Eavesdropping (30 page)

The crime in intimate following, and in perceptual trespassing, derives its meaning from the concept of personal territory or thresholds. It was predictable that the monitoring of private behavior would come to be seen as a transgression of the victim’s personal
boundaries. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggested that perceiving a place was equivalent, on some level, to actually being in that place. To illustrate this, he suggested that his readers close their eyes and then open them again. “Do you have the impression that you are staring out upon the world,” he asked, “as though you were looking through the windows of your unlit house, having opened the shutters? Far from it,” he wrote, “you are out there yourself, shamelessly mingling with all you see.”
¹⁷

In a book on eavesdropping in the novel, Ann Gaylin wrote that the essence of eavesdropping, the property responsible for its special allure, is that it “represents
liminality
.” Eavesdroppers straddle two worlds. Indeed, we would not be as acutely aware of the boundaries between public and private if there were no people who sought to violate them.
¹⁸

Gaylin’s reference to liminality was perceptive. Privacy is not about
being
alone, or in any other physical or social context. It is about the desire to maintain unbreachable barricades around our
life
. Foremost, here, is a psychological life, one that is truly and completely our own. Legal definitions of privacy began to reflect a general desire to block unwarranted forays into psychological territory. Law professor Anita Allen argued that “personal privacy is a condition of inaccessibility of the
person
,” including any mental states that others might be able to sense. To say that a person is private, she wrote, is to say that his
“conduct, thought, belief, or emotion
” are beyond the sensory range of others.
¹⁹

Allen was not alone in stressing the territoriality of thought and feeling. “The
boundary
between what we
reveal
and what we do not,” wrote philosopher Thomas Nagel, “and some control over that
boundary
, are among the most important attributes of our humanity.” Nagel wrote that inner life would be impossible if our thoughts, feelings, and private behaviors were exposed to public view. “The division of the self protects the limited public space from unmanageable
encroachment
and the unruly inner life from excessive inhibition.”
²⁰

If laws protected privacy, then penalties for breaking these laws would need to be meted out. Decisions would have to be made about the severity of violations, the extent of damages. In the 1960s and 1970s, several theorists identified an important condition of life that would be compromised if privacy were infringed—a condition that is now familiar to us here. It was intimacy.

The question was, how to define it, not just semantically, but in a way that could be used in a courtroom. A respected jurist, Charles Fried, was among the first to give it a try. In his definition, intimacy was “the sharing of information about one’s actions, beliefs, or emotions which one does not share with all, and which one has the right not to share with anyone.”
²¹
Philosopher Jeffrey Reiman objected to elements of Fried’s definition, claiming that intimate relationships involve a “reciprocal desire to share present and future intense and important experiences together, not merely to swap information.”
²²
Julie Innes seemed to agree, for she argued that intimacy had less to do with any acts and activities than the participants’ motivation to engage in them. Where intimacy is involved, the motivation, she suggested, will be “love, liking, or care.”
²³

All of these definitions stress intimate
relationships
, but there is no reason why intimacy should be defined in exclusively social terms. Humans also have a desire to relate to themselves, and a need to do so. This has less to do with observable acts and activities than opportunities to be alone with one’s feelings and thoughts. Thomas Nagel’s definition of intimacy is salient here. Intimacy, he wrote, “is the situation where the
interior of the self
is most exposed.”
²⁴

What makes the interior of a person so special, so in need of protection against the senses of others? When jailed for crimes uncovered by the Whitewater investigation in the late 1990s, Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell, like other prisoners,
involuntarily relinquished control of certain privacies. Journalists obtained transcripts of his personal telephone conversations with Mrs. Hubbell. In one transcript, she discusses her plans for dinner, remarking that the children wanted meatloaf. Hubbell reminds his wife that meatloaf is not among his favorite foods. “Have it before I get home,” he tells his wife. “I just don’t like meatloaf—O.K.?” His wife, in mock sympathy, responds “Poor Webby.”

He doesn’t like meatloaf. She calls him “Webby.” These are the kinds of things that really hurt when they become public, and the hurt is hard to describe. When The
Washington Post
published details of his personal diary, former U.S. Senator Robert Packwood complained that the most painful revelations were not the “lewd and foolish” acts that had been alleged and about which the public wanted to know. They were his favorite recipe for baked apples, preferred local supermarket, and fondness for the music of Edvard Grieg. Packwood said these irrelevant disclosures left him “feeling violated.”

These kinds of revelations are reminiscent of reactions to domestic burglaries. Typically, the victims of these break-ins comment that even if
nothing was taken
they experience the distress that comes from knowing that things normally seen only by them were briefly in the perceptual possession, and may persist in the memory, of persons unknown. In research carried out in France, victims said they were particularly bothered by burglars looking into containers that were usually kept closed—boxes, safes, drawers, and cupboards. A thirty-five-year-old man told interviewers that burglars had “seen things which belong to us, which are, if you like, our little secrets.” A woman of the same age said that her apartment “had been visited in all its nooks and crannies and really in the most private of places.” What bothered her the most, she said, was that the burglars had seen her cosmetics.
²⁵

There are gendered influences here, as there are throughout the study of human intimacy. In evaluations of the meaning assigned to domestic objects, it has been consistently found that
women, more than men, place a high value on photographs, mementoes, souvenirs, and other items that symbolize emotional relationships.
²⁶

We saw in
Chapter 3
that some groups of hunter-gatherers store ordinary things, for example, cooking utensils and extra clothing,
in
their huts, but do intimate things, such as sleeping,
in front
of them. Now, in ironic reversal, we keep our intimate things inside our homes and display our ordinary behaviors outside of them. As a consequence, we are horrified at the thought that thieves might see
our things
, for this would tell them more about who we are, as we think of ourselves, than an
actual view of us
would.

