“L’enfer, c’est les autres”

When surveillance shapes behaviour, we live in Hell 

We live in a world of cameras and cookies. Everywhere we go, everything we do, want, or think, is tracked. Most of the time, this is to maximise the effectiveness of marketing tactics that push us towards buying the latest unneeded thing. Yet, whether or not we realise it, all forms of surveillance work to control and police every aspect of who we are and what we do. This is the theme of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famed No Exit, a play about three people in Hell doomed to torment each other through what Sartre calls “The Look for eternity.” As the characters become aware of their fate, in a moment of clarity, one famously exclaims, “Hell is other people!”

These fictional unfortunates are indeed cursed to surrender their self-perceptions and identities to the observation and judgement of the others. But Sartre was not just a playwright. He was a leftist philosopher in an occupied Paris during World War II, and while he managed to keep a low profile and covertly create and circulate anti-Nazi literature, he found himself unable to escape surveillance’s potential for societal control. In the original French, the line “Hell is other people” is “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” which may in fact be a subtle jab at the soon-to-be-overrun German occupiers who were colloquially referred to by his fellow Parisians as “Les Autres.” After the war, Sartre would become publicly involved with many leftist and anti-fascist movements, perhaps out of guilt for his lacklustre resistance to Nazi rule. If No Exit is partially inspired by his experience of surveillance under perhaps the most notoriously authoritarian regime, then it also serves as a lesson on the reality of being watched. 

In her celebrated book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, American-Canadian journalist and urban theorist Jane Jacobs details the ways in which the urban renewal peddled by Robert Moses made North American cities less livable. However, relevant to any discussion of surveillance is her insightful analysis of the city sidewalk and its role in maintaining community safety. One key factor Jacobs mentions is the number of “eyes on the street”—in other words, people casually watching and policing their own neighbourhood. The idea is that a street thrives when its citizens are engaged in watching its happenings. For this to work, there must be consistent foot traffic, windows overlooking the streets, and small businesses whose owners have a vested interest in policing the sidewalk. If Jacobs is right, then giving people a reason to watch the street will drastically reduce the likelihood of violence or theft going unseen and unstopped by creating an informal web of surveillance. But how do residents know when to intervene? There must be some unspoken rule of which people and actions are welcome and which are not. As they watch, residents and shopkeepers evaluate and form judgements on the people they see. Sartre would say that, in that moment, the people they see are as the residents see them: passerby, neighbour, stranger, criminal. 

But how does this control behaviour? Consider for a moment how you perform when you’re being watched. Perhaps you perform better, perhaps you begin to fumble, but you almost certainly become very aware of what you are doing, and what you want to be seen doing. You are experiencing ‘The Look.’ You are not only aware of being perceived, but know how you want your beholder to perceive you, and any misalignment between that desire and that perception is liable to cause you distress. The same is true of being in public: you may dress nicely when going to a nice restaurant so that you appear to belong. Maybe you avoid playing loud music from a portable speaker because you don’t want to be seen as rude. Or perhaps you play it precisely because you want to stand out and be noticed. The trouble comes when being perceived a certain way becomes dangerous.

American political scientist Zein Murib is the author of an article entitled “Administering Biology: How ‘Bathroom Bills’ Criminalize and Stigmatize Trans and Gender Non-Conforming People in Public Space.” Murib reviews the number and content of legislation introduced across the United States concerning transgender identity. He focuses on the infamous bathroom bills. A bathroom bill is a law which effectively prohibits trans-identifying people from using public washrooms and states that they must use the washroom designated for their sex assigned at birth, which can be and often is unsafe. Most interesting, however, is that of the bills reviewed, most recommended the creation of a separate single-user unisex or “accessible to all” washroom. How strange! Why would bills interested in removing trans people from public bathrooms create a separate, gender-neutral bathroom? One might suspect that ‘The Look’ is at play once again. 

Murib notes that many bathroom bills give a cisgendered person the right to sue if they encounter someone in the ‘wrong’ bathroom and often play on ‘safety’ narratives within gender-segregated spaces. In doing so, bathroom bills foster a false sense of danger and prompt people to use ‘The Look’ to evaluate trans people in bathrooms as threats. Furthermore, the presence of a gender-neutral bathroom alerts people to the possibility that there are trans people who use it, much in the same way that a security camera alerts people to the possibility of criminal activity in an area. The murder of Nex Benedict has shown us the true power of ‘The Look’—how merely being watched, judged, or perceived in a certain way can have devastating consequences. 

If there is one conclusion to be made from all of this, it’s that surveillance is an effective tool to shape behaviour, not just by providing information to authorities, but also by raising suspicions amongst people. When the cameras make us distrust each other, I too am inclined to say, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.”