Cyberpunk’s penchant for representing wealth and poverty as a matter of “up versus down” generally results in the depiction of lofty spaces such as high-rises as bastions of security, while lower spaces like city streets carry countless dangers. However, while cyberpunk media almost always foregrounds the societal violences of extreme inequality, those violences are not always neatly contained to the streets. An early scene in RoboCop (1987) presents a example wherein cyberpunk’s thematic concerns of corporate greed and government privatization give rise to violence within a supposedly secure space of an upper-class corporate high-rise. As I’ll unpack below, RoboCop’s depiction of the violent killing of a wealthy bureaucrat during a boardroom meeting can add nuance to our understanding of the spatial arguments in cyberpunk’s representations of urban design: namely that cyberpunk does not relegate the violence of its necroscapes to the lowly realm of the streets—in fact, this scene from RoboCop insists that necroscapes envelop society as a whole, including the socioeconomic elite.

In the RoboCop scene, a scaled down model of the utopian urban revitalization project known as Delta City occupies the foreground of the frame (fig. 1) before the scene shifts toward what would now be referred to as a “big tech takeover” of Detroit’s local police force. Executives and business partners of Omni Consumer Products (OCP) listen while the company’s unnamed CEO remarks that “Although shifts in tax structure have created an economy ideal for corporate growth, community services, in this case law enforcement, have suffered.” Infused with irony and foreshadowing the upcoming moment of gory satire, the CEO states “I think it’s time we gave something back” before another businessman, Dick Jones, introduces a bipedal tank-like robot called ED-209, a “24-hour-a-day police officer” that needs neither sleep nor meals. A handgun disarming demonstration with the robot goes awry and the hesitant volunteer who held the gun to ED-209, Mr. Kinney, gets shot repeatedly as the boardroom watches in horror and technicians fail to disable the robot (fig. 2). Excessive spurts of blood and chunks of flesh fly about the room in the film’s unrated director’s cut, but even in the toned-down theatrical release, the thoroughly bloodied Mr. Kinney gets thrown back by the gunfire, landing upon the table displaying the model of Delta City, literally shattering OCP’s corporate-utopian visions of future Detroit, staining its white plastics with his viscera. During his presentation before this incident, Dick Jones had noted that while policing generally functions as a public service, OCP often successfully “gambled in markets traditionally regarded as nonprofit. Hospitals, prisons, space exploration.” He continues, “I say good business is where you find it.”

Within cyberpunk’s necroscapes, everyone and everything is good business, or at least a resource for good business. After some initial gasps, several businessmen present in the boardroom resume discussions as usual, one making a successful pitch to the CEO to forego the now-embarrassed ED-209 project to instead fund the film’s eponymous RoboCop program. The ED-209 crisis makes RoboCop appear ever more the opportunity. The fatal malfunctions just witnessed signify to OCP executives only that they need to innovate policing with a new product, rather than prompting consideration of their involvement in and militarization of policing to begin with. The terrible irony that permeates this scene stems from its satirical reinforcement of corporate hubris in the face of a shocking event that should cause dispute; the CEO’s remarks about “an economy ideal for corporate growth” echo the deregulatory policies of the Reagan administration contemporary to the film. With public services in disrepair both in RoboCop’s fiction and the realities it reflects, corporations posture as saviors to communities facing crises of crime and poverty, but pose solutions through profit-driven systems, as opposed to the nonprofit systems of social benefit that OCP declares it has successfully dominated.

While Mr. Kinney’s bloody crash upon the Delta City model shatters the allure of technologized business solutions for socioeconomic problems only momentarily for the characters in the scene, this incident confronts audiences with a striking representation of the “infrastructural brutalism” that Truscello discusses in his book of the same name. He says the term describes “the historical context in which industrial capitalism has met the limits of its expansion and domination, and yet continues to press for unprecedented commitments to build more” (Truscello 4). The bloodied, shattered Delta City model illustrates that even when such violent tragedies transpire on the human level, the broader systems undergirding corporatism keep ticking along, keep pressing for those “unprecedented commitments” by constructing naïve aspirations such as utopian future cities rather than attempts to resolve the issues already at hand. Infrastructural brutalism—in other words, capitalism’s overextensions—actualizes frequently in the form of “exciting” new products (such as Delta City, ED-209, or RoboCop himself) that corporations successfully market as solutions regardless of their actual viability when deployed within the communities that they will affect.

Just before the shooting, in an over-the-shoulder shot that aligns the robot’s gun barrels, Mr. Kinney, Delta City, and Detroit itself through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the high-rise boardroom, the many businesspeople scatter about in fear and surprise (fig. 3). However, opposite to Mr. Kinney’s rightward presence on the screen, the OCP CEO appears calm in the background of the upper left, sitting at the head of the conference table whereas the others have all sprung up in fear, resting his chin upon his hands with haunting indifference. Unnamed, referred to by others simply as “the Old Man,” the CEO functions less as a character and more as a figurative representation of the institutional drive and will of OCP as a corporation. Though an employee of OCP, Mr. Kinney remained expendable. As Carlen Lavigne explains, cyberpunk is “closely associated with North American economic and labor concerns of the 1980s; its citizens, devalued as interchangeable and easily replaceable assets within corporate society” (12). Illustrated by the abundance of his suited coworkers in the scene, within a necroscape even those who have climbed the corporate ladder often function as surplus populations, described by Marx as “a relatively redundant working population . . . superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization” (782). Alphin attests that present day neoliberal capitalist governments “eliminate surplus bodies that fail to function in the production of value” (1). With Mr. Kinney, it becomes apparent that even those ostensibly contributing to the production of value remain expendable within the full systemic scope of a corporation like OCP.

Alongside this scene’s visual foregrounding of the Delta City model, the prominently featured floor-to-ceiling windows maintain the presence of actual Detroit[1] in the background as members of the boardroom rather nonchalantly make investment and technological development decisions in a corporate space vertically removed from the populace of the city itself. Furthermore, the exaggerated verticality pictured by the central towers of Delta City declare an intent for an even further distancing between this controlling class of corporate executives and the Detroit citizenry. ED-209 targeting Mr. Kinney depicts not only malfunction, but disregard for collateral damage—satirical in the self-destructive crushing of Delta City, and symbolic in its taking aim upon Detroit in the distance.

