Self, Vigilance, and Society
The Sociological Quarterly, Volume 43, Number 3, pages 439-445.
We appreciate the suggestions that Keith Bybee, Douglas Goodman, Karen McCormack, and Joseph Swingle provided on these brief comments.
Go to Tom Voire essay
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main Gary Marx page | Notes | References
Other
essays in this series: Nippert-Eng: Out of Sight, Out of Mind | Manning: Doubles and Tom Voire | Staples & Nagel: Gary’s Gone… | Marx: Reflective Eyes and Moods Apart
James Willis
University
of Massachusetts at Boston
Susan Silbey
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
(Direct all
correspondence to: James Willis, Department of Sociology, University of
Massachusetts at Boston, 100 Morrissey Boulevard, Boston, MA 02125-3393.
E-mail: james.willis@umb.edu).
“We have met the enemy, and he is us”- Pogo
There is much to admire about Thomas
Voire. At a time when many contemporary observers express concern about
increasing crime rates, an economic downturn, xenophobia, and political apathy,
Tom is presented as a law-abiding and hard-working citizen. We do not use the
word “citizen” lightly. Born in 1966, Tom has lived peaceably, stayed gainfully
employed, served his country, explored non-U.S. cultures in libraries and
museums, and, most laudably, demonstrated a willingness to articulate and
defend nationally cherished and constitutionally protected personal freedoms.
In Thomas Voire, Gary T. Marx provides us with an archetype of the postmodern
democratic man--educated, tolerant, worldly, and a staunch believer in equality
under the law.
Tom is a
product of much that is good about a nation devoted to preserving and enhancing
individual liberties. The fact that Tom is a voyeur who collects personal data
on unsuspecting women, tapes his consensual sexual relations with them, and
spies while they disrobe does not challenge or undermine the nation's or Tom's
foundational principles--it merely extends them. Marx shows how mass media and
visual and communication technologies, omnipresent elements of postmodernity, 1. have constructed a fragmented and alienated self. Tom is a
contemporary everyman whose freedom to engage in voyeurism represents the
triumph of universal, abstract individual rights over the particular, real-life
social relationships that constitute his actions as harmful. He is entirely
dependent on collective discursive and material practices, yet denies his
interdependence through the invocation of a radical individualism. 2.
By having
ready access to the enabling tools--remote cameras, hidden microphones, the
World Wide Web, and personal computers--Tom can live independently from others
yet enjoy as much of others as he desires. TomIn doing so, he
occupies a moral and legal safe house. By appealing to both contemporary
discourses of freedom and individualism and traditional ideals of equality
under law, he tries to persuade us that his private fantasy
harms nobody and is perfectly legal.fantasies
harm nobody and are perfectly legal, keeping with the foundational principles
of American society and justice. Tom's actions are mediated
through electronic artifice and protected by the law in its "majestic
equality." It is a world without obligation or constraint to the degree
that reciprocity is mechanical and transactions are virtual. Isolated in his
electronic anonymity, he can focus on his personal feelings--his only sensate
experience--and reasonably disassociate his actions from understandings of power,
gender, and privacy that suffuse everyday interactions. Without a social
context to define and provide meaning, Tom has no sense of the harm that his
actions cause. In denying the consequences of his behavior, Tombehavior, he
is appealing to one of law's grandest principles--it
applies universally. Just as the law claims to disengage itself from context,
history, and intersubjective connections, Tom's virtual world is similarly
disconnected from everyday life. If "the rich and poor alike are
forbidden to sleep under the bridges of the Seine, "
surely, Tom's reasoning suggests, peeping is equally innocuous
whether the perpetrator is a man or a woman. Just as legal
authority denies its disproportionate effect on the rich and poor,
Tom expunges the influence of power and gender in social
interactions. Marx’s satirical description of Thomas Voire not only illuminates
the frightening logic of a society that creates and facilitates this
individualistic antisocial self, it also provides us with a subtle and compelling
sociological critique.
Let’s Take A Look At Tom
Marx
presents Tom’s history of sexual dysfunction and voyeurism as a fictional
clinical case study. Early on, we find out that for the first seven years of his
life Tom was entombed in a body cast, the result of a rare bone disorder.
