Apparently the Social Contract is not in Dr. Phil's Contract

Today’s episode of Dr. Phil was all about vigilante justice. As someone very interested in non-vigilante justice, this is, of course, of great interest to me. Furthermore, while the issue may not be at the forefront of contemporary political dialogue, it does at least weave through many current controversies—from immigration and the “minute men” border guards to Guantanamo Bay where the U.S. government can hold prisoners without trials. See Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004). What is so interesting about Dr. Phil’s take on the subject is that it’s absolutely insane, unsupported by the vast cannon of Western philosophy, and downright dangerous. Perhaps it isn’t so unique after all. But when I saw yesterday’s sneak peak with individuals pulling people out of cars and pushing them, or beating them, I really figured Phil would give these people their come uppings. After all, when it comes to drug addicts, abusive spouses, child predators, and even people who are bad neighbors, Phil gives them his special treatment. One dose of derision, a condescension drip, a shot of common sense, and a prescription for changing their deplorable lives. Today, when we met an old woman who, as a dissatisfied Comcast customer, went into their office and smashed telephones and computers with a hammer, next being introduced to a man who spotted a suspected drunk driver rolling down the highway and boxed him off the road with his truck, only to tackle and physically restrain the supposedly inebriated man. How did Phil react? With praise, admiration, and cheer. Only on the rarest occasion did he criticize any of the guests’ actions or motivations and, even then, it was in the most casual and subtle of ways. There are justifications for vigilante justice, of course. Law enforcement resources are limited, they can’t be everywhere, and it seems innately unjust that two identical crimes and criminals could meet two disparate fates simply because one failed to get caught. On the other hand, being addicted to drugs or abusing spouses are actions which involve the violations of one or two specific laws, while vigilante justice, in itself, runs against all laws. Perhaps this is not clear. Let’s reference chapter 28 of Thomas Hobbes’s famous work, The Leviathan, which outlined the first conception of the social contract. In Hobbes definition of punishment he writes “neither private revenges, nor injuries of private men, can properly be styled punishment; because they proceed not from public authority.” One could argue that this simply means that private actions may resemble punishment, without actually entailing punishment. Yet this does not seem to be the author’s intent. After all, Hobbes writes that members of a government “assist him that hath the sovereignty, in the punishing of another.” This assistance is not by way of actually contacting those punished in any direct way, however, but rather through all of society consenting to the sovereignty of a public power. Hobbes is quite to the point about the dangers of what Dr. Phil terms vigilante justice when he writes: “the fact for which a man is punished, ought first to be judged by public authority, to be a transgression of the law.” In the case of the angry, old woman—who was also the most boastful—it is clear that, without a trial, and without public authority, a single citizen has, in the name of justice, levied her own punishment. This has the appearance of being somewhat just, but only when one forgets that the woman is, in fact, overlooking public departments, non-governmental organizations, and alternative private providers, to say nothing of sovereignty and the big picture of justice. Even more ominously, she has committed her own crime—admittedly destroying property—in order to remedy a situation she views as criminal. In her mind, no doubt, the Comcast office got a fair desert. However, it is not for individual citizens in their private capacities to decide such matters. For one, this old curmudgeon might be biased against Comcast for some reason, she might be hateful in general, or outright insane. The same goes for the drunk driver; as it is, unfortunately, far too easy to think of a “reason” why two white men would want to beat and subdue an African-American without conventional legal recourse. Furthermore, if everyone could privately take action to right their own wrongs, it is easy to imagine how a back in forth would continue where the next logical step would be a whole fleet of Comcast trucks showing up and this senile desperado’s door to seek their revenge. Intranational nuclear war is the next obvious step. The fact of the matter is, vigilante justice is not fit for society, but rather, as many social contractarians note, the state of nature. In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, he describes the state of nature as a place where “every man hath a right to punish the offender, and be executioner of the law of nature.” In fact, Locke is far more optimistic about this natural state than Hobbes, yet only because he feels this natural state is governed by the law of reason. Even if Locke is right, it is nonetheless possible that vigilante justice can subvert the law of reason. In any case, we no longer live in the state of nature and, as Locke points out that it is “legislative and executive power of civil society, which is to judge by standing laws, how far offences are to be punished. Many benefits have been proposed that are said to arise from democracy, such as Kant’s idea that democracies do not fight with each other, thus leading to perpetual peace. Democracy, indeed freedom itself, does have its inevitable drawbacks, though. For democracy to even appear to work, people necessarily must give up natural freedoms in order to gain democratic ones. Increasingly, modern writers like Rousseau and Marx began to question whether it wasn’t actually industrialized economies and systems of labor and property which bound naturally free and content people, making the otherwise carefree state of nature seem objectionable. However, what is clear among most traditional political theorists—Dr. Phil excluded—is that, for good or bad, vigilante justice works outside and against the sovereignty of the ruling government (its political forms and figures) and other important foundations of society, such as the economic order. If the day ever comes when the masses feel as though it’s just and equitable to act in the manner of Phil’s dear old Comcast subscribing guest, it will become impossible to watch the Dr. Phil show. For one, televisions would be smuldering, broken in the rubbled remains of city streets, as individuals and sub-societal groups ravage each other in ever-escalating acts of revenge. Secondly, lacking the public remedy of courts, surely one of Phil’s many legal adversaries would make certain that McGraw would fail to see the full realization of the post-governmental state, existing, as it necessarily must, without citizens.