In addressing cyberpunk’s imaginary worlds, I suggest that the capitalist overextensions that Truscello terms as “infrastructural brutalism” drive the elimination of the surplus bodies that this kind of societal organization kills “in subtle and overt ways” (Alphin 93). Tendencies toward deregulatory policy, alongside incentives for continuous corporate growth that disincentivize sustainable planning, establish conditions that devalue lives—not only the lives of the lower classes who in the RoboCop example would be policed by the violent machines onscreen, but even the lives of those integrated into corporate hegemony, like Mr. Kinney. Thus, infrastructural brutalism permits indiscriminate brutality.

Notes

[1] The “actual Detroit” of the fiction, at least. In reality, the window featured in figs. 8 and 9 overlooks Dallas, Texas, the film’s boardroom set located on the 54th floor of the city’s Rennaisance Tower (Maschino and Gallagher).

Works Cited

AKIRA. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Toho, 1988.

Alphin, Caroline. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout. Routledge, 2021.

Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. Warner Brothers, 1982. The Final Cut, 2007.

Maschino, Brian, and Danny Gallagher. “RoboCop Versus Reality: Looking at Dallas Locations of the Film’s Scenes.” Dallas Observer, 11 July 2017, https://www.dallasobserver.com/slideshow/robocop-versus-reality-looking-at-dallas-locations-of-the-films-scenes-9647490/9647497. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

RoboCop. Directed by Peter Weller, Orion Pictures, 1987. Director’s Cut, 1995.

Truscello, Michael. Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure. MIT P, 2020.

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The American flag, in its original form, presents a highly organized design. The horizontal and alternating red and white stripes provide the visual foundation for the flag and the symbolic foundation for the nation, supporting fifty white stars housed in a field of blue. Red symbolizes hardiness and valor; white, purity and innocence; and blue, vigilance, perseverance, and justice.[ii] In her haunting reinterpretation, Clarke complicates this ordered visual in terms of reconfiguring the composition along with the mental image, or idea, that the American flag evokes.

The American flag is a sacred symbol that signifies the country’s past, present, and future. It forces one to recall her battles for independence, the birth of a liberal democracy, the countless lives lost in her defense, our inalienable rights, ceaseless fights for equality, the formation of established values and traditions, and the culminating of a fully formed nation that promises life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all her inhabitants. The “desecration” of this sacred symbol—a contentious issue dating to the early 20^th century that still holds relevancy—displays an act of symbolic speech. Clarke’s symbolic act signifies a provocative, yet beautifully poetic gesture admissible by the very symbol she redesigns. 

Compositionally, the quilted flag is predominantly white. Modest geometric fragments of blue resemble shattered glass while feeble red stripes convey an equally disquieting note. “This quilt,” Clarke states “represents the (lack of) gender and racial diversity in the US Senate during the 116th Congress” (2019-2021). Every blue triangle in the star field represents a female senator; the red stripes represent the proportion of non-white senators.”[iii] Red and blue, once equally prominent and offering a sense of harmony within the original, lose their sense of vitality in Clarke’s interpretation. In their diminished state, these colors reflect the marginalized and the unheard, which serves to underscore the work’s uneasy tension.

Perpetuating further tensions is the frieze-like pillowed fabric resembling an oozing discharge from that of a wound, which contrasts sharply with the quilt’s uneven horizontal bands. Running from weakened, yet taut red strips of fabric, one can infer that the white discharge not only references a predominantly white male run Congress, but stems from a wounded, bleeding nation, a nation that has witnessed a rise in white nationalist groups, the emergence of a Black Lives Matter movement, an insurrection on our nation’s Capital, an overflow of disinformation, a floundering educational system, harrowing numbers of mass shootings, a widening wealth gap, increased polarization, and a misremembering of America’s past that has perpetuated a fictionized post-racial present. If one were to consider the works’ aliveness and predict the outcome of its continuous seepage, the white discharge would soon engulf the few red stripes that remain, erasing one of the very elements that lends the work its alluring magnetism. The work’s transformation into a dull homogenous whole would coax an infectious and uniform way of seeing with no alternative subjectivities to complicate or supplement the composition’s projected worldview.

But not all is lost, for the act of quilting is a delicate one, one that—like all art forms— requires tender patience and an understanding of the medium. Clarke’s stated “aim” is “to further blur the line between art and craft, old and young, science and emotion, and the individual and the community.”[iv] Through quilt making, Clarke offers a unifying and reparative gesture. Notwithstanding heart ache, the “tangible” and functional qualities of her work convey the comfort of reassurance and affectionate warmth, bringing a sense of calm to uncertain times. The critical message of These Colors Should Run, thus, not only illuminates Congress’s unacceptable lack of diversity, but suggests a process of healing, where the metaphor of stitching symbolically mends a divided nation.

Aside from Clarke’s role as artist/practitioner, her current profession aligns with that of a facilitator. At the heart of her work is a librarian’s spirit to organize and disseminate information. “Motivated by the juxtaposition of modern themes with traditional textile techniques,” Clarke wishes “to provoke viewers and users into seeing new and alternative perspectives,” in turn, creating new ways of understanding.[v] The creative transformation of “hard data” to “soft textiles,” enables Clarke “to visualize information in a tangible, visceral way with the ultimate goal of introducing­ quilting to digital natives and technological provocations to quilters of traditional demographics.”[vi]

Yet, her work extends beyond mere instruction. As an ominous forewarning of threats to democracy, These Colors Should Run offers an alternative narrative of patriotism in material form, asking us to partake in critical reflection. Albeit at times unwelcome, her quilt acts as a sympathetic and helpful guide to a more equitable and accepting future while acknowledging it a painful process. In a nation whose dissatisfaction with democracy grows, her work, however, brings a softness to the “visceral” tensions on display, tensions that recall the emotive rationale behind the recent acts of iconoclasm against Confederate monuments [vii]. As an allusion to hope and possibility, These Colors Should Run emanates an elusive sensibility that awakens an array of sensations from melancholy to revelation, thereby presenting a palpable visual rhetoric that embodies affective politics and rekindles one’s sense of civic duty. The quilt forces us to constantly question, rework, and re-define what our mental image of America is and what we want it to become. The “desecration”—or rather, a skillful reimagining—of the American flag paradoxically reflects a re-sanctification of a sacred symbol, one that we all wish to see uphold its founding principles. Reaffirming this lofty aim is the work’s loaded title; terminating in the word Run, which extends itself to the directional flow of a liquid, a form of physical exertion, management, and the political arena, the implied communal nature of These Colors Should Run demands that we—colors—run together in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness to create a better, less pernicious world.

