From Seduction to Pornography

If some of the most important social consequences of tests flow from their representational character, others stem from the fact that they are devices of power. Testing is an outstanding example of the collusion and mutual extension of power and knowledge (expounded on by Foucault in nearly all his works), because testing as a technique for acquiring knowledge about people has simultaneously operated as a means to extend power over them. How this comes about is, in the most general terms, signaled in the clause of our definition stating that tests are applied by an agency to an individual with the intention of gathering information. Test givers are nearly always organizations, while test takers are individuals. Organizations are richer and stronger than individuals, so a power differential is established at the start.^[21] The asymmetrical relation of power is further evident from the total control that the test-giving agency exercises over the situation. The individual is required to submit passively while the agency extracts the information it wants in order to use it for its own purposes.

Compare this situation with how persons are otherwise known. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , Erving Goffman examined how the person seeks to manipulate the impressions that others form of oneself and thereby to exert some measure of control over the social situations in which one participates through a process of creative and selective masking and revela-

tion of the self.^[22] The self so presented is typically a nuanced character, evincing a unique pattern of abilities, temperament, and preferences. It is also variable, for depending on the circumstances and ends in view, one may present a self that is forthright and businesslike, or playful, or vindictive, or seductive, or enigmatic, and so on.

The capacity of the self to adopt such a rich variety of roles in social life is grounded in "privileged access." This term refers to the idea that other people have no direct knowledge of what is going on in someone's mind—one's thoughts, desires, day-dreams, fantasies, jealousies, and hidden agendas. The notion that the self can exclude all others from this inner sanctum (except, in some religious persuasions, God) ensures the ultimate uncertainty or mystery that the self can parlay into selective, creative, and variable presentations in the social world. Obviously, if this mystery were dispelled and all one's inner states were transparent to others, one's ability to mold one's public image would be drastically curtailed.

The effect of testing is precisely to dispel that mystery. Testing thwarts privileged access, intruding unchaperoned into the private realm formerly controlled by the self as gatekeeper and monitor of information. We have seen in earlier chapters how such intrusion is the explicit goal of lie detection, but it also occurs in somewhat subtler forms in all kinds of testing. Intelligence tests probe one's cognitive faculties, personality tests profile one's temperamental and emotional state, and drug tests provide information about possible private habits, proclivities, and activities. Production and presentation of knowledge about the self comes under the control of test givers. The self is no longer able, in a test situation, to temper or embellish it. Whatever tempering and embellishing takes place now stems from the tests themselves, which, as we have seen, regularly redefine or even fabricate the qualities they are intended to measure. If the artful presentation of Goffman's self is seductive, what happens in testing is, to borrow a simile from Jean Baudrillard, pornographic.^[23] Pornography differs from seduction in that the individual fixed by the pornographic gaze is powerless to conceal, control, or nuance anything. She or he is displayed for the observer's inspection,

recreation, probing, and penetration in whatever way satisfies his or her purely selfish purposes.

The development of testing is an outstanding example of Foucault's thesis that power has been evolving in the direction of increasing efficiency, subtlety, and scope. Tests are applied ever more frequently for an expanding array of purposes. Especially remarkable is that people have increasingly found themselves in the position where they feel their only recourse is to ask, even to insist, that they undergo the pornographic scrutiny of tests. Power has become refined indeed when people demand that they be subjected to it.

In medieval times, this was limited to circumstances in which a person was suspected or accused of some wrongdoing and would demand trial by ordeal or by battle as a means of exoneration. A similar situation exists today when people under investigation by law enforcement agencies or employers, or who feel the need to lend credence to some important statement they have made, demand a lie detector test in an effort to bolster their veracity. The polygraphing of Anita Hill in connection with her accusation of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings in 1991 is a case in point. People also request or demand drug tests in circumstances of individualized suspicion. An example occurred in 1990 when a Northwest Airlines pilot was called in at the last minute as a substitute to take a flight from Detroit to Atlanta. While they were waiting for him, a woman (recollecting an incident that had occurred six weeks earlier, when three Northwest Airlines pilots were arrested on charges of drunkenness after they landed a plane in Minneapolis) speculated to the other passengers that the delay was probably due to his being drunk or partying. Learning of her statements, the pilot refused to take off until blood and urine tests proved that he was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.^[24]

