The Self, The Network of Gazes, and Living Through the Screen

What I am is inseparable from what you are. I do not have some kind of autonomous self that subsists independently from the people around me. The people I come into contact are an integral part of what I become.

For when I engage with you I am not simply deducing your mental process from your words. I am doing something more like recreating your mind within my own. I simulate your mental processes as I observe them in order to be connected to you and therefore part of my understanding you is becoming you within myself. What I know of you is really something that I know of me.

Similarly, when I am around you I not only see from my point of view, I imagine how you view me. When I walk down the street, for example, I often have an internal image of what I look like from behind, how a stranger would view me walking down the street. I always see myself from both within and without.

Sometimes the view from without is a definite perspective, like that of a close friend or lover. Sometimes the view from without is vague, amorphous, not belonging to any one person in particular, but rather a general sort of mind that I assume belongs to our time and place.

All this should be fairly obvious. Of course the self is not some static entity. It changes based on who I am around. And, more specifically, it changes based on what perspectives I am able to imagine myself from. Thus my therapist posed the very intelligent question, 'Which me do I get to be around this person?' The point being precisely that relating to different people make us into different things because it forces us to occupy their perspective and therefore to subtlety change ourselves. The point being: The self emerges out of the constellation of perspectives that we take on a regular basis.

This idea of the self as hinging on the possible perspectives we can imagine ourselves through is at the heart of Foucault's work on panopticism. In Discipline & Punish Foucault wrote about a 18th-19th century prison design known as the panopticon. The idea is that there is a guard tower standing in the middle of a ring of prison cells, each one visible from the tower. The top of the tower is totally blacked out, whereas the cells are fully lit at all times. The prisoners therefore cannot know if they are being watched at any particular moment, but they know that there is a possibility for them to be viewed at any moment and thus they must behave as if though they were being observed.

The idea of a panopticon is therefore essentially a means of control that functions by forcing an individual to view themselves from a point of view other than their own, in particular, an outside perspective that  has the capacity to judge or punish. In the case of the literal panopticon, a prisoner is being forced to imagine they are being watched by a guard who could inflict punishment on them if t hey catch them breaking a rule. There is, however, a more general point to be made: any new perspective I learn to take allows me to criticize and praise my actions in new ways. This is why Allan Bloom said that great authors must be worn like a pair of glasses through which we see the world. I've also read that therapy, from the patient's point of view, is about learning to build a more balanced perspective in part by using your relationship with your therapist as a touchstone for healthy consciousness. I can say from personal experience that it is a useful to ask, What would my favorite professor say about this? Or what would my therapist say to me right now?

The ability to internalize another person's perspective, and learning to criticize oneself through that perspective, therefore has significant repercussions for our actions. Foucault used the image of the panopticon precisely to draw attention to how our behavior can be altered merely by 'the gaze' of another. He therefore meant the panopticon primarily as a metaphor for the way our current social order depends on a regulatory 'network of gazes'. Our dominant institutions, penal, legal, psychiatric, medical, etc., all institutions that exert power on society by producing knowledge about what is and is not acceptable behavior, therefore putting a corral on the potentials for action. The knowledge they wield, moreover, expresses itself in a gaze: a point of view that each of us internalizes and learns to criticize ourselves through. Foucault might say that there is a doctor, a psychiatrist, a judge, and a priest inside us all. Or, more precisely, we have all learned to silently judge ourselves through those perspectives.

So much of our experience is filtered through these dominant perspectives. So much of what we are is about the other perspectives we imagine ourselves from, which stories we tell about ourselves from which points of view. I am thus claiming that the self is something that emerges out of a 'network of gazes', or, to put it differently, it is the sum of all the points of view, all the silently simulated perspectives, that we carry with us in our daily lives. Solitude, friendships, relationships, all breed very different kinds of selfs.

If it is true that the self is something that emerges out of the variety of perspectives that we carry within us, what does this say about our relationship with media in general and facebook in particular?

