Seeing and Being Seen: Toward a Liberal Democratic Theory of Spectatorship
In 2018, America learned that the electoral campaign of the first reality-TV star President had microtargeted potential voters with personalized ads using vast troves of data collected from social media. The scandal revealed the hidden infrastructure of today’s digital media environment; using social media, we watch and contribute to democratic politics while simultaneously being subject to surveillance––from each other, from private companies, and from political actors. In turn, the data collected about us determines what we see. To capture the centrality of spectatorship in our politics, democratic theorists have advanced the notion of “audience democracy”; some even propose that the public can harness the power of their collective gaze to influence political leaders. Can the people exert power over political leaders by watching them, or are spectators subject to the power of those they watch? How does the ubiquity of surveillance affect the people’s experiences as political spectators and participants?
These questions, though made newly urgent by twenty-first century technology, are present in the philosophical foundations of liberal democracy. By retrieving approaches to the politics of spectatorship in the works of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, I show how what we see affects how we experience being seen, and vice versa. Whereas many theorists of audience democracy emphasize the visual and affective dimensions of spectatorship, engaging with these thinkers draws our attention to the political actors and social factors, like different forms of inequality, that shape experiences of seeing and being seen. The politically and socioeconomically eminent often benefit from a particularly attentive and admiring public audience, while unjust public scrutiny is more easily directed toward relatively vulnerable members of the community. Democratic freedom requires not only opportunities of observing, judging, and electing political leadership but also protections of the individual’s ability to control the terms of her own publicity.
These questions, though made newly urgent by twenty-first century technology, are present in the philosophical foundations of liberal democracy. By retrieving approaches to the politics of spectatorship in the works of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, I show how what we see affects how we experience being seen, and vice versa. Whereas many theorists of audience democracy emphasize the visual and affective dimensions of spectatorship, engaging with these thinkers draws our attention to the political actors and social factors, like different forms of inequality, that shape experiences of seeing and being seen. The politically and socioeconomically eminent often benefit from a particularly attentive and admiring public audience, while unjust public scrutiny is more easily directed toward relatively vulnerable members of the community. Democratic freedom requires not only opportunities of observing, judging, and electing political leadership but also protections of the individual’s ability to control the terms of her own publicity.