SURVEILLANCE

Under Western Eyes

REPORTING BEGINS WITH LOOKING. VISUAL OBSERVATION is the essence of the reporter's function as witness. But the gaze upon which the journalist so faithfully relies for knowledge marks an exclusion as well as a privilege: the privilege of inspecting, of examining, of looking at, by its nature excludes the journalist from the human reality constituted as the object of observation.

A passage from James Agee's writing on conditions in the American South during the 1930s is remarkable for its self-conscious awareness of the power implied by the gaze. Agee describes the gathering of black farmworkers near the house of their white foreman:

They all approached softly and strangely until they stood within the shade of the grove, then stayed their ground as if floated, their eyes shifting upon us sidelong and to the ground and to the distance, speaking together very little, in quieted voices: it was as if they had been under some magnetic obligation to approach just this closely and to show themselves. (27)

They are obligated to show themselves to view for the white men, but they themselves lack the privilege of the gaze; though looked at, they are forbidden from looking back. The foreman calls for the black men to sing, and they begin the song "now that they were looked at and the order given." When the song is ended, Agee hands some money to one of the men: "He thanked me for them in a dead voice, not looking me in the eye, and they went away." The gratuity offered to the singers in effect acknowledges the unevenness of the exchange. Gazed upon, they are denied the power of the gaze; spoken to, they are denied the power to speak freely.

The scene, however, is more than a simple demonstration of power where it reveals signs of resistance on the part of the black farmworkers. The man receiving the gratuity thanks Agee "in a dead voice, not looking me in the eye," withholding his thanks even in the act of giving it. Here the avoidance of eye contact constitutes a refusal rather than a sign of submission: it says in effect, "Forbidden from looking on you freely, I refuse to meet your eye when called on to do so."

With an eye for these complexities, Agee demonstrates how looking and speaking enter into the economy of an essentially colonial situation, in which one race holds, however provisionally and uneasily, authority over another. To look at and speak to not only implies a position of authority; it also constitutes the commanding act itself: "now that they were looked at and the order given." By entering into this economy of uneven exchange, Agee becomes an accomplice to the very system of authority, of control, and of surveillance that causes him so much anguish and that removes him from those people whose lives he would attempt to understand. For all his awareness of its ironies, Agee's position is nonetheless analogous to the classic position of the Western writer in the colonial situation: the conditions of access to colonized peoples also mark an exclusion from the lived human reality of the colonized.

In 1982 Joanne Omang, a reporter for the Washington Post, shared a ride in a van with a group of other North American and Western European reporters to a tiny, remote village in El Salvador. Here she tries to imagine the effect of their arrival on the handful of peasants who witnessed the scene:

The van emptied—men in sunglasses with headphones wielding shiny microphones on long stalks pouring out behind other burly men carrying huge TV cameras and photographers drenched in Nikons—men and women alike wielding tape recorders and notebooks. We were clearly invaders from another planet. (47)

These remarks are printed not in the Post itself, but in the Washington Journalism Review, a trade journal. As a commentary on how her work is actually done, it would be out of place in a news report. Although reporters tend to know better than anyone else the limitations inherent in their methods of work, the standard journalistic forms do not easily permit reflection on the conditions—technological, economic, historical—that make reporting possible.

These conditions give the reporter a privileged point of view over what is surveyed, yet the nature of this privilege and the distance that it imposes between the seer and the seen rarely enters into the explicit content of journalistic writing. In those cases where the particular advantage inherent in the reporter's position is openly acknowledged, we suddenly see the dynamics of power that underlie even the most ordinary journalistic modes of surveillance.

In a series of articles on the Vietnam war written originally for the New York Review of Books in 1967, Mary McCarthy describes being taken up in a helicopter outside Saigon for "a ringside view of American bombing"— a routine part of the war correspondent's work. Her eyes wander over the great patches of earth scorched by the defoliation program and watch as a small plane below hits a bombing target. A typical day in the war includes 460 such bombing sorties "in support of ground forces." She comments:

The Saigonese themselves are unaware of the magnitude of what is happening to their country, since they are unable to use military transport to get an aerial view of it; they only note the refugees sleeping in the streets and hearing the B-52S pounding a few miles away.... The Air Force seems inescapable, like the Eye of God, and soon, you imagine ... all will be razed, charred, defoliated by that terrible searching gaze. (32-33)

McCarthy's account shows, first of all, that her logistical, if not her ideological, point of view is identical to that of the U.S. Air Force; her own airborne eye commands the same position as that terrible Eye of God. More importantly, her commentary implies that because of that position, the war for her takes on a different order of reality from that experienced by the Vietnamese. By looking down at the bombing targets rather than being on them, she literally sees another war.

In their disparate ways, Agee, Omang, and McCarthy are all concerned with the overpowering and potentially destructive effect of the gaze. But as any visual artist knows, the gaze is also the active instrument of construction, order, and arrangement. What one might call the ideology of the gaze takes on one of its clearest forms in the convention of the commanding view. One knows the importance of the commanding view—the panoramic vista—to architecture, landscape painting, and sites of tourism, as well as to scientific research, military intelligence, and police surveillance: it offers aesthetic...