Most of the commentators on the Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) have referred to George Orwell, 1984 or Big Brother when they've wanted to find an emblem or cite a precedent for the current proliferation of surveillance cameras in public places. This is as it should be: in 1998 and 1999, the SCP thought 1984 relevant enough to warrant several performances of a specially adapted version of the novel, and even defense of it against one of its contemporary detractors.
But Orwell was primarily a novelist, not a social historian or a political scientist; he didn't have a carefully elaborated "theory" to explain the nightmarish world depicted in his most famous book. And so several theory-minded commentators on the SCP -- following-up on the fact that the group's website is part of a larger, "situationist" project known as NOT BORED! -- have looked to Guy Debord and his theory of "the spectacle" for suitable emblems or precedents. Mostly they have been successful, despite or precisely because of the fact that the SCP's relationship to situationist theory and tactics is quite complicated. (For more, see the SCP's remarks on transparency.) If theory-minded commentators have gotten themselves into trouble, perhaps it has been because they have looked for emblems and precedents in the works of writers who, whether the commentators on the SCP know it or not, are in fact anti-situationists.
As Professor Gary Genosko indicates in his response to an e-mail from the SCP, his article on the group was informed or influenced by Michel de Certeau, author of , at least one commentator has referred instead to the Panopticon. Coined by Jeremy Bentham in the late 1780s, the word "pantopticon" refers to a circular or star-shaped prison in which the inmates' cells are made visible to the surveilling eyes of a central tower. At least of the has referred to (to a "decentralized" pantopticon In 1975, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault published Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison,
Contact the Surveillance Camera Players
By e-mail Info@notbored.org
By snail mail: SCP c/o NOT BORED! POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998
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