Digital Surveillance, Social Media, and Fragmented Identity in Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits

Abstract

In this paper I will look at Chosen Spirits (2020) by Samit Basu, which is a speculative fiction on life in a digitally saturated and heavily monitored near future Indian city. It suggests that the novel is a critique of surveillance and social media, as they are not just two distinct systems but rather a system within a system, that is, a system that creates a performative and fragmented self. The paper draws upon the theory of disciplinary power (Michel Foucault), societies of control (Gilles Deleuze), the sociology of surveillance (David Lyon), and the surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson) to examine how a surveillant society is envisioned in the novel: one in which being seen and being recorded are conditions of social existence. Based on the dramaturgy of Erving Goffman, the society of the spectacle of Guy Debord, the simulation of Jean Baudrillard, and the liquid modernity of Zygmunt Bauman, it depicts the negotiation of multiple selves of the novel's characters, their public and private selves, and their commercial selves, as well as the character's lack of coherence of these selves. Basu's fiction, the paper concludes, provides a darkly comic and ethically concerned critique of digital culture, in which intimacy, solidarity, and the recalcitrant opacity of the human heart is the space of resistance.