Contemporary Sociology 7(5) (September 1978):566—68. When the intellectual history of our times comes to be written, that peculiarly Left Bank mixture of Marxism and structuralism now in fashion will be among the most puzzlingofourideastoevaluate.Aliteral “archeology of knowledge” (the title of one of Foucault’s earlier books) will be required to sort out the valuable from the obvious rubbish. I suspect that in this exercise the iconographers of the present (like Barthes) will fare less well than those who have read the past. Of such “historians” (a description which does not really cover his method) Foucault is the most dazzlingly creative. Discipline and Punish (which, shamefully, has taken over two years to be translated into English) follows Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1971) as the next stage in Foucault’s massive project of tracing the genealogy of control institutions (asylums, teaching hospitals, prisons) and the human sciences symbiotically linked with them (psychiatry, clinical medicine, criminology, penology). His concern throughout is the relationship between power and knowledge, the articulation of each on the other. Here (as he makes explicit in an interview recently published in the English journal, Radical Philosophy) he opposes the humanist position that, once we gain power, we cease to know——it makes us blind—— and that only those who keep their distance from power, who are no way implicated in tyranny, can attain the truth. For Foucault, such forms of knowledge as psychiatry and criminology (with its “garrulous discourses” and “intermidable [sic] repetitions”) are directly related to the exercise of power. Power itself creates new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. Thus to “liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism” can only be a slogan. Placing such programmatic Big Issues on one side, though, a superficial first reading of the book mightstartatthelevelofitssubtitle, “The Birth of the Prison.” The key historical transition——at the end of the eighteenth century——is from punishment as torture, a public spectacle, to the more economically and politically discreet prison sentence. The body as the major target of penal repression disappears: within a few decades, the grisly spectacles of torture, dismemberment, exposure, amputation, and branding are over. Interest is transferred from the body to the mind; a coercive, solitary, and secret mode of punishment replaces one that was representative, scenic, and collective. Gone is the liturgy of torture and execution, where the triumph of the sovereign was symbolized in the processions, halts at crossroads, public readings of the sentence even after death, where the criminal’s corpse was exhibited or burnt. In its place comes a whole technology of subtle power. When punishment leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters into abstract consciousness, it does not become less effective. But its effectiveness arises from its inevitability not its horrific theatrical intensity. The new power is not to punish less but to In Retrospect: 1978 29

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0094306118815499a

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison:

Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched

What hath Harvey wrought? In 1932 Sir Paul Harvey edited the first version of this “useful companion to ordinary everyday readers of English literature” (Harvey 1932, p.v). Harvey provided a guide to writers, some of their writings, some allusions, places, and some other information pertinent to an informed appreciation of English literature. Because of the nature of the work—the one‐volume companion—Harvey made the decision to eschew “Completeness in a moderate compass, and the equipment of a specialist at all points” (ibid.).

The Oxford Companion to English Literature

Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination

The City and the City

Over the last few decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have come together to contribute to the field of Surveillance Studies, which explores the relationship between humans and surveillance technology. Traditionally, this field has been dominated by the social sciences with little contribution from the humanities.In the last few years, however, this has begun to change as the importance of the humanities, and literature especially, to the discipline has been acknowledged. The relationship between humans and surveillance has been continually explored in dystopian literature and film since the twentieth century, as surveillance technology has become an important part of human existence. Dystopian fiction frequently engages with the subject of surveillance as this genre is inherently political and concerned with issues such as autonomy, identity and power struggles. This thesis will bring together dystopian fiction, surveillance theory, critical posthumanism, biopower and spatial geography. In the following analysis, it will become apparent how dystopian fiction can provide original ways of conceptualising how the human body and society as a collective can be controlled and manipulated through surveillance methods, which collapse the boundaries between the public and private spheres. Dystopian fiction from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will be analysed in chronological order, alongside surveillance theory, in order to establish how each text builds on images and metaphors from previous novels to create a palimpsest of dystopian references regarding surveillance. The literary texts will also be examined using a spatial framework that investigates the portrayal of surveillance technology in public spaces (the city and the work place) and private spaces (the home and the body). This will establish how the boundaries between the public and the private spheres, as well as the societal body and the individual body, are collapsed, in the novels, through surveillance methods, which result in individuals being increasingly monitored and controlled. Contrary to what many surveillance theorists suggest, this thesis will argue that digital technology did not cause surveillance methods to become more fluid, decentralised and participatory; it did, however, cause an intensification of these surveillance methods which were already in place. The frightening conclusion, in the novels, that surveillance technology results in humans becoming more susceptible to control and manipulation through their participation in surveillance practices causes the reader to examine the role of surveillance technology in their own lives; this examination, paradoxically, suggests hope for a future that does not resemble a dystopian nightmare.

The Representation of Surveillance in Dystopian Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

A review of Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay’s (Eds) Surveillance, Architecture and Control (2019).Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay, Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan, £89.99, 2019, ISBN: 978-3-030-00370-8.

https://c21.openlibhums.org/article/1334/galley/1567/download/

Review of Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay, Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture

In her 2009 novel The Method, Juli Zeh presents a healthcare dictatorship that requires all of its citizens to submit medical data to the state through self-monitoring practices and have a chip inside of them to ensure that they are healthy in both mind and body. Similarly, in her 2017 novel H(a)ppy, Nicola Barker envisions a society where everyone is monitored and induced with chemicals so that they are calm and balanced. Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson argue that surveillance is “driven by the desire to bring systems together" (610) and they coined the phrase the “surveillant assemblage” (606) which is the “convergence of what were once discrete surveillance systems […] [which] operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows” (606) to create a data double. The data double can be interpreted as an extension of the physical body, when read in light of critical posthumanism and Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. Pramod Nayar (13) suggests that, as a theoretical approach, critical posthumanism “treat(s) the human itself as an assemblage, co-evolving with other forms of life, enmeshed with the environment and technology”. By reading Zeh’s and Barker’s novels using critical posthumanism, biopolitics and surveillance theory, this paper will examine the ethical concerns of using biometric technologies for self-improvement and the implications of normalising certain behaviours and bodies, in order to ascertain what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

Health, Happiness and the (Post) Human: An Exploration of Biometrics, Biopolitics and the Body in Juli Zeh’s The Method (2009) and Nicola Barker’s H(a)ppy (2017)

Jade Hinchliffe

Papers

The Representation of Surveillance in Dystopian Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Review of Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay, Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture

Health, Happiness and the (Post) Human: An Exploration of Biometrics, Biopolitics and the Body in Juli Zeh’s The Method (2009) and Nicola Barker’s H(a)ppy (2017)

Review of Beardsworth’s Confessional Poetry in the Cold War: The Poetics of Doublespeak

Review of Sumner’s Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance