Reflective Eyes And Moods Apart
The
Sociological Quarterly, Volume 43, Number 3, pages 461-478.
Back to Main Page | References | Notes
Papers discussed here:
Marx: Tom Voire
| Willis
& Silbey: Self, Vigilance and Society
| Nippert-Eng:
Out of Sight, Out of Mind | Manning: Doubles and
Tom Voire | Staples &
Nagel: Gary's Gone...
Gary T. Marx
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
Gosh--the denial of death, simulacra, the postmodern, neuro-aesthetic signals, fragmented and alienated selves, heteronormality subtext, genre play, affective solipsism, intertextuality--all I was trying to do was share with colleagues a juicy psychological report that came to me anonymously over the Internet. Consistent with the blurring of borders and the confusion around copies and originals, I edited it a bit and put my name on it in order to have something to list on my department’s annual report.
On a more
truthful note, if there is an academic heaven beyond that blissfully
self-indulgent state of the perpetual sabbatical identified by David Lodge, 1. it must lie in exchanges such as this with thoughtful
colleagues, as we jointly struggle to see darkly through the glass. Unlike most
forms of consumption, information has a wonderfully subversive quality in which
the very act of sharing it may enhance rather than lessen the original.
In the
usual article-comment-rejoinder format, the author is given the last word in
responding to commentators. But in this case, since I chose a genre that disassociates
the voice of the author from that of the narrator, it is not clear how to
respond: as Tom, as myself commenting on what Tom means, 2.
responding to what the commentators say, or responding to some remarks Tom
might direct to me. I will opt for a little of each. I begin with an e-mail
from Tom to the participants.
From: “Tom I. Voire” voire@icu-ucme.com
To: “Nagel,
Joane” nagel@ku.edu, “Bill Staples” staples@ku.edu, “Christena Nippert-Eng” Nippert@charlie.cns.iit.edu,
“Peter Manning” pet.manning@neu.edu, “James
Willis” James.willis@umb.edu, “Susan Silbey” ssilbey@mit.edu, “Gary T. Marx” gtmarx@bainbridgeisland.net
Subject: Re:
Response to My Life
Date: Mon.,
31 Apr 2002
The eyes cannot by the law of
England be found guilty of trespass.
--Entick v. Carrington (1765)
Hi all.
Thanks for receiving my message. While scanning the Internet using the latest
sniffing technology as part of my “tiger team work” testing the vulnerability
of computer systems, I came across your use of my name and some other
interesting things you have on your home computers. Did you know my name is
copyrighted and I charge for its use? You and all those mass marketers are
liable for using it without my permission. On another legal matter, I know it’s
a cynical ritual for many fieldworkers, but under the Freedom of Information
Act I am entitled to, and hereby request, a copy of your Human Subjects Review
Board application for this project. (only kidding)
Bill and Joane (I hope it’s ok to call you that,--from your writings I know
you are hip egalitarian informal professers who stand in solidarity against all
the old male hierarchy stuff). What can I say? At least you speled by name
correctly.
I am more
than sorely vexed by Joane’s being only “a little disturbed” by all of this. As
a woman, your superior abilities to empathize and intuit should have led you to
feel and understand my pain. An “apologia”? Hardly. I think you owe me an
apology. My story is about injustice! How would you like to have a secret video
made of your nature calls, be accused of unspecified violations by anonymous
denouncers, and be denied employment and social participation because of your
gender? I guess you sociologists just stand for principle when the case
involves one of the right categories of the tripartite mantra.You also sound a
little guilty about the way “our work reinforces the social order,” but many of
us see you social researchers as doing exactly the opposite--undermining
society by constantly pointing out what’s wrong, rather than what’s right with it.
Bill
--Having read your book Everyday
surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life, I would expect a
little more sympathy from a guy who writes about “meticulous rituals of power,”
“domination,” “the body as an object that can be watched, assessed, and
manipulated,” and who puts quotation marks around the term “objective.”
Are these
just abstract professional gaming words that go by the wayside when you
encounter a real case like mine? I doubt it. I think there is a better
explanation and ironically you gave me the lens to see it. It’s about power and
knowledge. I will assume what you say about my case (and even more, fail to
say) is related to the fact that Dean Nagel is your boss.
It is also
clear that you don’t see things the way we in law enforcement do. I never
understood Foucault’s critique and all the accompanying self-righteousness regarding
the supposed “invention” of normality. Maybe you are shielded in the ivory
tower, but in the world I inhabit, there really are criminals and very
troubled, even evil, people. We need to be protected from them and they need to
be helped and changed. Scientific means of assessment and evaluation are
essential for this. We judge by differences, and we need to compare the
atypical with the typical. Your talk of “normalization” seems to imply some
kind of self-interested, status-quo fostering conspiracy by the hegemons,
rather than the altruistic pursuit of consensual goals.
Sure, large organizations have ever
more informational power over us little guys. But it goes both ways, and the
technology can also help even the score. I was able to put the recording I
obtained of the department store discussing my case (and their illegal tapping
of my communications) to good use. I also had an unprecedented level of privacy
at work because I used my own encryption on all communications.
Christena–You are my kind of person! I’m also
an ethnographer of sorts. No one has ever before said they love me--let alone
someone with private islands. I really agree with you that “fun is . . .
something not to be underestimated.” In all of your fieldwork I am sure that
the parallel between peek and peak has not been lost on you. I love Peter
Sellers and am honored that you connect me with him. He was one profound dude
in Being There.
I sense
that you understand me and to show my appreciation (and contrary to James
Willis and Susan Silbey’s unkind statement about my inability to reciprocate) I
recently purchased 341 copies of your book Home
and Work and sent them to Dominion Swann Industries and its affiliates
(pseudonymously known as the Omniscient Organization--a high-tech firm honored
for its work monitoring practices and efforts to eliminate the home/work
distinction in a recent business publication).
We also
agree that women are generally more upset with watching than are men, not to
mention that they are sometimes favored in choirs, workplaces, restrooms, etc.,
etc. As I told Ms. Comstock and old Dr. A. Fount De’Knowledge, women who feel
that way need to work on those feelings, lighten up, and take equality
seriously. As Emerson said, “inconsistency is the hobgoblin of a crumbling
society.”
One minor
point of disagreement. You note that the technology can be miss used as with
stealing identity. Here I sense some lurking technophobia often found among
social scientists and humanists teaching in technical institutes. Yes, there
unfortunately will always be people who take advantage, that’s why we need
strong policing and accountability. The best way to get that ironically is
through the visibility and documentation offered by the new means of
technology. Do you know that over 100 wrongly convicted people have been
released from prison based on DNA evidence? Think of all the children who would
find out who their father really is if we had mandatory DNA testing. You
liberal types seem to have a bit of a dilemma here. You worry about the social
control and power aspects of the technology but ignore the validation,
efficiency, and justice aspects. My reading of the Fourteenth Amendment
suggests that police have a constitutional obligation to use every available
technology.
