Yet what contemporary city-denizens take for granted was not always the case, and most people would be surprised to know that surveillance has a long history, and was linked to modes of punishment from early on.

The thinker who brought us the history of punishment, linked with surveillance, was Michel Foucault, who died prematurely in 1984, and whose thesis of 'panopticism' I referred to in an earlier post. His work is an inexhaustible source of insight regarding the way in which one enters into a relationship with history – something that is not self-evident, but requires careful consideration of the contingent, usually unpredictable factors which have contributed to the present state of affairs. This insight also opens the way for a critique of current social practices, which may otherwise seem self-justifying and necessary. 

Foucault's writings on enlightenment suggest that there is a fundamental difference between 'enlightenment' in the Kantian sense, which emphasised the universal moment of scientific and philosophical knowledge, and 'enlightenment' in the sense of a philosophy of the contemporary present, which would do justice to both the (Kantian) universal as well as what is contingent and particular, which is not subject to historical laws, deterministically conceived.

In his essay, What is enlightenment? (in The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, P., New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 32-50), Foucault argues that Kant's emphasis on the universal should be amplified by Baudelaire's characterisation of the modern in terms of a tension between being and becoming (or the universal and the particular), in this way finding the 'eternal' (or enduringly valuable) in the transitory, historically contingent moment. For Baudelaire, this amounts to a species of self-invention.