The Culture of Surveillance

The Culture of Surveillance

Postmodern cultural theory after Foucault, Debord, and Baudrillard has tended

to indict surveillance as a disciplinary apparatus, producing a society that is both

“carceral” and increasingly virtual. At the same time, social critics like Lasch have

decried the growth of narcissism amid the failure of liberalism. This essay aims

to complicate both of these perspectives by examining the contradictory desire

for surveillance in popular media like “reality TV” and in the social sciences

themselves. It may be that the desire to watch and be watched is a more deeply

rooted element of the liberal democratic impulse than we normally care to admit.

KEY WORDS: surveillance; reality-based television; narcissism; social psychology; liberal

democracy.

At least since Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison,

the way in which surveillance functions as a mechanism of social regulation

and discipline has been central to the study of cultural representations (1975).

Foucault’s resurrection of Bentham’s panopticon was in large part also a reelaboration

of Max Weber’s “iron cage” thesis about bureaucratic, capitalist society,

this time for an increasingly media-saturated age (1958, p. 181). To be sure,

the power of surveillance was presented by Foucault as both coercive and productive

where social relations were concerned—he famously claimed to refuse any

normative approach to the topic—but it would be fair to say that it was surveillance

as morally and even epistemologically regulative authority that became the

dominant issue for the majority of Foucault’s readers, who applied it equally to the

unseen enforcement of good social order in the nineteenth-century novel (

[1988]) and the unacknowledged

workings of political and economic control in the modern metropolis (

 [1990]). In these and countless other examples, surveillance

emerged as an instrument by which authoritative social institutions shaped reality,

either for the benefit of such institutions and the classes they served or for some

more general tyrannous purpose. Foucault’s thesis resonated in profound ways

with a Western intelligentsia that had been reminded constantly of the evils of

surveillance in communist Eastern Europe, especially through novels like

 1984; that watched both the Zapruder home movie of John Kennedy’s

assassination and the live broadcast of Lee Harvey Oswald’s subsequent murder;

that had been educated in the ways of the media by films like Medium Cool and

Blow Up; and that had witnessed full-scale televised war in Vietnam from their

living rooms.

At the same time, with commentators like  (1967), Jean

 (1972, 1973), and (1984), the truth of contemporary

(or postmodern) culture began to take shape in the idea that reality

itself was already a theatrical spectacle or hyper-real simulation—a thesis that

would have seemed utterly inane were it not for the power of film and television

technologies to make fictional worlds appear indistinguishable from real ones. In

one of his famous dicta,  (1983) insisted that Disneyland functioned

not as a fantasy escape from the harsh reality of Los Angeles, but rather as a ruse to

make us think that Los Angeles and the rest of an equally fantastic America were

in fact real.2 Such a wonderfully Parisian bon mot depended on the perception

that Los Angeles is reducible to Hollywood, and that Hollywood itself is further

reducible to studio lots (even if not all in Hollywood) filled with false building

fa¸cades arranged in imitation neighborhoods. The trompe-l’æil of the studio lot

was indeed the material basis ofWalt Disney’s quite profitable good idea, one that

has been further elaborated by projects like Universal City Walk—for many visitors,

a virtual urban scene preferable to the real thing just outside. Baudrillard saw

correctly that the preference for Disney’s simulated village square was related to

similar simulations across America (and the rest of the world), from theme parks

to nostalgic urban renewal projects—but he continued to link this “hyperreality” to

the “carceral” nature of modern society, thus repeating Foucault’s basic premise.

Even so, neither Foucault nor Baudrillard explicitly clarified the link between

surveillance and simulated reality, and it is in part the implicit connection between

them that I will be talking about.

While some contemporary popular entertainment would seem to be following

in Foucault’s footsteps—the recent film The Truman Show is, precisely, about

the tyranny of surveillance as a manipulative, god-like control of individual and

society alike, all set in what could be called a carceral “small town” version of

2“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is

Disneyland ( just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal

omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe

that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real,

but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation” ().

