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

Rosen, David; Santesso, Aaron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300155417 ISBN 13: 9780300155419

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 orpainting. In the pages that follow, we will examine the ways that anallegorical state of mind, as an act of imagination, implied certain ways ofunderstanding the interiority of other people—and by extension provokedcertain ways of watching them and of behaving towards them in general.The Renaissance State read and understood its subjects allegorically, asdid the subjects themselves—and it is largely in revolt against thesemodes of understanding that modern strategies of observation (and thepolitics that came with them) took shape.

Our assertion would be tendentious enough were the nature ofallegory a matter of general consent—which is hardly the case. On theface of things, this might seem an esoteric concern—but in fact the briefhistory we are about to offer establishes the premises, and reveals thestakes, for most of the claims (about surveillance, about society, aboutselfhood) that we will be making in the book. Few definitions are asprofoundly adequate and deeply misleading as Angus Fletcher's well-knownattempt: "In the simplest terms, allegory says one thing andmeans another. It destroys the normal expectation we have aboutlanguage, that our words 'mean what they say.'" In a note, Fletcherexplains that he is simply breaking the word down to its Greek roots,"from allos + agoreuein (other + speak openly, speak in the assembly ormarket)." The "otherness" of allegory is infinitely complicated, however,by its "didactic function," its basic need for a "common culture ofmeaning." To take a very simple and famous example from the twentiethcentury: Orwell's Animal Farm is a transparent allegory depicting thecourse of the Russian Revolution from its idealistic beginnings to itsauthoritarian conclusion. To be effective, the novel's narrative of rebelliouslivestock and human owners must be recognized as allegory, andthe significance of each character made perfectly clear to the reader (e.g.,Napoleon the pig is Joseph Stalin); otherwise it just comes across as theconfusing and depressing tale of an extremely dysfunctional barnyard.Without a common culture of meaning, an audience that understandsOrwell's point and which is open to his didactic purpose (in this casecondemnation), the whole project collapses. At the same time one mightask: if Orwell wishes to write about Soviet Russia, why is he botheringwith goats and donkeys? He is saying one thing and meaning somethingquite different, and it's only natural to wonder what worries or hesitationshave prevented him from writing more directly. Even allegories that,unlike Animal Farm, succeed aesthetically on the surface level and do notrequire an awareness of ulterior meaning to give pleasure carry thisresidue of concealment and anxiety. In short, allegory, as a way of takingin the world, is naturally riven by competing centripetal and centrifugalforces; the basic allegorical unit is a sign/signified dyad, which, at anymoment, can either be ripped apart by otherness or collapsed into amonad by the sheer demand for coherence.

Within a broad consensus about the structure of allegory, however,there is little agreement about its purpose or how it functions. Since theallegorical image is always being forced in two directions—pulled towardsdissolution and pushed towards collapse, incomprehensibility or reductivesimplicity—it is not surprising that critics disagree over which directionis the more important. One side of the debate: allegory appeared ineleventh-century Europe as a naïve, primitive form of psychologicalwriting. Lacking a language of interiority but wishing to depict strongemotions, writers like Chrétien de Troyes were forced to use personifiedabstractions (e.g., "Reason," "Love"), a process that survives today, insomewhat debased form, as the angel and devil who appear on oppositeshoulders every time you find yourself alone with a cookie jar. The angeland devil are comic only because a vocabulary of inwardness exists now todescribe what you are feeling ("I am hungry and can get away with it"; "Itis wrong to steal cookies from crying four-year-olds")—a language thatostensibly did not exist at the moment allegory appeared in the ChristianWest. Ultimately, for critics who see allegory as primarily didactic, theallos, the otherness inherent in allegory, is almost incidental compared tothe genre's requirement to speak openly, vividly, forcefully. For allegory,on this model, to succeed, the relation between sign and signified mustbe transparent, or better yet, invisible; today the angel and devil fail (orsucceed only ironically) precisely because they strike us as representations—andgrotesquely inadequate ones at that. Allegory may say onething and mean another, but the experience of allegory, as with all powerfulmetaphor, should be unitary: the sign and signified are one thing. Withconsciousness of difference, allegory dies.

Not unexpectedly, a second (and much more numerous) group oftheorists is content to let the metaphor die and admire the exquisitecorpse. For this group, allegory is the trope of otherness par excellence, inwhich meaning is generated precisely out of the disconnect betweentenor and vehicle (Joseph Stalin, Napoleon the pig). In Walter Benjamin'sclassic account of German baroque allegory, the sheer outlandishnessand complexity of allegorical imagery is purposely confusing: by steadfastlyresisting transparency, it foregrounds its own inadequacy as metaphor,its own brokenness, and points to a transcendent, ineffable reality, a"singularity," as one later critic has put it, beyond human expression.From this viewpoint, however, it is easy enough to plot an even moreradical course and dismiss the transcendent altogether. For rhetoricaltheorists like Paul de Man, allegory is simply the principle underlyinga failure in all language at every moment: the tenor/vehicle disconnectis a spectacular and overt instance of the way all words fail to signifyadequately objects in the world. As one might expect, most accounts ofallegory finally stake out a position somewhere between the twoextremes—or else attempt to explain how both extremes might simultaneouslybe true. That is, in its didactic project, allegory (1) generates meaningby masking the gap between sign and signified, i.e., through profoundcoherence, and (2) generates meaning by foregrounding the very samegap, i.e., through incoherence. To recognize that centripetal and centrifugalforces are always at work in allegory is to acknowledge the mode'scomplex flexibility and helps explain its persistent appeal, in somequarters, as a way of thinking.

