Surveillance III: Corpus mysticum

Surveilling the Unseen Body

Biopolitics, Capital, and The Surveillance System

I'm taking a detour to describe the way I see all of this. 

    Molecular HIV Surveillance (MHS) and Cluster Detection and Response (CDR) are not simply tools of public health, but systems of disciplinary control,entangled in state power, capitalist interest, and ideological domination. From data collection to analysis, reporting and visualization, the entire system functions not neutrally, but as a technology of governance targeting those already socially marked: queer folks, Black and Brown bodies, trans people, sex workers, the HIV+ and HIV-risk labeled-people, for having lives that deviate from the normative scripts of capitalist biopolitics.
    Biopolitics is term used to describe how modern states exercise power not just over individuals, (a sovereign power) but over populations, by managing life itself, health, reproduction, risk, death. In this way populations become objects of knowledge, subjectified through statistics, epidemiology and demography; which are then used to target communities and groups for interventions. If written differently, this might sound like a good thing. I mean, we are - as public health professionals- supposed to target high risk groups and used effective interventions to improve health outcomes. But that is not what is happening with MHS and CDR, which are biopolitical practices. These methods of surveillance treat populations as data landscapes, where risk is managed by identifying hotspots of life and disease.
    In the previous post on categories, I questioned the foundations of knowledge production in epidemiology and biostatistics; and I'm doing it again here. Clusters are not neutral; they are constructed through choices about thresholds, significance, which populations get surveilled. Once a cluster is identified, the state can direct resources, policing, or medical intervention there. (E.g., ramping up PrEP in one neighborhood, or increasing policing in “drug-using” spaces.). Populations are stratified into “safe” and “risky” zones. Cluster detection literally draws boundaries between acceptable and dangerous life; and in, MHS detecting genetic clusters ties individuals into networks that they might not even know they’re part of, raising ethical concerns (privacy, policing, stigmatization).

So while the biostatistician may see "clusters of genetically similar HIV sequences" and I see it as the state mapping hidden relations between bodies, deciding where to intervene, which communities to surveil, and who is rendered a public health threat. 

Since the epidemic rages on, what are they doing with all the data being collected? 

    Capital moves this apparatus to operate as a mechanism of accumulation by surveillance. Just as capital extracts surplus labor, the state and its public health arms extract surplus data, converting lives into information to be modeled, predicted, and controlled. This data is not just about people, it is taken from people, often involuntarily. And like the exploitation of labor, this extraction benefits the systems that profit from regulation, risk management, and pharmaceutical intervention. Our identities, be they raced, gendered, sexualized, are commodified for the smooth operation of institutional markets, public health funding flows, and predictive biotechnologies. Data becomes a raw material, and the body, especially the queer, Black, HIV+ body, is its site of production.

    Whose interests does this serve? Not the unique individual, but the abstraction: the "Human," the “Population,” the “At-Risk.” Public health claims to act in our interest, while rendering us docile, surveilled, and ultimately de-individualized. Surveillance becomes a ghost we internalize, shaping our behavior, aligning us with roles we never authored. In this way, the surveillance  is not simply coercive, it’s existentially invasive. The queer self, the Black trans woman, the drug user are all reduced to categories within a data schema. 

Our "uniqueness" becomes the very reason for our targeting, our erasure, or our posthumous analysis.

    The contemporary data regime is a vampiric one: it lives off our information, and the more it consumes, the more powerful it becomes. This is the monster of Capital itself, feeling, insatiable, efficient. But this is not metaphor: molecular surveillance literally draws blood, extracts sequences, traces contact webs. It does not just analyze communities—it constructs them, managing human life via algorithmic rationalities. The ideological veil that obscures this process: we are told it’s all for "our safety," for "public good," but these narratives cloak a deep and growing asymmetry of power.
    What’s worse is how we come to internalize these categories. We see ourselves as risks, vectors, data points. We manage ourselves accordingly, self-regulating, preemptively conforming to avoid triggering a flag in the system. And those who cannot or will not conform—those too unruly, too messy, too far outside the predictive frame—are left to perish in statistical obscurity. They are seen only as retrospective lessons, not as subjects worthy of care in life.

    HIV Surveillance is codependency writ-large. The State feeds on our data, and in return, we are offered conditional care: governed assistance, algorithmic compassion. But like any abusive relationship rooted in structural dependency, we find ourselves unable to break free. The system says: "You need me." And in a world where health, housing, and life itself are mediated through data, perhaps it’s right. But that does not make it just.
    We must interrogate not only how data is extracted, circulated, and modeled, but how it might be reclaimed: how it might serve liberatory ends, not just institutional ones. What would it mean to use data in a way that centers the unique, that defends the unclassifiable, that affirms the lives currently marked only for study, discipline, or discard?

In the words of music icon M.I.A. on the intro to her album MAYA

 "Headbone connected to the headphones / Headphones connected to the iPhone / iPhone connected to the internet / Connected to the Google / Connected to the government."

Surveillance is not separate from power—it is power. And power, as always, decides who gets to live, who gets to die, and who gets counted.