Surveying the Body Electric,
or How Voyeurism Transforms Audience and E-valuation
by Tim Krause, Purdue University
(http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.3/ )

(Note: This is a linear version of a hypertexted essay. You might still be able to find the original at the above URL. - Lonnie Turbee - lmturbee@syr.edu)

Employing the techniques of "appropriation" and "inversion," Krause demonstrates how the activities of surveillance, voyeurism, and exhibitionism change our definitions of authorship, and asks us to consider how those changes may force us to re-imagine the power we enact and serve in our grading techniques.

Rethinking the Academy: Problems and Possibilities of Teaching, Scholarship, Authority, and Power in Electronic Environments by Keith Dorwick, University of Illinois-Chicago What are the problems and possibilities inherent in the academy as it exists in a web of social, political, technological, and legal forces that are mostly beyond its own control? Dorwick emphasizes scholarship and teaching, with a contrast to the problems and possibilities that are increasingly evident as growing numbers of teachers and students begin to experiment with the creation of knowledge in cyberspace.

Hyped-Up for Friends: Cultural Studies and Web Research in Composition by Michelle Sidler, Purdue University Are web sites simply hyped-up virtual representations of the American popular experience, decontextualized information wrapped up in unfamiliar space? Sidler demonstrates and discusses the use and usefulness of a cultural studies assignment which explores the ways in which popular visual media reflect--and impact on--larger social, political and economic conditions.

In Virilio's The Art of the Motor, Stelios Arcadiou argues that he is "trying to extend the body's capabilities through technology" (109). Much like his technology invading the body proper from the outside, the devices attached to the net accomplish their invasion through visual and auditory channels. Expanding to connect our bodies through other senses moves closer to what Virilio calls the "Hyperactive Man (sic)" (119)--extended in a myriad of different ways.

On one level, then, it's fairly easy to look at the devices on the net as superfluous--nothing more than the ability to watch through the neighbor's bedroom window. On another level, as mentioned earlier, it's about redefining ourselves and our relationship to our machines. The Web is a battleground for who and what we would become.

On the Web, you can see just about anything, and see it as quickly or as slowly as you want. Of course, there are the back alley peep shows and strip joints, but also the feet of your co-workers, toilets, and chia pets.

On one level it's all about voyeurism, but simulated voyeurism--being allowed to watch, but without the danger, or thrill, of being caught . Sure the site might be intelligent enough to know you're there, but you're likely to not end up in a courtroom somewhere.

On another level, though, it's about one definition of authorship, about constructing meaning out of the images that make up the lives of our virtual neighbors. They provide the images, you provide the text (or a collection of images, or an ordering of images to provide meaning). It's not exactly turtles all the way down, but images and meaning as far down as we care to descend.

Plagiarism? Hardly as long as you give credit to the original source or don't unfairly try to take credit, through profit, or otherwise, for someone else's work. The debate arises here, though as parties contend for the right to exclusive authorship. The optimistic side of surveillance on the net is that it extends our abilities out to include new perspectives. The flip side, however, revolves around issues of ownership and authorship...how the technology might be used for yet other means. Perched atop building cornices and on people's heads, cameras provide us with de Certeau's voyeuristic vision: flattening the landscape from the privileged perspective of the person with the camera. De Certeau's vision is described, ironically enough, from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center--the Web's vision, supposedly more democratic, from virtually any building overlooking numerous famous and not-so-famous cities around the world.

An act of authorship? de Certeau would argue not....rather, that it's an act of voyeurism...an act of totalizing and flattening out, of creating impotent "gods" (153).

Down in the city itself, where people walk, there are authors who are shaped by their own trajectories (153) in an emphasis on time to the detriment of space (155). This essay, therefore, seeks to define a space based on surveillance, based on the privileged gaze of voyeurs and of gods to illustrate how we are defined through the play of those roles on the Web.

The images of a previous screen are helpful: they observe and track human and machine traffic, purportedly saving us lots of time by recommending alternate routes. But, at the same time, Mike Davis argues that it's an easy next step to take the same machinic extensions and use them to put the equivalent of electronic handcuffs on the activities of entire urban social strata. Drug offenders and gang members (convicted or merely suspected) can be "bar coded" and paroled to the omniscient scrutiny of a satellite that will track their 24-hour whereabouts and automatically sound an alarm if they stray outside the borders of their surveillance district (128).

Although there's a marked pessimistic shift, at issue is authorship as control. Authorship, in these instances, is about control of material resources, and controlling trajectories.

Foucault describes panopticism as functioning through spatial coordinates:

"The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions--to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide--it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two." (200)

The Web functions similarly, but reverses even the first, making panoptic mechanisms more hegemonic through their ability to become their surroundings. Who knows, for example, if the person next to you on the subway is being tracked by a surveillance satellite?

