Liquid Surveillance: The Contribution of Zygmunt Bauman to Surveillance Studies 1 David Lyon Queen’s University Liquid surveillance describes well today’s regimes of in ⁄ visibility and is characterized by data-flows, mutating surveillance agencies and the tar- geting and sorting of everyone. However, the great virtue of Zygmunt Bauman’s work for surveillance studies is that he engages several tasks: he contextualizes what might be called liquid surveillance within the major movements of modern society, recognizes the significance of changing forms of surveillance to the production of social order, encourages serious consideration of the lived realities of in ⁄ visibility, refuses to accept monocausal explanations of the surveillant vision and dynamic, and confronts courageously the ethical and political chal- lenges that surveillance now presents to our world. Bauman’s work on surveillance spans his illustrious career as a social thinker but as yet awaits full exploration and exposition. Today’s Big Brother is not about keeping people in and making them stick to the line, but about kicking people out and making sure that when they are kicked out that they will duly go and won’t come back… (Bauman 2006:25) Liquid surveillance captures the core of what can be learned about surveillance from Zygmunt Bauman. Although Bauman does not use this phrase, it aptly con- nects his work with surveillance studies. It speaks to the looseness and frailty of social bonds, seen in surveillance terms as the transformation of ordinary citizens into suspects and their relegation to consumer status across a range of life-spheres. Because of the way that personal data are used, everyone living in so-called advanced societies is routinely targeted and sorted by numerous organi- zations on a daily basis, whether applying for a driver’s license, paying a tele- phone bill or surfing the internet. The concept of liquid surveillance captures the reduction of the body to data and the creation of data-doubles on which life-chances and choices hang more significantly than on our real lives and the stories we tell about them. It also evokes the flows of data that are now crucial to surveillance as well as to the ‘‘time-sensitivity’’ of surveillance ‘‘truths’’ that mutate as more data come in (producing Kafkaesque consequences for some at the sharp end). The old, relatively solid institutions of marketing or crime control have soft- ened, becoming malleable and rapidly adaptive in a world of software and net- works. For Gilles Deleuze, this is no longer a world of discipline in fixed 1 An earlier version of this article was presented as a keynote lecture at the Surveillance Studies Network bi-annual conference at Sheffield University, UK, in April 2007. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2010.00109.x Ó 2010 International Studies Association International Political Sociology (2010) 4, 325–338