Also a giant
YES! to your mention of accessibility. That is a big part of my
project–harvesting all from the expanding cornucopian opportunity structures
this wonderful technological age offers! As brother Cliff sings, “I just want
what’s mine.” On the reciprocal side again, I am very accessible–email, pager,
cell phone, fax-should you want to study me.
P.S. Please don’t ever worry about the “hotel
room with a mirror facing the bed.” I can show you a simple means of
discovering, and if necessary, blocking that. Whatever you do, don’t think that
you can become invisible by putting lemon juice on your face, as one of my
former cell mates thought. On the collection side, I have lots of suggestions
for unobtrusive data collection that you may not have encountered. I say that
only because I once heard that social scientists were the last to get the news.
Did you hear the old Chicago story: Question:
“What’s a sociologist?” Answer:
“A person who spends $250,000 of tax money to find a house of ill-repute.”
Peter: At last an honest man, if only I had
a kingdom to give you in return for seeing the irony and pathos of my
situation. I sense you know the true meaning of the story about the little
child who said that the emperor was unclothed, when all about him were waxing eloquently
about his cool threads.
I act
logically, consistently, and honestly and try to live up to American ideals and
in return I get tried and fried, hung in the dung, diced and sliced, nailed and
jailed. It’s enough to make you want to withdraw or at least not live in Los
Angeles.
I appreciate your mention of so many
great films and books. You refer to a commercial-profit driven and defined
culture--how about that scene in The Big Lebowski when the Dude is asked by a
police officer to show his ID and all he can offer is a Safeway card? We are
what we consume. The King of Hearts must
speak to you-especially that line where the mental hospital patient, in
observing the so-called sane persons, says, “What funny people.” Well, as I
think you know, that’s the way I feel when I look at your/our culture.
Jim and Susan: Like Peter you strongly sense how the society is responsible for
my behavior. But then you get moralistic on us about reciprocity and separation
from the social context. I remember studying about how conflicts can escalate.
By avoiding direct interaction, I eliminate the possibility of conflict and
misunderstanding, not to mention the hypocritical creation of the gap between
self-presentation and the real me. Reciprocity is neutral and can be positive
or negative. Why take the chance?
You say,
“Tom has no sense of the harm his actions cause.” But here you conveniently
elide the fact that Eve never learns how I honor and protect her. You might
want to reread Richard Posner on the social consequences of moralism for
society. Like the Greeks, he stresses outcomes. Isn’t it the case that “what
you don’t know can’t hurt you”? One of the best sociology articles I ever read
was by Tumin and Moore on the social functions of ignorance.
Gary: As far as you are concerned, if
you really exist, I don’t know you from a coat hanger. I wouldn’t at all be
surprised if you are using a pseudonym and are really a hypocritical,
politically correct, crypto-feminist, male-hating female trying to muddy the
waters of reflection by satirically editing a clinical report that I never
signed off on (indeed, they refused to even show it to me because of a billing
dispute with the health insurer). They even said they owned my records. I don’t remember what I said
to Dr. Funt but he wrote it all down except when he was dozing off. How do I
know he got it right? I do recall that he seemed to believe everything I said.
How do I know I got it right? Who can you believe these days?
I agree
with the mental patient in the King of
Hearts who said, “This joke has lasted long enough, let’s go back to bed,”
or in my case, back to my virtual world. You treat my life as a joke and make
fun of me. But in reality, it’s your contradictions and illusions that are
funny. I am just a reflection in a pond. You paint me as some far out,
peripheral character, but I am from the very center of your society.
Also, isn’t
it a violation of the American Sociological Association Code of Ethics on informed
consent, nonexploitation, and confidentiality for you to get professional
mileage out of my life? What’s in it for me? If my story reflects what you
really feel about high-tech surveillance and men and women, why don’t you be
man (woman? person?) enough to just come out and say it, instead of shrouding
it in this confusing genre melange (clinical report, journal article, science,
satire, facts, fictions, my words, Ms. Comstock’s words, the shrink’s words,
your words)? I like layers in my cakes, not in my communication. You are just
another timid, vicariously observing sociological obfuscater, protected by your
abstractions who lacks the clarity, intelligence, and courage to tell it like
it is. As Sharon Stone said at the end of Sliver,
“Get a life.”
From: Gary
T. Marx gtmarx@bainbridgeisland.net
To: “Tom I.
Voire” voire@icu-ucme.com
Tom--You are an original (although not
necessarily in the sense meant by Umberto Eco and Peter Manning). As the
discussants imply, you might even be the posterboy for the penultimate,
paradigmatic, ideal-typical, protean, postmodern, invisible
twenty-first-century man with all your contradictions, separations, deceptions,
opacity, and technology. However, I am not sure if you should be seen as an
object of scorn or of sympathy, or viewed more neutrally as just another piece
of social meat to be understood and helped by those of us with superior
scientific and professional insights. I don’t get personally involved with
those I study, so I will just ignore your ad hominem insults.
I am sorry
if you feel that I was making fun of
you. That was certainly not my intent. I hope further therapy can help you better
deal with those feelings. I am sure you will agree that in this period of
resource constraints it’s a lot easier to fit people into existing systems than
to change systems. I urge you to find a therapist who will focus less on your
narcissistic self-development and more on assessing the consequences of your
behavior.
The
presence of humor is not meant to trivialize your situation, deny your pain and
confusion, or suggest that these issues are unworthy of serious attention.
Indeed, it is the means for calling attention to them and helping me sustain my
motivation. Freud said there are no jokes and he wasn’t kidding.
I will deal with you in more detail in my book. Until then,
get back in my psyche and stop sending those unsolicited e-mail ads for Viagra
and body part enhancers and stop intercepting other people’s mail and brain
waves.
End of e-mail
Reflective Social Researchers
Joane Nagel
and Bill Staples are the most critical of Tom/Gary. In this limited space I
will address only one issue: the presumed impact of my motivation and situation
on the results of the case study.
Your
question about why, with all the things that could be written about
surveillance technology, I chose to give it a sexual slant is well put and easy
to answer. Certainly as good sociologists and psychologists of knowledge we
need to be aware of what you call “intentionality” and “positionality.” Were it not for the fact
that Tom is only one of fifteen chapters in the book, your argument would be
more applicable and it would be helpful to find out whose dirty pictures (p.419
this journal) they really are. Sex is interesting to write about and garners
attention. More on sex, gender, and surveillance in a minute.
