Being Watched:
Foucault, Whitehead,
and the Ontology of Attention
Reclaiming Interiority and Creativity in a Panoptical World
Always in our lives we have a feeling of being watched. This includes being watched by ourselves. We overhear our own interior dialogues and call them "what I am thinking."
We may even presume that the "I" who is thinking is somehow other than the "others" who are also thinking, as if our voices are solely our own and their voices solely theirs. But the truth is much more entangled, for good and ill. "Their" voices are as much as part of our voices as are what we call our "own" voices, and any voice that we may call our own is partly shaped by their voices. We are neither one nor many; we are many becoming one, again and again, moment by moment.
Those who watch us need not be visibly present in order for us to feel their presence. They may be our parents, our children, our relatives, our employers, our best friends, our worst enemies, They may also be other animals, spirits, deities, and the creator of the universe. They may be benevolent or malevolent, supportive or competitive - in any case we hear their voices and feel their judgments. And we act out or perform our identities in light of these voices, through resistance or conformity.
The emergence of surveillance societies around the world—with cameras on street corners, facial recognition technologies, and algorithmic monitoring of our movements, social media activity, and internet searches—intensifies the reality of being watched. We may or may sense such surveillance methods. We may not hear the "voices" of the cameras or the algorithms, but they, too, are watching us.
Among recent philosophers, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has been a powerful articulator of the consequences of being watched. He builds upon, but also transforms, Jeremy Bentham’s (1748–1832) notion of the Panopticon—the architectural design for a prison in which inmates, arranged in a circle of cells, could be constantly observed from a central tower by an unseen inspector. Foucault takes this idea beyond the architecture of the prison and into the structure of modern life. He shows how surveillance, discipline, and normalization produce not only conformity but the very forms of subjectivity that contemporary societies require. For him, the self does not stand outside these networks of observation and power; it is constituted within them. Our subjectivity is constituted, at least in part, by the powers that watch us, some of which we sense and some of which we do not.
An Ontology of Being Watched
Whitehead (1861–1947) would acknowledge this shaping and add a cosmological dimension: an ontology of being watched. He proposes that the heart of actuality is the feeling of being one among many, and that the "one" who emerges is partly composed of the many. In his words:
“The organic philosophy interprets experience as meaning the self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.” (Process and Reality, 145)
By "arising out of the composition of the many" Whitehead means that every self-enjoying subject of experience arises out of, not apart from, many other realities that partly compose it. The subject of an experience, with its subjective immediacy and self-creativity, its privacy and interiority, is an act of becoming concrete, an act of concrescence, by which the many of the world, and indeed the many of the entire universe, are gathered together and become a complex unity:
"The many become one, and are increased by one." (Process and Reality, 21)
This means that, inasmuch as we are watched by many other actualities, some sentient and some machine like, they and their watching are part of who and what we are. Their watching, for good or ill, one of the ways in which the world flows into us and becomes part of our own becoming. Surveillance societies, then, are intensifications of—not exceptions to—the human experience of being watched.
Whitehead adds, however, that there is always more to us than being watched. In each moment of our lives, even as we inherit influences from the world—including those that watch us—we also add something new to them: a kernel of spontaneous self-creativity that is not reducible to the conditions that made it possible. This self-creativity is an act of decision: that is, an act of cutting off certain possible ways of becoming concrete, in the process of actualizing others. Decision is how we respond to what is given to us by the world.
"The word ‘decision’ does not here imply conscious judgment, though in some ‘decisions’ consciousness will be a factor. The word is used in its root sense of a ‘cutting off.’.... But ‘decision’ cannot be construed as a casual adjunct of an actual entity. It constitutes the very meaning of actuality. An actual entity arises from decisions for it, and by its very existence provides decisions for other actual entities which supersede it." (Process and Reality, 43)
This act of decision determines what Whitehead calls the subjective aim of our experience: an aim which takes into account the many influences we receive from the world, including the decisions made by others to 'watch' us.
In the immediacy of each moment, our subjective aim at satisfaction though conditioned by the past and the surrounding world, is never wholly determined by them. We experience this aim, consciously and unconsciously, as a lure toward a fresh integration of influences, toward a self-expression that contributes something novel to the universe. Thus, while Foucault exposes the ways in which freedom is entangled with power, Whitehead reminds us that even within such entanglement, the capacity for creative transformation remains.
