EDPL 1|2021 9 A Cultural Turn in the Surveillance Studies: Possibilities and Challenges Nicole Falkenhayner* In the last decade, there has been a growing collective realisation that contemporary lifeworlds, not only in western democratic states, but globally, are structured by mul- tiple and overlapping technologies of control, which extend their reach far beyond in- stitutional concerns into practices of desire, self-expression and “structures of feeling”. 1 Surveillance scholar David Lyon has coined the notion of “the culture of surveillance” – for him, surveillance today constitutes nothing less than a “way of life”. 2 In the twen- ty-fist century, surveillance has become a pervasive aspect of our present due to an entanglement of policies of surveillance and security stemming from the ideology of the ‘war on terror’ and the rise of a digitalised economical episteme that Soshana Zuboff has called TheAgeofSurveillanceCapitalism. 3 Accordingly, creative practices ranging from activism and art to literature, film and interactive media have explored venues of the representation and reflection of the current fact of ‘inhabiting surveil- lance’. 4 In turn, the field of Surveillance Studies, which has mapped this development since the 1990s mostly through perspectives of the Social Sciences, has seen a still increas- ing productivity from various fields of expertise in Cultural Studies. 5 Connected to the recent interest in theoretical questions of posthumanism and affect within Cultural Studies, critics from film studies, art criticism and literary studies have been involved in the ongoing “work of mapping the diversity of affects, moods and atmospheres of surveillance”. 6 This work offers the possibility to reconfigure what living in “the cul- ture of surveillance” actually means, how it influences our imaginaries, hopes and fears, and ultimately, our forms of subjectivation. The ‘cultural turn’ in the study of sur- veillance broadens the perspectives from which knowledge about this concept is pro- duced. DOI: 10.21552/edpl/2021/1/4 * Nicole Falkenhayner is an Associate Professor at the University of Freiburg. For Correspondence: <nicole.falkenhayner@anglistik.uni-freiburg .de> 1 Raymond Williams, MarxismandLiterature (2009, OUP) 2 David Lyon, TheCultureofSurveillance:WatchingasaWayofLife (2018, Polity) 3 Soshana Zuboff, TheAgeofSurveillanceCapitalism (2019, Profile Books) 4 Patricia Pisters, TheNeuro-Image:ADeleuzianFilm-PhilosophyofDigitalScreenCulture (2012, Stanford UP), Nicole Falkenhayner, Media,Surveillance,andAffect:NarratingFeeling-States (2019, Routledge) 5 eg S Flynn and A McKay, eds, SpacesofSurveillance:StatesandSelfs (2017, Palgrave Macmillan), F Zappe and A S Gross, eds, Surveillance,Society,Culture (2020, Peter Lang), B Wasihun, ed., NarratingSurveillance–Überwachenerzählen (2020, Ergon). 6 Karen Louise Grova Søilen, “Safe is a Wonderful Feeling: Atmospheres of Surveillance and Contemporary Art” (2020) 18(2) Surveillanceand Society, <https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/index> 172