The Culture of Surveillance 347

Universal City Walk—recent trends like “reality TV” have made it obvious that a

very different, far more embracing, attitude toward surveillance has been evolving

at the same time, especially in fin-de-si`ecle society. Some of the shift in attitude

about surveillance is due simply to a shift in the primary object and purpose of

surveillance. Most Americans, for example, saw a surveillance-obsessed East Germany

where every sixth person was a political informant for the secret police, or

Stasi, as a frightening threat to liberty and privacy, one worth the risk of a nuclear

arms race. But Americans today react very differently when the television

program America’s Most Wanted, increasingly celebrated as a tool of law enforcement,

mobilizes its viewing public as bounty hunters’ apprentices. (A “real-life”

police program like Cops is a related phenomenon: though not interactive, Cops

in its own way also functions as a law-enforcement tool, making viewers virtually

complicit with the police actions filmed.) In the same vein, high school students,

after the Columbine shootings (and others similar to it), now seem far more willing

than formerly to agree that “snitching” to authorities about the privately voiced

violent fantasies of their friends is the right thing to do. Perhaps most striking of all,

in becoming a common household appliance, the small video camera transformed

surveillance into a practice in which average citizens could control, rather than be

controlled by, a recording gaze. A bystander’s videotaping of the police beating of

 in Los Angeles transformed the nature of surveillance, turning back

the eye of authority upon itself. Some police forces have responded to the proliferation

of video cameras by policing their officers with self-surveillance video recordings

that might also provide evidence against subsequent charges of police brutality.

In what could be taken as a kind of practical, if perhaps terribly ironic, refutation

of Foucault’s work on the modern prison as disciplinary panopticon, San

Francisco’s newest prison facility has won rave reviews from its inmates (to the

extent that such a thing is measurable), precisely because the prison’s explicitly

panoptical architecture undermines the culture of rape that has plagued other facilities

for years. In this prison, as in America’s Most Wanted, the suburban high

school, the airport, the stadium, the government building, the queue at the ATM

machine, the local convenience store, and especially cases like that of

 video surveillance is now often embraced as an undeniable good. One might

also mention the more passively accepted (if often unwanted) sort of electronic

surveillance that goes on unnoticed as we browse the Internet, or purchase products

on-line: The “cookies” that merchandisers attach to our electronic identities

track our consumer preferences in ways that are almost as revealing as a hidden

camera in our homes. Undoubtedly, the destruction of the World Trade Center

towers in New York on September 11, 2001 by terrorists in hijacked airliners will

make surveillance, at least for the purposes of law enforcement, all the more acceptable.

At Universal City, a voice on the public address system now repeatedly

declares, “You are being watched,” and visitors report that they are comforted

by the message. Still, I want to suggest that the new trend toward “reality TV,”

by which I mean largely unscripted, though heavily edited, programs peopled by

ensembles of nonprofessional actors and focussed on group dynamics, as exemplified

by programs like Big Brother, Survivor, Boot Camp, and many others, seems

to be tapping into something quite apart from America’s continuing fear of crime,

terrorism, and senseless adolescent mayhem, and distinct from the ever deeper

penetration of market research into our lives. A development that began almost a

decade ago with MTV’s Real World (1992) and has evolved considerably since

then in Europe, the United States, and, most recently, Russia, “reality TV” elaborates

surveillance as a sublime object of desire, and it is the nature of that desire

that we should try to understand.

When we add to this the growth of self-surveillance in cyberspace—the

24-hour video feed of one’s routine activities on a computer website that Big

Brother incorporated into its format—the possibility arises that, for a growing

number of people in contemporary Western society, surveillance has become less

a regulative mechanism of authority (either feared as tyrannous or welcomed as

protection) than a populist path to self-affirmation and a ready-made source of

insight into the current norms of group behavior (even, as I hope to show, for the

academic social psychologists among us). In 2000 Apple introduced a computer

that would allow you to edit and provide musical accompaniment to digital home

movies. The Truman Show, that is, only got it half right:We are now the subjects of

media-shaped, even virtual, realities, but we are also being encouraged to become

the producers—and the ethnographers—of these virtual lives, to edit them on our

iMACs even as we live them.

