To derive any principle regarding the existential attitude toward surveillance from the ideas outlined in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the actual effect of a camera must first be established. To conceive of a camera as an electronic human eye is wrong; the camera operates independently from the person (who may or may not be) behind it. More saliently, people observe – an act freighted with categorization and judgment – whereas cameras can only see. This distinction is critical, for the existential implications of omnipresent surveillance pivot on the fact that the presence of a human observer is wholly irrelevant. The camera is the device that does the seeing. Whether or not the footage collected by cameras is actually watched does not in any way alter the implications of all-pervasive electronic surveillance. Ultimately Sartre’s commentary on seeing and being seen amounts to a ringing denunciation of electronic surveillance on the ground that being seen by an object devoid of possibility is tantamount to condemning the person being seen to a parallel existence of nothing outside facticity.
In his discussion of “the Other,” Sartre indicates that the presence of something that sees – in this case a camera – drastically alters the attitude of the one being seen. “By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment upon myself as an object,” he argues, “for it is as an object that I appear to the other.” Crucially, being seen imposes a new condition. It casts pure subjectivity, the only possible existential position available to a person acting alone, against the umbra of objectivity. Alone, cloistered in the shadows, a person is purely transcendent. The intrusion of a seeing eye reveals to this person the reality of their existence as a physical object to the other. Sartre’s conception of the Other focuses on the interjection of an “indispensible mediator between myself and me.” The arc of transcendence is interrupted by a new ontology, an inventory of “new qualifications” that cannot be supported without the presence of the Other. These new modes of consideration – shame, vulgarity, and awkwardness – “are meanings and as such they transcend the body and at the same time refer to a witness capable of understanding them and to the totality of my human reality.” Sartre’s “indispensible mediator,” then, impels the person being seen to grasp a more complete version of their existence. Put another way, being seen imputes a new angle of consciousness or, more appositely, self-consciousness.
Take for instance Sartre’s idea of a person watching some event through a keyhole. Prior to being observed, this person is an isolated totality because there is no reference point to which actions can be related. “I am my acts,” Sartre explains, “and hence they carry in themselves their whole justification.” Facticity is abandoned as the body is transcended; the notion of self, which is immutably both transcendence and facticity, is therefore jettisoned as the world casts the “sight to be seen behind the door” into sharp focus. The introduction of this new condition, being seen, compels the voyeur to reconstitute transcendence as facticity. The act of considering the lens of the Other imparts the inalienable reality that the person is an object to this lens. The being of the voyeur is rooted in the perception of the Other. Unsurprisingly, this person’s new self-consciousness is dominated by shame. The voyeur, in recognizing his position an object, feels shame. Sartre summarizes the nuances of this position later in the work: “for the Other I have stripped myself of my transcendence [because] I am seated as this inkwell is on the table…” Being seen renders the person being seen as a mere object. This is where the progression stops unless the Other is a human being.
If the Other possesses the same existential equipment as the one being seen – that is, facticity and transcendence – a further step occurs. “I grasp the Other’s look,” Sartre explains, “at the very center [sic] of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities.” By being conceived of as a simple thing, an object or instrument, transcendental possibility is divorced from facticity while remaining firmly entrenched in human identity. Insofar as the basic existential composition of human consciousness is remembered, being seen “in the world and from the standpoint of the world” imbues the voyeur with a deeply ambiguous self-consciousness. The person being seen is at once objective and full of possibility, for the Other in objectifying the person being seen highlights that person’s possibility and transcendence. Sartre’s phrasing echoes the ambiguity inherent to the notion of being seen: “[t]hus I who, insofar as I am my possibles, am what I am not and am not what I am.” In being seen the fundamental negation that is human consciousness is not repudiated by exclusive objectivity by perpetually affirmed.
This assertion of identity, of self-consciousness and being, is built into the other, yet it cannot be grasped by surrender to objectivity. Should the voyeur succumb to the lure of being in itself – complete and realized being – bad faith is inevitable. Only be clutching at the thread of possibility is the lack of being in itself maintained. This is achieved because being seen is an indisputable threat to possibility; it impels the seen to grasp the threat and assume subjectivity by seeing it in turn as an object. A subject sees another subject as an object. The reified subject replies by reaffirming subjectivity through objectification. Threat and danger are insuperably linked to freedom, for awareness of them enhances possibility. This process of continual assertion and transmutation from object to subject and back again proclaims and buttresses the fusion of transcendence and facticity in human possibility within the world.
The cameras of Big Brother, however, cannot ever aid in this process. Though they resemble the ocular apparatus of humans, they possess the immutable being humans lack. What they see cannot ever be anything other than an object. The unblinking electronic eye cannot distinguish between a sofa or a vase or a person. All are inexorably and permanently rendered as objects. For the sofa the condition of pure objectivity presents no problems, for it possesses a being that is both finite and realized; it can never be anything more than a sofa. For people, who embody a lack of being, having a rigid and unvarying being ascribed to them represents a calamity, the death of possibility and the extinction of transcendence. Whereas non-being is established through a reciprocal process when both the one being seen and the one seeing are capable of transcending objectivity, the camera substitutes rudimentary (and ultimately unconscious) being for the possibility offered by a lack. Because constant objectivity is anathema to possibility, and because the camera’s nature of being prohibits extrication from this condition, electronic surveillance can only ever be an existential nightmare, a condemnation of humanity to the status of the sofa or the vase. “In order to get the truth about myself,” Sartre writes in “Existentialism,” “I must have contact with another person.” The materialism known to the camera is “in no way distinguished from the ensemble of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table or a chair or a stone.”
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