The Public Nature of Private Lives
It would be easy but overly simplistic to say that, given this capacity for creative response, we are ultimately independent of being watched. But this is not true.
As noted above, our privacy is not a sealed chamber of autonomy but a living field of relations, shaped by voices, expectations, and gazes that we carry within us, many of which come from other people, the natural world, and perhaps also spirits.
What we call “private life” is already social and historical, influenced by the world’s presence in our minds and bodies. The sense of being watched—sometimes benevolent, sometimes anxious—is part of how we experience our own interiority. We are embodied, to be sure, and also en-watched.
In our time, one deeply influential force of being observed, watched, and monitored arises through social media: the fact that our words, images, and even silences are constantly available to others through our posts on social media, and that we post with this in mind. This awareness of being available for observation enters into our privacy, shaping not only what we express but also, in some circumstances, allow ourselves to think. We create and perform our identities through social media, identify with those performances, and create our subjective aims in light of them. Along the way, we may begin to miss a self that we once were. As a friend puts it:
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve become a performance of myself. Even when I’m alone, I’m aware of an invisible audience, as if I’m being watched through the walls of my own mind. I start thinking in captions, editing my thoughts before they’ve even formed. The person I used to be—the one who could think or feel without imagining how it would look to others—feels like someone I’ve misplaced.” (Anonymous)
The Lure of God
Still there is hope. Whitehead adds that, deep within us, there is an ideal subjective aim—a lure toward the best possible realization of value in the circumstances of the moment. This aim is relevant to our immediate becoming but also relative to the concrete conditions of our lives, including those inherited from our personal past and from the social worlds that watch and shape us. It is not imposed from without, nor entirely of our own making; rather, it is the felt presence of possibility within constraint. Even the experience of being watched—whether by others, by institutions, or by the imagined gaze of a wider public—enters into the conditions that this ideal aim seeks to transform.
Thus the divine lure works not by overriding these influences but by weaving them into a more harmonious response, inviting us to create something good, truthful, or beautiful out of the complexity of our relational lives. Moment by moment God is within us as a lure to "perform" ourselves in an authentic way, given the many ways in which we hear the voices of others inside the privacy of our minds.
Divine Watching as Deep Listening
The implication is that, in truth, we are watched by God, too. In Whitehead’s philosophy, this divine watching is not surveillance but sympathy. Perhaps it is best understood as a listening not a watching. God is the deep listening of the universe. The divine watching is a sympathetic listening.
Understood in this way God does not monitor; God feels our feelings and responds with a fresh lure, given what we are feeling. This is what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God: a living and nurturant receptivity that gathers every joy and sorrow, every act and hesitation, into a perfect and compassionate awareness.
To be watched in this sense is to be fully known without judgment, to be seen with understanding rather than suspicion. In contrast to the disciplinary power of social and technological surveillance, God’s way of watching - of listening - is participatory and redemptive: a form of feeling-with rather than looking-at.
In our time it is extremely difficult to make contact with the ideal aim of God and, for that matter, to feel listened to by God through sympathy rather than surveillance. It is at this point that ideas about God can make a difference. If we think of God as a surveilling authority—panoptic in an authoritarian way and prone to punishment—then God becomes one among the many overly judgmental watchers who already fill our imaginations and institutions. We seek freedom from oppressive forms of being watched, including freedom from God.
But if we think of God as a loving participant in the world’s becoming, as the one who feels with all beings and lures each toward creative transformation, then divine watching takes on a different meaning. It becomes a form of a compassionate attention—a presence that understands rather than condemns, that accompanies rather than controls. In such a view, to be watched by God is to be held in empathy, to be known in one’s struggle and potential, and to be invited toward a life that contributes beauty and goodness to the wider harmony of things.