[i] Rachel Ivy Clarke, “Toward a Design Epistemology for Librarianship,” The Library Quarterly 88, no. 1 (2018): 41–59, https://doi.org/10.1086/694872.

[ii] “History of the American Flag,” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, June 27, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/a-capitol-fourth/history/old-glory/.

[iii] “Art Quiltsgoing Forward – Paqa-South,” PAQA, accessed January 19, 2023, https://www.paqa-south.org/artquiltsgoing-forward.

[iv] Rachel Ivy Clarke, “Art and Design.” Accessed January 19, 2023. http://archivy.net/ivywp/art-and-design/.

[v] Clarke, “Art and Design.”

[vi] Clarke, “Art and Design.”

[vii] Richard Wike, et. al., “Social Media Seen as Mostly Good for Democracy Across Many Nations, but U.S. is a Major Outlier.” Pew Research Center. December, 6, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/PG_2022.12.06_Online-Civic-Engagement_REPORT.pdf

Works Cited

“Art Quiltsgoing Forward – Paqa-South.” PAQA. Accessed January 19, 2023. https://www.paqa-south.org/artquiltsgoing-forward.

 Clarke, Rachel Ivy. “Art and Design.” Accessed January 19, 2023. http://archivy.net/ivywp/art-and-design/.

Clarke, Rachel Ivy. “Toward a Design Epistemology for Librarianship.” The Library Quarterly 88, no. 1 (2018): 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/694872.

“History of the American Flag.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. June 27, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/a-capitol-fourth/history/old-glory/.

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Focusing on things like Russian troll farms and the theft of polling data, the public discourse surrounding surveillance and data manipulation has increasingly emphasized their threat to the imagined integrity of governing bodies since 2016. We increasingly worry about our hyper-connected lives and the degree to which those lives produce digital footprints that can be examined and manipulated. We worry that we are being surveilled for political projects that are more complicated and insidious than the targeted advertising and data collection that we have taken a much more blasé response towards.

One of the most common versions of this fear lies in the figure of the agent provocateur, an undercover agent placed within a space, intent on fomenting some degree of chaos or illegality. In the months leading up to the 2016 election (and, as evidence suggests, is still occurring leading up to the 2020 election), the vision of this kind of espionage shifted greatly. Rather than imagining the agent provocateur as an individual or small group of individual infiltrating organizations (such as Maria Butina’s involvement with the National Rifle Association), we came to imagine the figure of the agent provocateur as a collection of millions of online personas, carefully constructed to look like real human beings entering into online spaces to sow discord and dissent.[2] This further enflames dissension, as individuals are then conditioned to worry that anyone they are interacting with might be bots or foreign assets. This creates an uneasy climate wherein accusations of dissent or disagreement stemming from “Russian propagandists” gain traction and currency.

The digital space becomes one in which both the presence of foreign intelligence assets and the fear of those assets create a feedback loop, one that serves the same function that we imagine was performed by Cold War spies attempting to destabilize public opinion. Furthermore, we imagine this as a project of disinformation,[3] exploiting the public’s inability to distinguish fact from fiction, in order to craft politically advantageous popular narratives for the benefit of foreign states. Thus, this mode of surveillance, I argue, invokes two different anxieties surrounding our relationship to other members of the body politic. First, we don’t know which voices can be trusted. And second, we become worried that other people will be less discerning in their trust than is necessary.

I’ve spoken on Shakespeare’s relationship with powerful people fomenting popular discontent before, and the degree to which it unnerved early modern playwrights. While Shakespeare rarely directly addresses the concerns of foreign conspiracies against England,[4] his works do frequently comment upon the ways in which social manipulation and disinformation threaten the body politic. The populace, as it is imagined by Shakespeare, Marlowe and their contemporaries, is fickle and dangerous if properly manipulated. Julius Caesar, 2 Henry IV, and Coriolanus all communicate a pervasive fear that the crowd can be mobilized to violence or, at the very least, to act against its own interest if sufficiently skilled rhetoricians are able to shape and manipulate public sentiment. Coriolanus must combat disinformation and dissemination of rumor and scandal. Meanwhile, 2 Henry IV’s Jack Cade benefits from an infrastructure of convenient lies to bolster his own political ambition (which the people are more than happy to believe when it suits them).

In these plays, there is a fear concerning the possibility that granting authority to the populace will encourage bad actors to create and stoke public anxieties in service of nefarious ends. Our present historical moment seems to be invoking similar fears as it pertains to electoral politics. There is a worry that we, like Shakespeare, take a dim view to the capacity of public opinion to resist disinformation (what we now imagine as Cold War-style black-ops campaigns) and, like Shakespeare, we have an impulse to continue to project a dim view of this power onto the populace, as we look to explain away the motions of the body politic. 

While these plays may not provide us answers in how to combat the anxieties that contemporary surveillance and espionage practices provoke in our daily lives, we can use them as a site to understand how these fears are shaped and exploited. We witness in the drama of the period a society reacting to increased social surveillance and the pervasive fear that states could manipulate political instability in order to generate unrest and chaos. It is in moments such as this that we explore how individuals relate to the sense of their own private spaces, what information they make visible to the world, and how they relate to other members of the body politic. While the anxieties will certainly persist, to even begin to address them we must consider the long history of these worries and contemplate how others have responded the encroachment of surveillance.

[1] Using espionage and covert action to manipulate public opinion and rig elections is hardly a new concept, as evidenced by the United States’ long and brutal history of meddling in elections during the Cold War.

[2] This was not the only project by which disinformation campaigns or projects of public manipulation operated within the last few years, as legitimate sources of “fake news,” for instance also served this role.

[3] As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, disinformation is itself a loan word from Russian, dezinformatsiya, referring to a specific kind of KGB black-ops.

[4] These conspiracies were a very real threat. The primary job of the developing English intelligence apparatus was ostensibly to protect England from Catholic plots to replace Queen Elizabeth I.