With media in general we have to recognize that many of the things we may think about ourselves, our bodies or our minds, is often being generated by a machine that doesn't want to make us into better people. It wants to make us into consumers. It wants us to buy into unrealistic standards for our bodies and our relationships. We can catch ourselves criticizing ourselves through this lens we've internalized from marketing and media generally. We can label it as such. In doing so we can place a little bit of distance between us and those narratives. In our initial dealings with media it is easy to be unaware of its subtle influence on behavior, but the goal is to recognize that it serves a regulatory function that you are capable of resisting for yourself, free to explore alternative narratives of what you'd like to be.

Foucault would wager that such an activity is 'political'. It is true that the dominant institutions of our society have become somewhat politicized. I can't eat at Chic-fil-a anymore, god dammit. I wish I could just eat one of those chicken sandwiches because it's a fabulous sandwich. Chic-fil-a's approach to social and political issues, however, overrides that. The medical industry, psychiatric clinics, and penal institutions, too, are major structures of our political system. But does merely thinking about them differently constitute a political action? I suppose that being open to counter-narratives and alternative subjectivities could drive one to have a certain political leaning or attitude towards action. I've never quite grasped Foucault's thinking on politics. I know I'm not the only one. Forgive this digression.

In addition to being critical of the dominant narratives around us, we can actively seek out positive forms of media that will provide us with new points of view which to view ourselves. Reading and getting to know an excellent philosopher, for example, can provide you with a new set of eyes to see the world through. I can say that my world view has become noticeably richer and more exciting because of the contact I've had with friends, therapists, and philosophers. Each of them offers me a new perspective that I can see myself and the world through. At the end of it I feel like I'm able to build up a more realistic perspective on myself and the world because I try to find a place within myself where I can balance all the perspectives I've internalized. Recognizing that a more realistic sense of can self emerge out of interaction with diverse perspectives is very helpful in the task of reflection and self-cultivation.

I finally just want to comment briefly on what all this means in relation to facebook. Facebook is a very strange thing if you think about it in the terms I've presented here. It allows us to imagine our profiles from the perspective of hundreds of people that we've met throughout our lives, many of whom are acquaintances at best. I think in turn people tend to put their 'best foot forward' online: we choose our best pictures, we spend time thinking of witty things to share, we want to be acknowledged. There is an interesting quotation from some bro named Steve Furtick. It goes, "The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel." What is facebook if not a permanent highlight reel?

My concern here is that we are abstracting ourselves, that we are forcing ourselves to become generalized people, one's more amenable to the packaged presentation that something like facebook or okcupid enables. This imperative, moreover, is something that may emerge out of the network of gazes that facebook provides us. When all we see is people having tons of fun and posting great meals and changing their statuses to engaged or married or whatever it can be easy to assume that they experience no speed bumps, no fits of self doubt or sadness that come out of nowhere. But of course they do. We all do. What I'm wondering, though, is if it's possible that long term exposure to facebook (as a network of gazes that we imagine ourselves through) can have a lasting affect on our behavior? If we take a picture of every meal, if everything is documented, and we know that it is being documented, is it not true that a part of our mind is perhaps imagining what that picture will look like to the hundreds of people we know online? Is not part of our mind therefore detached from the situation itself, and the experience in some ways passes through imagined screens as we experience it?

Other people have written about facebook as a panopticon. It makes perfect sense. I have not, however, seen anyone render the panopticon in the language of perspective taking and simulation theory more specifically. When we do render facebook panopticism in the language of simulation theory, we get something like what I'm trying to talk about. I'm struggling. But the idea is that facebook can exert a regulatory affect on our behavior by providing a huge number of perspectives that we criticize and praise our actions through. Facebook as a network of gazes, moreover, exerts a generalizing power, forcing our self expression to be condensed and trimmed. It encourages us to display only our highlight reels, and I fear we may forget how to move comfortably behind the scenes.