Fractal actors and infrastructures: the case of DNA surveillance
Abstract
As we move into an age of ever more cameras and databases, monitoring and identity checks, surveillance theory paradoxically turns away from the totalitarian gazes of Big Brother and the Panopticon, looking for freshtheoretical resources.Scholars have put fortha plethora of interesting approaches and conceptssuch as social sorting (Lyoned. 2003) and thesurveillant assemblage(Haggerty & Ericson 2000), thus adding encouragingvarietyto apreviously much more homogenousfield.In thewake of this development, somehave sought tobring the fruits of the successful actor-network-theory (ANT) into surveillance studies(Ball 2002, Adey 2004, Gad & Lauritsen 2009). In this paper, I further explore the potential of this connection by experimenting with Marilyn Strathern’s concept of the fractal (1991), which has been discussedinnewer ANTliterature (Law2002;Law 2004; Jensen 2007). I argue that the concept fits nicely intothe ANT-oriented situated surveillanceapproach(Gad & Lauritsen 2009), not because it explains surveillance, but because it bringsempirical sensitivityto our effortsto understanding what comprises a surveillance actor, its network and its relations to those under surveillance. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2008and 2011 in relation to my Master’s thesisand PhD respectively, Iillustratefractal concepts by describingtheacts, actors and infrastructure that make up the ‘DNA surveillance’ conducted by the Danish police.
Please note that the author considers the paper to bea work-in-progress!
Keywords:Fractal, Situated Surveillance, ANT, DNA
Introduction
Surveillance is increasingly becoming woven into the fabric of ordinary life.Responding to the fast pace of surveillance societies, surveillance studies has grown rapidly over the last decade. In the wake of this development, the field has been enveloped in fruitful theoretical discussions about surveillance and, in particular, the usefulness of Big Brother and the Panopticon (e.g. Lyon ed. 2006). Interesting new approaches and concepts have emerged out of this debate, most notably David Lyons understanding of surveillance as social sorting(Lyon ed. 2003) and the manifoldDeleuzian contributions (e.g. Haggerty & Ericson 2000; Hier 2003; Bogard 2006).In addition to their work, an undergrowth of other conceptualizations of surveillance has emerged, including attempts to relate ANT(Ball 2002; Adey 2004) and Marxist analysis (Fuchs 2011) to surveillance studies. In this paper, I further investigatepossible connections between ANT and surveillance studies, by exploringfractal conceptualizations of objects, actors and infrastructures.I argue that these concepts are helpful in studying situated surveillance (Gad & Lauritsen 2009), not because they are able to explain how surveillance works, but because they add empirical sensitivity through cognitive dissonance. In contrast toaforementioned surveillance concepts, the fractal is useless without detailed empirical descriptions, because it leaves all questions of “who”, “what” and “how”open.This quality makes the fractal fit into the infra-language of ANT(Latour 2005) and thus the ANT-oriented situated surveillance approach.
Focusing on concepts that offer empirical sensitivity rather than strong explanatory theories is relevant because of two related imbalances within surveillance studies.First and foremost the field continues to “suffer from an overabundance of speculative theorizing and a dearth of rigorous empirical research” (Walby 2005: 158).Rarely are we invited through rich ethnographic descriptions to meet the actors that are doing or are under surveillance. Secondly,scholars tend to focus on the extraordinary and unjust and neglect the ordinary. Apart from the normative ethos of surveillance studies, I believe that there are normal methodological causes for this bracketing of mundane practice. One factor isthe difficulty of getting real access, which is substantially enhanced in surveillance studiesdue topolarized politics and privacy concerns. Another restraining factor is that describing surveillance can be a difficult enterprise because the acts that make up surveillance (e.g. data collection, analysis and control) are often spread in time and space amongst actors that are only partially connected.When this is the case, the empirical realities themselves resist descriptionbecausesurveillance – no matter where you position yourself –always seemsto be elsewhere.This paper tries to address this problem of doing situated studies in partially connectedsurveillance assemblages by presenting the concept of the fractal, which opens up a different venue for thinking about what we observe when weare grappling with the difficult and elusive object ofsituated surveillance.
