Comments on: Experiencing Surveillance: A Phenomenological Approach http://ipseity.blogsome.com/2006/04/17/experiencing-surveillance-a-phenomenological-approach-2/ Norm Friesen: 1. pron. Himself; truly himself; in his right mind. (OED) Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:58:54 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5.1-alpha by: Scott Leslie http://ipseity.blogsome.com/2006/04/17/experiencing-surveillance-a-phenomenological-approach-2/#comment-66 Tue, 04 Jul 2006 16:43:16 +0100 http://ipseity.blogsome.com/2006/04/17/experiencing-surveillance-a-phenomenological-approach-2/#comment-66 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 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

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