ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author looks at surveillance at work in terms of its role in creating the circumstances in which what he shall style “heterotopias” can appear—that is, configurations of the gaze in space and time that challenge established power relations as we experience them in different parts of our lives. The main substance of this chapter is an extension of work the author first developed with Joeri Mol and Laurent Taskin. The author begins by reflecting on important recent contributions to the surveillance literature by two major figures in the field as they situate this mainly conceptual enterprise in its current technological, social, and cultural contexts. The foundations of surveillance capitalism lie in the way the neoliberal ideological project has consciously degraded the human individual of classical liberalism to leave nothing more than a hollowed-out Homo Economicus. Under capitalism a social space could only ever be a particular manifestation of the domination of labour by capital.