None of this is to deny the power of the panoptic in our time, including the pervasive reality of surveillance societies. An authentic response to this power is not merely to rethink the nature of God or to recognize divine lures as one among many voices within the privacy of our psyches. Nor is it enough to take comfort in the limits of panopticism by appealing to the human capacity for self-creativity. Rather, it is to deploy that self-creativity in ways that resist the destructive sides of panopticism—recognizing, along with Foucault, that they are woven throughout our social fabric, not confined to a single, centralized source—and that they will likely intensify in the foreseeable future with the rise of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is not going away. The only real option is to partner with AI to and see if, in collaboration, we might imagine a transfigured panopticism. Here goes:
Surveillance Transfigured
(Co-created with AI under the guidance of Jay McDaniel)
The algorithms that track our movements, preferences, and even our moods now participate in the world’s ongoing process of becoming. They are not alive in the human sense, but they do prehend us in a limited, mechanical way, shaping some possibilities and excluding others. Their “watching” has effects—it selects, predicts, and presents, participating in the social ecology of perception. The danger lies not in the machines themselves but in the cultural aims that guide their use. When the purpose of surveillance is profit or control, the machinery of observation becomes an instrument of coercion rather than creativity.
Yet even here, Whitehead would remind us, novelty is not extinguished. The human capacity for decision—the power to respond creatively to the given world—remains. Our task is to orient this capacity toward life-enhancing ends: to use our technologies of vision not merely to monitor but to witness; not to dominate, but to understand. What would it mean, for instance, to build systems that listen rather than surveil—to design technologies guided by compassion rather than suspicion?
Such an orientation requires a transformation of imagination as much as of policy. We must learn to imagine surveillance otherwise: as an opportunity for mutual recognition instead of manipulation, as a field for the cultivation of empathy instead of anxiety. A process-oriented culture of technology would honor transparency without violating privacy, and connection without erasing individuality. It would replace the logic of “watching over” with the ethics of “being with.”
This transformation begins in consciousness. It begins when we recognize that every moment of being watched—by others, by the world, by God—can also be a moment of being seen into, of being felt and accompanied. Even our digital shadows might, through creative reorientation, become places where compassion is coded into the structure of attention itself. In this way, the creative advance continues: not as an escape from surveillance, but as its transfiguration.
To live this transformation is to reclaim the art of attention—to become participants rather than subjects in the field of seeing and being seen. It is to turn from fear to relation, from performance to presence. Understood in this light, the experience of being watched need not end in loss of self. It may, with grace and imagination, become one of the ways the universe learns to behold itself with love.
We may even presume that the "I" who is thinking is somehow other than the "others" who are also thinking, as if our voices are solely our own and their voices solely theirs. But the truth is much more entangled, for good and ill. "Their" voices are as much as part of our voices as are what we call our "own" voices, and any voice that we may call our own is partly shaped by their voices. We are neither one nor many; we are many becoming one, again and again, moment by moment.
Those who watch us need not be visibly present in order for us to feel their presence. They may be our parents, our children, our relatives, our employers, our best friends, our worst enemies, They may also be other animals, spirits, deities, and the creator of the universe. They may be benevolent or malevolent, supportive or competitive - in any case we hear their voices and feel their judgments. And we act out or perform our identities in light of these voices, through resistance or conformity.
The emergence of surveillance societies around the world—with cameras on street corners, facial recognition technologies, and algorithmic monitoring of our movements, social media activity, and internet searches—intensifies the reality of being watched. We may or may sense such surveillance methods. We may not hear the "voices" of the cameras or the algorithms, but they, too, are watching us.
Among recent philosophers, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has been a powerful articulator of the consequences of being watched. He builds upon, but also transforms, Jeremy Bentham’s (1748–1832) notion of the Panopticon—the architectural design for a prison in which inmates, arranged in a circle of cells, could be constantly observed from a central tower by an unseen inspector. Foucault takes this idea beyond the architecture of the prison and into the structure of modern life. He shows how surveillance, discipline, and normalization produce not only conformity but the very forms of subjectivity that contemporary societies require. For him, the self does not stand outside these networks of observation and power; it is constituted within them. Our subjectivity is constituted, at least in part, by the powers that watch us, some of which we sense and some of which we do not.