To this conversation, we would add a modest suggestion: while theopposing forces within allegory must, certainly, be understood synchronically(i.e., they are always tugging against each other), they should also beunderstood diachronically—in short, historically. Chrétien worked in theeleventh century, Benjamin focuses on the seventeenth; it is almost banalto conclude that the intervening years saw a gradual process, whereby thecentripetal tendencies of allegory gradually weakened (without ever quitedisappearing) and the centrifugal forces grew stronger. To give a sense ofhow this process took place and why it is germane to the history of surveillancein the West, we can offer a just-so story, which probably has thevirtue of being true. C. S. Lewis is persuasive in his claim that allegoricalpersonages first emerged as the projections of inner emotions—Envy,Faith, and so on—that could not otherwise be articulated, whose interactionscould not otherwise be depicted. As psychological entities, theycould hardly be called "ideological" in the usual sense of the word, and thegap between tenor and vehicle would be nearly (or entirely) imperceptible.The act of projecting these emotions, however, also had aninevitable abstracting, reifying effect: to give these entities a shape andform outside the mind meant also eventually recognizing them as alienor other—and, most important, as susceptible to creative reuse. Reason,Love, Envy, and Faith may first have carried no overt dogmatic charge—butit would only have been a matter of time (very little time) before theirdidactic potential was recognized and allegory put to the service of a beliefsystem: the Catholic Church, medieval statecraft, etc. A more convenientand powerful propaganda mechanism could hardly be imagined.

In no time at all, allegory, which had begun as the projection of somethinginternal, would be returned to the self as something external: therepresentation of an ideology, as well as a practical way of putting peoplein their place. But although this process of alienation and impositionmust have begun almost immediately, its full effects would have takencenturies to ramify. Indeed, since the process was at least partly unconscious,it would be perfectly logical to expect long periods during whichthe nature of the allegorical image (mental figment or didactic emblem?self or other?) was a matter of sincere confusion. One need only recallnumerous passages in Piers Plowman where the characters Will encountersseem at some moments projections of his persona but at others takeon an unnerving and completely autonomous life of their own. It's anambiguity that persists as late as Spenser, though by Spenser's timethings have largely shifted towards the alien. Most important, this periodof ambiguity—during which allegory could be strongly didactic and yetstill seem unitary, during which, that is, the residue of allegory's originseffectively masked its increasing tendentiousness and concealed its dualnature—was also the high point of its true influence as a mode.

It was a situation that could not possibly last, and by the earlyRenaissance, dissolution was well underway. The effect can be likened toa loss of innocence, which is particularly visible in allegorical writing: asthe audience became aware of the genre's didactic intentions, as the audience'scredulity about the allegorical image turned to skepticism, certainpredictable effects followed. As a performance, allegory became at oncemore coercive and spectacular. Faced with increasing resistance, allegoryneeded to grow more insistent, thus producing still stronger resistanceand driving a dialectic that could only end in catastrophe. At the sametime, in its hopeless attempt to sustain belief, allegory could not insistovertly: it had to conceal its purposes behind ever more extravagant,and therefore potentially opaque, imagery. To borrow an analogy frompsychoanalysis: the more unspeakable the latent desires, the morefantastic and bizarre the manifest display. Thus the intensification of lateRenaissance allegory, culminating in The Faerie Queene, its consciousperversions of transparent signification, its inclusion of characters whocan assume multiple forms and meanings—but with that intensificationa plummeting ability to command belief. Meanwhile, an analogous anddialectically related process was occurring beyond the immediate reach ofliterature, in the realm of individual personality. If allegory first appeared,and was accepted, as a projection of inner states, it was inevitable that theincreasingly alien and ideological forms allegory later took, especiallywhen directed by the State towards its citizens, would be experienced asinadequate to the self; indeed, the more strenuously allegory attempted toimpose a model of selfhood from without, the greater impetus peoplewould naturally feel to understand their inmost beings as entirely separatefrom external forces. Allegory would thus have contributed to two socialdevelopments in ironic contrast to its principal goals as a politicalideology. First, the development of a new kind of interiority, which criticsat least since Burckhardt have seen as a defining characteristic of theRenaissance, and which others have seen as equally pivotal to theProtestant Reformation: a new tendency to see inner identity as somethingfundamentally different from social persona. Second, a new abilityto view Church and State, the key ideological agents in society, criticallyand with detachment; to view Church and State as the (often hostile)determinants of one's social role, but not one's very selfhood; to viewsociety as something objectively separate from the self.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE Watchman in Pieces by DAVID ROSEN. Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300155417
• ISBN 13: 9780300155419
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352