Rendered immobile and interactionally isolated, Tom observed life by reading
comic books, watching television, eavesdropping on family members, and aiming
his boy’s telescope at neighbors’ apartments and windows. At twenty he joined
the military but was discharged when the Navy, unable to locate his records,
accessed his Internet account and discovered that he had listed his marital
status as gay. Later we learn that his therapist suggested that he record his
sexual encounters to improve his technique. While applying this advice, Tom
quickly develops his fascination for secretly videotaping women. (Due to
feelings of embarrassment and a fear of rejection, Tom ignores his psychiatrist’s
advice to seek permission.) When he is
eventually discovered, he promises his partner that nobody else would ever see
the video tapes. In addition, he reasons, “An
image is just an image, regardless of where it originates or resides.” In good
poststructural analysis, the representational properties of images are opaque,
if not indeterminant. While in college and working as a security guard in a
women’s department store, Tom gets
caught in a relay of surveillance: his employers observe him with the management's
hidden camera while Tom is using the store’s video-monitoring equipment to look
at women undressing in the changing rooms. He argues that he is
the victim of gender discrimination since only female employees are permitted
in the video-monitoring room. He justifies his conduct by stating that the
female customers “didn’t even know I was watching, so no harm was done.” Some of his other trespasses include: being
caught using the women’s restroom in
the department store (he claims it was more comfortable than the men’s);
being arrested and imprisoned for
soliciting an undercover policewoman
(he states he simply wanted to talk); and
while in jail using a private database (as an inmate he is given a job
entering data from medical insurance records)-
to mail unsuspecting women letters requesting companionship. (He argues that by
honing his computer skills and fostering community he was rehabilitating
himself.) Before the file’s end, we
read that Tom has achieved his ultimate fantasy. He has fabricated a long-term
relationship with a woman he has technologically composed through pictures
(video camera, electronic scanning), sounds (laser listening device, answering
machine, speech synthesizer), life-size mannequins (3-D computer modeling), and
personal identifying information (public records, databases, trash receptacles)
abstracted from the visual, oral, and documentary representations of a real
woman he has never actually met. Collecting detailed and intimate knowledge of
his “girlfriend’s” apartment, work, friends, thoughts, and habits, his virtual
relationship is testimony to his technological wizardry and sociopathic
tendencies.
An Analysis: The Triumph
of the Individual and the Failure of the Social
In
presenting Tom’s licentious and delusional behavior in the form of a clinical
case study, Marx makes us willing participants in the very surveillance culture
that he is prodding us to condemn.
Through this literary device, Marx illuminates how individual behavior,
no matter how ubiquitous and familiar, although discrete and nonviolent, can be
quite destructive when looked at from a broader sociocultural and structural
perspective. Just as Tom's isolation and virtual relations prevent his
apprehension of the implications of his actions, so too the very success of the
human sciences in observing patterns of variation and developing criteria of
normalization can limit our ability to provide sustained contextualized
analysis and sustained critique. The modern authority of the human sciences has
made us, to a degree, accomplices in the constitution of a contemporary society
that produces a Tom Voire. Thus, Marx's parody amplifies two destructive
characteristics of contemporary life: (1) an over-reliance on individual
explanations for social problems and individual psychology to mitigate them and
(2) the role played by experts (e.g., therapists, lawyers, managers and
sociologists) in eroding the social context for meaningful relationships by
promoting the commodification of knowledge and technique and by failing to
condemn antisocial behavior.
In therapy,
Tom’s imagination is ignited and his narcissism exacerbated when his
psychiatrist’s recommendation leads him
to tape his own sexual encounters. Despite a cursory nod to obtaining consent, the
therapist ultimately encourages Tom to focus on his own self-development,
rather than the consequences of his actions. Tom does not regard his voyeurism
as destructive because he considers himself to be a moral individual who
intends no harm. At this point, therapy as an exploration of oneself, one's
desires and emotions, becomes a metaphor for an ethic of intentions.
