Robert Lowell, Richard Nixon, and Surveillance Culture
Published in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2018
Winner of the 2018 Tony Hilfer Prize for Best Essay in a volume of Texas Studies in Literature and Language.
Abstract
Richard Nixon’s White House taping system has become iconic of a burgeoning culture of surveillance in the United States. Analysis of this culture has generally described an erosion of discourse and trust. But by juxtaposing Robert Lowell’s poetry with Nixon’s rhetoric, one can see how both men took advantage of an emergent presumption of ubiquitous surveillance to create spaces in which overhearing might be read as oversight. Together, their work defines a poetics of surveillance that augurs the emergence of participatory social networking as a medium of everyday surveillance.