In the paper, I illustrate the fractal concepts throughobservations and interviews made in connection with my study on ‘DNA surveillance’ as conducted by the Danish police force.I define DNA surveillance as the collective of police and forensic actors that collect, analyze and retain DNA profiles from suspects and crime scenes in order to control a population of suspects. I invitethe readerinto the daily work of police detectives, forensic personnel and the administrators of the police DNA database.First, however, I describe the main attributes of situated surveillance and the fractal image.
The situated surveillance approach
Situated surveillance is an approach coined by Christopher Gad and Peter Lauritsen (2009).Aligning themselves with the known critiques of the Panopticonand Big Brother (Lyon 2006; Haggerty 2006) theydistance themselves fromthe all-seeingeye as a fruitful metaphor. Drawing on Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour they argue that vision is instead always embodied, partial and limited and thatsurveillance can bemulti-directional.They furthermoreemphasize that we cannot assume that surveillance flows freely, but that it must be seen as work that involves effort,friction and resistance, and that surveillance may be used for both control and care (see also Lyon 2001).In order to capture these qualities, they propose Latours notion of the oligopticon(Latour 2005; Latour & Hermant1998) and Harawayssituated knowledges(1988) as guiding concepts for a situated approach.
Situated knowledgeisHaraway’ssuggestion ofa feminist understanding ofobjectivity, which attacks the idea of science as a privileged practice that through a neutral and elevated gaze has the ability to formulate objective anddisembodied statements.She sees this as a rhetorical device – a “God trick”–that distorts how science really works. She claims that science cannot be isolated from their materiel surroundings, but are bound to their technologies (microscopes, databases etc.), which both serve as making opportunities and limitations at the same time.But non-situated vision simplydoes not exist; there are no views-from-nowhere. An important point is that neither Gad & Lauritsen norHarawayareinterested in defining vision generally, but in investigating how vision is produced and for whom it works.
Gad Lauritsenrelate theunderstanding of situated knowledge and vision to Latoursconcept of the oligopticon, which further underlines the fragility and limitations of surveillance. Latour understands oligoptica as specific bureaucraticlandscapes that allow detailed but limited observation that is providedbythe available maps,documents, files, screens, databases and computer programs etc. The resulting visionis very different from the panopticon:
“Oligoptica […] do exactly the opposite of panoptica: they see much too little to feed the megalomania of the inspector or the paranoia ofthe inspected, but what they see they see it well” (Latour 2005: 181)
The technologies arenot allowinga complete overview of the observed. Instead they create inscriptions that translate the observed (e.g. suspects) into something more workable (e.g. DNA profiles, criminal records, images,lists of phone calls).It is these inscriptions that the surveillingactor(-network) has access to and not the observed itself. In other words, what is observed is out of sight and is performed by the materiality which is in view inside the surveillance system.But this view is not a static thing. The observers’vision may quickly be blurred or undermined: “the tiniest bug can blind oligoptica” (ibid.). It-systems can break down, cameras can be turned away, files be deleted and DNA profiles can be contaminated, planted or falsely identified.
Ultimately, this line of thoughtleads to an interesting and different a priori for the situated study, namely the assumption that surveillance does not workand that making it work requires the constant alignment of actors.
Gad & Lauritsen exemplify their approach and concepts through an ethnographic study done by Gad on the inspection ship Vestkysten (The West Coast), which is used by the Danish Fishery Inspection to monitor that the fishermen do not exceed their fishing quotas. The described surveillance is conducted through a database containing information on vessels, catches, personal details on fishermen and their licenses,offenders etc. which the inspectors use as a basis for decisions on what ships to inspect.In order to find the fishingboats, the inspection ship is equipped with a GPS monitoring system that tracks all the boats over 15 meters in length which by law are required to broadcast their position through an installed antenna. Every hour the system automatically updates and receivesinformation on the position, speed and course of every boat. At the same time, however, the IT system allows the inspectors to monitor individual boats more closely as needed.