Already, whole families document the trivialities of their existence on web

pages designed to celebrate intimacy as a public performance. I am bombarded

almost daily with news (and worse: vacation pictures!) from cousins a continent

away, and I feel technologically slow because I do not (yet) display my personal

life on a constantly updated website. While these forms of surveillance are surely

less oppressive than the one that Orwell foretold, they embody to an astonishing

degree the idea that modern culture has become dominated by the practice of

testing reality. Advanced capitalist society at the dawn of the new millennium is

less about truth versus fiction, or authenticity versus simulation. It is instead about

a quest for real life that requires surveillance for its—for our—verification.

The relatively recent rise of reality television is in many ways the culmination

of developments in modern culture since 1945 (to which I will return at the end

of this article), some dependent on new media technology and some quite independent

of it, in which fiction and truth are blurred in new, but also not so new,

ways. There are obviously much older precedents: from the seventeenth century

on, the bird’s-eye (or God’s-eye) view elaborated by the European novel’s omniscient

narrator turned a given segment of society into a believable reproduction

through the fiction of anonymous surveillance. Nineteenth-century romancers like

Nathaniel Hawthorne reveled in the role of unseen social observer, naturalists like

 explicitly referred to their practice as a kind of sociological experiment

in observation and recording, and Henry James finally codified the entire relationship

of the novel to surveillance by embodying the recording consciousness of his

narrative perspective in a nosy, spying character

l).  notion that the nation-state could have arisen

only in the context of a “print-capitalism” that provided the medium for a collective

sense of simultaneity among distant strangers must be mentioned as well. For what

Anderson implies in the coming of mass-consumed print is the point of viewof virtual,

quasi-divine surveillance that any citizen could assume when imagining the

“simultaneity” of the national community ([1983]1991). That point of

viewis formethe perspective of “the social” itself, the nascent idea of “society” that

would be elevated by early twentieth-century sociologists into an all-encompassing

super-subject watching over all. “The collective consciousness,” wrote

 “is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness

of the consciousnesses. Being placed outside of and above individual and local

contingencies, it sees things only in their permanent and essential aspects, which it

crystallizes into communicable ideas. As the same time that it sees from above, it

sees farther; at every moment of time, it embraces all known reality; that is why

it alone can furnish the mind with the moulds which are applicable to the totality

of things and which make it possible to think of them” (1915).

hypostatization of the social, remarkable in its own time, is a prescient forecast of

a social mind far more materially embedded in today’s proliferation of collectively

approved and encouraged surveillance and surveillance-oriented television.

Early photography suggested at times the more totalizing surveillance to

come: It was said that Atget photographed the streets of Paris,

remarked, as if they were the scene of a crime (1969). The moving picture of

cinema made it possible to reproduce human action, which for Aristotle had been

the primary object of all poetic mimesis, with a previously unknown verisimilitude

that even captured war in newsreel footage. And the hand-held camera eventually

allowed cinema and television to achieve, or fabricate, a sometimes startling immediacy

and intimacy. It is this new combination of surveillance and putative

immediacy that marks the present moment in cultural representation, as we in

Los Angeles routinely watch televised automobile police pursuits on our nightly

newscasts, unfolding in real time and perhaps right outside our doors, led by

individuals who know they are being observed constantly from hovering news

helicopters but who choose to play out to its inevitable end a scenario that appears

to have been scripted for them in advance.

These automobile chases are primarily the effect of two decisions: First,

the LAPD abandoned reckless pursuits that produced unacceptable amounts of

“collateral damage” whenever police attempted to run down and apprehend the

fleeing suspect as quickly as possible; and second, embarked in the

wake of his ex-wife’s murder on whatwemight call a simulated “run for the border,”

which became the most widely observed police pursuit of the era. This television

genre—for that is what it has become, a genre—has since taken on a life of its

own, complete with bizarre “color commentary” provided by local newscasters

who during the chase say things like, “Ok, now that’s something new,” or “Well,

we’ve never seen that before.” There are websites devoted to the genre. Here is

what can be read at the home page of one such site:

How do you find out when a chase is being broadcast live on TV? And how many have

you missed because you didn’t know about it? Some people rely on their friends to tell

them about a chase, but with PursuitAlertTM service, you’ll be alerted by pager, phone,

or cell-phone of every live high speed chase broadcast in your region. When you get the

page, you’ll know a chase can be seen on your TV as it happens. Sign up now for a FREE,

no-obligation, 3 month trial. Nothing to cancel!3

These car chases are at heart reproductions of one of the oldest Hollywood film

genres: The Keystone Cops helped lay the foundation for American cinema itself,

and a long history of LAPD chiefs have unwittingly found themselves haunted

by the bumbling Keystone legacy. If we could ever fully understand the meaning

of the live, televised car chase, I am suggesting, we might also understand the

complicated relationship between truth and fiction in contemporary culture.

