’ and unique data elements to be rationallymanaged.

Clearly, in addition to the humanitarian and bureaucratic imperatives, there is a desire to screenout or exclude people who may introduce a potential terrorist or criminal threat. As one story relates:‘The scans also prevent members of extremist groups from misrepresenting themselves, and preventthe cards containing aid money from being stolen and resold’ (Balakrishnan 2015).5 Because the

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identities of most so-called extremists are unknown, ProGres and similar systems must depend onsubjective ‘profiles’ and risk indicators of possible extremists (by family members, place of origin,occupation, etc.) to make such determinations (cf. Amoore 2013; Leese 2014). In the process, screen-ing systems of this sort shift the emphasis from seeing migrants as in need of aid to seeing them assecurity risks (La Fors-Owczynik & van der Ploeg 2016; Mueller 2010). Some commentators cautionthat biometric screening and tracking of refugees may become ‘a backdoor for attempting to monitorand control majority Muslim populations and tracking them in Europe’ (Balakrishnan 2015). Thesystems are marginalizing in the ways that they fix populations, positioning them as legible, deeplyracialized ‘refugees’ whose tenuous sense of security may be revoked at any time.

While technological systems are always polyvalent, in emphasizing the screening and tracking ofrefugees, humanitarian systems are transduced into security systems. Transduction in this senseindicates a fundamental change in state, which, as Kitchin and Dodge (2011) explain, can be broughtabout by technical change, such as a grocery store effectively becoming a warehouse if the computercheckout system crashes. In the context of refugee management systems, the impetus for this changeappears to be more of a political shift catalyzed by responses to the Islamic State terrorist attacks inParis in November 2015 and Brussels in March 2016. The embodied material effects of this shift canbe seen in violent attacks on and xenophobic rhetoric directed at refugees, the tightening of pre-viously porous borders in the European Union, and the transformation of refugee ‘camps’ intopotentially indefinite detention facilities.6

Camps are designed to centralize the distribution of humanitarian resources, but also to containand manage bodies. They can exact their own kinds of dehumanizing effects upon refugees who maystill be struggling to achieve human security (freedom from fear and want) and who find themselvescold, wet, sick, lonely, hungry, and traumatized. The diversity of refugee camps across countriesmakes generalizations difficult, and surely some achieve or exceed humanitarian objectives, butmany of the stories emerging from camps speak of overcrowding and existential uncertainty. Forinstance, more than 430,000 people have cycled through the Za’atari Camp in Jordan, which at pre-sent houses over 85,000 refugees in a zone of tightly packed tents and trailers (Ryot 2015). Many ofthe camps in Europe are teeming with disease and fail to meet basic humanitarian standards set bythe United Nations (Moore 2015b). The camp at Calais in France is lined with razor-wire fences todeter migrants from accessing the Channel Tunnel into England (Halkon 2015). Meanwhile, at theBela Jezova camp in the Czech Republic, conditions are described as being worse than those in pris-ons, where refugees are transported in handcuffs to the barbed-wire-lined facility and ‘every eveningthe foreigners are pulled out of bed by police, who sometimes wear helmets or balaclavas, to becounted. If the children are asleep, the parents must wake them and make them stand up’ (DW2015). Because of the conditions at camps, more than a few migrants have said things like, ‘Itwould have been better to die in my own country…At least then I would have died with myhonor’ (Bajekal 2015). Refugee camps, therefore, can serve as architectural technologies of margin-alizing surveillance, cultivating subjectivities of marginality through their application of dehumaniz-ing control logics.