Seth Woolf is writing a blog entry about Dr. Phil

Tonight’s Dr. Phil was all about women posting “inappropriate” pictures of themselves (i.e. sexually provocative or evincing extensive drinking or illicit drug use) on facebook and myspace. Even more than usual, today’s episode exhibited Dr. Phil’s proclivity toward using sweeping generalizations and blatant logical fallacies as the foundation of his analyses, which might better be characterized as arguments, if not Philicies. The good doctor was especially fond of Ad Hominem (“Okay, but you drink and you’re seventeen!”), appeals to tradition (“You think most people see this as liberating?), false dilemmas (these girls either don’t know what they’re doing, or are making stupid decisions), guilt by association (“You don’t post the pictures, but you do run the facebook group!”), slippery slope (“you’re not gonna be able to get into any colleges, or get any jobs!”), biased sampling (“so, you went into a coma after hitting your head from drinking?”), and the straw man (“I don’t look at these pictures and see Susan B. Anthony”). Beyond these simple, generally theory-less critiques, there are also deep, philosophically disturbing problems with Dr. Phil’s contentions. First of all, there is a large thematic and circumstantial problem with Phil’s approach. For one, though occasionally advised guests and viewers to refrain from participating in wild, compromising behavior, his focus was much more on simply restraining oneself from posting pictures of such behavior on popular internet forums. As such, his argument is not, in fact, about ethics, aesthetics, or everyday behavior as such, but rather the mouthings of a tragically unhip Luddite. A Marxist analysis of this strange parsing is very elucidating. If an individual of relatively simple means and power posts such a revealing picture or written omission, it is quite damaging to job prospects, the social order, and even the rituals of courtship. If, one the other, a major corporation or commercial power (i.e. Harpo productions, CBS, etc.) reveals selective information or negatively portrays someone it is not only said to be permissible, it is in fact lauded as being beneficial. Consider this simple hypothetical: you are an employer combing through candidates to fill a position in your company. You have settled on two candidates. The first, Ms. A, had a strong interview, resume, and references, but she has a picture on facebook of her clearly intoxicated, and vomiting. The second, Mr. B, also had a strong interview, resume, and references, and though he has no facebook account, he did appear on the Dr. Phil show in an episode that focused on spousal abuse. If you had to choose one of these two candidates, you would probably choose Ms. A. Similarly, one could imagine a website where users can communicate with others, view pictures and even movies of dubious social behavior, and learn potentially sensitive information about a variety of people. Is this website facebook or myspace? Yes, quite possibly. On the other hand, it might just as easily be Dr. Phil’s website. I do not intend to mirror Dr. Phils Ad Hominem thesis with and Ad Hominem antithesis of my own, however, one must realize that transference and projection are both very valid and significant issues in Freudian, Marxist, and postmodern thought. Indeed, a more positive antithesis to Dr. Phil’s thesis would be not to criticize people who are honest and open about their personal life, while embracing technology and feeling psychologically at peace with themselves, but to instead chastise those who behave deplorably and yet hide their authentically human actions and attitudes. It might be more accurate to say these people—and we could even include Dr. Phil among their ranks—are the ones in society who are antisocial and plagued by a certain psychotic tendency to admonish their own faults visible in the more economically and socially exploitable positions. To delve into another area of theory, there are a great many places to go in terms of gender, sexuality, feminist, and queer theory. Along the lines of my previous reasoning, one could take a lot from Luce Irigaray’s essay “This Sex Which Is Not One” where she writes that “woman is traditionally use-value for man, exchange value among men. Merchandise, then.” Particularly as Dr. Phil tried to show that the pictures he found so distasteful made employment opportunities scarce and possibilities of relationships with people like the audience member Roco impossible, it seemed more and more like the argument had less to do with one’s mental state, ethical value, and aesthetic well-being and far more to do with value as a lifeless commercial object. Other feminists, such as Susan Moller-Okin see sex as biological while gender is performed, claiming that “public policies and laws should generally assume no social differentiation of the sexes” (Justice, Gender, and the Family 175). Clearly, this is not Dr. Phil’s way. It is, to put it mildly, offensive and deeply biased to ask Roco if he would want to date women he only knows through “inappropriate” facebook pictures. For one, it reinforces a societal emphasis on the female exterior, only caring about a woman’s interior when it’s being vomited up in plain view. It also fails to ask these individuals—and one cannot forget that they are individuals—if they would ever consider dating someone like Roco. While this could be characterized as a double standard, it might be more realistic, and more inhumane, to interpret it as the male gaze and the lack of a female voice that is so often criticized by feminists. Lastly, there is also a very real questions pertaining to queer theory here. In “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” Judith Butler writes that “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” and that “the psyche is not ‘in’ the body, but in the very signifying process through which that body comes to appear.” These women are most assuredly not displaying themselves as women being taken advantage of, and women who are basically disgusting outcasts. That is the act of interpreting their actions, it is the “fantasy” as much as the “gender presentation,” and it is a potentially damaging, not advantageous, to closet that which desires to roam free, despite consequences. When one really looks at the topic with a postmodern gaze, rather than a male or Bourgeoisie gaze, the question is not why these women have facebook and myspace pages with pictures detailing their life, but rather, why doesn’t Dr. Phil? If it isn’t clear already, the simple point is, it is Dr. Phil, not any guest, who is in a position to really hide something significant, serious, and horrendous.

