“Down with Foucault, Up with Goffman!” might be the rallying cry of the new book by David Rosen and Aaron Santesso. Their argument takes aim at the burgeoning minidiscipline of surveillance studies, which insists with Michel Foucault that the more closely we are watched, the more we become molded to the needs of a powerful system that uses or even “writes” us. Rosen and Santesso make the case against Foucault (as well as Jean Baudrillard, Niklas Luhmann, and a bevy of other theorists who like to say that humans are the unwitting pawns or effects produced by displays of power). We are not the mere instruments of the discourse of our time, Rosen and Santesso assert. Instead, the more closely we are watched, the more we perform, and, as Erving Goffman explained long ago, performance is the way to make a self. We are confirmed by our performances, not violated....
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Book Review|
September 01 2015
The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood
The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood
. By Rosen, David and Santesso, Aaron. New Haven, CT
: Yale University Press
, 2013
. xii + 357 pp.
David Mikics
David Mikics
David Mikics is Moores Distinguished Professor in the Honors College and the English Department at the University of Houston. His most recent books are The Art of the Sonnet, with Stephen Burt (2010); The Annotated Emerson (2012); and Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (2013). He is also author of A New Handbook of Literary Terms (2007), Who Was Jacques Derrida? (2009), and other books. He is writing a study of Saul Bellow, tentatively titled Bellow’s People.
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Modern Language Quarterly (2015) 76 (3): 397–399.
Citation
David Mikics; The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood. Modern Language Quarterly 1 September 2015; 76 (3): 397–399. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2920078
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