Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood - Hardcover

Rosen, David; Santesso, Aaron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300155417 ISBN 13: 9780300155419

Verlag: Yale University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Spanning nearly 500 years of cultural and social history, this book examines the ways that literature and surveillance have developed together, as kindred modern practices. As ideas about personhood--what constitutes a self--have changed over time, so too have ideas about how to represent, shape, or invade the self. The authors show that, since the Renaissance, changes in observation strategies have driven innovations in literature; literature, in turn, has provided a laboratory and forum for the way we think about surveillance and privacy. Ultimately, they contend that the habits of mind cultivated by literature make rational and self-aware participation in contemporary surveillance environments possible. In a society increasingly dominated by interlocking surveillance systems, these habits of mind are consequently necessary for fully realized liberal citizenship.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Rosen is associate professor of English at Trinity College, and Aaron Santesso is associate professor of Literature at Georgia Tech.

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THE Watchman in Pieces

SURVEILLANCE, LITERATURE, AND LIBERAL PERSONHOOD

By DAVID ROSEN, AARON SANTESSO

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Yale University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-15541-9

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................
ix
Introduction...............................................................
1
1 The Retreat of Allegory..................................................
18
2 The Liberal Panopticon...................................................
53
3 Inviolate Personality....................................................
105
4 The Return of Allegory...................................................
157
5 Towards a Theory of Liberal Reading......................................
223
Notes......................................................................
283
Index......................................................................
343

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Retreat of Allegory

    I. ALLEGORICAL CULTURE

      Others there are
    Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty,
    Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
    And throwing but shows of service on their lords,
    Do well thrive by them; and when they have lin'd their coats,
    Do themselves homage. These fellows have some soul,
    And such a one do I profess myself. For, sir,
    Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago.
    In following him, I follow but myself.
    Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
    But seeming so, for my peculiar end;
    For when my outward action doth demonstrate
    The native act and figure of my heart
    In complement extern, 'tis not long after
    But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
    For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

Few passages, even in the vast output of a writer so centrallyconcerned with questions of role-playing, of performance, andmasquerade, suggest a looming crisis in the nature of personality asstrongly as this one. Barely fifty lines into Othello, Iago is assuring hispatsy Roderigo that he means the title character no good: though heappears to serve Othello as a faithful ensign, he follows but himself, forhis own "peculiar end." As often in Shakespeare, when a character tries toarticulate the split between his own desires and the social role he mustplay, Iago toys with tropes of interiority and exteriority: in contrast to the"forms and visages of duty," "outward action," and "complement extern,"he posits a soul, heart, and self, which only heaven can see and judge.Iago's usual rhetorical strategy, however, is to begin with clear distinctionsand then muddy the waters—which is precisely what happens here. Inhindsight, his "peculiar end," which he never bothers to explain toRoderigo, turns out to be far more peculiar than his flat understatementwould let on. And his comment "were I the Moor, I would not be Iago"sounds logical (not to say obvious) but is sufficiently vague as to supportall manner of interpretation: would he rather be Othello than himself? Ishe saying he wouldn't need to be duplicitous if he were as well-off (ornaïve?) as Othello? Is he making a more banal point about personal identity?Part of Iago's purpose, surely, is to confuse Roderigo (even theDramatis Personae dismisses him as "a gull'd gentleman"), but we wouldsuggest that something additional is happening: a discomfort with theimplications of the inner/outer distinction itself, which finally findsexpression in pure contradiction: "I am not what I am."

Commentators have always recognized this line as an importantmoment in the play, an early glimpse into Iago's depravity. Most editionsdutifully note that he is blaspheming, revealing himself as a kind of devilfigure; in Exodus 3, God defines himself to Moses as follows: "I AM THAT IAM.... Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent meunto you." Beyond that, however, most readers silently translate the lineto mean "I am not what I seem"—this despite the fact that the word "seem"was fully available to Shakespeare (it appears five lines earlier). By sotranslating it, we would argue, readers miss the truly uncanny thrill thatmust have seized Shakespeare's first audiences. That is to say: the twohalves of Iago's inner/outer equation—the two iterations of "I am"—areequally true and valid and yet somehow in contradiction to each other.Neither can claim ontological precedence, which would be precisely theeffect of substituting "seem" for the second "am." The writer with thelargest vocabulary in English has run into a conceptual problem for whichhis language is inadequate. Critics of early modernism who take interiorityand selfhood as their special focus have long understood thismoment as a crux, but while we concur with Stephen Greenblatt'scomment that " 'I am not what I am' goes beyond social feigning," wecannot endorse his conclusion that Iago in fact possesses no essential self.

"I am not what I am" suggests that this elusiveness [i.e., atthe center] is permanent, that even self-interest, whosetranscendental guarantee is the divine "I am what I am," is amask. Iago's constant recourse to narrative then is both theaffirmation of absolute self-interest, and the affirmation ofabsolute vacancy.

This conclusion fuels a powerful, Lacan-inflected reading of the play as awhole: Iago's inner vacancy makes him particularly adept at entering intothe discourses of others. A monster of empathy, he destroys his victimsfrom within. And yet to read Iago as a cipher, we would argue, meansunderestimating, anachronistically, Shakespeare's deep investment inboth halves of Iago's line: if anything, Iago suffers from too much selfhood,not the reverse. Behind Iago's seeming self-contradiction lurksneither nihilism nor a Lacanian specter, but rather a confusion over howone should recognize the truth about oneself and other people: a problemin the nature of allegory.

Allegory and Personhood

Proposition: Renaissance culture was allegorical, and (to skip severalsteps ahead in the argument) this insured that modern surveillance practiceswould not develop until a new dispensation could take hold. Bycalling the Renaissance "allegorical" we are not making the obvious pointthat allegory was the dominant literary option from (confining ourselvesto Britain) Langland to Spenser; if that were the case, one could as easilydescribe Augustan England as "satirical" and the Victorian period as abaggy triple-decker. Nor, for that matter, are we claiming that theRenaissance was particularly conducive (though it most certainly was)to the production of literary allegory. We are not, finally, interested inquestions about allegory as a genre per se, but instead are arguing thatallegory, as a mode, involves certain habits of thought, observation, andways of organizing reality that are as operative in everyday life—socially,politically, ideologically—as in the aesthetic structure of a poem...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Yale University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0300155417
• ISBN 13: 9780300155419
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 376
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland