Bakers blight: why we need to resist surveillance culture

Back in the day when there were three or four cake shops on every high street, the Friday morning cake run was a big workplace thing, an end-of-the-week splurge. So let’s do it this Friday morning, with our idea of treats — another episode in the culture wars — and try and get a teachable experience from it.

The story popped up at the start of the week: the cakes-and-goodies chain Bakers Delight might be putting up signs in its stores warning its customers against sexually harassing the staff. To which one’s first response was, what? Bakers Delight? Was this… what, a sugar-rush effect? Turns out, no, it wasn’t. The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission (VEOHRC) was not responding to any explicit complaint. It had chosen Bakers Delight because, one story reported, this was a high-risk sector for this sort of thing. It was later clarified that they meant the retail sector in general.

The inquiry was based on Victoria’s “positive duty” statute, which means that companies have to demonstrate proactive steps to address sexual harassment, rather than simply handle complaints. As it was, the company didn’t have a staff complaints procedure in place at all, which is pretty archaic. So CEO Elise Gillespie has vowed to take this “great opportunity … to be the leader nationally”. Doubtlessly Gillespie is sincere in her efforts against sexual harassment, but it can’t be denied that the initiative turns a black mark into a gold star for a company that was very far behind on these matters (no central register, no staff training).

The episode is, in microcosm, a demonstration of how culture and life are made these days. We’ll now get a notice on the wall reminding us not to sexually harass people, just in case we forget not to do that. It will join all the notices warning that staff don’t have to put up with aggression, etc, signs that began in high-stress places like hospitals, and which are now ubiquitous. The Bakers Delight initiative suggests they may be joined by a whole series more.

That is the spirit of the age, part of which is that many people will not find anything bizarre about such a notice — and will find this article nitpicking. Yet it’s worth looking at the wider cultural and personal effects of such a move. What’s essential to it is that it takes the form of a warning for physical danger — something like “hot surface” — for a psychological one, a control on action. It’s done explicitly in the absence of any unusual number of such events: Bakers Delight had only “isolated incidents”, according to the original story. Indeed VEOHRC clarified that it had focused on the chain precisely because there wasn’t any unusual frequency of occurrence.

What’s the social-psychological effect of this relentless piling on? It can’t be nothing. The obvious is cultural de-internalisation: the notion of public space ceasing to be a neutral one where the continent behaviour of the citizen is assumed, and immoral or criminal behaviour is the exception. Instead it becomes a place of probation, where your capacity to be a citizen — i.e. to relate to each other in a controlled fashion — is under suspicion. The most basic structural point would be that such a notice puts one in a position of surveillance of oneself. The basic self, the ego, making its way in the world, is resituated. When such notices become general, universal, a sort of loop effect takes over, in which energy is repeatedly drawn away from desire to self-monitoring.

The response to this sort of argument might well be, ohhhhhh come on, it’s just a sign. Indeed that’s the working principle of this relentless addition of control to every area of existence: that it can be done without loss at another level of life. It’s just a sign, just a piece of helpful advice. But it isn’t really. It’s a process whereby the whole of life is steadily controlled by moralising. It’s a now-universal social process that was unknown years — OK, decades ago.

In the period from the ’60s to, say, the ’90s, when old moral authorities had departed and this new process of moral self-surveillance had not yet been introduced, there was just us here, with each other. Before that, there were strong moral agents such as the church or the school, but they were separate. Realms of life were there without explicit moral ordering, and if anything were like that, it was the cake shop, the very epicentre, surely, of pleasure that is without sin (before the self-care “ethic” of the body developed).

The way in which this regulating process has unerringly sought out a place that offers the simplest of pleasures to enforce a moral order is hard to see as a coincidence. The movement of power, conscious or otherwise, is present. Every such act, by the officers, researchers and lawyers of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), by the executives of Bakers Delight, is an exercise in power, whereby knowledge class and CEO elites reinforce their ability to control not merely the lives of the ruled, but their inner lives as well — to reach into your head while you’re buying a coffee scroll, for God’s sake, and lecture you about public behaviour.

Indeed, the report suggests that HREOC’s attitude with regards to the staff was explicitly elitist, baking chosen for the study because of a gendered division of labour between female shop assistants and male bakers. Ah, silly shopgirls and oven-feeding oafs — who knows what would happen if graduate professionals were not there to shape their behaviour?

And what purpose and pleasure would the graduates have, if there were not the others, whose behaviour needed to be shaped? Victoria has made itself the epicentre of this, and the state’s Socialist Left has driven it, through a generation of Labor in power. Deprived of the chance for real socialist action, by a leadership that would privatise ambulance defibrillators if it could, if it had chosen behavioural control over the people it once purported to represent, as a historical consolation prize. These are the small things, so small as to barely register as politics. What could be more frivolous, more ridiculous, than the doings of a cake shop? But that is how this process occurs, place by place, sector by sector, filling out all of social life.

If the feeling this gives one is of “demoralisation”, then it’s worth unpacking. One is “de-moralised” if the regard of one as a moral actor has been removed; if one is no longer trusted to behave as a citizen, then one has been turned into an object, rather than a subject. That’s the deep structure of the hard-to-define crappy feeling that such an initiative gives many people.

But the spread of such initiatives also has a less visible culture effect as well. Creating a framework of universal self- and other-surveillance — of low trust, making life itself a suspicious activity — really serves to pull apart the cultural framework in which secure selfhood is possible. The widespread development of pervasive conditions experienced as individual mental illness — anxiety, etc — has come in parallel with the development of such all-encompassing psycho-surveillance (aided by social media). Of course, everyone’s anxious. The whole of social life is oriented to second-guessing each other, so jittery is the default setting.

The answer to this is to listen to one’s disquiet. If these processes disturb, irritate, depress, demoralise, then resist them where you can, push back against them. Don’t let the pettiness of the initiative dissuade one: much of life is a set of intersecting pettinesses, from which meaning and purpose emerge. If it’s too much to ask that HREOC lawyers would think about the corrosive effect they have on social life — though it would be great to find a human rights lawyer who didn’t think the answer to every social issue was the further reshaping of everyday social life through new laws and regulations — it is something for politicians, unions and management to question and challenge.

Eventually, if this new wave continues, it will produce an opposition, which will come largely from the right. Further down the track, an awareness of the life-denying effects of these practices will emerge, just as past passions of progress — from eugenics to freeways — could eventually come to be seen as the social disasters they were. But at the moment, and for a while, it’s baked in. 

Are signs in bakeries a blight on society? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.