Finally, it is vital to account for the ways in which discourses of racism animate marginalizingsurveillance for refugees. The systems cannot simply be assessed as forms of rational managementor even criticized merely for their ‘objectification’ when those in need are referred to as a ‘swarm’,as former British Prime Minister David Cameron called them (Elgot & Taylor 2015). Rather, the sys-tems are tools of abjectification that enforce social exclusion of racialized others. It is telling, forinstance, that the Calais camp in France is colloquially referred to as ‘The Jungle,’ which, especiallygiven France’s colonial past, is a label with disturbingly racist overtones. Meanwhile, the rhetoric ofthe political right in the United States equates Muslim refugees with terrorists and proposes that allSyrian refugees be barred from entry (Fantz & Brumfield 2015; Levy 2015). Presidential candidateDonald Trump went as far as suggesting that there should be a complete nationwide ban on Muslimsentering the US, as a form of institutionalized religious discrimination, until supposed Muslimhatred of America could be diagnosed (Diamond 2015). In Trump’s words:

200 T. MONAHAN

It is obvious to anybody the hatred [of Muslims for America] is beyond comprehension. Where this hatredcomes from and why we will have to determine… our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacksby people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. (Diamond 2015)

Cultural narratives of this sort fuel suspicion, fear, and hatred of the abject other; they shift policyfoci from humanitarianism to security screening; they invite nationalistic violence and impede asense of collective responsibility for refugees who are deemed to be backward, dangerous, and law-less. In such a context, surveillance becomes a tool of dehumanization. The production of margin-alization is recast as a logical and rational response to the imaginary existential threat that refugeespose to civilization.

Conclusion

Structural forces and cultural representations exert a profound influence on conditions of abjectionand on surveillance-based responses to them. In order to grasp this influence, I have sought to tracesome of the links between marginalizing surveillance practices and their social and cultural contexts,with particular attention to the influence of gendering and racializing discourses upon subjectivities,policies, and relations. In effect, what is required for such analysis is a ‘cultural studies of surveillance’that perceives surveillance as ‘embedded within, brought about by, and generative of social practicesin specific cultural contexts’ (Monahan 2011, p. 496). Context in this sense is not restricted to aspecific locality; rather it signifies ‘the relationships that have been made by the operation ofpower, in the interests of certain positions of power’ (Grossberg 2010, p. 21). A cultural studies ofsurveillance would need to map such manifold relationships across social formations and situate sur-veillance encounters within larger systems of politics and meaning. By doing so, it could open up aspace for critique and seek possibilities for alternative articulations of power relations.

The various social and cultural contexts reviewed here each illustrate the agential role of surveil-lance in producing and regulating conditions of abjection. Forms of everyday abjection, while incred-ibly varied, are materialized by neoliberal dynamics of retrenchment of the welfare state, unrealisticexpectations that private companies and civil society organizations could compensate for statereductions, and imperatives for data collection and technological automation. Surveillance fuseswith a culture of suspicion of welfare fraud, moral judgment of violence against women survivors,and perceptions of uncleanliness or undesirability of the homeless. The context for criminalized pov-erty imbricates: legal changes to decriminalize misdemeanor offenses, privatization of electronicmonitoring and fee collection, reductions in resources for courts and police departments, structuralinequalities and employment precarity, and a persistent legacy of antiblack racism in the US. In thiscontext, surveillance becomes a mechanism for extracting resources, rendering bodies visible, stig-matizing individuals, and aggravating the conditions for police violence. Racist cultural narrativesfunction to paint over the complex interrelations that bring about such marginalized subjectivitiesand police conflict. Finally, the context for the management of refugees – the radically adrift – pre-sents complexity on a geopolitical scale, but with specific particularities or interfaces that mediateembodied experiences (e.g. the camp, the border, the biometric identification system). Clearly, con-tributing factors include the civil war in Syria, regional and economic instabilities brought about bythe ‘war on terror’, colonial histories, the emergence of terrorist groups like the Islamic State, econ-omic recession, inequalities among European Union member countries, legal arrangements amongcountries, and much more. Whereas refugee surveillance systems might have initially prioritizedhuman security, alongside the profit motives of technology companies, the tone has shifted to stressnational security and containment. The function and meaning of such surveillance mutates inresponse to xenophobic nationalism that casts refugees as dehumanized and threatening others.As with the other examples, but perhaps even more so, the capacity of refugees to contest such sub-jectivities is attenuated by extreme vulnerability and crushing need.

