Authors: John L. Locke
Eavesdropping
EAVESDROPPING
We have only so much as to glance at another human being and we at once begin to read beneath the surface. We see there another conscious person, like ourselves. We see someone with human feelings, memories, desires. A mind potentially like ours.
N
ICHOLAS
H
UMPHREY
With the aid of a word I overhear in passing, I reconstruct an entire conversation, an entire existence. The inflection of a voice suffices for me to attach the name of a deadly sin to the man whom I have just jostled and whose profile I glimpsed.
V
ICTOR
F
OURNEL
AN INTIMATE HISTORY
JOHN L. LOCKE
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford
OX
2 6
DP
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ISBN: 978–0–19–923613–8
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Chapter One
Passionate Spectators
Chapter Four
Reluctant Domestication
Chapter Five
Privacy, Intimacy, and The Selves
Chapter Six
Personal Power and Social Control
Chapter Seven
Passionate Exhibitors
Chapter Eight
What Will the Servants Say?
I
DID
the research for this book at the University of Cambridge, New York University, and the City University of New York, completing the manuscript while I was on sabbatical in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. I have enjoyed the encouragement and advice of several scholars and writers, including Michael Studdert-Kennedy, Kathrin Perutz, Alison Wray, Anne van Kleeck, and Kim Oller, though none has seen the final version of the manuscript. I have also received assistance on specific matters from a number of scholars, including Adrian Treves and Marjorie McIntosh. My greatest debt is to my wife, Catherine Flanagan, who has offered personal encouragement, editorial advice, and countless hours of thoughtful conversation. This book is dedicated to her.
J
OHN
L. L
OCKE
Cambridge, England
Old Lyme, Connecticut
July 2009
Exhibit 2 “Coupe de maison,” image by Karl Girardet,
Magasin pittoresque
, 1847
Exhibit 3
Overheard
, Jules Adolphe Goupil, 1839–83
Exhibit 4
Curiosity
, Eugene de Blaas, from the
Pears Annual
, Christmas 1892
Exhibit 5
Spionnetje
, or “little spy” (photo by Florien van Beinum and Franz Zwanikken)
Exhibit 6 “Spy hole” in Dinkelsbuhl, an ancient village in Bavaria (photo by Kim Oller)
Exhibit 9
L’Armoire
, etching by Jean-Honore Fragonard, 1778
Exhibit 10 Plan of a typical Kung village (Fig. 3–3 in Lee 1979a, p. 34)
Exhibit 11 The chief’s foot, as drawn by one of the villagers (Fig. 12 in Gregor 1977)
Exhibit 12 Holy watchfulness (Fischer 1989, p. 123)
Exhibit 13
L’epouse indiscrète
(The indiscreet wife), engraving by Delaunay, 1771
Exhibit 14
L’amour à I’épreuve
(Love on trial), Pierre-Antoine Baudouin, c. 1777
Exhibit 15 Wartime poster warning Englishmen about female eavesdropping
Exhibit 18
La Croisée
(The casement window) I, Philibert-Louis Debucourt, 1791
Exhibit 20
Galerie Colbert, Rotunda
, lithograph by Billaud, 1828
Exhibit 21
A flaneur
(from Louis Huart,
Physiologie du flâneur
, 1841)
Exhibit 22
Paris: A Rainy Day
, Gustave Caillebotte, 1877
Exhibit 23
The Washing Tub
, Pierre Vidal, from an engraving by F. Masse
Exhibit 24
Le Toucher
, Abraham Bosse, 1638
Exhibit 25
Curiosity
, 1817 (from Stone 1990)
Exhibit 28
What’s in a Name
?, 1892
Exhibit 29
The Private Letter Drawer
, photogravure by Attilia Simonetti
Exhibit 30
Die Lauscherin
(The eavesdropper), Nicholas Maes, 1657
Exhibit 31 Key escutcheon with swinging cover (from Chateau de Villarlon, Minervois, France)
Exhibit 32
Forbidden Books
, Alexander Rossi, 1897
Exhibit 33
Blind Woman
, Paul Strand, 1916
Exhibit 34
Subway Passengers
, Walker Evans
O
N
a flight from Milan to London I was slumped down in my aisle seat, deep in thought as I reviewed an early draft of the manuscript that has become this book. Unbeknownst to me, I was being watched by a woman in the middle seat of the row immediately in front. After we had landed and the passengers were commencing the customary disembarking ritual, the woman startled me by looking over her headrest and pointedly asking if I was writing a book. I answered that I was. What’s it about, she asked. I said my book concerned the intense desire of members of our species to know what is going on in the personal lives of others. At this, the woman burst into ironic laughter since first in watching, and then in asking, she had just expressed two different forms of that very desire.
Watching and asking produce a form of intimate experience, which can be enjoyable in its own right, as well as intimate images, which may be re-experienced when privately brought to mind or—as information—shared with others. Intimacies tend to circulate preferentially among people who know and trust each other, and they usually move swiftly. Since many of these “secrets” ultimately become public knowledge, a look at how intimate material travels enables us to understand the social foundations of scandal, rough justice, and the “news,” even “history.”
I smiled in response to the lady on the plane but I could just as well have laughed, too, for here I was, writing a book about a subject on which there was little in the way of directly relevant research. Indeed, until I began to study eavesdropping—one of the more important ways that ordinary people express the desire at issue—I had never, in many years of research, encountered a
behavior whose actual significance was so greatly at variance with its recognized importance. Look for books on social behavior with the word “eavesdropping” in the index section and you are likely to be severely disappointed. Enter the same word in computerized literature searches and your screen will display a list of books on wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance. But the word was coined centuries before telephones and recording equipment were invented, and the practice of eavesdropping documented nearly a thousand years earlier, when people were happy to entrust to unaided senses the question of who was doing what to whom.
Just after I began my studies of eavesdropping, a colleague asked me why I had chosen to address this particular subject. It must have seemed a radical departure from my previous work on the psychology of language. I told him that I had come across Marjorie McIntosh’s analysis of court records indicating that five and six centuries ago, English citizens had, in impressive numbers, been
arrested for eavesdropping
. I wondered what, in the medieval mind, would have caused this behavior to be criminalized, and what the “criminals” themselves were doing, or thought they were doing, when they went out at night and listened to their neighbors’ conversations.