While people still demand to be exonerated by authenticity tests, as they did centuries ago, modern lie detector and drug tests are much less violent than ordeal by water or hot iron, they involve less expenditure of public resources, and they are used in a wider range of circumstances. This is in line with Foucault's claim that

power has developed in the direction of lighter, more efficient, and more pervasive application. Most important in this regard, contemporary authenticity testing advanced beyond the medieval forms when it burst the limitations of individualized suspicion. No one would demand trial by ordeal or by battle unless they had been accused of some specific misdeed. But with the development of preemployment, periodic, and random lie detection and drug testing, the pool of potential test takers expanded to include people in general, who are suspected of having committed some as yet undiscovered wrongdoing. The advance from individualized to generalized suspicion as grounds for tests vastly increased the number of people who are subject to them and who, therefore, are brought under the exercise of power.

The law has supported the expansion of drug testing to cover those under generalized suspicion, with a number of recent court decisions sustaining random testing. And if testing of hair should become popular, it would constitute an advance beyond urinalysis and blood tests both in efficiency and simplicity in procedures for sample collection and in the period over which drug use could be monitored. In contrast, mechanical lie detector testing in circumstances of generalized suspicion was drastically cut back by the federal antipolygraph law of 1988. Although this deflected the growth trajectory of authenticity testing, it did not stop it. Written integrity tests are filling the breach created by the curtailment of polygraph testing,^[25] and the result is likely to be a net gain for authenticity testing. While written tests are largely limited to preemployment testing,^[26] from the perspective of efficiency and economy, they are far superior to polygraph tests. The latter require an hour or more of one-on-one contact between examiner and subject, while the standardized format of written tests allows them to be given to subjects either individually or in groups of any size. This, together with the fact that they can be machine graded in a matter of seconds, makes written integrity tests much cheaper than polygraph tests (often under $10 per test as opposed to $50 to $100). Hence they have a growth potential considerably beyond that ever enjoyed by polygraph testing.

If one were to imagine the next step in the perfection of power by testing, it would be for people to request that they be tested in

circumstances of generalized suspicion, as they already ask to be tested when they are under individualized suspicion. At first glance, such a development seems preposterous. Why would anyone demand a test to prove that they are not doing something that nobody accuses or specifically suspects them of doing in the first place? To bring this about would mark a truly ingenious extension of power.

Claims for it have actually been made on behalf of lie detection, but they are not convincing. A high-ranking police officer who manages lie detection in a metropolitan department told me that the police welcome the polygraph screen they all must pass as part of their training, because it bolsters the esprit de corps of the force as a fraternity of outstanding individuals, honest and true. But when I raised this possibility with one of the lower-ranking members of this police fraternity—who was more on the receiving than the giving end of polygraph tests—his answer was a terse and unequivocal, "Bullshit." Again, Zales jewelry chain has argued that polygraph tests boost employee morale because they assure that one's co-workers, superiors and subordinates, are honest people. This is welcome news to employees because it eliminates worry that company profits (and, therefore, one's benefits from the employee profit sharing plan) are being ripped off by unscrupulous fellow workers.^[27] But this information comes from the personnel director at Zales rather than from employees themselves. And even if this were a correct characterization of employee attitudes, at most it would mean that they approve a policy of lie detector tests on the basis of individualized suspicion. There is no suggestion that Zales employees make specific requests to be tested unless they are identified as suspects.

It falls to drug testing actually to achieve this next step in the extension of power: getting people positively to endorse—on occasion, even specifically to request—tests of themselves even when no suspicion has been directed against them. One case in point has to do with the use of steroids by athletes. It is widely recognized that steroids enhance performance in many events. Athletes who observe the ban against steroids in their own training are deeply concerned that their competitors who use steroids gain an unfair advantage. The several college athletes whom I

interviewed on this issue expressed the opinion that the only way to be sure that no athletes use steroids is to test all of them. One individual stressed the importance of dealing with this issue early and recommended that the testing begin in high school. The strategy to deter steroid use by testing athletes universally or at random is currently in effect for the Olympics, NCAA events, and as part of the policies governing intercollegiate athletics at many universities. Most important for the present analysis, many if not most athletes approve that strategy although it requires that they themselves submit to testing. In this case, then, the level of power has been achieved where people gladly submit themselves to testing in the absence of individualized suspicion.

