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Experiencing Surveillance: A Phenomenological Approach

Explore the evolving landscape of surveillance through a phenomenological lens, challenging traditional notions of total control to reveal new modalities of intentionality, lifeworld, and agency.

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Experiencing Surveillance: A Phenomenological Approach

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  1. Experiencing Surveillance: A Phenomenological Approach Friesen, Feenberg & Chung Feb. 23, 2007

  2. Surveillance Today • Surveillance has become commonplace, domesticated, multifarious, part of the background,. • E.g., Packet sniffing, nannycams, cell phone clips, credit card theft, NSA • What does this mean for received notions about surveillance as “panoptic,” as enabling “total control”?

  3. From the central tower the guardian can see all of the prisoners at any time. The prisoners cannot see the guards in the tower. Not knowing if they are being watched, they discipline themselves.

  4. Recent Variations • Synoptic: we are watched; but "the many have been enabled to see the few" (Mathiessen, 1997) • Surveillant Assemblage: "discrete data flows of an essentially limitless range of other phenomena such as people, signs, chemicals, knowledge and institutions" (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000) • Data doubles; Body double: the body itself and body information as indistinguishable; “a change on the level of ontology" (van der Ploeg, 2003)

  5. Commonalities • Surveillance and control explained via functions, operations and structures that are impersonal and ultimately institutional • "the subject of the gaze is rendered in terms of its passivity, confined to internalising the behavioural repertoires laid out by the disciplining authority" (Yar, 2003) • Pathological subjectivity, lifeworld (shared world of experience), formed through macro-social

  6. A Phenomenological Account "Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. I am alone … behind that door a spectacle is presented as 'to be seen,' something 'to be heard.' […] 'I do what I have to do.' My consciousness sticks to my acts, it is my acts. My attitude…has no "outside“ …a pure mode of losing myself in the world, of causing myself to be drunk in by things as ink is by a blotter. (Sartre, ‘56)

  7. Intentionality & Lifeworld • Self, as consciousness is constituted through plans and intentions, and the resulting relationship to the world: "My consciousness sticks to my acts, it is my acts.“ • The lifeworld, its space & time, & one’s embodiment in it, are shaped by this intentionality: "a pure mode of losing myself in the world, of causing myself to be drunk in by things as ink is by a blotter."

  8. A Phenomenological Account • But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me! What does this mean? First of all, I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness. It is this irruption of the self which has been most often described: I see myself because somebody sees me..

  9. New Ontological Modality • space and intentional focus shift from the space or the world observed through the keyhole to the observing self • different ontological modality is introduced • The person watching now sees herself as watched through the eyes of another • Awareness shaped by the objectifying gaze of the other; questions like posture, dress become important

  10. Extended Body & its Traces • In surveillance / dataveillance situations, the boundaries of the objectified, the "extended body" are extended further, and also blurred • E.g., Forensic traces, identification online • Also are sometimes subject to manipulation by the individual • Using this conceptual framework, can articulate strategies of resistance

  11. Agency • The question of the "consciousness of the subject" "opens the question of panoptic power to precisely the phenomenological question of intentionality, what the subject does or does not attend to in his relation to the world he encounters“ (Yar, 2003) • What the subject does/doesn't do in coordinating his/her action

  12. Objectified, Extended Body in Resistance • Guerilla Programming of Video Surveillance Equipment. • The first work to be performed by the SCP -- Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi • Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot • Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros

  13. Conclusion: Phenomenology & Agency • It is not the objective world --its formations and determinations-- that lies at the centre of the phenomenological cosmology, but the meanings, projects and adventures of embodied consciousness. • the subjective and objective reconceptualized together as co-emergent in action and lived experience

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