Literature and Surveillance Studies

Johnston, Katherine; Johnston, Katherine

Although researchers including James Rule, Gary Marx, and of course Michele Foucault were considering surveillance as a distinct field of study as early as the late 1970s, it was not until David Lyon convened a small group in the 1990s to launch the Surveillance Studies Network and its journal Surveillance and Society that “Surveillance Studies” became formalized as an interdisciplinary and transnational field. Since then the proliferation of computerization, the U.S. response to the attacks on 9/11, the rise of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019), advancements and investments in artificial intelligence, and rising techno-authoritarianism have all fueled further interest in the study of surveillance among academics, activists, and artists. In the past decade, literary scholarship on surveillance has pushed past its preoccupation with Orwell’s 1984 and its focus on privacy to consider the forms of algorithmic governance that are now characteristic of surveillance societies. This MLA special session proposes to build on the “literary turn” in surveillance studies that one submitter to this panel rightly describes as “well underway.” In fact, Surveillance and Society is poised to publish their first issue dedicated to literary studies this year. This panel would address how four contemporary authors (two novelists and two poets) work within or against what Kirstie Ball describes as the confines of the “surveillance imaginary” to understand and resist pervasive forms of digital surveillance.

Published almost a decade before Shoshanna Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, Ali Smith’s novel There but for the (2011) may be read as a prescient critique of datafication and its implications for subjectivity, democracy, and society. The novel centers on a dinner party which exposes the complicity of the guests in the deployment of surveillance across society, with for instance one character who helps the State turn immigrants and refugees into useful data and another who develops microdrones with potential military uses but whose company is mainly “emphasizing surveillance aspects for the domestic market.” The novel takes a decisive turn when Miles, an “ethical consultant,” locks himself in a bedroom and refuses to speak or leave – indefinitely. As in Herman Melville’s Bartleby (1856), Miles’s withdrawal gesture constitutes a glitch in the capitalistic machine and its actuarial logic. Claire Wrobel, Assistant Professor at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University, will argue in her paper that through this hitherto neglected intertextual relationship, the novel emphasizes the centrality of risk management, statistics, and profiling in the economic dimension of surveillance. This presentation will also probe possible modes of resistance in a society governed by a nascent form of surveillance capitalism.

Also arguing that surveillance is now algorithmic, Tyne Daile Sumner turns toward two contemporary poets–Solma Sharif and Gabriel Dozal–to consider how AI’s “political ecology” is inseparable from the material conditions of everyday surveillance. In the poetry of Sharif and Dozal the lyric becomes a place of transmutation, crossings, simulation, and refusal; a turning the tables on the algorithmic logics that inform emerging infrastructural arrangements behind migration, mass surveillance, deportation policy, social justice, resource extraction, the prison industrial complex, oppression of First Nations peoples, and a host of other contemporary crises. In Sumner’s original reading, both poets use the lyric to not only to address algorithmic infrastructures of the present, but to instantiate a new linguistic order at the interface of data, poetry, and political ecology. They initiate a novel way of thinking lyrically, across networks and nodes, between subjects and texts. Sumner’s paper theorizes the “networked lyric” as a critical site of interdisciplinary inquiry in addressing one of the most pressing infrastructural issues of the current moment — the ‘catastrophic event,’ to use Sharif’s term, of the algorithm.

Completing this panel is a reading of Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood (2024). Fiction about drones has remained largely understood in terms of the technology’s military contexts; although we now live in a second drone age of accessible civilian drone technology (Rogers, 2023) and we need to conceptualize a “specifically domestic drone theory” (Bradley and Cerella, 2019). Professor Beryl Pong’s reading of Birnham Wood argues that the latest instantiations of drone form reflect the drone’s relationship to broader networked surveillance infrastructures that underpin domestic life, particularly the novel’s backdrop of Big Tech and the climate crisis. Examining the intersection of unmanned technologies with what Timothy Bewes (2022) theorizes as the “thought” of the novel, Pong will consider how drone form manifests the logic and banalization of unmanned surveillance.

Together these three papers represent a critical shift in literature about surveillance to account for its everyday algorithmic forms and the creative confrontations they engender.

644 Literature and Surveillance Studies: Calls for Papers