Surveillance and Secrecy - Fictional
Representations
My
research focuses on fictional representations of surveillance and secrecy.
Where this work intersects with applied theory and technical expertise lies, I
think, in the contested question of popular and/or public understanding of
surveillance in society. The cross-pollination between narratives of espionage
and the history of British intelligence has a long and well-documented history.
John le Carré, in particular, is widely credited with creating a new type of
espionage fiction, qualitatively different than that of Ian Fleming and his
other predecessors - one that has been built around his own experience within
and alongside the British intelligence establishment. The popularity of his
fiction attests to the strength of the public appetite for narratives of
surveillance in a realist mode (contra Bond). He has been positioned as
an author of the ‘negative thriller’, and there is currently, post-Snowden,
renewed critical interest in his fiction. His work continues to reach a wide
audience through big-budget cinematic adaptation. Here, I use le Carré as an
example of just one aspect of how literary analysis might suggest potential
research questions arising from the juxtaposition of literary enquiry with
other disciplinary fields in surveillance and information studies.
Fictional
representations of secrecy and privacy are always contingent on the readers’
awareness of the narrator and the author-figure. Narratologists distinguish between
‘story’ (or plot, that is the events that happen in order for a narrative to be
a narrative) and ‘discourse’ (how the story is told). In le Carré, the gap
between the two is often wide: think of Tinker,
Tailor, Solider, Spy, which
opens with Jim Prideaux arriving to take up work as a supply teacher in a minor
public school. There are many pages to go before we can shape this into a
chronological sequence (the plot) to discover that he was injured as a result
of a disastrous operation in Czechoslovakia, ordered by Control in the last
days of his reign at the Circus, before he was ousted by Alleline and Smiley
was fired-retired … This is an example not of secrecy within the narrative as theme,
but as device: for sustaining interest or tension, i.e., implicitly, for
keeping us invested in the plot. Secrecy, personified in the form of Karla’s
mole, is arguably also the dominant theme of Tinker, Tailor – harnessed
to varying ends and in various ways. In this formulation, then, secrecy, lifted
out of any real-world ethical framework, becomes instead a tool or technology
to drive narrative.
The
relevance of literary narratives to the public understanding of Snowden was
demonstrated conclusively by the rapid rise in sales of Nineteen
Eighty-Four in the wake of the story breaking. To what extent does
secrecy operate in media surveillance narratives? How does the discourse
of Snowden, as shaped by Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian, use
the story of secrecy? How might public conceptions of privacy, secrecy
and surveillance be shaped by the ways in which the media and literary
narratives that inform them operate self-reflexively within these parameters?
How might a concrete or policy-driven ethics of surveillance take into account
these factors?
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