Experiencing Surveillance: A Phenomenological Approach

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Experiencing Surveillance A Phenomenological
Approach

• Friesen, Feenberg Chung
• Feb. 23, 2007

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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?

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• 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.

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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)

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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

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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 attitudehas 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)

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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, ones
  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."

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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..

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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