Object(ive) relations become submerged within a totalizing emotional and moral
subjectivity. Rather than bridge the
distance between self and other, Tom erases the distance in a world of
nonintersecting selves imagined as sets of internalized systems of
neuroaesthetic signals (i.e., feelings). According to Tom, if women are put off
by his behavior and “feel badly,” then they must deal with their feelings rather than use him as a scapegoat. Both Tom and his therapist elevate his
individual needs and desires over any explanation of the social conditions that
encourage voyeurism. Furthermore, the fact that Tom’s peeping destroys the
trust indispensable for making and sustaining social relationships is never
addressed.
Our
justification for examining Tom’s file, counseling him as a patient, and
monitoring him in the workplace rests on our professional authority. As
experts, we appeal to higher purposes for reading Tom’s confidential medical
records because, after all, by examining his file without his permission we are
violating the same privacy rights that Tom’s disturbing behavior compels us to
defend. As therapists we are attempting to change Tom’s behavior; as employers
we are using video monitoring to watch and regulate his behavior to improve
employment conditions. Unfortunately,
our knee-jerk fears of the repressive effects of power and knowledge prevent us
from explicitly recognizing the social context of these unequal relationships
(therapist/patient, employer/employee).
By failing to explain to Tom how we are using our socially constructed
authority to invade his privacy, it is understandable that he is confused about
why his actions are deemed more harmful than ours. He may be an employee and a patient,a patient and an
employee, but how does that justify our invasions of his privacy? By failing to
come up with any explanation for why
some types of secret surveillance are preferable to others, we are effacing the
distinction between invasions of privacy for purposes of social control and
medical treatment and invasions of privacy for sheer self-gratification. His argument that as a “professional”
security guard his action is similar to a male doctor watching a female patient
allows Tom to exploit the postmodern sensibilities of a self-centered culture.
He is not guilty of peeping. He is the real victim.
But Marx exposesMarx continues to
expose the frailty of our moral claims.
For one thing, as a society, we are responsible for creating “Peeping
Tom,” especially those of us with professional and technical expertise that has been fashioningwho are helping
to fashion this “open” egalitarian society, a world where all
distinctions (of social status, of truth, of gender, of
subjectivity/objectivity) are elided and commodified for profit taking. Tom is a utilitarian consumer of the popular
market as well as a good student of our expert knowledge. HeWe learn that he
broadens his knowledge of surveillance techniques in mainstream institutions
(the military, jail, and college) rather than in extremist survivalist groups
or illicit chat rooms. Tom’s
voyeuristic tendencies are nurtured byFurthermore,
ubiquitous mainstream media (e.g.
'reality'(e.g., “reality” television) that blur the
distinction between fact and fiction nurture Tom’s voyeuristic tendencies. He
relies on the pop psychology of supermarket magazines to reason that his
leering at young women fulfills their need to feel attractive and better about
themselves. The line dividing unwanted and threatening sexual attention from
harmless flirting is as unclear to Tom as the difference between supermarket
tabloids and college classrooms. Thus, Tom learns to articulate antisocial
reasons for his behavior while taking college-level courses in criminal justice
and women’s studies. He explains that he was in the department store
video-monitoring room while conducting research for a paper on shoplifting
(personal edification). Referencing a phrase he encountered in his women’s
studies class, he argues that he was not “cowardly or exploitative” because he
was not gaining any sexual gratification from his voyeurism
(self-righteousness).
We want to
protest (surely Tom’s actions are more deplorable than ours?), but Marx
suddenly startles us with a
thunderclap. Perhaps there is no
distinction between our surveillance of Tom and his voyeurism. No matter how
laudable our reasons, our actions constitute an invasion of privacy and are
equally destructive in their cumulative effects. Marx’s critique of the
conditions that elevate the individual over the social remain, but he also
troubles our understanding of social context. Is it sufficient? Might not our
critical self-reflexive practices, operationalized through the ethical
procedures for engaged consensual research, provide a ground of differentiation
between Tom and ourselves? Does an awareness of the fuzzy boundary between self
and other,
and a sensitivity to the authority and power of professional knowledge help us
monitor and hopefully contain the possible violence and coercive tendencies of
our own research? And might not our research surveillance expose relationships of
inequality and subordination whose otherwise relative invisibility helpsmight sustain a kind of sacrificial
positioning in the collective social structure.structure?