Given what
we know from Freud about hidden motives and from Goffman about presentational
prevarications, can we ever get an adequate grasp of intentions (even if we had
the latest in brain wave reading technology)? When scholarship is well done and
scientific findings validated across observers, then neither intention nor
location make much difference.
Your
mention of positionality and old white guys reminds me of a story. A traveling saleswoman unexpectedly comes
home a day early from a road trip and finds her best friend in bed with her
husband. Shocked she asks, “What are you doing here?” Her friend replies,
“Well, everybody’s got to be somewhere.” So it is with our observations. We are
rooted in space and time and culture. So what else is new? Because there are
limits and some relative components to knowledge, do we give up?
Certainly
the situation of a monogamously married white guy raised in Hollywood, who
spent the year in Washington, D.C., during the titillating Clinton-Lewinski
spectacle (when Tom’s dossier appeared on my computer), is not totally
irrelevant. But we must not confuse the message with the messenger nor reduce
reality simply to varied intentions, positions, and social constructions. Those
doubting this should try closing their eyes during rush hour and then walk across
a busy intersection thinking about the rich implications of positionality and
intentionality for the social construction of reality. Yes, Virginia, there
really is a world out there. It is a world in which surveillance frequently has
sexual overtones and involves profound gender differences. Telling Tom’s story
is one way to deal with that.
As Harry
Caul said in the Conversation, “It
has nothing to do with me. I just turn in the tape.” You can’t understand what
runs through a pipe or is carried on a conveyor belt by studying the means of
conveyance. Better to look at what they transport. I’m not much more than an
ambulatory camera or a slightly tinted mirror just trying to reflect the social
reality out there and to do this under the sway of a professional ethic that
says tell the truth, be logical, submit your ideas to criticism and try to
differentiate your empirical from your normative claims. If the shoe fits, it
doesn’t matter who the cobbler is.
The day we
in good faith have to routinely legitimate what we study by reference to our
identities, rather than by the quality of the work or the properties of the
reality we seek to understand, is a good day to find another occupation or to
lead a sit-in.
Creepy Quotients and Fuzzy
Borders
The critics
are undecided about how Tom should be evaluated. On the one hand, we have Jim
Willis and Susan Silbey who note that Tom represents much that is good about
American society: self-improvement, honesty, patriotism. He is also
compassionate, forgiving, and protective of those he cares about. A tactful
Goffmanian study in etiquette, he submerges his own strongly felt needs in
order not to inflict harm or embarrassment on others.
Christena
Nippert-Eng, steeped in rich data on the public and the private from her
research (1996) on the borders between work and home, finds Tom’s issues to be
all too familiar. She appreciates Tom’s characterization. Even with some
questionable behavior, she sees Tom falling toward “the milder end of things”
and not “really getting to the skin-crawling level.”
Peter
Manning doesn’t show us his hole card. Like a sportscaster, he offers
commentary, but doesn’t take sides. We don’t know what he personally thinks of
Tom. Perhaps this reflects the “value neutrality” lesson learned as a graduate
student. Or perhaps his hesitancy reflects the difficulties he notes in getting
a handle on what is real in the contemporary period and on determining who is
telling the truth in the story and even who is telling the story. With so much
deception, illusion, haze, and so many political landmines, prudence dictates
evading a position.
Joane Nagel
and Bill Staples in contrast are more critical of Tom. They see him as “way
high on the ‘creepy’ meter” and “a hapless stalker, a
misunderstood sociopath.”
What are we
to make of the fact that these leading qualitative sociologists, whether from
the very heartland of America or Boston, the citadel of higher education in the
United States, don’t agree? Is Tom, like the society he reflects, just a giant
Rorschach in which observers offer their location-saturated mishagas as truth?
With respect to where the truth lies (or does it? How’s that for a postmodern pun?), can we do no better than the
congressman who, in responding to testimony he did not agree with, politely
said, “Well, I guess everyone is entitled to their own statistics.”
Yet there
are commonalities in analysis, apart from issues of judgment. Whatever the
power, gender, and sexual themes, this is a story about values in conflict, the
absence of clearly defined norms, and the limits of rules in a rapidly changing
society.
Manning writes of the blurred “boundaries of the self,” “inconsistent
standards,” and “contradictions in our collective life”; Nippert-Eng refers to
“the fuzzyness of borders”; Staples suggests that Tom crosses an “ill-defined
line into the realm of THE creepy”; Willis and Silbey mention the unclear “line dividing unwanted and threatening
sexual attention from harmless flirting”; Nagel notes the absence of a bright
line between “notice” and “NOTICE.”
Concepts
such as fuzzyness, blurring, ill-defined or absent lines, and contradictions
call attention to “ambivalence” as a
central theme in analyzing and judging Tom and, more broadly, surveillance in
society. 3. Responsibly used surveillance is an essential
feature of social life; irresponsibly used it destroys trust and the social,
and there is a sense in which the surveillance society is a contradiction in
terms.
The ambivalence takes several forms. One involves the
conflict between competing values such as freedom of inquiry and communication
versus the penumbra of privacy-supporting values in the Bill of Rights and in
our culture more broadly. Even a given value such as individual liberty can be
emphasized with respect to the right to treat one’s personal data as one’s
property or solitude and the right to be left alone absent cause (whether from
government, organizations, and other individuals) vsersus the right to access
what is freely (if often involuntarily) offered and publicly archived. There is
also the need to attend to our environment to interact with others and for
security. Our society emphasizes freedom of thought and expression and focuses
on controlling behavior. Yet we also value proper motives and thoughts, and
much social energy goes into trying to create these, whether from education,
religion, or psychotherapy. There is no easy resolution to conflicts of rights
and expectations other than acknowledging such conflicts and being clear about
how and under what conditions we prioritize values. Manners are an opaque
mechanism or compromise for permitting right behavior, while leaving out inner
beliefs and feelings. 4.
Another
source of ambivalence and blurred boundaries rests in the fact that it is
social context much more than the literal qualities of behavior that determine
evaluation. It is not so much what one does, but where and in what way and
under what conditions. To look can be to honor and not to look can be taken as
hurtful. Yet to look can also be intimidating and frightening and to not look a
sign of respect for the other. Thus, the line between subtle friendly glances
and unwanted leering is on a continuum and is clearest as we move toward the
extremes. There is no bright line separating these. It is the vast middle area
that can be problematic. There is ample room for misinterpreting looks intended
as harmless. Yet there is equal room for a perpetrator to misperceive what
seems to others to be inappropriate behavior.
