I Do Love / To Note and to Observe”
The Pleasures of Surveillance and Resistance in the Work of Ben Jonson
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12729331 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Benjamin Miele (University of the Incarnate Word, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 171-188 |
| Publication date | 2023-07-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Surveillance & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1477-7487 • E-ISSN: 1477-7487 |
| Publisher | Surveillance Studies Network (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.24908/ss.v21i2.15756 |
| OpenAlex | W4383069546 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Poet, playwright, religious dissident, and collaborator with the state surveillance apparatus: Ben Jonson experienced a long and tortuous relationship with surveilling in late-Tudor/early-Stuart England. The cultures of surveillance he encountered extended beyond espionage to social and religious surveillance, which in early modern England often bled into and facilitated the workings of the state’s network of informants. His literary output and unusually detailed (for the time) biographical information combine to give us a complex picture of his engagement with surveilling, secrecy, and resistance. Jonson’s experience of surveillance involved incarceration and the threat of corporal punishment, but in his writings, he associates surveilling and being surveilled with pleasure in the context of his Humanist education, his conversion to Catholicism at a time when the Protestant English state had outlawed such worship, and his work as a satirist, playwright, and poet. Using Freud’s notion of unheimlich, or the uncanny, I argue that Jonson demystifies surveilling, but approaches his critique from two directions simultaneously: he interrogates and encourages resistance to state violence and coercion while highlighting his own acquiescence to the pleasures of voyeurism and exhibitionism, suggesting that surveilling is seemingly irresistible, as in both overpowering and appealing. Because he centers the uncanny in his writings, Jonson may be a useful guide for those theorizing and navigating the complexities of surveillance. He exemplifies how resistance to asymmetries of power persists through time and despite outward conformity to a regime of surveillance, which itself may be unheimlich
Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Criminology · Pleasure · Political science · Prison · Psychoanalysis · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · State (computer science · Uncanny · Voyeurism · Wickedness · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology
Religion and the decline of magic
Self-crowned laureates
The Rise and Fall of the English Ecclesiastical Courts, 1500–1860
Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe
Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England
Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition
Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship
Ben Jonson, Catholic Poet
"He took his religion by trust"
The Jonsonian Corpulence, or the Poet as Mouthpiece
Performing, Translating, Fashioning
Mastering the Revels
Notes from the Ecclesiastical Court Records at Somerset House
Ambition and Privilege
Morals and Moral Regulation in Protestant France
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |