Surveillance, Utopia and Satire in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
Abstract
This chapter discusses the archeology of surveillance through the examination of several early modern texts. It first analyses the utopian relationship between science and surveillance, through a reading of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627). It then moves on to the ambiguities of utopia, to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe which tries to articulate the interactions between personhood, autonomy, and surveillance. Finally, it considers the satire of utopia enacted first by Swift, who, in book III of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), seemed to be responding to Bacon’s House of Salomon, and then by Pope, who tries to open up the path to resistance to the world of surveillance that was slowly beginning to unfold. It shows how satire enables Pope, as well as Swift, to think through a world which is being gradually invaded by the principles of surveillance, and to use the tools of surveillance against itself.