Experiencing Surveillance: A Phenomenological Approach
Working further on phenomenology as a way of investigating the ongoing colonization of the lifeworld by technological systems, I have been collaborating on this paper with Andrew Feenberg and Grace Chung. The abstract is below; a complete draft of the paper is also available.
The near-ubiquity of surveillance and dataveillance technologies in public and other spaces (public squares, transit stations, supermarkets, bank lobbies) has recently given rise to doubts about the totalizing, panoptic discipline and control frequently ascribed to these technologies. If these pervasive technologies are as “panoptic” as the theories derived from Foucault’s classic work suggest, would this not render everyday life as totally controlled as the cells in Bentham’s prison? In the wake of this and other kinds of questioning of the Foucauldian approach, new ways of conceptualizing both surveillance and the observed subject are coming to light. This paper takes this post-panoptic questioning further by utilizing phenomenological theory and method to study the everyday experiential reality of surveillance and dataveillence. This approach, little utilized in surveillance studies, addresses the under-theorized questions of individual experience of surveillance. Perhaps surprisingly, such a study appears to reinforce Foucault’s original panoptic articulation much more directly than do more recent models and conceptions of surveillant regimes. But at the same time, this study raises new questions regarding the role of the body and of attention in surveillance and dataveillance –and of the potential resistance to these technologies and practices.
Hi Norm, really enjoyed the paper when I finally got around to reading it. I was a bit frustrated at first with the portrait of subjectivity being laid out but came to realize this was part of the critique of Focault and others, and that I can actually get behind the notion of “embodied consciousness” which seems to be what you are pursuing here.
I found the paragraph on page 12 that begins “To be a subject, we need the gap between what we are and what we seem to be even if we make very little use of it and on the whole do actually behave in socially acceptable ways” to be of great interest. It seemed to go against for me another mode of being (I won’t say “resistance” because that already gives too much power away), which is to live in active ignore-ance of being surveiled through a conscious attempt to live without incongruities between ones internal life and ones external actions. Resist by conforming? No. Instead, don’t look through the keyhole not because of apprehension of being perceived looking through keyholes, but because of a conscious perception of how you feel as you are drawn to look through the keyhole that allows you to stop yourself from looking through it. I know this may sound like the perfect interiorization of the will of the surveyor, but that’s not how I intend it at all. Instead I mean a real attempt at embodied consciousnes where acts and thoughts are in accordance, by choice, mediated by feelings. I don’t think the implication is “we could no longer choose an identity to project depending on our inclination and the situation at hand” but that we choose not project a false one, and if we do chose to project a false one we CHOOSE to.
Not sure this makes any sense. Anyways, liked the paper, it at least seems more hopeful and perserves a sense of agency that I don’t get from other works on panoptical effects and being surveiled. Cheers, Scott
Comment by Scott Leslie — July 4, 2006 @ 4:43 pm