The surveillance of the fishermen is, however, in no way unproblematic. The satellite system is slow and prone to breakdowns, which often causes the inspectors to be late to the sceneor base their inspections on rumors and knowledge about fishermen behavior.Bad weather conditions can alsocause the inspectors to stayon shore. In addition to system failures and weather conditions, the fishermen sometimes resistthe surveillance by covering the boats’ antenna so that their position is not revealed. They also conduct counter-surveillance as a collective by telling each other about the position of the inspection shipover the radio, which makes it near impossible for the inspectors to sneak in on suspicious activities.
Reiterating the primary aspects of a situated approach, surveillance is,as the case shows, not a static relationship, but one that is formed everyday through the actions of human and nonhuman actors on both sides.It is subject to resistance in spite of expensive technological equipment. And vision is never total and may suddenly be disturbed.
Fractal actors and infrastructures
The concept of fractals originates in mathematics, but has later been adopted into social anthropology and ANT as a way to relate naively to scales and ontology. The jobdescription for the fractal in these types of studies is not to function as a strong theory that explains social phenomena, but rather to work as aresource of thought, which opens up for an empirical sensitivity to the situated, complex and ordinary. It is a mechanism that can be employed to confuse simplistic dualisms such as micro/macro, one/many and self/other and help us towards a better starting point for description. In this section, I begin with a brief introduction to the fractal and follow it up with fractal stories about DNA surveillance.
Living in A non-Euclidean universe
“Fractal”stems from the Latin word “fractus”, which means ‘broken’ or ‘shattered’.In 1975the Polish bornmathematician Benoit Mandelbrot used the concept as a classification fora group of complex geometrical figures that did not fit into the Euclidean mathematical universe and had thus historically been considered as pathological curves, unworthy of further study (Abraham 1993).However, Mandelbrot undermined this critique by showing that natural phenomena (e.g. coastal line, clouds, lightning, lungs and leafs) often displayed fractal qualities, thus urging mathematicians to take fractals more seriously (Peitgen & Richter 1986).
In contrast to classical geometrical figures, fractals have one or more dimensions that do not follow the Euclidean rules. They are irregular, folded, strange in time and/or space. The most famous fractal is the image of the Mandelbrot set, which is depicted below.
Chart 1: Four images of the Mandelbrot set.
The Mandelbrot set is drawn by a computer based on a mathematical formula, where the result recursively is put back into the equation. As one magnifies an area of the image,the computer simultaneously calculatesand presents the next layer of details, which at every level reveals a figure, similar to the original image.Zooming thusresultsin a sense of disproportiondue to this self-similarity. Instead of coming closer to an objectthat is magnified or gaining an overview as one zooms out, the fractal image seems to elude scaling.
In addition it becomes clear as one zooms in that the line that seems to separate the reoccurring figure from its background is in fact not a line at all, but can more precisely be described as a ‘fractal region’, where the background is folded into the figure and vice versa.No matter what is magnified, itreveals bothfigure and background. Thereforeneither “figure” nor “background”fill the space, but together they create a complex region where they constitute each other’s existence (see also Gleick 1988).
The translation of the fractal image from mathematics and into social theorycan be attributed to the British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern and her book Partial Connections (1991/2004). In the book she develops a combination of ontology and methodology based on the fractal image, which has become a considerable source of inspiration for actor-network-theorists (Law 2002; Law 2004; Mol 2002: 78-82; Jensen 2007).I briefly explain the concepts “fractal infrastructures”, “fractal actors” and “fractal objects”below and later illustrate them by telling fractal storiesi.e. stories that identify fractal qualities, thusunderminingdualisms such as micro/macro, self/other and one/many.