Yet another
source of ambivalence lies in the area W. F. Ogburn (1952) referred to as
cultural lag. There is a frequent gap between new technology and effective
means of dealing with its consequences–whether involving laws, policies, or
manners. Over time, greater consensus often emerges over what behavior means
and how it should be treated. Consider, for example, the gradual emergence of
standards over whether and when it was proper to telephone others at home and
the arrival decades later of strong restrictions on wiretapping or the legal
move from the acceptability to the unacceptability of intercepting others’
e-mails or sending junk faxes.
As noted,
Tom is the beneficiary of culture lag. Given the power of new technologies to
give meaning to previously meaningless personal emanations involuntarily or
freely given off (such as image, heat, scents, DNA, eye movements, stomach
flutters, biological leavings, and garbage), the question of when the person
ends and something beyond begins is contestable. The traditional embodied self
discussed by Peter Manning has a series of shadow selves as companions whose
validity and appropriate use are subject to question.
As
observers, we show ambivalence in settling on explanations. The tension between
social and cultural determinism and individual responsibility and choice
generates ambivalence. Tom is in a complex society whose social organization
and messages are often contradictory or unclear. Given the vagaries and
conflicts in culture and social structure, he can in good conscience
rationalize his behavior and behave badly or on the edge, while not violating
the law. Tom may even warrant our sympathy for the messy muddles that society
thrusts upon him. Who then is to blame? He can’t be faulted for having the bad
luck to land in a less that perfectly integrated society whose universal rules
ignore social contexts. Yet structural pressures are hardly the entire story.
Most others in the same social setting don’t behave the way he does.
The commentators also show ambivalence in being uncertain of
whether Tom is a villain or a hero, a victim or victimizer. The multiplicity of
social contexts and consequences makes it difficult to reach an overall
conclusion. Tom victimizes others, if softly. He also uses surveillance to act
heroically, or at least in a socially responsible fashion (e.g., alerting
police when Eve had a disorderly visitor, working as a lifeguard and store
detective, and volunteering as a neighborhood watcher). He is also victimized
by the Navy’s snooping into his email account, by anonymous denouncers, and by
hidden cameras. He is also the beneficiary of positive surveillance–from his
parents who successfully helped him become an adult, the doctors, who after
extensive testing, evaluation, and monitoring, diagnosed and treated his
childhood illness, not to mention the vast array of unseen food, air quality,
transportation, product, and work safety inspectors.
Tom’s story
is accessible and resonates with most readers because we all are both objects
and subjects of appropriate and inappropriate surveillance. We also are
consumers of surveillance. In our various social roles and simply being out in
the world (or having the world come into our home over electronic media), we
watch others–and not always legitimately. It is the familiarity and tension or
ambiguity that makes the topic interesting and very fit for social research.
The ambivalence, lack of clarity, and inherent contradictions make for a feast
of ironies.
Ironies
There is
irony in the fact that in logically following one set of values, such as
freedom of inquiry and of expression, Tom runs afoul of others, such as the
invasion of privacy. We see Tom prying into other’s lives even as we pry into
his in spite of the opening warning about confidentiality. Professionals,
shocked at his behavior, behave in similar ways and are occupationally rewarded
for doing so.
We also see
irony in the tension between separating prisoners and seeking to integrate them
into the community. In Tom’s case his job training and exposure to data of
women’s medical records, also gave him the opportunity to wreak some havoc.
It is
ironic that the surveillance that Tom uses is in turn used against him. Jeremy
Bentham’s Panopticon, although never literally built, was a place where the
guards and supervisors were to be watched as well as the inmates (Boyne 2000).
Current technologies tend to be distinctive because the very tool for
controlling others can itself also be a tool for controlling the controllers.
The video camera is indiscriminate and egalitarian in catching all who urinate
in the coffeepot or sleep under bridges, regardless of their organizational
station.
There are
existential ironies rooted in the very nature of things perceived. To hide or
mask an identifiable object or to withhold information known to exist can be to
throw down a gauntlet to the interested parties denied access. The withholding or
shielding may even pique curiousity and intensify interest, as the
informationally excluded wonder what the secret is, or how the object appears
unsheathed. The answer to Joane’s question about whether getting dressed is an
invitation to be undressed, at least in the mind of the interested observer, is
“yes” (although it is also interesting that being partially unclothed is
generally more alluring than the full
monty). However on any quantitative basis, the strategic reasons for seeking
the secret far outweigh the prurient.
Sexual
material has an ironic or paradoxical quality that makes it difficult to avoid
suspicions of pruriency, whatever the intentions of the analyst. As the
feminist and religious critics of pornography who must engage the materials
they find distasteful have discovered, there is an ironic contamination
effect--like trying to clean up a paint spot with a rag that has paint on it.
In dealing with sexual materials, the critics are subject to complaints about
their prurient interests or at least the prurient impact of their work. Freud
said in the beginning there is the body--no amount of detached analysis or
moral high ground can quite overcome that.
Art Is Like Life
The
resolution to much of the ambivalence over unclear or absent lines is to
clarify or to draw them. This leads to the issue of line drawing and attention
to social context rather than behavioral acts per se. C.K. Chesterton said
something like, “Art is like life. You have to draw the line somewhere.” The
same might be said of surveillance. All of the commentators seek the
luminous line that separates the good
from the bad. But it is elusive. We are dealing with multdimensional continua
that do not sit isomorphically or cleanly overlap.
In response to Jim and Susan asking for “an explanation for
why some types of secret surveillance are preferable to others,” the following
distinctions may be helpful. Analysis requires differentiating between thoughts
and overt behavior, real and simulated information, awareness or lack of
awareness of the subject/object, and then the consensual and nonconsensual
collection of information, whether the information is available to the unaided
senses or requires a technology to extract, and assessing the type of
relationship whether personal or impersonal, the place of the collection,
whether there is surveillance reciprocity, and the goals.
It is also helpful to indicate just which dimension(s) of
public and private we draw upon. 5. Some of the mental cacophony associated with
surveillance stems from a failure to differentiate between, and note the
interrelations of, the following factors:
1.
Public
and private geographical places as legally defined
2.
Public
and private information access as legally defined
3.
Customary
expectations and manners regarding information access
4.
Accessibility
or inaccessibility of information/communication to the unenhanced senses
5.
The
actual state of knowledge as being publicly known or unknown
6.
