ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author proposes a way of thinking about height and sight that allows us to reconsider the operation of surveillance at work as successive reconfigurations of the gaze. The discussion of the gaze will be primarily figurative although stubbornly enduring elements of embodied vision will still be involved. The chapter focuses on Martin Jay's treatment of three main figures that contributed enormously to a developing theory of the gaze. According to Jay, seeing has been a consistent feature of epistemology since Aristotle. All the talk of objectification through the gaze may seem far removed from anything to do with our everyday experience of surveillance at work, so we need to bring things back to earth from the stratospheric heights of French social theory. Turning to the work of Jacques-Alain Miller—yet another French psychoanalyst—to do this may therefore seem a rather unpromising move on the author's part.