Evan Hixon is a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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Today, increased emphasis on brute-force SIGINT surveillance seems to have replaced the image of the human spy in our imaginations. No longer is global espionage being imagined as a cloak-and-dagger game drawn from the pages of a James Bond novel. Rather, surveillance has become yet another aspect of our lives defined by autonomous algorithms and computing practices: the vision of mass government surveillance by agencies such as the NSA or, more “benignly,” the consumer-focused collection of mass data trends scraped from our collective internet metadata. We are no longer focused on thinking through the ways in which spying targets us as individuals. Instead, it reduces us to a set of demographically divided masses, which can be reduced to data points on a spreadsheet, making our activities easier to track and predict.

Here, we no longer envision surveillance as being targeted; instead we have come to understand that the project of spying is to monitor hundreds of millions of people at once and piece together “useful” intelligence from this project. This shifts the way that we tend to perceive the anxiety of being spied upon. Hamlet, Beatrice and their ilk on the early modern stage imaged the figure of the spy behind the stage arras, carefully listening in upon their conversations. We, however are burdened with the image of a passive machine unthinkingly recording and collecting our activity. Even in its most seemingly innocent form, conjuring up ideas of Amazon and Google “listening”[1] in on our activity to find ways to better monetize our footprint on their websites, we come to understand this as a feeling of invasive burden.

We increasingly value modes of securing our digital footprint, with VPN and other services that purport to increase our ability to operate on the internet without the threat of our data’s being collected or our files’ being stolen. An entire industry has cropped up around the promise that there exists a way to temporarily “beat” the pervasive cloud of surveilling programs that monitor our daily lives. Technological problems require technological solutions, and we are beginning to see a mainstreaming of both the worry of data collection and of products attempting to assuage this fear. While Shakespeare and his contemporaries could not have accessed the technological knowledge to envision the massive collection of metadata, they were witnessing both the scope and intensity of intelligence practices shifting around them. Just as we have witnessed the ways in which entities collect data on civilians slowly shifting, so too can we see shifts, and reactions to these shifts, in the plays of the early modern period. 

For early-modern playwrights, the answer to reclaiming privacy was often located in a similar project of personal dissimulation: attempting to mask our true actions and intentions from those who might be spying upon us by concealing them in a performance or another project (like a VPN). Hamlet’s performance of madness is a reaction to the knowledge that he is being observed by individuals in positions of power; it takes as its base assumption that the only truly private space is one’s own mind.[2] Likewise, the feigned “bed tricks” of Middleton’s Beatrice and Shakespeare’s Isabella suggest that trickery and dissimulation could be turned against the clandestine agents who attempt to enter into our private lives and spaces. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were not defeatists in their answers to questions of mass surveillance. They understood that the nature of their relationship to public space had changed, and they imagined differing modes of interacting with their worlds in order to counteract the anxieties provoked by surveillance. 

In a similar way, we too have come to understand that our relationship to surveillance and tracking has changed and we are slowly attempting to ask the questions of how we can remain connected to our increasingly digital social and political landscape in a time where questions of privacy and data security are at the forefront of many of our most pressing conversations. However, this speaks only to our relationship with what we view as the “benign” model of mass surveillance, the kind that treats our data as a valuable, but unthreatening commodity. In our current political climate, which I intend to discuss next week, the fear that our data is being gathered and manipulated provokes a far greater anxiety than the possibility that our Facebook feeds are being trawled to better service targeted advertisers.

[1] It should be noted that even the language of treating this as an act of listening demonstrates the degree to which we still link contemporary data surveillance to older traditions of spying as an act of listening — itself an interesting term, given that “to spy” is most often used as a synonym for seeing.

[2] Hamlet still imagines a world in which trust can be possible, but that trust is fleeting and temporary.  He aligns himself with Horatio, believing his friend to be a trustworthy co-conspirator, but he also dooms Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for their too trusting allegiance to the monarch.

Header image CC by 2.0 from POP, cropped.

Evan Hixon is a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

The post “Millions of false eyes”: Responding to Surveillance appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

As I mentioned last week, the playhouse of the early modern period was understood by the English government to be a dangerous space of potential political unrest (I’ve written about this in the past). This fear resulted in the censorship and targeted surveillance practices being undertaken by the English government. This fear is also seemingly a feeling that early modern playwrights understood.  Many of the most famous plays of the era recognize the degree to which spaces, both public and private, often only possess a veneer of legitimate privacy away from the gaze of the powerful.

It is within this historical moment that the early modern stage because increasingly invested in how surveillance cultures impact and restrict human relationships. Ben Jonson’s 1605 play Volpone sets the scene of a fictionalized Venice bydrawing our attention to how the city is filled with spies. Speaking of the jealous Corvino’s watch upon his wife Celia, the servant Mosca notes:

There is a guard of spies ten thick upon her,
All his whole household; each of which is set
Upon his fellow, and have all their charge,
When he goes out, when he comes in, examined.

Ben Jonson, Volpone, 1.5.123-126

Here, Jonson does not merely draw our attention to the intense scrutiny placed upon Corvino’s wife, but also the degree to which the spies are being set upon themselves. The spies are tasked with not only observing the movements of their charge, but also the movements of one another. Employees of Corvino are asked to spy upon his wife, in order to ensure him of her fidelity; they are asked to spy upon one another, lest Corvino risk that one of them might cuckold him in the process. It is a vision of a world defined by mistrust, manifested in the form of the spy watching the every move of one of the play’s only innocent bodies. Jonson’s critique is located safely in the domestic sphere of far-away Venice (no threat to the English government here). But this sense of the ever-present and recursive nature of the surveillance state became a staple of early modern drama.

For the early modern playwright, this sense of an ever-present culture of surveillance crept into the everyday relationships that defined social organizations, such as familial relationships like marriages and parent-child relationships. For instance, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the boisterous and sycophantic courtier Polonius reveals himself to be a somewhat competent spymaster and, in doing so, demonstrates the warping effects of the “prison-like” qualities of Denmark. Not only is Polonius spying upon his son, employing a member of the court to carefully monitor his actions abroad, but also he draws his daughter into the role of the spy, making her a (possibly unwilling) member of the Danish surveillance state. We see Shakespeare represent the degree to which the paranoia of the court of Denmark is so pervasive that the father-daughter relationship between Polonius and Ophelia gives way to the demands of the state surveillance system. Polonius, in an effort to please his king, places his family at tremendous risk in order to discreetly produce the intelligence that Claudius desires. Like Jonson’s Volpone, under the watching gaze of the surveillance system, even the seemingly private space of the domestic sphere is revealed to be little more than an illusion, one in which those in positions of power are able to carefully monitor the movements of all bodies in and around their domain, whether or not those bodies are positioned as threats.