These observations do not deny the important agential capacity of subjects to resist, resignify, andsometimes even appropriate forms of marginalizing surveillance (Coleman 2012; McCahill & Finn

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2014; Browne 2015; Hall, Monahan, & Reeves 2016). Conditions of abjection, especially when renderedvisible and problematized, can serve as a powerful resource for personal and political struggle (Tyler2013). It should also be acknowledged that local contexts always mediate surveillance applications,institutional practices, and cultural meanings. The goal here has not been to advance an argumentabout a totalizing form of marginalizing surveillance, but instead to highlight some patterns in the con-vergence of structural conditions and cultural logics that motivate the surveillance of abject bodies.

Thus, this paper has illustrated some of the ways in which conditions of abjection are policed byand reproduced through surveillance. Surveillance is yoked to structural inequalities and systems ofoppression, but it also possesses a cultural dimension that thrusts marginalized and dehumanizedsubjectivities upon the abject, marking them as complicit victims, societal outcasts, invasive species,or swarms. Such marginalizing surveillance pulls bodies between extremes of compulsory legibilityand exclusionary invisibility. In order to critique the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions ofcontemporary surveillance, it is necessary, therefore, that surveillance be comprehended as insepar-able from social and cultural contexts. Through such analysis we can begin to address the nightmareof structural and symbolic violence engendered by such surveillance.

Notes

1. I intentionally employ the term ‘subjectivities’ instead of ‘identities’ to flag the contingent, socially constructednature of categories of the self. As Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg explain: ‘Unlike the term identity, theconcept of subjectivity does not imply individual agency or self-ascription. It treats taken-for-granted charac-teristics such as demographic profile or psychological temperament as discursive products of modernity ratherthan innate categories’ (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009, pp. 18–19).

2. Rather than being unique to shelters, this double-bind may reflect larger patterns with the use of surveillance tointervene into the lives of women considered to be ‘at risk’ of abuse, such as when systems used to monitorwomen and girls deemed to be at risk of sex-trafficking might unintentionally pull them into punitive law-enforcement encounters (Musto & boyd 2014).

3. It is important to note the ways in which Rihanna, as a racialized subject, was recast in the register of whiteness(e.g. police camera flashes on bruised skin, bleached hair for tell-all Diane Sawyer interview) to afford circula-tion as a representative of universal (white) victimhood (Moore 2015a).

4. Because contemporary global logistics is organized around the flow of goods (protected through supply-chainsecurity systems), human security is more often construed as presenting friction to such movement (Cowen2014). Thus, the science of logistics may be poorly equipped to manage humanitarian crises without first trans-forming them into opportunities for financial gain, whether through the coordination of vectors of flow (e.g.laws, transport systems) or the reduction of security risks.

5. The propensity is high for such technological systems to ‘boomerang’ back from liminal spaces to find similarapplications on domestic populations (Graham 2010). In the case of IrisGuard, that boomerang effect is explicitand intentional, as the senior vice president of the company, Joe O’Carroll, has indicated his desire to use it forthings like domestic distribution of welfare benefits (Balakrishnan 2015). There are obvious neoliberal inflec-tions to iris-scanning systems for refugees too, where refugees are ostensibly given ‘greater choice’ and ‘moredignified’ ways to access resources, while being deterred from ‘theft and fraud’ (Computer Weekly 2015). Theserationales mirror exactly those provided for the initial deployment of electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards forfood-stamp benefits in the United States (Monahan 2006).

6. Even before these changes, the data more globally suggest that once refugees arrive at camps, they will spend anaverage of 17 years there (Ryot 2015; U.S. Department of State 2016).

Notes on contributor

Torin Monahan is a Professor of Communication at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His researchfocuses on institutional transformations with new technologies, with a particular emphasis on surveillance and securityprograms. Monahan is a director of the international Surveillance Studies Network and an associate editor of the lead-ing academic journal on surveillance, Surveillance & Society.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

202 T. MONAHAN

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