The underlying strategy at work in shows like Survivor and Big Brother

(a title conjuring up ironically what had been depicted with such horror in 1984)

can be summed up in a phrase used by  to describe the sort of autoethnography

practiced by the avant-garde intellectuals (

) of the short-lived Coll`ege de Sociologie

in late 1930s Paris: to “make each of [the community’s] members participate so

that : : : they would become the voyeurs of and actors in a sociological experiment”

(1980, ). Like the Coll`ege, that is, contemporary reality-based television

has awkwardly embraced an oft-repeated modern quest for the sacred and most

primitive elements of human community, and (also like the Coll`ege) has done so

in an elective, participatory, and highly self-reflexive, ironic way. It is no accident

that the first American edition of Survivor (a European import) was set on a

“desert island,” thus reproducing the signature element of countless Victorian

“Robinsonades” aimed primarily at adolescent boys, and that the second edition,

dividing its teams into “tribes,”was set in the Australian outback, which is precisely

where much groundbreaking ethnology on aboriginal peoples was performed in

the late nineteenth century.4

If such programs explore the foundations of community, they do so in the more

commercial context of a game show, in which the winner is actually the person

who manages to survive the group’s predestined self-dissolution. (MTV’s original

reality television series, Real World, has no game-show format, though the series

may have inadvertently spawned the device of ritual expulsion marking all later

versions of the genre when its participants spontaneously banished by majority vote

one particularly disruptive member.) In Survivor and Big Brother (also a success in

the Netherlands and Germany before coming to American television) the “tribe”

or “household” periodically votes to expel a member from the community, and

the programs focus on the shame involved in being expelled—a crucial element

that suggests the degree to which all reality television is a nostalgic exercise in the

production of shame for individuals, whether participants or audience members,

who no longer feel any in everyday life. The various group members must thus

manipulate one another, with varying degrees of subtlety, to insure their own social

survival for as long as possible. Participants do not simply vote to expel those who

are not “fit,” or do not “fit in”; in many cases, a participant votes to rid the group of

another individual who may fit in too well and thus become a threatening rival at the

end. On the surface, as many commentators have pointed out, loyalty is reduced to a

commodity, valuable only as long as it is useful for individual success. But a better

analogy may be the inner reality of ordinary democratic politics. In summarizing

the driving ambition of F. Clinton White, the manager largely responsible for

Barry Goldwater’s Republican nomination for U.S. president in 1964, Russell

Baker perfectly describes the central plot device of both Big Brother and Survivor:

“He became fascinated,” Baker writes of White, “by the mechanics of acquiring

power through democratic process.”5 It would be na¨ıve to think that the average

person in Germany or America is any less fascinated by, or concerned about, the

same thing, and reality TV is a suitably populist exploration of the theme.

Underlying this eccentric exercise in democratic voting strategy is an exploration

of forms of communal belonging and intimacy, complete with the exhilaration

of solidarity won through hardship and ordeal, and the embarrassment

attending expulsion. The act of expulsion holds commercial possibilities also for

those sacrificed, who often conduct staged interviews immediately after the experience

and wind up (quite without any residue of shame) on talk shows in the days

and weeks following. The expelled thus provide the program an afterlife through

in-house gossip about those who betrayed them, laying at the same time what they

hope will be the groundwork for further television exposure. One contestant expelled

from last season’s Survivor resurfaced on the soap opera series The Young

and the Restless, playing—who else?—herself, implying nothing less than that she

is, as a real person, already a recognizably fictionalized character. (This idea—that