I bring all of this up for two reasons: One, to set the stage for understanding what surveillance culture meant to the early modern audiences watching plays such as Volpone, Hamlet or The Duchess of Malfi, all of which examine the anxiety that is derived from living in a space where it feels as if one is always being watched. Second, to begin to contextualize the differences between what surveillance culture meant to Shakespeare and Jonson and what it might currently mean to us. Jonson and Shakespeare understood the degree to which all of their actions might have potentially been watched, but these concerns were limited by the technology and practices of the era.

Early modern surveillance almost strictly falls into the category of what today’s intelligence agencies call human intelligence or HUMINT: intelligence gathering performed by human agents by means of personal contact. Thus, early modern fears of surveillance culture centered on concerns about interpersonal contact, with the specter of the body of the spy or informant intruding into private spaces.[2] With this knowledge, we can further explore the degree to which our modern understandings of privacy differ as a product of the ways in which we interface with one another change. Today, we do not imagine the work of surveillance being performed by hired human informants, but instead imagine it as the cost of interfacing with the devices that simplify our lives.

Shakespeare and Jonson had no understanding of metadata, digital cookies and algorithmic profiles of human beings being created out of fragments of data being trawled out of our search histories. Nor could they have imagined the ways in which institutions and hostile third parties would leverage that data as components of complex disinformation campaigns. They did, however, imagine the stakes of living in a world where privacy evaporated and everyone in their society was made aware of the ever-present surveillance apparatuses that surrounded them. For Shakespeare and Jonson, it fundamentally unsettled familial relationships and made acts of trust implicit in these relationships impossible. All human interaction could thus be leveraged in service of assuring that, for those in power, individual privacy was merely an illusion. 

Beyond this, though, much of our understandings of modern surveillance cultures are not rooted in questions of national security as early modern commentators framed them.[3] Our attention is instead focused on the algorithmic construction of mass data as an economically valuable project, either for advertising or the control of public opinion. Information and intelligence about consumers, their habits and their desires are a profitable industry. The manipulation of that data is both a key social and a massive political concern. In the next two posts, I will be looking at the ways in which the early modern period does align more closely with our contemporary understandings of intelligence, focusing first on the degree to which intelligence is transformed into a moveable commodity, and, second, on the use of this kind of intelligence to sway and manipulate public opinion.

[1] The culmination of religious strife in Paris, resulting in the death of thousands of French Protestants at the hands of French Catholics.  Christopher Marlowe would later write a (possibly unfinished) play about the massacre in 1593, the year of his death.

[2] There were also concerns of rudimentary Signal Intelligence, concerned with the breaking or forging of letters, but this was nothing close to the contemporary investment in SIGINT.

[3] Though this is the language that serves to justify a great deal of illegal espionage practices.

Evan Hixon is a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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I say we have come to understand that we’re always being spied upon, but this is not a new attitude in English-speaking society. In two poems of his 1616 collection of epigrams, the English poet and playwright Ben Jonson makes oblique reference to two men he understood to be employed by the government of England to spy upon him.[1] Speaking of an imagined moment of hospitality, he writes: “Of this we will sup free, but moderately, / And we will have no Pooly’, or Parrot by.” He may have been correct: these men, called “Poley” and “Parrot,” were in fact government spies. Employed by the English Privy Council, they were charged with locating political dissidents and securing the stability of the English government. Also true: Jonson himself was targeted by the government as a possible dissident.[2] And Jonson’s poems, particularly “On Spies,” produce a rather unassuming image of these men, whom he treats as little more than tools of the state.

Jonson’s passivity in the face of government surveillance seems to have been standard among the many English playwrights who saw increased government scrutiny upon their actions and their works. The English government sought to control and repress the theater, instituting measures of censorship on the production of new plays from the late 1500s onward. This came to a head when Jonson found himself imprisoned and tortured after the suppression of his 1597 collaboration with Thomas Nashe, the now lost play The Isle of Dogs.

For a scholar of early modern espionage, the public theater is a unique site to begin contemplating the impact of surveillance culture. The stage served as one of the most hyper-visible venues for political commentary during the late 16^th century, and it was understood by the government as a gathering place for the common rabble.[3] Not merely is the theater a major public space, it is also structured in such a way as to deny the possibility of privacy.

Thus, the stage was a key feature of early modern espionage. On the one hand, playwrights were often tasked with serving as spies, such as the infamous Christopher Marlowe, who was likely killed in relation to his work as a government agent. On the other hand, as evidenced by Jonson’s poems, playwrights often understood that they were themselves being spied upon, and they recognized the tremendous stakes of assuring the watching government that they were not threats or dissidents. This dichotomy placed the role of the surveilling agent at the forefront of the minds of early modern playwrights. Thus, the early modern stage was littered with representations of the spy, from the learned Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,to the bumbling Politic-Would Be in Jonson’s Volpone,to the insidious intelligencers in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman Hater.

It has always struck me how blasé people can be about the ubiquity of mass intelligence gathering practices. The early modern playwrights knew that they were being spied upon, and they integrated this into their work, producing a vision of their society that was defined by the reach of government surveillance. But these representations were not always insidious or morally dubious figures, often depicting loyal clandestine servants operating at the behest of good representatives of government service. Early modern plays, particularly those set in political courts, such as Hamlet and The Massacre at Paris, are defined by the choking miasma of government surveillance that surround them.

But these representations were just as frequently treated as natural manifestations of state power, rather than fearful images of government over-reach. The spy on the early modern stage was just as often a figure of the natural evolution and practice of state politics, a normalized presence in public spaces. Just as we normalized the idea that both the government and Silicon Valley track our internet activity and collect our metadata as status quo of our own lives, early modern subjects had come to understand the presence of spies and informants as the status quo of their own lives.

This series of blog posts will explore the question of what early modern literature can teach us about living with a society structured around surveillance and spying. While our understandings of what it means to be monitored by cold and unfeeling institutions is more defined by corporate data mining and algorithmic control than ever before, such questions of surveillance culture were still prevalent in early modern England, particularly on the stage.