Marx seems to suggestis suggesting
that perhaps an understanding of social context does not provide us with
sufficient means for evaluating social or legal harm. If social meaning varies,
depending on who acts, against whom, at what time, and whereabouts, there are
no universal standards for evaluating behavior or intentions. MarxHe demonstrates this limitation by showing
how socially constructed rules and meanings impact differentially on men and
women. For example, Tom complains that female correctional officers are able to
watch him dress, shower, and use the bathroom, but female inmates are not
subjected to the same humiliation since male guards cannot conduct similar
surveillance in women’s prisons. He argues that this violates his right to
practice Christian modesty, and is also an example of employment discrimination
based upon gender. It is, of course, possible to argue that this unequal
treatment is reasonable given that women have been, and continue to be,
disproportionately victimized by men. Nevertheless, this does not provide a
particularly clear and consistent refutation of Tom’s argument. Isn’t it
possible that Tom feels unfairly victimized and debased in this situation? Why
does gender trump Tom’s freedom to exercise his religious beliefs? To make such
an argument--about the weight of historic discrimination and
subordination--requires an abandonment of that cherished legal equality.
Moreover, it would require some notion of aggregate effects that modern society
is unable to grasp epistemologically and morally. The therapists, lawyers,
judges, and social
workers that
know Tom are unable to explain to Tomhim why he
cannot do to women what they can do to him becausehim. In effect, his
case reveals that at the heart of modernity is a political, moral, and
philosophical reductionism (individual freedom, equality, subjectivity) that
has not yet found the grounds to explain or justify human aggregation or social
bonding.
Marx is suggestingimplying
that laws are too general and social norms too capricious for defining and
preventing antisocial behavior, just as they are inadequate for explaining and
justifying sociality. They fail to
provide rational, defensible, and consistent criteria for condemning (and hence
discouraging) actions that are destructive on both individual and social
levels. Perhaps the impossible
justificatory burden derives from the desire for consistent criteria. Perhaps the seductive qualities of
increasingly sophisticated technologies render us insufficiently pragmatic in
the face of technologies’ instrumental, positivistic epistemologies. Here, Marx
suggests that perhaps sociology can help us resolve this conundrum by more
clearly establishing the nature of the relationship between society and self,
by creating the bridge that Tom Voire denies. Marx
valorizesIn a sense, Marx is valorizing C. Wright
Mills’s
claim for the sociological imagination: to connect biography and history.
Marx has already
laid this foundation by introducing us to Cooley’s observation that part of our
sense of self is constructed through interactions with other people.
Unfortunately, Tom has already used this knowledge, gleaned from a social
psychology class, to his advantage. When Tom argued that by staring at
attractive women he was helping them feel good about themselves, he was relying
on Cooley’s concept of the “looking-glass self.” It is only when Tom reads a
copy of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life that Tom reassesses his behavior and seeks
therapy. In acknowledging the effect of Goffman’s rather profound concept of
the performed self, Marx suddenly reveals a
compelling sociological argument for why invasions of privacy are invidious and,
more generally, for why the surveillance society is no society at all. Even
though a sense of self does rely on the perceptions of others, taken out of
context, off the stage of ongoing social transactions, the looking-glass self
can be interpreted in a reductionist manner. This is exemplified by the
solipsism of Tom Voire. By looking at the surface, or only the image in the
glass, Tom fails to understand the importance of preserving the individual
self’s personal borders and back-stage regions from assault. If these are
invaded, social relationships and appreciative illusions, in our own eyes and
the eyes of other people, can no longer be sustained.
Goffman
provides Marx with his critical wedge against epistemological and moral
nihilism. Tom is irretrievably split between his surface, front-stage behavior
and his back-stage subjectivity. He is unable to bridge these seemingly bounded
terrains perhaps because the same "positivistic" 3. and reductionist logic that justifies formal legal
equality in the face of social inequality ("The rich and poor alike are prohibited from sleepingforbidden to
sleep under the bridges of the Seine") also produces the abundant
technological marvels that populate the material front stage of Tom's life.
