Remediated Sociality and the Dual Logic of Surveillance

The institutional and (meta)processual dimensions of surveillance have been scrutinized extensively in literature (e.g. Foucault’s [1975/1979] panopticism; Haggerty and Ericson’s [2000] “surveillant assemblages”, to name but two), with the subjective, individual level often being invoked in relation to subject-object and surveillor-surveilled dualities and in terms of the kinds of subjectivity modern and late-modern institutions and processes engender. The experiential, ontological realm of the “mediatized everyday” vis-à-vis “social control” remains lesser explored, particularly from the phenomenological perspective of the lifeworld. Academic discourses of surveillance mostly address rhetorically oriented macro perspectives. As we discussed in Chapter 1, the same diagnosis largely applies to the debates on and around the cosmopolitanization process.1