We do not have the same understanding of privacy and the private life that early modern audiences and playwrights had, but we still face questions surrounding how we live our lives in a society that is seemingly defined by the lack of private spaces where we can retreat. What does it mean to live in a world where surveillance is understood as commonplace? How do we negotiate our relationship with a government that we understand to be spying upon us? How are changes in technology and government practice being used to limit or restrict our privacy? I will draw upon these questions to consider two main points. First, how do individuals come to understand their position in a society where they are spied upon? And second, what can early modern art teach us about our own relationship to the structures of surveillance under which we currently live?

[1] LIX “On Spies,” and CI “Inviting a Friend to Supper.”

[2] And may have been later employed by the government as a spy.

[3] This extended beyond political issues, as public theaters were frequently shutdown by government decree over fears that their status as public gathering places exacerbated plagues.

Evan Hixon is a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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“A good teacher will lead the horse to water; an excellent teacher will make the horse thirsty first.”

— Mario Cortes

Inside the academic classroom, we instructors face a number of pedagogical challenges, ranging from constant apprehension regarding proper time management, to confusion over how to best incorporate new media technologies in diverse lesson plans. If the multitudes of our profession may be encompassed by so simplistic a maxim, a good amount of the efforts toward leading our students toward the proverbial well of knowledge involves acknowledging the limits of our ability to engage, and the students’ ability to stay engaged.

Try as we might to liven up lectures on nineteenth-century textual portrayals of class and gender struggles, or lead animated discussion on symbolic content and elements of stylistic form, just to name a couple of personal examples, the passion of an instructor may not always yield a similar investment from those they teach. Here, the learning curve inherent in pedagogy applies to us as well. We acknowledge that students may have chosen to take our course for the purpose of filling out credit hours, anticipate the potential difficulties of teaching the disinterested, and yet do our best to construct inclusive syllabi, encourage open discussion, and foster an environment defined by dialectical learning.

Even in the face of such apathy, within the classroom setting, an instructor retains the authority to insist on certain standards of behavior. Students are expected to pay attention to the material, despite their personal level of enthusiasm for the subject, or lack thereof, and often must display their acquired knowledge through active participation.

Outside of the classroom, however, the authority to instruct has always been a tenuous thing at best, undercut by the style of one’s delivery, the power of one’s rhetoric, and the ongoing struggle to make one’s voice heard at all. There are no quantitative grades to earn in what so many have termed the “real world” outside of academic institutions; no controlled learning environment in which anyone is obligated to respect the notion of a “safe space,” and certainly no imperative to engage in critical discussion or any measure of empathetic self-reflection.

Moreover, in the wake of the U.S. Presidential election, the anti-intellectual impulse now seems to be morphing into a frightening American norm. Never mind leading horses to water – in a “post truth” world, if words aren’t enough, what is left?

Empathy, many say. Following a seemingly never-ending election season distinguished early on by threatening speech, stunningly vitriolic ideological premises, and outlandish promises now turned very real dangers, those grieving for the loss of a democratic ideal were told to empathize with those we had grown to view with fear, anger, and even disgust. Among increasingly convoluted dissections of what the concept of empathy means [1], voices from all over the political spectrum, mainstream news outlets, and media platforms urged those on the “losing” side to swallow the bitter pill – at least for the next four years – and unite. Accept. Get over it.

In other words: don’t fight.

But for many of us, there is no other choice. At the end of the day, we are thinkers. Letting things go unquestioned, unexamined, and unanalyzed is something we cannot do. Easy acceptance and complacency go hand-in hand, joined together in a desperate flight from grappling with our own mistakes, and pushing to change what we cannot tolerate, much less endure.

Instructors, researchers, public thinkers and scholars affiliated with the academy have all been students at one point or another. As such, we consider the intellectual process as one requiring constant and self-conscious revision – not only must we often admit our own shortcomings, but we must also anticipate learning from those we may initially oppose.

Crafting a common vocabulary is perhaps the first step toward building a rapport with bored or uninterested students, but deconstructing the complexities of hegemonic ideology and the semantic battle over what has been fashionably debated and dismissed as “identity politics” takes the concentrated work of months, if not years. Effective communication becomes much more difficult with the assumption that empathy and cooperative understanding rests upon mutual mute compliance, instead of examination and accountability. Engaging in productive discussions with political opponents is far from impossible. Historically, however, conversations require equal measures of willingness to listen and learn from all those involved.

How do we reach those who see no reward in critical reflection, and harbor no desire for intellectual engagement? To what extent are we meant to empathize and “break bread” [2] with those who would much rather imagine the well of knowledge empty, than deign to be led anywhere?

In an op-ed piece from The New York Times, R. Derek Black shares another personal narrative tracing the unlearning of hatred-driven ideology through experiences at a liberal college:

“Through many talks with devoted and diverse people there – people who chose to invite me into their dorms and conversations rather than ostracize me – I began to realize the damage I had done. Ever since, I have been trying to make up for it…

People have approached me looking for a way to change the minds of Trump voters, but I can’t offer any magic technique. That kind of persuasion happens in person-to-person interactions and it requires a lot of honest listening on both sides. For me, the conversations that led me to change my views started because I couldn’t understand why anyone would fear me…

I never would have begun my own conversations without first experiencing clear and passionate outrage to what I believed from those I interacted with. Now is the time for me to pass on that outrage by clearly and unremittingly denouncing the people who used a wave of white anger to take the White House.” [3]

On one hand, there are no easy answers. But on the other, admittedly, easy answers aren’t our forte. We press for deeper truths than that.

Buck up, academics. We have our work cut out for us.

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.

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“Next time someone tells Bronx girls to take off their hoops, they can just say they’re dressing like a Congresswoman.”

Every year, I make a feminist New Year’s resolution: apologize less; shut down more mansplaining; take up more space. Sometimes I mean this last one literally: I’ve learned to square my shoulders and stake my place in crowded subways, and to combat manspreading on airplanes by enbyspreading right back at them. But I also mean it figuratively: I wear blue lipstick to meetings, speak forcefully in focus groups, and take up many pages on this site talking about asexuality.

I identify as nonbinary, but I still have to navigate a society that sees me as a woman, and treats me like one. My resolution to take up more space was inspired by Roxane Gay, who describes in her memoir Hunger the expectations that American society still maintains for women:

“that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society” (13).

Fat-shaming is just one of many ways that women’s bodies and how women use them are relentlessly policed. Women are instructed to “fit in,” fitting into narrower and narrower categories and spaces until they virtually disappear.

