Making (In)Visible

• Author: Christine Hentschel
• Published date: 01 December 2007
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567707311583
• Date: 01 December 2007
• Subject Matter: Articles

International Criminal
Justice Review
Volume 17 Number 4
December 2007 289-303
Making (In)Visible
© 2007 Georgia State University
Research Foundation, Inc.
10.1177/1057567707311583
http://icjr.sagepub.com
CCTV, “Living Cameras,” and Their
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Objects in a Post-Apartheid Metropolis
Christine Hentschel
University of Leipzig, Germany
This article focuses on the new plurality of social and spatial categorizing in everyday policing
and watching in urban South Africa. It is argued that the pluralization of control produces new
forms of social sorting that are neither reducible to after-pains of racial apartheid nor to an
often-claimed new economic segregation. By investigating different, not only state-driven,
modes of observing public space, mapping hotspots, controlling bars, or identifying “intruders,”
it is shown that “the will-to-see” goes hand-in-hand with a tendency to force from view.
Outlined is how the interaction of these opposing logics of making visible and making invisible
in the everyday policing of “crime and grime” in the coastal town of Durban can provide
insights into practices of inclusion in the new South Africa.
Keywords:
surveillance; crime; urban space; governmentality; visibility; responsibilization;
South Africa
Introduction
Social scientists studying surveillance have argued that “everyday surveillance . . . is a
vital means of sorting populations for discriminatory treatment” (Lyon, 2003, p. 19).
Sorting populations for discriminatory treatment has a dramatic history in South Africa.
Recently many South Africans argue that racial apartheid has been replaced by an eco-
nomic apartheid (Bond, 2005; Kempa & Shearing, 2002), and both forms of discrimination
structure the debates on social sorting today. This has the effect that discriminatory treat-
ment through security and surveillance measures is often reduced either to the side effects
of the alleged new economic segregation or to after-pains of racial apartheid. I argue that
social sorting through surveillance takes different forms, cannot be reduced to racial or eco-
nomic aspects, and creates new forms of classifying people: those who fit into the vision of
the “New South Africa” and those pushed into its shadows.
In this article I outline an assemblage of watching in the name of security for the South
African coastal city of Durban. As we will see, surveillance is carried out today not only by
professional watchers who use a variety of means to make crime and its environments more
Author’s Note: I would like to thank Heather Cameron, Michael Kempa, and Conny van Heemstra for their
insightful comments.
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International Criminal Justice Review
visible, such as CCTV cameras or “crime mapping” tools, but also by a variety of nonpro-
fessional watchers, who are the new agents of everyday surveillance. From the state’s
perspective, this is responsibilization (Garland, 1996; O’Malley, 1992, 1996). From the
perspective of many citizens, it is often perceived as state failure (Herbst, 2000).
I will argue that in this assemblage of multiple watchers, social sorting is decentralized
and follows not one but many different logics. As Haggerty and Ericson (2000, p. 609) have
shown, “the surveillant assemblage . . . is multiple, unstable, and lacks discernible boundaries
or responsible governmental departments.” However, in spite of such creative hybridity in
the everyday watching arena, certain figures occur repeatedly in the discourses of the
watchers: first personal figures, second spatial figures. On the personal level, the watchers’
assessments are structured by the distinction between the intruder and the user of an urban
area. This bifurcated concept of the urban inhabitant can be understood as a counter concept
to the citizen who is supposed to move freely in the post-apartheid “open city.” With regard
to spaces, so-called “hot spots” or “breeding grounds of crime” are contrasted with “corridors
of excellence” or “urban improvement precincts” that occur in the representations of the new
city of Durban. I will follow these figures and their observers’ eyes throughout my article.
My second argument is that observing the public space, mapping hot spots, and asking
people to participate in surveillance reflects only one side of contemporary Durban secu-
rity management. The “will-to-see” goes hand-in-hand with a tendency to force from view.
Everyday policing practices are often aimed at rendering bad behavior or “bad buildings” less
visible from the public gaze. I will show that the interaction between these two approaches
(making visible and making invisible) can give important insights into the practice of inclusion
in the New South Africa. “How are you watched?” becomes one of the key questions to measure
the different qualities of urban citizenship.
My third argument outlines a new relationship between the state, technology, and the
citizen. A manager of a security company recently stated that we should “think of the guards
as an alternative to surveillance cameras” (Freeman, 2005). The manager’s statement might
seem surprising given that many scholars of surveillance use this comparison in the opposite
way—by describing cameras as the new form of guards who watched their subjects from
the watchtower of the panopticon (see Haggerty & Ericson, 2000, p. 607; Norris, 2003,
pp. 249-250). Thus, the manager’s statement might indicate a new way of thinking about
who governs with what means and with what consequences in terms of social categorizing.
I borrow the manager’s idea of imagining guards as an alternative to cameras, and in this
article I shall call all Durbanites with watching tasks (either professional or unprofessional)
living cameras.
The material I use for this article consists of political statements, newspaper articles,
administrative guidelines, and internal discussion papers from various agents of the Durban
security apparatus. In addition, my material includes interviews with, among others, the
safety and policing adviser of Durban, CCTV managers and operators, crime mappers, police
officers, and representatives of the liquor board and of the urban reconfiguration project
iTrump.1 Many of these helpful respondents took me on tours to show me their cameras,
their control room, their crime mapping programs, and their districts. The analysis I pre-
sent here is based on tracing the rationalities of the watchers. By working on such govern-
ing discourses and practices, I am interested in the effects of certain sets of knowledge that
identify and classify problems, and make certain strategies probable (Foucault, 1991;