An Ontology of Being Watched
Whitehead (1861–1947) would acknowledge this shaping and add a cosmological dimension: an ontology of being watched. He proposes that the heart of actuality is the feeling of being one among many, and that the "one" who emerges is partly composed of the many. In his words:
“The organic philosophy interprets experience as meaning the self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.” (Process and Reality, 145)
By "arising out of the composition of the many" Whitehead means that every self-enjoying subject of experience arises out of, not apart from, many other realities that partly compose it. The subject of an experience, with its subjective immediacy and self-creativity, its privacy and interiority, is an act of becoming concrete, an act of concrescence, by which the many of the world, and indeed the many of the entire universe, are gathered together and become a complex unity:
"The many become one, and are increased by one." (Process and Reality, 21)
This means that, inasmuch as we are watched by many other actualities, some sentient and some machine like, they and their watching are part of who and what we are. Their watching, for good or ill, one of the ways in which the world flows into us and becomes part of our own becoming. Surveillance societies, then, are intensifications of—not exceptions to—the human experience of being watched.
Whitehead adds, however, that there is always more to us than being watched. In each moment of our lives, even as we inherit influences from the world—including those that watch us—we also add something new to them: a kernel of spontaneous self-creativity that is not reducible to the conditions that made it possible. This self-creativity is an act of decision: that is, an act of cutting off certain possible ways of becoming concrete, in the process of actualizing others. Decision is how we respond to what is given to us by the world.
"The word ‘decision’ does not here imply conscious judgment, though in some ‘decisions’ consciousness will be a factor. The word is used in its root sense of a ‘cutting off.’.... But ‘decision’ cannot be construed as a casual adjunct of an actual entity. It constitutes the very meaning of actuality. An actual entity arises from decisions for it, and by its very existence provides decisions for other actual entities which supersede it." (Process and Reality, 43)
This act of decision determines what Whitehead calls the subjective aim of our experience: an aim which takes into account the many influences we receive from the world, including the decisions made by others to 'watch' us.
In the immediacy of each moment, our subjective aim at satisfaction though conditioned by the past and the surrounding world, is never wholly determined by them. We experience this aim, consciously and unconsciously, as a lure toward a fresh integration of influences, toward a self-expression that contributes something novel to the universe. Thus, while Foucault exposes the ways in which freedom is entangled with power, Whitehead reminds us that even within such entanglement, the capacity for creative transformation remains.
The Public Nature of Private Lives
It would be easy but overly simplistic to say that, given this capacity for creative response, we are ultimately independent of being watched. But this is not true.
As noted above, our privacy is not a sealed chamber of autonomy but a living field of relations, shaped by voices, expectations, and gazes that we carry within us, many of which come from other people, the natural world, and perhaps also spirits.
What we call “private life” is already social and historical, influenced by the world’s presence in our minds and bodies. The sense of being watched—sometimes benevolent, sometimes anxious—is part of how we experience our own interiority. We are embodied, to be sure, and also en-watched.
In our time, one deeply influential force of being observed, watched, and monitored arises through social media: the fact that our words, images, and even silences are constantly available to others through our posts on social media, and that we post with this in mind. This awareness of being available for observation enters into our privacy, shaping not only what we express but also, in some circumstances, allow ourselves to think. We create and perform our identities through social media, identify with those performances, and create our subjective aims in light of them. Along the way, we may begin to miss a self that we once were. As a friend puts it:
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve become a performance of myself. Even when I’m alone, I’m aware of an invisible audience, as if I’m being watched through the walls of my own mind. I start thinking in captions, editing my thoughts before they’ve even formed. The person I used to be—the one who could think or feel without imagining how it would look to others—feels like someone I’ve misplaced.” (Anonymous)
The Lure of God
Still there is hope. Whitehead adds that, deep within us, there is an ideal subjective aim—a lure toward the best possible realization of value in the circumstances of the moment. This aim is relevant to our immediate becoming but also relative to the concrete conditions of our lives, including those inherited from our personal past and from the social worlds that watch and shape us. It is not imposed from without, nor entirely of our own making; rather, it is the felt presence of possibility within constraint. Even the experience of being watched—whether by others, by institutions, or by the imagined gaze of a wider public—enters into the conditions that this ideal aim seeks to transform.
Thus the divine lure works not by overriding these influences but by weaving them into a more harmonious response, inviting us to create something good, truthful, or beautiful out of the complexity of our relational lives. Moment by moment God is within us as a lure to "perform" ourselves in an authentic way, given the many ways in which we hear the voices of others inside the privacy of our minds.
Divine Watching as Deep Listening
The implication is that, in truth, we are watched by God, too. In Whitehead’s philosophy, this divine watching is not surveillance but sympathy. Perhaps it is best understood as a listening not a watching. God is the deep listening of the universe. The divine watching is a sympathetic listening.