people in real life are increasingly coming to see themselves, and play themselves,

as fictional characters—is of course an idea as old as Cervantes’s great seventeenthcentury

novel, Don Quixote. But contemporary modes of surveillance provide a

stage, and an audience, for such real-life fictions that is not merely quantitative

in its difference.) In the newer Chains of Love television program, a surveillanceoriented

version of the Dating Game—both part of a genre I would call “intimacy

surveillance” that first appears in the earliest days of television—the “game” involves

five people who have been chained together for several days, including a

“picker” of one sex who periodically decides to release/renounce one of the four

opposite-sex members of the chain gang until there is only one left to date. (So

far, there have been no homosexual versions of reality-based television, though

the winner of last season’s Survivor was indeed gay.) The structure of Chains of

Love is thus an absurd, if suitably populist, fulfillment of Hegel’s famous account

of master-slave relations in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where the enchained

bondsman’s desire for recognition (in today’s world, for the main 19- to 34-yearold

demographic, this means a date) requires a labor that becomes the mechanism

and sign of accession to culture and self-consciousness—albeit of a rather limited

sort, if the post-show interviews are to be believed (1977, p. 115).

The communities formed within these television programs are in a sense

cursed from the start: They must slowly dissolve through the continuous expulsion

of one of their own, and the camera lingers time and again on the delicious

mixture of sadness and guilty joy—Schadenfreude par excellence—on the faces of

those who remain. The seemingly paradoxical community-destroying motif was

made explicit in two additions to the genre: The Mole, in which a member of

the group—not unlike a Stasi informant—is assigned the task of working “undercover”

to thwart its collective efforts; and Temptation Island, in which single

seducers are assigned the task of breaking up already troubled couples—a plot

device that enables (for the first time, I think) legal, nonfiction prostitution in the

guise of a television program, the seducers in effect being paid to provide sex to

strangers. In these shows, both the victims of ritual expulsion and the sovereign

saboteurs of the group function as what Bataille and his friends would have called

“accursed shares,” which is to say they also appear as illustrations of the sacred

forces embedded in the notion of the group (1967). The collective’s dissolution

becomes the surest way of demonstrating the social magic that was holding it

together in the first place.

The trend within the reality-based genre may well be toward a more obvious

game show structure, one that dispenses altogether with the surveillance and “reallife”

settings of Survivor, Big Brother, and Temptation Island while retaining the

tension between group solidarity and individual triumph, as well as the emphasis

on the humiliation and rancor of those voted out of the group. A recent import

from Britain, The Weakest Link, is really just a quiz show moderated by a British

host with the aura of a dominatrix, humiliating those who answer incorrectly and

dismissing those voted off with a highly ritualized “You are the weakest link: goodbye.”

(In the English version, the humiliation appears to be more intensely felt,

less easily laughed off, than on the subsequent American one.) But the immediate

popularity of The Weakest Link—its curious appeal—is that it has distilled to

a formulaic essence what other “reality-based” programs only achieve in more

circuitous ways. Even where the surveillance-driven “reality-based” genre has

The Culture of Surveillance 353

been completely taken over by the game show, the basic elements that, to my

mind, structure all the new surveillance programming remain: 1) simulation of

a sociological experiment; 2) display of the normative conditions of collective

solidarity; 3) exploration of (and nostalgia for) the ritual of social ostracization;

and 4) evaluation of the lengths to which individuals will go in manipulating group

loyalty to achieve success (though even here the “survivor” who gets to claim the

prize at show’s or season’s end may also be the unwitting beneficiary of even more

aggressive rivals doing themselves in).

It is impossible to ignore both the extent to which the “game show” may be the

dominant genre determining the evolution of such programs and their “amateurhour”

character, as they provide previously unknown participants with a chance

at prime time television exposure. But it is also significant that their merging of

reality and fiction obeys the same logic as that proposed by Jamin: we are being

invited, as in so many other arenas of contemporary culture (

, to become participant-observers of our own lives. As Lord

, the cynical aesthete of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, observes:

“Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play.

Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle

enthralls us.”6 Simultaneously ethnologists and ethnological subjects, actors and

audience in a culture that is increasingly like a self-conscious sociological experiment,

we test ourselves to see what we will do, how we will perform, and what

we will look like in the process.

