The (in)visible eye of authority: notes on surveillance in Paul Auster's Ghosts

Abstract

In his Discipline and Punish (1995), Foucault describes the plague-stricken city where authorities exercised surveillance to control the contagion of the disease. As Foucault states, the first precaution to take was the strict division of space which led to the isolation of dwellers; this spatial partitioning reinforced the notion of pervasive surveillance and paved the way for the modern disciplinary society of which Panopticon was an ideal architectural embodiment. In this paper, we try to show how a combination of the plague-ridden city’s discipline diagrams and Panopticism make the whole scene of Auster's Ghosts. By focusing on the role of writing in power mechanisms depicted in the novel, we illustrate the power-knowledge relations which involve the characters in the process of subjectification and which construct the subject position of the author (Blue) who acts as the (in) visible eye of authority. Then, we argue that Blue's dilemma aggravates mainly because he identifies his individual life with his Foucauldian "author function".