Romantic Hackers: Keats, Wordsworth and Total Surveillance
Anne Marggraf-Turley and Professor Richard Marggraf Turley (Aberystwyth University)
Talk held at 29c3 28/12/12 in Hamburg
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5138.en.html
In 1791, the political reformer Jeremy Bentham theorized the Panopticon, whose design promised to allow a single Inspector to surveil (exercise "inspective force" over) large numbers of criminals or workers. In recent years, the advent of a suitable technical apparatus – CCTV, ISP taps (network traffic interception), data banks, and so on – has extended the proposed 30m circumference of Bentham’s structure to, and beyond, the physical boundaries of entire countries. While total surveillance is often perceived as a feature of modernity, its conceptual and epistemological framework is rooted in the Romantic period, moreover at a key juncture in the history of ideas concerning individual subjectivity, rights and freedoms. David Barnard-Wills refers to inspective culture as a "nexus of surveillance, identity and language" (2012). In this talk, we examine this nexus in the historical period that first, and so powerfully, imagined the fully surveilled world.
8. “I’m a neck or
nothing man …”
lice”
ve
po
en ta9
pr ev s
of d Horror
omise (1796)
s te m l
es Gil ch Inv
r
ray: “P asion”
sy
Jam n
he Fre
“A of t
1819 cartoon depicting Romantic reformers
as French-symapthizing walking guillotines.
9. British Romanticism: c. 1790-1830
An escape from history … or fugitive
engagement with it?
• “total War” with revolutionary France
• Widening surveillance (spies, informants,
infiltration, Letter interception)
• 1795: The “Gagging Acts”
• 1794-1801 and 1817: Habeas Corpus suspended
• Trials for sedition and treasonable practices
• Expanding National debt
• Unstable Paper-money system
Painting: Joseph Gandy, “Bank of England as a Ruin” (1830)
10.
11. Homi Bhabha argues that any increase in the “visibility of
the subject as an object of surveillance” provokes a
corresponding increase in social “paranoia and fantasy”.
12. “All our happiness depends on social confidence.
This beautiful fabric of Love the system of Spies and
Informers has shaken to the very foundation. There
have been multiplied among us Men who resemble the
familiar Spirits described by Isaiah, as ‘dark ones,
that peep and that mutter! little low animals with
chilly blood and staring eyes, that ‘come up into our
houses and our bed-chambers!’” (ColeriDge, 1795)
13.
14. Leigh Hunt
(1784-1859)
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an bel”
foul
li
“ a nt
lig na
ma
Prince Regent, future
King George IV of England
15.
16. Jeremy Bentham, author of
Panopticon; or, The Inspection
House (1791), called Leigh Hunt
a “poet and man of wit”
(Letter, Nov. 1820)
reve rses
rison
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9c
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azy
R oman e
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cr
Hunt ic
of
“insp ec9v
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17.
18. 2.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
John Keats, ode “To Autumn” (1819)
John Constable, “Cottage, Rainbow Hill” (1822)
19. 2.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
John Keats, ode “To Autumn” (1819)
John Constable, “Cottage, Rainbow Hill” (1822)
21. Wordworth’s 1798 Note to “The Thorn”:
“It was necessary that the Poem should
in reality move slowly; yet I hoped, that
to those who should enter into the
spirit of the Poem, it would appear to
move quickly.”
24. “The Thorn”
XXX
Lyrical Ballads (1798): John Thelwall
poems of “human
Wpassions” and
o r d s w o r t h!
“human incidents”
C o l e r i d g e
“Spy Nozy” … or “Spinoza”?
25.
26.
27. sources:
Ivan Laptev research in computer vision http://www.di.ens.fr/~laptev/
Hannah Dee research in computer vision for the analysis of human
behaviour http://www.hannahdee.eu/
1. The fabric
––––– intentional modelling http://bit.ly/UnwaDZ
ETH group: tracking-by-detection algorithm http://bit.ly/TPaq1H
TLD real-time algorithm for tracking of unknown objects in video
streams http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html
Jeffrey Robinson’s at the Poetry & Revolution conference
of <3
http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/reconfiguring-
romanticism-54-jeffrey-c.html
Russia today: Drone tests over West Wales enrage locals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c73liZ7srx4
ASTRAEA http://www.astraea.aero/
Activists blog:
http://harryseeingred.wordpress.com/author/harryseeingred/
Qinetic website: http://www.qinetiq.com/Pages/default.aspx
Richard Marggraf Turley, Jayne Archer, Howard Thomas – Keats articles:
http://bit.ly/GRVitX, http://bit.ly/UXsMgD, http://bit.ly/GHMGnS
Andrew S. Tannenbaum, Computer Networks, 5th edn (2010)
David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (2010)
Nicholas Roe, Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1998)
––––– The Politics of Nature, 2nd edn (2002)
