Complicit surveillance, interveillance, and the question of cosmopolitanism: Toward a phenomenological understanding of mediatization

The institutional and meta-processual dimensions of surveillance have been scrutinized extensively in literature. In these accounts, the subjective, individual level has often been invoked in relation to subject–object, surveillor–surveilled dualities and in terms of the kinds of subjectivity modern and late-modern institutions engender. The experiential, ontological realm of the “mediatized everyday” vis-a-vis surveillance remains less explored, particularly from the phenomenological perspective of the lifeworld. Academic discourses of surveillance mostly address rhetorically oriented macro-perspectives. The same diagnosis largely applies to the debates on the cosmopolitanization process. The literature of cosmopolitan ism revolves around broad cultural and ethical transformations in terms of the relationship between Self and Other, individual and humanity, and the local and the universal. Our aim in this article is to conceptualize the dynamics that yield a cosmopolitan Self and an encapsulated Self under conditions of increasingly interactive and ubiquitous forms of mediation and surveillance.