Fiercely loving one’s body and leaning into its unruliness (as Melissa’s post discussed last week) is the antidote that some women have taken to combat the toxicity of the white male gaze. When I teach the concept of unruly women to my gender and literature students, we talk about the ways that such women don’t fit in: they’re fat, they have curly hair, they’re loud and laughing, they take delight in food and/or sexual pleasure — in general they take up space.

Conscious unruliness was on spectacular display during the swearing-in of the 2019 cohort of the US Congress. While none of the new members elected in 2018 were fat — evidence of the continuing marginalization and devaluation of fat bodies in America — the women taking their oaths of office were unruly in other ways, especially in their dress.

After her swearing-in, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted in detail about her inspiration for her suit and accessories on the Congressional floor that day:

In two ways, Ocasio-Cortez changed the narrative by being unruly for her oath of office. The first is in how she deliberately crafted her appearance to not conform to expectations for a Congresswoman. She did not don stud earrings and a “neutral” lip color, aesthetic choices that would have suggested femininity, yet restrained femininity — the kind of femininity that doesn’t threaten feminine gender norms and also doesn’t threaten the predominantly white masculine space of the US Congress. Instead, she accessorized how she always has, as a woman of color from the Bronx, for the express purpose of visibly bringing her identity onto the Congress floor rather than disappearing.

The second is how Ocasio-Cortez leans into the stereotype that women put a great deal of thought into how they dress by tweeting about her decisions, rewriting the stereotype by demonstrating that those decisions aren’t vapid or shallow. Her choice to wear white to her swearing-in, she explains, is historically and politically informed, designed to “honor” women and the socialist and matriarchal values of community and connection.

Speaking of community, Ocasio-Cortez was not the only woman inducted into Congress this month who refused to disappear. Of the many women recently elected to Congress, one of the two Native American women, Deb Haaland (D, N.M.); and two of the three Arab-American women, Ilhan Omar (D-Min.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), wore the traditional dress of their respective heritages to their swearing-in ceremonies. Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), the first bi member of Congress, took her oath of office in a boldly patterned floral skirt. In community with Ocasio-Cortez and her gold hoops, these women disrupt the norms of “professional” Congressional attire by visibly signaling their unruly femininity together. By taking up space, they make space for nonwhite and non-male bodies in the US Congress.

Clothing isn’t the only way these women signal their unruliness. Congresswoman Tlaib swears, and refuses to apologize for it. Congresswomen Sharice Davids (D-Wis.) and Haaland were photographed in a forceful, emotional hug on the Congress floor. When right-wing commentators criticized Ocasio-Cortez for her college dance video, she responded by recording herself dancing at her Congressional office, using her body in ways that bring joy to herself and her followers and vexing those who want her body, and her politics, contained.

One Twitter user made the connection between how Ocasio-Cortez is photographed with her mouth open — laughing, speaking, shouting, her voice unruly and unrestrained — and how that pose captures for conservative media the threat of a powerful woman. She cites a lecture by author and journalist Rebecca Traister:

“This is the image of the woman who we’re told scares us the most: the one who has her mouth open in loud and assured complaint. It is the angry woman who is the big threat.”

Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, Sinema, Davids, Haaland, and all the other unruly women of the 116^th Congress demonstrate new meaning to the feminist maxim “the personal is political.” By unfurling their unruly bodies and taking up space in the US Congress, they signal that they are a threat to white patriarchy — and they intend to make good on that threat.

Ashley O’Mara is a PhD student in the Syracuse University English program, studying celibacy and asexuality in literature after the English Reformation. O’Mara also writes creative nonfiction and listens to Mashrou’ Leila, and has very strong opinions about hummus. Read more at ashleyomara.com.

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In our increasingly connected social lives, it becomes very easy for viral fictions to take on lives of their own and when these fictions are spread carelessly, they can produce very real consequences. Thus far, I have looked at medieval, early modern and contemporary issues of inciting rhetoric with easily identifiable points of origins and causes. This week, I want to look at what we do when the source of violent or inflammatory rhetoric is more diffuse.

In early modernity, the most consistent image of rumor was drawn from the Greco-Roman tradition, the figure of Fama. Most famously pulled from Virgil, she (and Fama is almost always gendered feminine) was a feathered monster with multiple eyes, tongues and ears to represent the multiplicity of her voice and her ability to hear and see all. She was capricious, such as in Chaucer’s The House of Fame, where she arbitrarily assigned glory and ignominy to those who seek her. She was a figure always kept at a distance, allowing other allegorical personages such as the wind or the crowd to spread the news, both true and untrue, for her.

Later, her image would be invoked in works by early modern playwrights such as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, who saw rumor as a source of unease and anxiety, particularly in the climate of state repression that defined much of the Elizabethan political world. While I discussed earlier that Shakespeare and his contemporaries had few populist rhetoricians, they did use the figure of rumor to express a fear concerning what word and language could incite when the crowd was taken in by its sway.

I bring this up because the viral qualities of the internet, particularly its decentralized amplification of any and all voices, makes the image of Fama particularly relevant in our contemporary moment. On December 4th, 2016, a man carrying an assault rifle entered into a Washington, DC, pizzeria and fired shots, with the intent of freeing a number of children he believed to have been held captive in the restaurant. No such children existed, but a well-circulated conspiracy theory surrounding the restaurant alleged that it was at the center of child-trafficking/pedophilia ring/satanic cult tied to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta.

While the origins of the conspiracy theory, dubbed “Pizzagate,” are likely tied to a specific white-supremacist Twitter account, the virality of the conspiracy placed it within the aether of the internet, endlessly cycling through permutation after permutation, becoming increasingly convoluted with each passing version. While the theory has been extensively debunked, its presence lingers in a number of later conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Seth Rich, the figure of QAnon and others. Each of these share a common thread: an accusation of criminal behavior, leveled against a major public figure, to incense rage.

I bring this up in relation to the early-modern concept of rumor because, like rumor, these viral conspiracy theories and the rhetoric that informs them are characterized by lacking a central point of origin. Fama exists, in part, to give form to the idea of rumor and scandal, rather than allowing it to exist as a shadow in the crowd. While the early moderns didn’t deal with virality in the same way that we understand it, there is a present unease with the capacity of dangerous or harmful rhetoric to catch fire and spiral out of control without the need of a Marc Antony or even a Jack Cade. Likewise, it seems as if part of the strength of an alt-right conspiracy theory like Pizzegate lies in its diffuseness. Rather than originating from a single source, it becomes part of a “wisdom of the crowd” and it can be shaped and reshaped as the present moment demands and as we have seen, it can be retrofitted into other conspiracy theories to construct a grand narrative of truth.