It is tempting in this context to invoke  influential Freudo-

Marxian thesis in The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing

Expectations—a book whose pessimistic, end-of-liberalism premises, first

outlined in essay form in 1976, laid the groundwork for ’s ill-fated announcement

of American “malaise” amid a culture of reduced expectations (1991).

—whose book was itself part of a wave of post-counterculture social theory

in the 1970s, from , lamenting a putative increase

in narcissism (p. 25)—re-tools an older Frankfurt School thesis about the inexorable

decline of daddy and family behind the rise of the authoritarian personality,

and concludes that “bureaucratic dependence” and “therapeutic justice” have become

the basis of a new culture of narcissism (pp. 228–229). He approvingly cites

Debord on capitalist advertising’s production of “pseudo-needs” (p. 72) and indicts

the media’s reliance on “credibility” as opposed to “truth” (p. 74). Contrary to earlier

theorists like , who emphasized Americans’

growing conformity and other-directed psychological orientation, Lasch insists

that “Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative : : : they

have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of inter-personal

relations for their own benefit” (p. 66). Lasch’s left critique can be readily applied

to reality television, which is on the whole an orgy of capitalist self-promotion that

tends to attract what might loosely be called “narcissistic” personalities. (A “Big

Brother” sort of reality television program enjoying record ratings for theM6channel

in France has in fact drawn sharp criticism from the left there, though along

lines closer to those associated with Foucault or The Truman Show. The cultural

difference from America is obvious. French communists, who have for decades

now apparently concluded that bad taste, rather than private property, is the true

enemy of the people, stormed the M6 studios waving copies of 1984 to “liberate”

the show’s participants.7)

From the vantage of the present moment, however, in the wake of the Cold

War’s end, the apparent dominance of the marketplace, and the roaring economies

of Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s administrations, it now seems clear that

narcissism thrives just as well when nourished by the optimism of boundless growth

and rhetorical tides that lift all boats as it does when stimulated by “stagflation”

and astronomical interest rates. To be sure, single-parent households are still on the

rise, and daddy gets less respect every day (though he is more likely to be heading

a single-parent household himself than before); and there is now good evidence

that divorce takes a greater toll on young children than anyone, at least outside

the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, previously believed. But the multitude of

familial arrangements seems to pose less of a direct threat today to the survival of

liberal democracy than it did when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan raised the

issue two decades ago, and no one now worries, `a la Dan Quayle, about Murphy

Brown having a child out of wedlock on prime time television. Even Barney the

dinosaur almost daily celebrates the diversity of family structures in children’s

song. Liberalism would seem to have consolidated its social hegemony in the last

decade, even if it is clear that it will take considerably more than a “village” to

sustain its promise in truly egalitarian ways.

Lasch’s conflation of the categories of individual psychology and social

history may have been profoundly misleading, that is, despite his best efforts to

clarify the relation between them. His high-toned, nominally left but also deeply

conservative anxiety over the intellectual, political, and historical bankruptcy of

American liberalism, which was the driving force behind his “culture of narcissism,”

has for many been swept away along with the Soviet Union and the ColdWar.

Lasch poignantly lamented liberal culture’s loss of, and disregard for, collective

historical memory, but only ten years later  (1989) celebrated the

end of history (a celebration oddly prefigured by academic ironists like Lyotard and

Hayden White decades earlier) in the millennial triumph of a liberalism that Lasch

thought was on its last legs. (reconsideration in 1990 of his arguments do

little to revise their meaning [1991].) In the end, Fukuyama’s thesis

may be even less convincing than Lasch’s, but it was a telling barometer of things

to come: A doggedly centrist version of liberalism re-emerged in the 1990s that

was successful enough to keep an otherwise quite impeachable president happily

in power, both the doctrine and the man never more popular than when attacked

by the radical right.