(Ben)Jamin' with Dr. Phil: part 2?

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin asserts that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” (Illuminations 220). Benjamin goes further, pointing out that reproduction through mechanical processes also removes itself from the original and places the subsequent copies “into situations which would be out of reach for the original.” (Ibid). In the case of Dr. Phil episodes, this is particularly true. Imagine a guest sitting down and watching the show they appeared on during a repeat, a year or so later. If symptoms and psychoses have intensified, it is easy to see how the patient would feel manipulated, abandoned, and like a failure. If the condition originally complained of has improved, it is likewise easy to comprehend how a repeat could retrigger or reshape a latent disorder. This is, of course, not exactly replicated when an average viewer watches a repeat, or a first-run example of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin is adamant, however, that this is as true for a spectator as it is for a participant. It is what he calls the “aura” withering, becoming alienated, and losing its uniqueness (222). While this idea has comprehensive implications for all arts and communicative media, Benjamin is focusing on film. Just as film loses ritualistic value and the ability to interact with an audience, Dr. Phil’s program—as compared to a heretofore non-existent live theatre version of Dr. Phil—is embroiled in difficulties since Dr. Phil is psychoanalyzing and performing, not for real live people, but to a camera. The audience, as Benjamin points out, is put in the position of the critic, identifying with the unseen cameraman, seeing Dr. Phil only through his mechanical, impersonal eyes (228). While Dr. Phil claims that his show aims to help viewers at home (particularly children) as much as he tries to help guests, this is of course impossible in a true psychoanalytical sense. Dr. Phil has the most powerful and oppressive bodyguard conceivable in the camera, taking away the audience’s freedom and preventing two-way communication. Benjamin describes a consequence by positing that “the aura that envelops the actor disappears, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.” (229). The mechanical reproduction inherent in the television industry seems to analogously extinguish the aura to the person, the real humanness, of Dr. Phil. What is left? According to Benjamin it is the “spell of the personality” and “the phony spell of a commodity.” (231). The difference between a person and a star has nothing to do with their ability to communicate artistically and everything to do with whether or not they are being filmed. Film’s salvation is that it changes the methods of participation in a way that has positive, as well as negative, effects. It can be personal in a new, mechanical way in the sense that it is perhaps better adapted than any artistic medium to “mobilize the masses.” (240). If the Dr. Phil show is unsuccessful, then, it may have less to do with the capabilities and disabilities that follow the camera, and more to do with the limits of psychoanalysis. Unless one is speaking of a mass psychosis, a public and communal therapy is useless by its very nature. Benjamin ends his essay with a rather curious epilogue. Thinking of the essay as a quarreling over semantics or an arcane argument about aesthetics is shown to be completely false. In fact, as Benjamin makes clear, what is at stakes is far more serious: fascism, modern society, and war. Benjamin (a Marxist, of course) has a simple solution: “politicizing art.” (242). Dr. Phil’s politics are about as personal and overt as is his contact with the television audience. Following Benjamin’s model, Dr. Phil’s vague and cautious political aesthetic—“children are important!” and “craziness is bad!”—is the perfect fodder for a war-mongering fascist. The only question remaining is whether the aggressive Fascist of the future is today’s Dr. Phil or the viewers of his enduring repeats.