Fractal infrastructures
In Partial Connections Marilyn Strathernuses the fractal image to demonstrate some of her thoughts on the field of anthropology. She points out that anthropologists are caught in a sterilediscussion about whether the micro or the macro perspective is better: ”[A]nthropologists alternate between accusing one another now of myopia, now ofpanoptics”(2004: xv).This distinction is according to Strathernrooted in a misguided Western understanding of phenomena as consisting of parts and wholes that determine one another. She argues that neither the micro perspective (e.g. description of rituals),nor the macro perspective (e.g. description of cultures) are privileged positions. No matter what wefocus on, we are faced with equally complex phenomenaand an equal loss of information (cf.the magnification of the Mandelbrot set above).
”Despite an increase in the magnitude of detail, the quantity ofinformation an anthropologist derives from what s/he is observing may remain the same. Observation thus remains a kind of constantbackground to the proliferation of forms” (2004: xxi).
We thus never have access to either the axiomatic parts or the totality of a phenomenon. We are only ever partially connected to the object of our study through the specific scale or scales on which we study it. In Partial Connections, Strathernillustrates this point by examining anthropologists’ descriptions ofcultures, cultural artifacts and rituals fromsocieties in Papua New Guinea (PNG).Among other things she describes how ‘face designs’(eyes, mouths and noses) seem to turn up everywhere acrossPNGsocietieson effigies, dance shields, drums etc. and thus seem to hold the cultures together. However upon further examination,it is discovered that the designs do not denote faces to all peoples.To the Pasum people they were instead depictions of spirits, whom do not have mouths (ibid. 70).Through this and many other examples (flutes, canoes etc.), she shows that on a certain scalethe cultural connections between the different societies are tooclose to be dismissed, but upon changing scale, we are faced with both new information and new gaps, which render the connections partial. Andthe supposed “parts” of the overarching cultural “whole”turn out to be no mere parts, but wholes themselves,with their own “parts-wholes”.
If we take Strathern seriously, then what does this mean for the study of surveillance infrastructures? First and foremost, I would argue that the fractal may serve as an underminingmechanism for monolithic concepts about surveillance systems. Concepts such as the Panopticon and Big Brother represent surveillance systemsas machine-like“wholes” with actors that simply work as part of the machine. The fractal is a way to maintain that surveillance infrastructures are not simplycoherent wholesdue to the distribution of activities and actors, but neither are they fragmented /non-coherent. They are somewhere in-between. Theyconsist of partial connections between actorslodged in their own realities.The “parts”of the surveillance organization can thus be studied as “wholes” in their own right (ibid. xxix).
Fractal actors and objects
” […] we are in a world of fractionality. We are in a world wherebodies, or organizations, or machines are more than one and less thanmany. In a world thatis more than one and less than many.Somewhere in between” (Law 2004: 62).
Besides being used as a weapon against a monolithic understanding of (surveillance) infrastructures, the fractal also offers other types of analysis. As the above quote shows,some actor-network-theoristshave been deeply inspired by the metaphor and see fractals everywhere(Law 2004; Mol 2002).In this section, I try to couplefractalitywith surveillance actors and surveillance objects.
Drawing on Strathern, the anthropologist Roy Wagner discusses using fractal in analyzing people. He defines a fractal person such:
“A fractal person is never a unit standing in relation to an aggregate, oran aggregate standing in relation to a unit, but always an entity withrelationshipintegrally implied” (Wagner 1991: 163,cited in Jensen2007: 845).
Rather than understanding people as simply part of a group, Wagners“fractal person"is someone who has integrated the relationship. This means that people may be detached from other people intheir group, but the detachment is not final because of the social relationships created through their social relating. As such people can be said to fractal as they “carry one another” as integrally implied relations(Strathern 1992: 125).
This way of addressing the social structure is in fact incompatible with ANT because it prioritizes humans and the social.If, however, we exchange “person” with ANT’sconcept of “actors”, the problem is solved, because actors in fact carry the same fractal qualities. The actors in ANT are not to be understood as actors in a network” (read: part of a whole), but actor-networks i.e. something that acts because it is attributed action by others.As John Law states, the concept holds a tension “between thecentered ‘actor’ on the one hand and the decentered ‘network’ on the other” (1999: 5).It is inescapablyfractal -neither one, nor many.