Social
status, roles, and personal attributes as they affect the concealment and
revelation of information
The
Male And Other Gazes
Standing on the corner
watching all the girls go by,
Buddy if you’ve got a rich imagination,
matter of fact, so do I
--The
Lettermen circa (1957)
There is a
pronounced male gender theme to much voyeuristic personal surveillance
activity. Given our culture, it is not surprising that the female form draws
greater sexual attention than does the male. Advertisements for surveillance
devices often show young women as the subjects. The purchasers and users of the
technology are disproportionately men, as are the consumers of pornography.
Contrast the circulation of Playboy and
its imitators with that of Playgirl.
In the traditional striptease women reveal and men observe, rather than the
reverse, which is why The Full Monty was funny. We do not find
many songs written by girls about “standing on the corner watching all the boys go by” (although there are more now
than previously). Nor do men usually complain about being yelled at or observed
by female construction workers (and only partly because there are so few). Nor
are there complaints about female landlords hiding cameras in the bath and
bedrooms of their tenants, nor do women frequent shopping malls with hidden
video cameras.
As Joane Nagel notes, Tom’s story fails miserably if he becomes a she who engages in the same behavior. It is just too far-fetched,
even in our more sexually liberated age, to have women behave toward men the
way Tom behaves toward women. 6. With the genders or
biology switched, we are unlikely to feel the same degree of indignation and
shock over her behavior, or sympathy and concern for the object of her
surveillance, as we do over Tom’s. Differences in power, risk, and the nature
of sexual roles and expression as shaped by culture (and maybe more) help
explain responses to the story of Tom as a male watching a female. It is also
interesting to speculate on how the reader’s response might change if it turned
out that the story ended not with Erving Goffman’s powerful insights but with
Tom’s surveillance discovering that Eve was really Evan, a man who presented
himself as a woman.
Yet the sense of invasion transcends biology and
gender roles. Some feelings of invasiveness remain even if the case involves a
woman watching a man, same-sex watching, or watching for nonsexual purposes.
Elsewhere I suggest that individuals are likely to feel personal borders have
been crossed when any of four conditions are present (Marx 1998). These involve
breaching of a “natural,” social, temporal, or spatial border protective of
information or violation of the assumption that interaction and communication
are ephemeral and transitory, like a river, and are not to be captured through
hidden video or audio means without the subject’s awareness.
It is possible to overemphasize the gender
differences. The issue may be one of form and content more than greater or
lesser interest or desire to know. 7. With respect to
content, men appear to find entangled bodies and the female form of sufficient
interest, while women are more likely to want a fuller context and story. Are
women really less interested in observation of the opposite sex or just more
affected by social customs? They are more likely to use surveillance for
defensive and protective rather than for prurient purposes. Women may be better
at watching than men; women may watch for different things and more subtly.
They are better at interpreting nonverbal meanings. That women are more likely
to engage in “relationship” talk, to discuss the personal and share
confidences, and perhaps to gossip more than men does not suggest any lesser
curiosity. As mothers watching their infants and children, they may, on the
average, be more attentive than men. They also, particularly when alone, are
more attentive to threats posed by their environment.
That surveillance technology lends itself to
disembodied, a contextual information may mean that men find it more attractive.
On the other hand, its very distancing quality makes it safe in a way that
direct observation is not. Anonymous surveillance mediated by distance does not
run the immediate risk of retaliation, invitation, or seeming to show bad
manners from staring or other direct interaction. Thus, one might expect that
over time, as women become more familiar with the various technologies, they
would make greater use of them. Caller-ID, for example, has been marketed more
for women than for men. In a related example, women may be as, or more, likely
than men to silently record phone conversations with the potential now offered
by answering machines.
Sex And Surveillance:
Unveiling Secrets
In beginning the surveillance project, I did not intend to
say anything about sex, let alone devote attention to it in this form. Yet it
soon became apparent that sexual themes often hover over the topic or lurk in
the background, particularly when surveillance is covert. Sexual images and
metaphors (whether conscious or latent) surround the subject. Covert
surveillance especially offers a “safe” passage to excluded but presumably
attractive or desirable territory and to things that are not “public” in the
sense of being available to anyone. Surveillance and sex share the increased
excitement that can accompany activities that are forbidden, illicit, or risky.
Secret surveillance represents a form of power over the other and can stimulate
the imagination. Voyeurism feeds consciousness, and sex is as much in the head
as anywhere else.
There are general features of sex that relate it to
surveillance apart from gender. Both sex and surveillance involve crossing
exclusionary borders. The allure of sexual secrets (whether the existence of a
relationship or its details) is well known. 8. Consensual
sexual encounters consist of seeking barriers against the surveillance of
others (e.g., the privacy offered by darkness, empty houses, closed doors,
basements, barns, the woods, cars, covers, and secret getaways). Yet they also
do the opposite in overcoming barriers to mutual surveillance and direct
contact. Involved here are a series of parallel and progressive unveilings,
revelations, and entrances--from the outer walls of a structure, to the doors
of a bedroom, to the shedding of clothes, to the contact of separated bodies,
to the revelation of inner thoughts and feelings that are masked in the public
and proper presentations of the self otherwise put forward. Here we see the
cooperative elimination of anti-surveillance measures in order to facilitate
surveillance of, and by, the partner. The hidden observer vicariously
participates in this unveiling.
Beyond these parallels, surveillance and sex may be
explicitly joined as new technologies offer opportunities for the consensual
videotaping of sexual encounters. Whether covert or overt, watching and filming
in some form is a frequent theme of conventional and pornographic films. This
may serve as a stimulant to the hidden watcher, to those being watched if they
know, or imagine they are being watched, and to the doubly voyeuristic viewing
audience.
What’s Wrong With His Behavior?
For any eye is an evil eye
That looks in onto a mood apart
--R.
Frost, “A Mood Apart” 9.
What kind of harm occurs from a privacy invasion that the
individual does not learn about and that results in no direct detrimental
action? As the discussants note, Tom’s behavior is troubling, but it is not
easy to indicate why. In Eve’s case, for example, he skirts but does not really
violate the criminal law. He has not engaged in trespassing, breaking and
entering, or theft as these are legally defined. One form of privacy invasion
involves a betrayal of trust, whether based on friendship or a professional
relationship involving confidentiality. Yet Tom is betraying neither a personal
nor a professional relationship. Nor do the conventional tort invasions of
privacy (disclosure of intimate facts, putting someone in a false light,
profiting from a person’s likeness, or intruding into their solitude) fit the
case.
We lack an adequate vocabulary for dealing with much of
Tom’s behavior. Nor do we have adequate concepts or theories for analyzing the
social setting in which such behavior appears and can be justified.