The Web extends the panoptic mechanism even further by allowing more individuals to "see constantly and recognize immediately." We, for example, can track our students' writing projects more closely, monitor the traffic, and keep an eye on the weather in geographically distant locales. In that sense, we are likely defined by others through the computer screens that we watch.

Surveillance on the Web (whether it's surveillance of images, student writing, etc.) ultimately is about competing definitions of authorship ranging from:

1. author as god

2. author as voyeur

3. author as cyborg

Authoring as god is about control, about watching everyone's movement at all times, or at least in a Foucauldian sense, of having the ability to. The author-god is concerned primarily with controlling who has access to surveillance, to extending his or her gaze over others. The author-god exerts power through surveillance.

Author as voyeur manifests itself through daily minutae, the chia pets and feet of others, never really putting the pieces together into a coherent road map of his or her surroundings. The voyeur possesses snapshots, but not a photo album.

Author as cyborg looks for a radical redefinition of what it means to be human--to put together a coherent road map, to alternate gazes between voyeur and god, to do something productive for oneself with it. As a practical example, instructors of writing might share the responsibility (and corresponding gazes) for grading (including the creation of criteria) with their students.

Saints and angels without eyes, would we voyeuristically watch others? How would we benefit? How would we suffer? The image, to the left, by Paul Mavrides, takes on new meaning as we rewrite ourselves by substituting machines for our eyes.

In their College English article, "The Case for Hyper-gradesheets: A Modest Proposal," authors Harkin and Sosnowski propose to look at grade sheets as institutional text. Here's what they claim their new hyper-gradesheet (HuGs) could accomplish:

In a hypermedic situation, we could not only call up the texts of Muffy's [the student's] assignment, her textbook, and her evaluation of her teacher, but we could also see a videotape of the actual classroom and observe directly the instructions that Muffy was given." (26)

Harkin and Sosnowski's arguments foreshadow developments on the web, noted in the term paper and classroom sites of a previous screen where instructors, employers, family members, administrators and lawyers all have immediate access to the work records of our students. The Web might not include all that HuGs offers us as a hypermedia database, but imagine combining elements of inner city surveillance with the papers.

In essence, this is a mapping of extremes to make an argument. Practically, however, how might one go about reconstructing the relationship between students, writing instructors, and the material that we share on the web?

Satirically, the authors argue that the hyperlinking of performance data (PD), like that mentioned in the above quote, successfully solves the problem of performance invisibility (PI).

Works Cited

For additional information on the citation of graphics in the essay please refer to the screen on appropriation.

Borruso, John. Image found on virilio.html (b). Mondo 2000 Users Guide to the New Edge. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 101.

Brock, Tim. Image found on surveillance.html. Mondo 2000 13 (1995): 23.

Certeau, Michel de. "Walking in the City." In The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1993.

Davis, Mike. "Scanscape: L.A.'s Ecology of Fear." Mondo 2000. 10 (1993): 126-128.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Guattari, Felix. "Machinic Heterogenesis." In Rethinking Technologies. Ed. Verena Andermatt Conley on behalf of the Miami Theory Collective. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 13-27.

Harkin, Patricia & James Sosnowski. "The Case for Hyper-Gradesheets." College English 54 (1992): 22-30.

Image found on map.html. Mondo 2000 10 (1993): 128.

KPDX & Island Records. Images found on burroughs.html. Mondo 2000 Users Guide to the New Edge. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 199.

Lee, Holly. Image found on decerteau.html. Mondo 2000 13 (1995): 11.

Mavrides, Paul. Image found on yourself.html. Mondo 2000 10 (1993): 103.

Nagel, Bart & Heide Foley. Image found on machines.html. Mondo 2000 9 (1993): 121.

Negroponte, Nicholas. being digital. New York: Knopf, 1995.

"PoMo Appro--Apropos?" Mondo 2000. 10 (1993): 2.

Rucker, Rudy. "An Interview with Paul Mavrides." Mondo 2000 10 (1993): 97-105.

Scher, Julia. Image found on voyeur.html. Mondo 2000 9 (1993): 38.

---. Image found on watching.html. Mondo 2000 9 (1993): 37.

Virilio, Paul. The Art of the Motor. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.

White, Eric. Image found on me.html. Mondo 2000 13 (1995): 119.

Wiedemann, Frank. Image found on virilio.html (a). Mondo 2000 Users Guide to the New Edge. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 67.

Thanks to Johndan Johnson-Eilola for early comments on a draft of this hypertext as part of his Computers and Writing Seminar.