Dr Gavin Smith,

Senior Lecturer, Sociology ANU,

Larry Saha Room, Haydon-Allen #2175

The everyday production of surveillance generates what has been termed ‘surveillance space’, an intermediary, technologically-facilitated, multi-dimensional zone of simulation where institutions and individuals ‘vicariously’ and ‘performatively’ encounter and co-construct the disembodied ‘referents’ – or exteriorised signifiers and markers of interiority – of one another in a series of recurrent informational relays, communicative exchanges, mediated service transactions and probabilistic assessments. It is in this ‘hyperreal’ virtuality that both parties, often unknowningly, negotiate and ritualistically perform a variety of truth claims and actions relating to personhood and citizenship entitlement, identification verification and identity work, resource and service provision, commodity transference and access and mobility rights. This is as much a representational and open space of fluidity, modulation, playfulness, transgressiveness and sociality as it is an encoded and closed space of protocol, individuation/dividualisation, cybernetic engineering, flow striation, social regulation and identity fixivity. This paper ponders the digital circuitries on which many surveillance systems are constructed – and duly depend – and the emergent forms of techno-scientific citizenship cultivated and constituted by surveillance-subject interplays. The network-centricity and connectivity of everyday life and concomitant revolution in digital complexity, circuitry and circulations has forced subjectivity and ‘what it means to be human’ to co-evolve and adapt in an assortment of significant ways. Persons are increasingly constituted as much by code, informatics, cybernetics and digital circuitry as by flesh, tissue, blood and genetics. The cyborg organism has become the key species of the digital age and this has important implications for theoretical ontologies of the social, methodology and socio-legal jurisprudence.