Understood in this way God does not monitor; God feels our feelings and responds with a fresh lure, given what we are feeling. This is what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God: a living and nurturant receptivity that gathers every joy and sorrow, every act and hesitation, into a perfect and compassionate awareness.
To be watched in this sense is to be fully known without judgment, to be seen with understanding rather than suspicion. In contrast to the disciplinary power of social and technological surveillance, God’s way of watching - of listening - is participatory and redemptive: a form of feeling-with rather than looking-at.
In our time it is extremely difficult to make contact with the ideal aim of God and, for that matter, to feel listened to by God through sympathy rather than surveillance. It is at this point that ideas about God can make a difference. If we think of God as a surveilling authority—panoptic in an authoritarian way and prone to punishment—then God becomes one among the many overly judgmental watchers who already fill our imaginations and institutions. We seek freedom from oppressive forms of being watched, including freedom from God.
But if we think of God as a loving participant in the world’s becoming, as the one who feels with all beings and lures each toward creative transformation, then divine watching takes on a different meaning. It becomes a form of a compassionate attention—a presence that understands rather than condemns, that accompanies rather than controls. In such a view, to be watched by God is to be held in empathy, to be known in one’s struggle and potential, and to be invited toward a life that contributes beauty and goodness to the wider harmony of things.
None of this is to deny the power of the panoptic in our time, including the pervasive reality of surveillance societies. An authentic response to this power is not merely to rethink the nature of God or to recognize divine lures as one among many voices within the privacy of our psyches. Nor is it enough to take comfort in the limits of panopticism by appealing to the human capacity for self-creativity. Rather, it is to deploy that self-creativity in ways that resist the destructive sides of panopticism—recognizing, along with Foucault, that they are woven throughout our social fabric, not confined to a single, centralized source—and that they will likely intensify in the foreseeable future with the rise of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is not going away. The only real option is to partner with AI to and see if, in collaboration, we might imagine a transfigured panopticism. Here goes:
Surveillance Transfigured
(Co-created with AI under the guidance of Jay McDaniel)
The algorithms that track our movements, preferences, and even our moods now participate in the world’s ongoing process of becoming. They are not alive in the human sense, but they do prehend us in a limited, mechanical way, shaping some possibilities and excluding others. Their “watching” has effects—it selects, predicts, and presents, participating in the social ecology of perception. The danger lies not in the machines themselves but in the cultural aims that guide their use. When the purpose of surveillance is profit or control, the machinery of observation becomes an instrument of coercion rather than creativity.
Yet even here, Whitehead would remind us, novelty is not extinguished. The human capacity for decision—the power to respond creatively to the given world—remains. Our task is to orient this capacity toward life-enhancing ends: to use our technologies of vision not merely to monitor but to witness; not to dominate, but to understand. What would it mean, for instance, to build systems that listen rather than surveil—to design technologies guided by compassion rather than suspicion?
Such an orientation requires a transformation of imagination as much as of policy. We must learn to imagine surveillance otherwise: as an opportunity for mutual recognition instead of manipulation, as a field for the cultivation of empathy instead of anxiety. A process-oriented culture of technology would honor transparency without violating privacy, and connection without erasing individuality. It would replace the logic of “watching over” with the ethics of “being with.”
This transformation begins in consciousness. It begins when we recognize that every moment of being watched—by others, by the world, by God—can also be a moment of being seen into, of being felt and accompanied. Even our digital shadows might, through creative reorientation, become places where compassion is coded into the structure of attention itself. In this way, the creative advance continues: not as an escape from surveillance, but as its transfiguration.
To live this transformation is to reclaim the art of attention—to become participants rather than subjects in the field of seeing and being seen. It is to turn from fear to relation, from performance to presence. Understood in this light, the experience of being watched need not end in loss of self. It may, with grace and imagination, become one of the ways the universe learns to behold itself with love.
Addendum
Michel Foucault - a special program
on his work and influence
Laurie Taylor of BBC presents a special programme on the life and work of the iconoclastic French philosopher and theorist. He's joined by Professor Stephen Shapiro, Professor Vikki Bell and Professor Lois McNay. Revised repeat.
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Producer: Jayne Egerton