Moving to street drugs, the students of Oklahoma's Bennington High School enlisted in the war on drugs with such fervor that they decided to make themselves an example of a school that is 100 percent drug free. To prove it, the entire student body (all seventy-five of them) voluntarily took drug tests. They all passed, and as evidence of their continuing commitment, 10 percent of them selected at random are to be tested again each month. Here is a situation in which people who are under no individualized suspicion of drug use positively ask to be tested. The students proudly wear black T-shirts that proclaim, "Drug Free Youth"; 15-year-old sophomore Christie Wilson gushed, "I just hope that they start doing this drug test all over."^[28]

There are some signs of her wish coming true. As discussed above, Chicago's St. Sabina Academy conducts random drug tests of sixth through eighth graders, although drugs have not been a problem within the school. Parents welcomed the move. Their most common response when the program was proposed was, why not begin in kindergarten?

How can we analyze people's willingness to display themselves to the scrutiny of drug tests when they are not suspected of using drugs? In cases of individualized suspicion, a person is already in some degree of trouble, and the offer to take a test is made as an effort to clear oneself. The individual submits to the application of power represented by the test, that is to say, to escape from a present threat. Someone who volunteers to take a test when not under individual suspicion would seem to be under

far less compulsion. That is not the case, however. Power works more subtly here, but no less insistently. What is not a present threat may quickly become one. After a policy has been adopted for voluntary testing of a group, any member of that group (e.g., a student at Bennington High School) who declines to "volunteer" for the test is immediately suspected of having something to hide. The choices become either to submit to the test now in order to avoid being brought under individualized suspicion or to submit to it later in an effort to clear oneself of individualized suspicion.

This reasoning does not account for those who take the lead in movements to encourage voluntary testing or for individuals who are anxious to submit to testing when they do not belong to a group that brings pressure on them to do so. Probably some of them are ingenuous. The gravity of the drug problem, the imperative to win the war on drugs, impresses itself on them so overwhelmingly that they believe extraordinary measures are necessary in the face of a monstrous threat. Hence they willingly open themselves to the power of testing and work to get others to do the same in the name of a great cause that justifies compromising the control they exercise over the collection and promulgation of information about themselves. Others may be more cynical and perceive the war on drugs as an opportunity for self-advancement. A political figure who calls for voluntary drug testing can garner publicity and gain the reputation as a diligent and fearless public servant who demands decisive action against the evil lurking at our very doorsteps. Moreover, the tactic is politically safe. Voluntary drug testing does not call for a significant outlay of funds, and it plays on the acute anxiety about drug abuse that has dominated the media and public opinion in recent years. It is not difficult to dismiss the civil libertarians who carp about invasion of privacy as being soft on drugs and pointedly ask why they should oppose voluntary testing unless they have something to hide.

Authenticity testing has been unmasked here as a technique for maintaining people under surveillance and insidiously transforming them into docile and unwitting subjects of an expanding disciplinary technology of power. What steps can be taken to curtail this threat to the autonomy and dignity of the individual?

I have argued that the expansion of surveillance and coercion exercised by authenticity testing has largely been a story of the increasing application of the tests to people who are under generalized rather than individualized suspicion. It follows that the harmful effects of these tests would be greatly reduced if that development were reversed. Quite simply, then, my suggestion is that authenticity tests be strictly limited to circumstances of individualized suspicion.

One effect of this proposal would be to extend the provisions of the Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988 (EPPA). That act outlaws most lie detector tests by polygraph and other mechanical devices in the private sector. It should be expanded to cover the few private industries now exempted. Most important, governmental agencies should be brought under the act, for at present it does not apply to them, and local, state, and federal agencies may use lie detector tests in any way they wish.