What interests me about these theories from the perspective of someone who studies the political applications of rhetoric is the way that the incited violence reads as a wholly unintended side-effect. Marc Antony and Henry II had very specific targets in mind when they spoke to their followers and there is little doubt that they intended that violence be done. These conspiracy theories, on the other hand, seem more intent on using rhetoric to construct a sense of purpose, a feeling of justified rage against an evil political other rather than a call to specific action against a target. Even though the original Pizzagate theory notes a specific crime and location, the revelation that someone believed this enough to take direct action feels shocking in a way that we don’t read into the story of Henry II, whose intent to cause violence is taken as a given.

This is the danger posed by virality and its relationship to rhetoric, as Pizzagate seems to have been picked up not by individuals who legitimately believed the accusations, but those who understood its rhetorical usefulness as part of a massive disinformation campaign near the waning moments of an election. There was never a movement to free children from a Satanic cannibal cult, because those individuals who pushed the theory seemingly knew there were no children to be freed, but at least one person didn’t and that was all it took to create a near tragic standoff.

This is certainly not the vision of Fama that Virgil, Chaucer or Shakespeare would have imagined, but it is useful to think of the degree to which the underlying anxiety remains constant. Rhetoric can be a powerful tool to persuade when it is purposeful, it can be a powerful tool when it used carelessly, and it can be a powerful tool when it isn’t clearly being used for anything at all. While we as modern political subjects confront politically inflammatory rhetoric in a very different light than early modern audiences would have, many of the fears and anxieties persist. I hope that this series of posts has begun to shed light upon the echoes of contemporary political anxiety we can see in the narratives and fictions of the early modern world.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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Early modern English writers, though they are drawing a great deal of their thought on rhetoric from sources dating back to the Roman Republic, were writing under the watching eyes of an absolutist monarch, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I, as well as many contemporary European monarchs, were understood to be careful, well-trained students of political rhetoric, having been trained in the art of speaking as the embodiment of state power. This is part of why, with the possible exception of Jack Cade in The History of Henry VI Part 2, Shakespeare’s rhetoricians are all styled in the vein of Marc Antony, and their capacity to manipulate the public to violent action is viewed as the product of a careful project of rhetorical manipulation. In our contemporary moment, this sense of conscious rhetorical provocation is less stable and as a result, slightly more challenging to address.

These works, as well as the underlying fear that colors the narrative of Henry II’s turbulent priest, are all contingent on the assumption that the careful suggestions of violence from the political leaders to their followers are all purposefully enacted by those leaders. They know exactly what their words will do. Marc Antony displays a concrete set of goals that he wishes the crowd to enact for him. He does not care how the crowd brings vengeance down upon Brutus and Cassius, he simply cares that his enemies suffer.

However, what do we do when it is less clear that the provocative speech and the fanning of violent tensions has an end-goal in mind? A common point of political discussion in recent months has concerned the degree to which President Trump is aware of the implications of his speech and to what degree individuals acting upon this speech are simply “misreading” his intent. When he calls the press “enemies of the people,” there is a frequent suggestion raised that these statements are not meant to be interpreted as calls to action.

The argument questions whether President Trump is a carefully Machiavellian rhetorician who knows precisely what he is doing when he makes these veiled threats, or if he is a raging bull in a china shop who only cares about the adulation of a crowd that legitimately enjoys the things he has to say about journalists and democrats alike. While, to a degree, this debate is present in most everything the President does, it takes on a relevance to discussions of rhetorical incitement to violence since these arguments so frequently hinge on concerns of motive and intent. In the popular narrative, and in the leveraging of his story, Henry II was not an angry man venting to no one in particular, he was a focused participant in the death of Thomas Beckett who knew exactly how his words were going to be interpreted by his followers. This shifts the focal point of the question away from the danger of focused and carefully constructed rhetoric to the dangers of rhetoric wielded like a hammer.

This then raises a second question; does it matter? If the result is the death of Thomas Beckett, does it matter whether Henry II truly wanted his knights to venture to Canterbury to have him murdered? Similarly, if journalists’ lives are being placed at risk, does it matter if President Trump was only attacking the press because he knew it played well to his base? In our contemporary moment, we are not given a clear affirmation like Marc Antony’s carefully constructed plot against the conspirators. Rather, the question that arises is a concern of intent against effect and the relationship between the two.

Without the help of a useful set of soliloquies documenting exactly how aware an individual is of the ramifications of their violent rhetoric, our contemporary moment places an increased scrutiny on whether a rhetorician is actively attempting to compel action or not. Therefore, the Comey moment is fascinating, as it becomes centered on a question of “proper interpretation” of a suggestion, implying that if Comey were to have interpreted “incorrectly” that would absolve Trump of all wrong-doing. This is mirrored less directly in responses to the recent instance of bombs being sent to key members of the Democratic Party and other vocal critics of the President. Individuals wishing to distance the President’s words from the action have positioned the attacks as a “misreading” or “misunderstanding” of Trump’s anti-media, anti-Democrat rhetoric.

With Henry II, it is assumed that we were not approaching the relationship between violence and rhetoric as one of interpretation. Here, there is a greater sense that the public debate is concerned with parsing out the meaning behind the words, as the possibility of misinterpretation is put on the table as a defense of the President’s involvement in these acts. In our moment, fears surrounding rhetoric are framed around interpretative questions more so than in past moments. The crowd in Julius Caesar is not guilty of misreading Marc Antony, as his intent is clear. In our contemporary debates, the certainty of the proper interpretation of inflammatory rhetoric is positioned as being as terrifying as the rhetoric itself, if not more so.

Next week, in my final post, I am going to turn slightly, towards a different kind of rhetorical provocation that troubles our current moment. In a public discourse increasingly defined by internet connectivity, these types of rhetorical strategies are becoming increasingly diffuse and increasingly anonymized. Looking at a case study of internet conspiracy theories, my last post will examine what happens when there is no singular individual concerned with the actions of a singular troublesome priest, but there is instead a legion of nameless, faceless voices collectively descending upon an invented troublesome priest.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

The post “If Thou Consider Rightly of the Matter”: Intent, Interpretation, and the Fear of Rhetoric appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.