A part of the answer, as Willis and Silbey note, is that the
magisterial universalism of the law is divorced from social context. The
unstated assumption here is that social contexts are somehow equal. This
ignores stratification as a central feature of society. Individuals who are to
be treated equally by the law are subject to unequal social pressures pushing
them to deviate and conform. They also have unequal social resources to protect
themselves from others exercising their individual rights and to defend
themselves if apprehended. 10. Tom, under the flag (and
broom) of egalitarianism and individualism, sweeps away the different meanings
(and risks) to men and women of being watched by someone of a different sex and
justifies his behavior. When this is mixed with individual liberties
disconnected from social interaction and responsibilities, there is ample room
for the good faith holding of righteously sociopathic constructions of reality.
If
neither Eve nor anyone else ever finds out about Tom and his data, is harm
done? Can an individual be hurt by secret surveillance intended to be consumed
only by the collector? Yes, what you don’t know can hurt you and, even if it doesn’t, there is a sense in which
such behavior offends the broader society. As Durkheim noted under modern
conceptions of criminal law, offenses are viewed as an attack on the community
at large, not just on the wronged party (whether he or she knows or cares about
the violation). Pris Regan (1995) effectively analyzes the social values of
privacy, apart from the individual as such.
We
can identify several kinds of harm and risk. While any single strand of
information may be relatively harmless, multiple strands offer a fuller picture
of the individual, revealing things that the person may not even know about him
or herself. There is a threshold point in the aggregation of information that
Tom has crossed. The creation of a “mosaic” in which, through a “value-added
model”, combining information (regardless of whether it is public or private or
available to the unaided senses or requires extractive technologies)
fundamentally alters its character. We assume that those with whom we have only
impersonal or no relationships will not come to know details that we have not
ourselves revealed. Under such conditions, it is unseemly for an individual to
make inferences about another’s health, happiness, beliefs, behavior, life
chances, and so on, and to create representations in the way and to the degree
that Tom does.
Tom can also be faulted for behaving deceptively. While he
prides himself on being open, he hides many of his data collection activities
(cameras in dark glasses and a cigarette lighter, a parabolic mike disguised as
a satellite dish, and the use of pseudonyms and pretenses in purchasing data
about her). Tom is clever in arguing that he takes advantage of situations not
people, but his use of ruses and sophisticated technology to extract, record,
and combine information means that he is hardly the passive agent he claims to
be. That he might rationalize his behavior out of a desire not to upset those
he is interested in is beside the point. Such behavior violates trust. We assume
that, under normal circumstances, both people and objects are as they appear to
be. Expectations of trust are not restricted just to personal relationships,
although they are strongest there.
While your physical property can be protected by borders of
concrete and steel, your image, much of your personal information, and what
someone does with you in their imaginary world is protected by nothing more
than manners and their sense of decency. The fact that appearance is in one
sense a free good for the sighted, like air or the water of a rushing river,
adds to the confusion in assessing Tom’s behavior. 11.
However, if we regard a seemingly free good (such as the appearance others
offer for us to look at) not only as one that can simply be taken in the world
without physical resistance or technologies, but as one that the individual
must be entitled to take (in anything beyond the most innocent regard), then
the look or photograph are not free goods. They are surrounded by rules, levels
of access, and a sense of propriety.
Looking may be free in one sense, but it is not necessarily
cheap. Mythology suggests that those who violate this control of image may
suffer. Lot’s wife was turned to salt after looking when she was told not to,
and those looking at the gorgon Medusa were said to be turned to stone (except
for Perseus who was able to kill Medusa by wearing a cap that made him
invisible). According to the seventeenth-century legend, when Lady Godiva made
her naked ride, citizens were required to remain indoors. Peeping Tom, who
looked out of the window, was struck blind and dead (presumably in that order).
There can be harm in violating the spirit, if not the
letter, of laws protecting property, contracts, and legitimate access. In
“copping a symbolic feel” there is a questionable cheap thrill element in which
the voyeur takes something he is not entitled to. A trespass may occur in the
ether and within the imagination, if not in physical space. What is taken has
either not been paid for or access has not been granted to it.
There is a kind of rip-off here in which Tom appropriates
her personal data with such intentionality that he colonizes her
representations. In his totalizing behavior he violates tacit assumptions that
we make about how others will respond to our personal information. We assume
that the kinds of information Tom gathers will not be much noted by others
(absent warrant to do so) and, if noted, will not be collected and aggregated.
The erotic looks that lovers may grant each other in public
are usually not acceptable when offered by others. Tom makes the logical error
of thinking that because he can with ease look lasciviously, or gather massive
amounts of public data on an individual, that he is entitled to do so. Yet just
because there is a legal right to, or no legal restriction on, doing something
does not make it right.
For many/most people these opportunities are used with
discretion as a result of manners and/or a desire not to be thought of as a
boor, lech, or slut, or to invite unwanted reciprocal attention or sanctioning.
We learn to avert our eyes even as we could look (this is often the case with a
dead body or when someone does something embarrassing, what Goffman refers to
as disattending). Children are taught that it is bad manners to stare. It can
also be dangerous. We offer respect for the other by not watching too
attentively or by recording and, in so doing, we also affirm something about
the kind of person we are.
It is not that women or men do not want to be looked at and
noticed, but that they have a proprietary interest in controlling who looks at
them and in what ways. A part of their personhood is defined by the autonomy
and ownership and a degree of control over their data and image, whether in
face-to-face interaction or beyond. It is interesting that a visual honor
system works so often in public. One can marvel that men and women are so
relatively (if not equally) inhibited in their looking.
When individuals have reason to suspect that they are under
such surveillance, they may take steps to prevent it (e.g., closing blinds,
using a shredder, not using a cordless phone, debugging rooms, unlisting a
phone number, encrypting computer and phone communications including answering
machines and, when there is interaction, perhaps even obtaining a restraining
order or getting a guard dog). Most people do none of the above because they
assume there are no Toms seeking to be a vicarious part of their life. This
leads to the issue of the harm that can come from discovery.
The pain, poignancy, and consistency in the voices of those
who speak out about their discovery of voyeuristic behavior and related forms
of the inappropriate crossing of personal borders is striking. Among responses
are a sense of betrayal, uncertainty and paranoia, embarrassment, and shame,
not to mention the possibility of strategic disadvantage. This raises the
question of what is the likelihood that the information will become public? How
good is the secret surveillor at keeping the results secret?
A distinction needs to be drawn between momentary
consumption of the data by the surveillor’s senses versus the creation of a
reproducible record. Empirical artifacts reflecting the surveillance such as
photos, video and audio recordings, and photocopies have a very different moral
status than mere imagination. The risk of leakage or accidental exposure with a
permanent record takes the surveillance down several moral notches relative to
overhearing or watching without recording.