In the wake of the EPPA, integrity tests given in written and other forms have flourished in the private sector. These too would be eliminated by my proposal. Some preliminary steps have already been taken in that direction, but efforts to control integrity tests by legislation crafted along the lines of the EPPA are complicated by the fact that it is difficult to construct a watertight definition of them.^[29] The EPPA uses a technological definition, proscribing tests that use a mechanical device such as a polygraph machine or psychological stress evaluator. A technological definition is problematic for integrity tests because some of them are taken in written form, others at a computer terminal, and still others orally either by direct interview or over the telephone. The publishers of many of them do not even acknowledge that they are tests, choosing instead to designate them by a wide variety of terms such as "survey," "inventory," or "audit." The policy recommended here that authenticity testing be limited to cases of individualized suspicion avoids this definitional problem because it focuses not on what the tests are but on how and when they are used. It would virtually terminate integrity tests, because they are used almost exclusively in circumstances of generalized suspicion, most especially preemployment testing.

Adoption of this proposal would also bring about drastic reductions in drug testing. Preemployment, periodic, and random tests would be eliminated, for these are all conducted on the basis of generalized rather than individualized suspicion. The only legitimate circumstance for a drug test would be for cause: when there is good reason to suspect from an individual's behavior that the person is under the influence of drugs.^[30] There are certain encouraging developments in this direction. As of July 1991, fourteen states had enacted legislation regulating drug testing by private employers. So far as current employees are concerned, a trend toward rejecting testing on the basis of generalized suspicion is visible:

Most of the statutes provide that before requiring drug testing of an employee, the employer must have a reasonable suspicion that the employee is impaired to the point of affecting job performance.^[31]

The statutes allow drug tests of job applicants without individualized suspicion, but Montana, at least, restricts such preemployment tests to those applying for jobs involving security, public safety, a hazardous work environment, or fiduciary responsibility.^[32]

Implementation of my recommendation would dramatically change the landscape of authenticity testing, and energetic opposition would inevitably be forthcoming from a coalition of interests committed to it. Those with an economic stake are the people and organizations that conduct and market the tests. Politicians who play on public fears about crime and drugs and who use outspoken support for testing as a way to draw attention to themselves and to obtain votes have a political interest in perpetuating authenticity testing. Those with an ideological commitment may be divided into two categories. One is composed of social scientists and others imbued with a positivistic creed that any and all means of acquiring and applying scientific information about people and society should be encouraged as contributions to social progress. The other includes persons of an authoritarian turn of mind who explicitly or implicitly operate on the assumption that people in general are not to be trusted and that

society is best served by firm controls that keep human impulses and liberty in check.

Although the opposition would be formidable, with sufficient resolve, a policy to restrict authenticity testing to cases of individualized suspicion could be implemented in the short term. The reason is that authenticity testing is not yet inextricably woven into the fabric of society. Few other institutions are dependent on it, and therefore it could be drastically reduced with minimal effect on the social structure. Drug testing, for example, is a recent phenomenon. The socioeconomic system got along without it quite adequately some ten years ago, when drug use was actually more prevalent in the United States than it is today. A general policy shift prohibiting preemployment, periodic, and random drug tests would have little effect on hiring and promotion practices, other than to make them less complicated and less expensive. Lie detection by polygraph was never massively practiced in the workplace, and its demise with the passage of the EPPA has not brought private business to its knees. Integrity testing has only been practiced in the last few years, and there has not been time for other business institutions to become systemically dependent on it. Terminating it before it becomes established would not produce major disruptions in personnel practices except, again, to save business the time and expense of giving the tests.

Implementing the policy would, however, require some explicit state or even national commitment in the form of a general agreement among employers or legislation. Organizations are reluctant to cease (or not to commence) authenticity testing in preemployment and other circumstances of generalized suspicion for several reasons. As has been demonstrated, they get the notion that they have to test because otherwise, with everyone else testing, drug abusers and criminals would flock to them. Again, if some organizations routinely conduct preemployment, periodic, and random tests for drugs and/or integrity, those that do not test feel vulnerable in case of accidents or losses to lawsuits claiming that they did not take reasonable precautions. That is, one of the strongest reasons organizations test is the fact that others do. They conclude that they must expend the time and money to conduct authenticity tests out of generalized suspicion not be-

cause they anticipate any particular benefits in productivity but in self-defense. General consensus or legislation on the policy to restrict authenticity testing to cases of individualized suspicion would defang that incentive.