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291
Merry, 2001; Rose & Miller, 1992). Hence, I investigate specific forms of “knowledge in
action” (Valverde, 2003, p. 15). More specifically, with the Durban case of hybrid knowl-
edges in the field of watching, I draw the attention to distinct and dispersive practices of
social sorting based on forms of knowledge situated between everyday lay knowledge and
scientific expert knowledge (Valverde, 2003, p. 20).2 In other words, this article is about the
informality of social categorizing in the everyday policing and watching arena, where what
we usually call the state is only partially involved.
I commence with a problematization3 of the so-called “crime crisis” in South Africa.
Then I shall scrutinize the watcher’s sorting eyes on (potentially) criminal subjects and on
unruly spaces, whereas in the following section I observe how the watchers push others out
of view. Finally, I draw the contours of a new citizen-state-technology relationship and
offer three answers to the question of how to make sense of social sorting in contemporary
South African urban crime politics.
1. (D)urban Terror and Apartheid Nostalgia:
The Problem of Crime
South Africa is “the murder capital of the world” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2006, p. 223).
Recently released crime statistics reveal that between April 2005 and March 2006 nearly
19,000 people were murdered, 55,000 raped, and 120,000 violently robbed in South Africa
(Sunday Times, 2006a, p. 1). No doubt, South Africa has a problem with crime, and Durban
is no exception. In 2005 the Durban Municipality published a survey about people’s living
conditions in the city of Durban. According to the survey, 25% of the interviewed residents
reported that they had been victims of crime in 2004, and this was already down from 35%
in 2003 (eThekwini Municipality,4 2005a, p. 58). Clearly, this is reason enough for many in
South Africa to talk about a “crime crisis” (Sunday Times, 2006a, p. 1), a “state of emergency”
(Sunday Times, 2006b, p. 1), or “urban Terror” (Hough, 2000). In an editorial in the South
African newspaper Sunday Times, the authors accused the ANC government of closing their
eyes in the face of the “country’s out-of-control crime situation . . . Like the proverbial
ostrich, they refuse to accept that this country is under siege from criminals” (Sunday
Times, 2006a, p. 1). According to the commentators, the political score of the crisis endan-
gers the major political achievements of the new South Africa. “Can we as South Africans
really proclaim that we are free people when we live in fear of the thousands of monsters
that roam our streets? . . . Just like South Africa was freed from the yoke of apartheid, South
Africa must be freed from the yoke of crime” (ibid.).
The yoke of crime has its numbers: John and Jean Comaroff (2006, p. 209) argued
recently that an explosion in crime statistics after apartheid...