It has long been known that humans have anthropomorphic dispositions—we tend to endow animals and objects with human qualities—but we also look for evidence of intimate qualities where they may not exist. A century ago, Leslie Stephen wrote about the “organic” approach to literature. When people read organically, Stephen said, they struggle to acquaint themselves with the author, even where the work is not autobiographical or the topic approached from a personal perspective. “The ultimate source of pleasure derivable from all art,” on Stephen’s view, “is that it brings you into communication with the artist. What you really love in the picture or the poem is the painter or poet.”
²⁷

The extent of this would be easy to underestimate. When viewers look
at
a landscape painting, they search
for
personal messages that may be embedded in the hues and brush strokes. “His verve and feeling for the dramatic are of a piece with his temperament,” wrote J. P. Hodin in reference to Charles Francois Daubigny. “All are there to be read in his nervous and clamant brushwork.” Van Gogh’s work, Hodin continued, “is a personal expression of utmost intensity. Its rhythm is that of heartbeats which become ever wilder as his mortal sickness grows upon him.”
²⁸

Most of us are naturally quite good at these inferences. It is the rare person, one who lacks an
intimate mind
, that is not. This exceptional individual, proving the rule, may at some point in his
life be diagnosed with a condition that is an obstacle to intimacy. One such condition is Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism that occurs disproportionately in males.

The desire to observe the unaware, who cannot protect or modify their images, is a product of human evolution, but what is the nature of the psychological experience? What is it that the observer senses or feels? What can be said about the “liminal” experience for the observer? Is it the experience of operating
near
a boundary, or
crossing
it, or
being on the other side of it
? The art historian David Freedberg wrote that sexuality does not work if it is blatant. In such cases, “there is none of the frisson, the tension, or the still stronger arousal that arises from a sense of the image being on the
borderline
of what is art… and what is not art.” If it is art, he wrote, “it transgresses—just—the limits of the admissible and the tolerable. This
borderline
position is what gives so many of these images their sexual potential.”
²⁹

We normal human eavesdroppers are particularly drawn to the partially open door, the dimly lit room, the whispered confession. Even as they seek to thwart, they invite, and if a border is crossed, reward. In her book
On Photography
, Susan Sontag wrote, “There is something on people’s faces when they don’t know they are being observed that never appears when they do.”
³⁰
° To Sartre, the problem with looking
visibly
is that it attracts a look in return. When that happens, he said, one loses the appearance of the eyes. “It is never when eyes are looking at you that you can find them beautiful or ugly, that you can remark on their color,” he wrote. “The Other’s look hides his eyes.”
³¹

These are simple things, and our perceptual wants are simple, according to postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard. The “other” need not
do anything
, he wrote. “We ask him only to
be
other, to have that minimal glimmer of otherness.”
³²
One sees this in
“The adventure of a photographer,” a short story by Italo Calvino. The story centers on the obsession of a photographer, Antonino Paraggi, to “capture” on film a young woman named Bice. What Paraggi sought, Calvino wrote, was a “
presence that presupposed his own absence and that of others
.”

Paraggi’s objective was to catch Bice when she didn’t know he was watching her: “to
surprise her as she was in the absence of his gaze, of any gaze
.”
³³
What Calvino’s photographer knew was this: if Bice saw him, the threshold experience would disappear and the image would vanish. At the same moment, the observer’s privileges would change as well. If the observer is seen, a new set of rules goes into effect. One of these rules is “no staring.”

The work, and the confessions, of real photographers—especially those who have sought images of people as they really are—provide additional insights. Frequently, the objective of street photographers is to photograph people who are alone, when they are wearing no particular face. The original practitioners were naturalists, amateur ethologists, who set out to observe human animals in their natural habitat. The problem, of course, was the difficulty of remaining obscure. When photographers first took to the streets of New York, they were unable to hide their bulky cameras. What they sought was a subject that would be blind to their existence. “I felt,” wrote Paul Strand, “that one could get a
quality of being
through the fact that the person did not know he was being photographed.”
³⁴
Strand got the naturalness he sought by photographing a person who was
actually
blind. In 1916, he took a picture called
Blind Woman
.

There is room for discomfort here, but this cannot be because the woman was unable to see the camera; the camera goes unnoticed by the subjects of many popular street photographs taken later. It seems more likely that it is because we sighted individuals are aware of our images and are conscious that others regularly partake of them, but blind individuals may not understand that they have such a visual presence—and, therefore, that it can be “taken” from them. They may not fully appreciate that unknown others—filing through art galleries or leafing through photography books—can study these unguarded representations of their selves.