In Tom’s case, for example, he could change his mind or
undergo a psychological change that could lead him to want share his work. Even
if he remains steadfast, what if a cleaning service, landlord, or fire or
ambulance personnel come upon it? What if there were a police search or
burglary of his home and his materials became public, whether because of failed
blackmail, a news story, or a trial? One of the cruelest ironies of all is that
the invaded person may then doubly suffer from the shock of discovery of the
surveillance and from having their information disseminated beyond their
control.
Even given legal rights to easily available information, the would-be secret surveillor needs to ask questions such as: If the subject suspected that she was under such surveillance, would she alter her behavior in any way to block or deflect it? What would the likely psychological impact on Eve be if she were to learn of Tom’s behavior? Does Tom want to be responsible for that? Would he be embarrassed, humiliated, or ashamed at having his kamikaze surveillance behavior become known? How would he feel if someone treated him or his mother or sister this way?
Fiction And Fun
Satirical fiction offers a neglected way of knowing,
communicating, and doing sociology. Much of the book in which Tom will appear
involves conventional sociological data and abstract analysis. Yet, as
important as systematic data and theory are, they usually lose the
nonspecialist reader and neglect the richness of situational detail. Ernest
Hemingway advises the writer to show rather than to tell. But the scholar
should not be forced to choose. As Nippert-Eng notes, if we wish to engage
wider publics in consideration of important social issues, we need to do both.
The affectivity of art, whether in the form of narrative writing or visual
images, may enhance the effective comprehension of analysis. We understand some
things noncognitively, and passion can fuel the effort to cognitively
understand.
With Tom (and other fictions in the book ,such as the
“Omniscient Organization” and a speech by “Rocky Bottoms” the president of
American Society for Security), I try to avoid what Mark Twain referred to as
the “impressive incomprehensibility” of many scientific treatises. Our
conventional approaches can be supplemented by more explicitly writing
sociological fiction.
Things may be fiction in multiple ways. One involves lies,
deception, hoax, fraud,
and distortion, in which it is claimed that something
happened that did not in fact happen. When caught, scientists and journalists
get a bad name for passing off fiction as fact. In contrast, conventional
fiction acknowledges that it is imaginary and makes no necessary claim to
direct correspondence to a particular empirical entity. An intermediate case is
the roman-a-clef which involves real
persons under invented names. Language conspires with us here in giving
multiple means to words such as “fabricate” which means both to construct and
to concoct, and “forge” to shape and to invent. 12.
Another
type of fiction well known to the social scientist is the ideal type that makes
a greater claim on reality. For Max Weber, this was abstract and involved
relatively few elements in pristine form. But more detailed case reports, such
as Tom’s, are also a form of ideal type. Tom is fiction because he is not
“embodied.” Nor is he a copy. Yet as an ideal type, he resonates with empirical
events and captures essential objective and subjective features of watching and
being watched. The question is not did it really happen this way, but does it
happen this way and is the account useful in capturing the central features of
the behavior we wish to understand? While the scenarios I offer are fiction,
they are to be judged by a standard of verisimilitude that need not burden the
novel.
A composite
account may be true, even if it is
impossible for it to be empirically accurate.
While the Tom I. Voire incidents did not occur together at the imaginary
times and places I describe, they do happen. Tom may be fiction, but he is not
science fiction. The line between fiction and reality can be fluid and Tom
represents intentional genre blurring. The complexity of the situation made me
do it. While I have taken some leeway, most of the substance and many direct
quotes are from my observations, interviews, and reading. A composite account
may be true, even if it is impossible
for it to be empirically accurate.
A map or compass coordinates are not literally the
territory. Yet they reflect elements of it and can be essential in navigating
it. In the same way I hope my use of fiction can help make sense of actual and
emerging social worlds. And perhaps by sparking thought can help shape these.
Tom is both docudrama and mockudrama. The nature of such writing must be clearly stated, else misuse of the form may degenerate into propaganda. There can be a tension between the scholar’s need for accuracy, balance, fairness, logic, and depth and the requisites of provocative satire and fiction. Education needn’t be entertaining, but neither should the solemnity of the academy preclude its being entertaining. Psychologists have a natural advantage over sociologists here in dealing with individual narratives as against the abstractions of social structure.
The risk for a social scientist in mixing fact and fiction
is that some readers will assume that the situations described are real in the
literal sense, rather than being real in the ideal typical sense of
representations of things in, or potentially in, the world. 13. At the other extreme, some readers will
dismiss it all precisely because it isn’t “real” as in literal.
In a moment of aging indiscretion, I had the temerity to
offer thirty-seven moral mandates for aspiring sociologists (Marx 1997). I
urged greater attention to writing and argued for new ways of communicating. I
also suggested that sociologists should have more fun. Drawing again from Weber
(1958), I argued for sociology as a vacation as well as a vocation. Life is
short, and the stuff many of us study is depressing and tragic. Humor not only
can alleviate stress, it can afford unique insights by pointing out cultural
contradictions (Davis 1993). Having a store of information built up from
studying the topic for a decade, I didn’t have to do research. I simply thought about Tom and his case flowed out. It
was great fun. I loved writing it.
I think our methods courses would do well to train students in writing reality-grounded fiction and in the uses of irony, parables, satire, and humor. There is a well-established fictional tradition in quantitative analysis of using simulated data. It is more than time to develop an equivalent tradition for qualitative work.
In describing Tom, I emphasized the bizarre and atypical to
surface and highlight the issues. However, his extreme behavior and responses
are at one end of a continuum. He illuminates potential uses of the new
technologies and the lack of adequate formal or mannerly protections against
violation. Whatever his distinctive psychology, he reflects elements of our
culture and conflicts within it.
Tom reminds us that the social and ethical issues around
information technology do not just involve large organizations (merchants,
banks, insurers, workplaces, government) and their treatment of individuals, or
their organizational rivals, but also the behavior of individuals toward each
other.
Willis and Silbey’s use of the Pogo epigraph is telling. Tom
does not come from the far reaches of American society. He has been formed and
affected by surveillance experiences in mainline institutions–the military,
education, work, therapy. His ideas are not drawn from the sanity-defying
fringe media but from mainstream sources such as “Reality TV” and the popular
press.
He shows how easy it is to rationalize highly questionable
behavior 14. and how muddled expectations regarding all
of this can be. There is some of Tom in all of us, regardless of gender,
although in our culture more in men than in women. To varying degrees, we also
share something with the objects of Tom’s unwelcome (and often unrecognized)
surveillance.