Narcissism is intrinsic to the culture of surveillance shaping reality TV, even

if there is no simple Laschian way of linking this narcissism to our collective life,

our political ideals, or our historical memories, of tracing its etiology either to

the decay of liberalism or to its triumph. In large part, the difficulty in contriving

these links is due to the complex relationship between reality TV and social

psychology itself, including the sort that Lasch practices. As one of the principal

psychological evaluators and consultants for Big Brother noted in conversation

with me recently, those who applied to be participants on the program exhibited an

unusually high quotient of narcissistic, extroverted personality traits, at times to a

manic degree.8 The psychologist’s task was to find individuals who also exhibited

a reasonably strong tendency to join and be loyal to a team, though to improve

ratings he occasionally advised producers to include a truly manic narcissist, who

tended to be voted out of the group rather quickly. Contra Lasch, however, I would

suggest that the audience’s appetite for the new surveillance-oriented television

programs—which in many cases hire academic psychologists as advisors—would

seem to be primarily the heightened emotional fulfillment of a desire elaborated for

some time, paradoxically enough, by enlightened social theory. While the spread

of surveillance is surely on one level a response to fear and the disorienting pace

of social change, the pleasure that, both as voyeurs and as exhibitionists, we take

in the proliferation of closely observed social reality is an almost inevitable consequence

of the liberal democratic demand to make the socially hidden visible,

to expose the secret workings of individual choice and group authority, and to

create the increasingly transparent life-world that philosophers from Jean-Jacques

 have held up as an ideal. This is precisely why, for

example, American social psychologists in the years after the all-too-successful

Nazi experiment in collective consciousness became so interested in testing and

recording with cameras the way group authority works on the individual’s sense

of identity and responsibility. Reality television is simply making exoteric (if also

trivializing) the same sort of filmed inquiry into group dynamics that social psychologists

have carried out esoterically for decades.

Some contemporary psychologists may even be envious of television’s foray

into the genre, since the ethical constraints on the use of human subjects at universities

today would forbid the kind of experimental protocol brazenly deployed by

programs like Temptation Island and Boot Camp. The consultant for Big Brother

confirmed this: while his own ethics would not, he said, allow him to act as consultant

for Temptation Island, he had already decided to use videotape footage from

his work on Big Brother as a teaching tool in his classes at his university—even

though the university itself would not have sanctioned the sort of experiment that

Big Brother represented. We should recall here that Big Brother was accessible

on the Internet, like a number of personal websites devoted to self-surveillance,

twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, and professional psychologists

were on hand observing the interactions on the set at all times. Reality TV is,

for me, the expression of a powerful, and increasingly unbridled, tendency within

democratic society, one also embedded in its academic institutions, to reveal the

norms and limits of individual responsibility and group identity, however exaggerated

(and commercialized) the settings that reveal such knowledge may be.

In effect, television is now doing the kind of social psychological research our

universities no longer permit.

The current wave of reality-based television programming can be traced back

at least to the early-1970s film (and television series) An American Family, which

inherited trends in earlier film documentaries and filmed academic social science,

such as the famous experiment on individual responsibility and authority at Yale

University in 1961 by Stanley Milgram. But it is obvious that what was a highly

suspect and much criticized experiment three decades ago is now a phenomenon

whose time has come. (The Louds of An American Family divorced on-air, and

many wondered publicly whether the constant surveillance contributed to the family’s

dissolution.) In the past, such public surveillance techniques had to be done

for laughs if they were to obtain wide approval as entertainment. Alan Funt’s very

successful Candid Camera was at heart a popularized version of an experiment in

social psychology, in which the humor derived from confronting a na¨ıve participant

with what might then have been called “cognitively dissonant” situations in (apparently)

real life. But Funt’s short vignettes were very limited in scope and were

completely devoted to a comic resolution. Likewise, the humiliations suffered by

participants in the earlier TV game show Beat the Clock occurred solely within the

context of slapstick comedy. The difference between Milgram’s experiment in the

early 1960s, in which the tested subjects had to be na¨ıve in order for the results to

be serious and meaningful, and An American Family a decade later, in which the

participants were willing subjects of a televised documentary project intended to be

equally serious and meaningful, perhaps represents a crucial shift in the American

public’s acceptance of, and response to, such surveillance. There were so many

applications for the second edition of Survivor, in many ways the catalyst for the

new wave of reality-based television programs, that Federal Express suspended

deliveries to the show’s producers. Big Brother too had an enormous applicant

pool from which to choose.

