Experiencing surveillance a phenomenological approach

Abstract

In response to the increasingly quotidian, even banal character of surveillant practices in postindustrial societies, this chapter explores the possibility of a theoretical and methodological re-alignment in surveillance studies. This realignment entails a move from broadly Foucauldian, macro-level, structural or poststructural analyses, to the existential-phenomenological study of subjective consciousness and experience. This piece illustrates such an experiential study by taking part of Sartre's famous description of the look, and comparing it to a similarly experientially based description of an everyday context of surveillance- specifically, a bank machine or ATM transaction.