Surveillance and Control in Irish Poetry of the Economic Crisis (2008-2015): Boland, Lyons, McCarthy, Ramsell

This article examines the literary responses of four contemporary Irish poets – Eavan Boland, Thomas McCarthy, Alice Lyons and Billy Ramsell – to the 2008-2015 economic crisis through the lens of surveillance studies. The poets expose the mechanisms of control characteristic for the times of austerity, and, in Boland’s case, prosperity with impending decline. Consequently, the article argues that their work lends itself to the analysis in the framework of panoptic/post-panoptic surveillance theories on the one hand (Bentham, Foucault, Deleuze), and non-panoptic models on the other (Haggerty and Ericson based on Deleuze and Guattari). Generally, Boland’s and McCarthy’s poems can be aligned with the panoptic perspective of centralised institutional power and diagnose a form of new colonialism, while Ramsell’s sequence recalls the non-panoptic decentralised assemblage and focuses on the processes of immaterial financialisation. However, the position of the surveillant and the supervised, with the latter’s capacity for counter-surveillance, allows for an overlap between these frames of reference. Alice Lyons’s poetry occupies a borderland between the two, using a multi-perspective soundscape to challenge the Panopticon’s binary gaze. Finally, the poets successfully appropriate economic newspeak, transforming it into an intense poetic idiom which symbolically undermines the systems of surveillance and control.