Not only did this trend expand in this year’s television season, but realitybased

programming has itself become fodder for “ripped-from-the-headlines,”

though still nominally fictional, police dramas like Law and Order, an episode

of which indicted reality-based television for being—what else?—too real, paradoxically

because it manipulates putative reality for the camera: the network vice

president of the episode’s “fictional” reality-based program had manipulated a

teenage actor, in a big-city version of the actual reality-based program Big Brother,

to kill one of his loft-mates. A more recent program, Boot Camp, which is largely

what its title implies, found itself caught in what may be the ultimate irony

for a reality-based show: Its producers were sued by the producers of Survivor for

copyright infringement, which would seem to imply that something like

“reality” itself—or at least the networks’ understanding of that term—might soon

be a legally copyright-able concept. Survivor has also been much discussed in

newscasts and newspapers because some of the scenes televised during last year’s

season were re-shot with extras or stunt persons standing in for the named

players, a technique that oddly seems to violate more the viewing audience’s desire

for the surveillance of unmediated “reality” than any overt claim made by the

producers.

The newreality programming can also be linked to an experiment by psychologist

 at Stanford in the summer of 1971, in which students, divided

into prisoners and warders, wound up displaying alarming degrees of cruelty to

one another. More recent experiments in England have involved the division of a

group sequestered in a country house into two rival moieties or teams that, faced

with simple game show-like tasks, exhibited ferocious amounts of hatred toward

their opposition, enforced a rigid loyalty to the group, and harshly branded any

sympathy for the “enemy” as betrayal. Professor declared in 1997 that

the ethical guidelines applied by today’s universities to research involving human

subjects are too restrictive—in large part, of course, because of the sort of mess that

 created three decades earlier at Stanford.9  may be watching a

lot of reality TV these days. (I have a recurring nightmare that one day soon I will

see a game show version of the Milgram experiment, complete with a celebrity

edition in which na¨ıve, average Joe contestants are tested to see how far they will

go in shocking , whose fake screams will emanate from an off-stage,

but also televised, sound booth.)

 quip about everyone in the future having fifteen minutes of

fame—which was actually a slightly altered quotation of —has

surely come significantly closer to realization since he uttered it, and the vehicle of

that fame has been a narcissism-fueled culture of surveillance. Many of us want,

desperately it seems, to be watched, and the rest are more than happy to play observers,

even if we’re not so sure about the benefits of beingwatched ourselves. But

when we watch, we do so for the same reasons that rivet our gaze to the visual

records of and  “shocking” experiments. In advertising and

justifying its surveillance-based mission, The National Inquirer articulates what

must be the foundational tautology of the age: “Inquiring minds want to know.”

We have been for some time both the subjects and the victims of that tautology,

and I imagine that only an increase in secrecy and privilege, for which I see little

demand from either enlightened theorists or common television viewers, would

reverse the trend.

And it is here that we may find the clearest link between Foucault’s panopticon

and Baudrillard’s hyperreality. While it is a safe bet that our collective passion

for social transparency and the egalitarian distribution of knowledge will never

find true fulfillment in the proliferation of surveillance, the desire for surveillance

has had a paradoxical side effect, inexorably transforming the world not

into the stage immortalized by Shakespeare but into a real-time social-psychology

experiment in which we are increasingly both test subjects and detached clinical

observers. Should anyone feel disconcerted by this possibility, or undecided

about its significance, I will note in closing that the whole phenomenon may be

rather more short-lived than I have so far implied. The events of September 11

and the subsequent clamor for increasingly vigilant police surveillance has, at

least for the moment, come to overshadow the appeal of cultural voyeurism. But

the arrival in the summer of 2001 of Final Fantasy, a movie populated only with

photo-realistic synthespians—computer-generated images indistinguishable (almost)

from filmed actors—may already signal the beginning of the end to our current

delight in surveillance.Within a decade, we might all be entertained primarily

by computerized, super-real cartoons. Whether we are on the way to becoming

cartoon characters ourselves is no longer a merely facetious question.