Risky Spaces and Dangerous Faces: Urban Surveillance,Social Disorder andCCTV

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, there has been a steady increase in the use of closed circuit television cameras to monitor public space(s) across Europe and North America. The existing theoretical literature has tended to explain the resort to CCTV in the context of disciplinary subjection. Whereas one set of studies explains CCTV surveillance using the metaphor of panopticon, more recent argumentation has identified CCTV as a ‘social ordering strategy’ which serves the interests of elite/business partnerships through risk-based modes of neoliberal regulation. This article provides insight into the hitherto neglected emotional and affective dimensions of the adoption of CCTV monitoring programs, privileging the role of social antagonism in the consolidation of public surveillance schemes. Developing one explanation for the ascension of open-street monitoring which advances the literature beyond the dominant materialideological perspective(s), the article engages insights from Foucauldian and psychoanalytic theory to explicate the reciprocal functioning of grievance and risk-based modes of problematization, set in a wider imaginary web of relations, in the symbolic constitution of social disorder as a mechanism of affective governance.