In offering Tom as satirical
fiction, I do not wish to detract from the mundane and omnipresent reality of
the topic nor from its seriousness. Tom may be an outlier and even an outlaw,
but it is premature to conclude that he is not also a guinea pig and pioneer.
Back to Main Page | References | Notes
Papers discussed here:
Marx: Tom Voire | Willis & Silbey: Self, Vigilance and Society | Nippert-Eng: Out of Sight, Out of Mind | Manning: Doubles and Tom Voire
References
Boyne, Roy
2000. “Post-Panopticism” Economy and Society 29: 285-307.
Davis,
Murray 1993. What’s So Funny? The Comic Conception of Culture and Society.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lathem,
Edward (ed.) 1975. The Poetry of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and
Winston.
Lodge,
David 1995. Small Worlds: An
Academic Romance. New York: Penguin.
Marx, Gary
T.1987. “Raising Your Hand Just Won’t Do.” Los Angeles Times, April 1.
------.
1988. Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. Berkeley: University
of
California Press.
-------.
1990. “The Case of the Omniscient Organization,”. Harvard Business Review
90:
12-16.
------.
1994. “New Telecommunications Technologies Require New Manners.”
Telecommunications Policy 18:538-551.
------.
1997. “Of Methods and Manners for Aspiring Sociologists: Thirty-seven
Moral Imperatives.” American
Sociologist 28:102-125.
------.
1998. “An Ethics for the New Surveillance.” Information Society. 14:171-186.
------.
2001. “Murky Conceptual Waters: The Public and the Private.” Ethics and
Information Technology 3:157-169.
-----.forthcoming. Windows Into
the Soul: Surveillance and Society in An Age of High
Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nippert-Eng, Christena. 1996. Home
and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through
Everyday Life. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Ogburn, William F. 1952. Social
Change. New York: Viking Press.
Regan, Priscilla 1995. Legislating
Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public
Policy. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Smelser, Neil 1998. “The Rational
and the Ambivalent in the Social Sciences,”.
American Sociological Review. 63:1-15.
Staples, William 2000. Everday
Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern
Life. Lanham, MD.:Rowan
and Littlefield.
Weber, Max 1958. From Max Weber.
(eds.) C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Wenger, D., J.
Lane, and S. Dimitri. 1994. “The Allure of Secret Relationships” Journal
of Personality and
Social Psychology 66: 287-290.
Back to Main Page | References | Notes
Papers discussed here:
Marx: Tom Voire | Willis & Silbey: Self, Vigilance and Society | Nippert-Eng: Out of Sight, Out of Mind | Manning: Doubles and Tom Voire
Notes
1.
“In theory, it was possible to wind up being full professor
while doing nothing except to be permanently absent on some kind of sabbatical
grant or fellowship” (Lodge 1995).
2.
My analysis chapter on Tom will be in Marx, (forthcoming) Related
articles can be found at garymarx.net
3.
Neil Smelser (1998) shows how useful ambivalence is as a category
for social analysis. There may also be ambivalence within the individual as raw
self-interest, whether socially or biologically driven, struggles with learned
rules that define the desired behavior as wrong.
4.
I consider the issue of manners and new telecommunications in
Marx (1994).
5.
In articles on an ethics for the new surveillance and the
multiple (and muddled) meaning of public and private, these themes are dealt
with in detail (e.g., Marx 1998; 2001).
6.
There are of course the occasional cases of the jealous and
perhaps revenge-seeking female stalking the male.
7.
Ease with using technology and opportunity may also be
factors. Note the enthusiasm with which Sharon Stone in the film Sliver, after a culturally expected
obeisance to the shock and insult of invasion, becomes intrigued and a regular
in watching her wired high-rise building. The film Kika chronicles a female voyeur. While more muted, Grace Kelley in Rear Window also becomes an interested
observer. Of course, we must not too unreflectively leap from movies to
generalizations about human behavior. Yet as Goffman noted, “It’s all data.”
8.
For example, Wenger, Lane, and Dimitri (1994) find that shared
secret romantic relationships have greater resonance than do open
relationships. What is true for the social secret may also be true for the
individual with a secret obsession such as Tom.
9.
In Latham (1975) p. 385.
10.
Among social mechanisms that may overcome some of this are
subsidization aimed at generating a more level playing field, differential penalties for violation depending on
characteristics of the offender and the victim, and compensation for victims.
11.
Of course, when a river is dammed, frozen, or made to
endlessly recirculate, new property and use issues appear just as they do with
recording voice and image.
The
veil and the separation of men and women in traditional Islamic societies seeks
to alter the free good quality of the look. Although in doing so it ironically
may intensify the desire. To enforce consumatory restrictions, it may have to
break its own taboos, as police must peer at women to be sure they are
appropriately covered and wearing stockings.
12.
With respect to the self there is the implication that
presentations as constructed or forged
may be also, but need not be disingenuous or deceptive.
13.
Of course, this is not a problem for those who view social
science as mostly fiction anyway, whether because of the complex, ever-changing
nature of its topics, its relatively weak methods, or the biases of its
practitioners. I learned about this problem when some readers, seeing earlier
satire, wrote and wanted to know where they could purchase the control
technologies described to regulate bathroom behavior and sought the address of the Omniscient
Organization. (Marx 1987; 1990).
14.
In so doing, he demonstrates a number of dogmatic
shoot-from-the-lip fallacies of folk reasoning. These include (1) the fallacy of
literalism in which a normative principle is rigidly asserted, making no
allowances for shades of grey, contingencies, or discretion, (2) the fallacy of
assumed representativeness in which a single (often personal) example is
believed to apply universally, (3) the fallacy of reductionism in which a given
cause or level of analysis is assumed
to explain everything, (4) the fallacy of value primacy in which a given value
is asserted to always overrule other values, (5) the fallacy of the final
authority involving legitimization through transference in which a quote from a
famous person is offered as sufficient justification for a position taken, (6)
the fallacy that because behavior is not as bad as it might be negative moral
evaluation should be softened or withheld, and (7) the fallacy of the double
standard in which when his personal informational borders are invaded he is
angry, yet he feels no remorse about behaving this way toward others. Survey
research suggests very strong support for protections from the privacy
invasions of others but much less support with respect to what the individual
feels entitled to do to others.
Back to Main Page | References | Notes
Papers discussed here:
Marx:
Tom Voire | Willis &
Silbey: Self, Vigilance and Society
| Nippert-Eng:
Out of Sight, Out of Mind | Manning: Doubles and
Tom Voire
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