Murder and Surveillance

From Richard Hull, "THE PURLOINED LETTER": POE'S DETECTIVE STORY VS.
PANOPTIC FOUCAULDIAN THEORY (Style 1990)

An important group of literary critics has derived from Michel Foucault's late work, especially Discipline and Punish, the idea that literary narrative polices thought and behavior.

Foucault argued that "disciplinary methods," developed since the seventeenth century, have made writing, and especially narrative description, a means of controlling and dominating:

The child, the patient, the prisoner, were to become, with increasing ease from the eighteenth century . . . the object of individual descriptions and biographical accounts. This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection.

(Discipline and Punish 191-92)

Since description and biographical accounts of characters are the stuff of literary narrative, it was inevitable that someone would see such narrative as part of this "method of domination." An important group of literary theorists (I will call them panoptic Foucauldians) have done just that.

Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison as a metaphor for an intrusive social surveillance:

"Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of . . . a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting" people (200, 199):

All that is needed . . . is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy.... [O]ne can observe from the tower ... the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery.... Each individual ... is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.

(Discipline and Punish 200)

Panoptic Foucauldians press Foucault's architectural figure into the service of interpreting literary narratives. A narrator is this supervisor, the unseen seer. Description of characters and their circumstances objectifies and dominates. As William Spanos points out, "What Foucault does not say but what his argument implicitly suggests is that the panoptic model is also applicable to literary texts" (205). Recognizing that Foucault was reluctant to apply his disciplinary theory to literature, D. A. Miller still calls "Foucauldian" his own discovery that the narrative techniques of Victorian novels are working "the modes of `social control' that Foucault called discipline." Bentham's supervisor becomes a narrative "ideal of unseen but all-seeing surveillance," an ideal that serves "a regime of the norm, in which normalizing perceptions, prescriptions, and sanctions are diffused in discourses and practices throughout the social fabric" (viii).

For panoptic Foucauldians such as Miller and Mark Seltzer, narration is the police. They interpret not merely the criminal justice system, which appears as the content of many narratives, but narrative technique itself, as an important component of intrusive normalizing disciplinary power. Thus Miller turns "from the discipline narrated in the novel to the discipline inherent in the novel's technique of narration" (52). In its minute detailing of character and circumstance, narrative extends the normalizing power of surveillance to every aspect of life. It is in this sense that Miller can maintain that "representational techniques" systematically "participate in a general economy of policing power" (2). And Seltzer can find "a `criminal continuity' between the techniques of representation . . . and the technologies of power" (13-14).[1]

To my knowledge, Foucault never proposed a theory of the detective story, and yet for both Miller and Seltzer, the detective story is crucial. In panoptic Foucauldian interpretation of literary technique, all narrative becomes a detective-like invasion of privacy.[2] Miller says panoptic narrative techniques find their "most programmatic embodiment in detective fiction" (28), since "the police supervision that it embodies . . . marks an explicit bringing-under-surveillance of the entire world of the narrative" (33). For Seltzer, detective fiction, which becomes "indistinguishable from a fantasy of surveillance" (34), is merely the most obvious form of "omniscient narration" that grants the narrative voice an unlimited authority over . . . a world thoroughly known and thoroughly mastered by the panoptic `eye' of the narration" (5455)