From this individuated reductionist logic, there is no need to consider how
front and back stage are related. At the same time, we note that Tom is not
insensitive to the power of internalized subjectivity, the back stage of desire
and need, an immaterial although equally real world to his front stage of
technological wizardry. Moreover, Marx describes the transactions across
these terrains for Tom---his
desires propel his technological mastery and his technological mastery
satisfies his emotional needs. Despite the permeability and exchanges across
these terrains, however, the discourses Voire mobilizes (individualistic
psychology, legal rationalism, consumer utility, freedom, equality) do not,
until he encounters Goffman, explain the mutual constitution of the front and
back stages. Without Goffman's recognition and explication of the intimate
connection between subjectivity and performance, Tom, like many postmodern
selves, remains fragmented, unmoored, and alone (with his virtual girlfriend).
In his
invocation of Goffman’s sociology as a framework for overcoming both empiricist
reductionism and affective solipsism, Marx offers us grounds for moral judgment
as well as epistemological critique. In recognizing that these personal, yet
socially constructed, boundaries are sacred and central to human dignity, Marx
circumvents the failure of moral relativism and identity politics to protect
our right to privacy. He replaces the unfair outcomes of discriminatory laws
and inconsistent social meanings with the universal principle of the performed
self. It is the application of this
standard that protects Tom’s right to maintain personal fantasies and,
simultaneously, provides us with reasonable, equitable, and defensible criteria
to judge when his actions constitute an invasion of privacy. Tom’s actions are
reprehensible when his imaginary world depends on his violation of another person’sindividual’s
personal borders. Similarly our
actions, if nonconsensual and unreflexive, are indefensible when we violate his.
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Notes
- We use the term
postmodernity to refer to a structure characterized by separations of time
and space, and flexible, instrumental, distanced, and
disembedded social relations as well as high degrees of reflexivity and
trust in expert systems. Giddens (1990, 1991) refers to
these as the consequences of modernity; Harvey (1989) describes it as
postmodernity.
- In his essay “The Jewish Question,”
Karl Marx ([1843] 1978, pp. 33-34)
arguesstates that legal rights, promulgated by the democratic state under capitalism, claim to guarantee universal freedoms by effacing social distinctions based on birth, social rank, education, and occupation and by eliminating property ownership as a qualification for citizenship. In reality, however, democracy serves capitalism’s interests by conveying some abstract notion of individual “personhood” through a set of specific laws.This contributesThus, Marx argued, capitalism contributed to the erosion of the communal norms and associational ties (e.g., guilds and kinship) that protected individuals from economic exploitation under feudalism (Sutton, 2001, p. 75). Similar to Marx, we are looking at what factors contribute to the construction of isolated selves in contemporary society, but we do not assert the primacy of economic relationships. We are suggesting that the social conditions associated with postmodernity (influenced and exposed by the law and modern forms of technology) may perpetuate an egoistic ethos that protects Tom’s right to peep while simultaneously denying that his actions are destructive. While Karl Marx advocates recomposition of the self through class struggle, this commentary explores the possibility that Erving Goffman’s conception of the self (1959) can be used to help identify and redress the social harm caused by violating others’ privacy.
- We distinguish
positivism, a
legitimate tradition of self-conscious empirical method, from
positivistic, the assertion that only what is known through methodological
positivism is real.
References
Goffman.
Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday
Marx, Karl. [1843] 1978. “On the
Jewish Question.” Pp. 26-52 in The
Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New
York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Sutton, John. 2001. Law/Society: Origins, Interactions, and
Change. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Pine Forge Press.
Top | Go to Tom Voire
essay | Go to main Gary Marx page | Notes | References
James Willis is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. His primary research interests are in the area of social control, more specifically, policing and punishment. Currently he is working on an NIJ-funded project examining COMPSTAT in American policing. His other research focuses on examining penal change from an historical and cultural perspective.
Susan Silbey is professor of sociology and anthropology at M.I.T. She has written extensively about the role of law in popular culture, alternatives to law and litigation, and the regulation of business. She is currently engaged in a study of the role of law in expert communities, specifically, the ways in which environmental and health regulations affect research practices in scientific laboratories.
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