‘I’m a dragon!’: Embodiment and Play

The sophistication of many home surveillance cameras currently available on the commercial market was perhaps unimaginable to the inventors of the first ever webcam, installed in 1991 as the ‘Trojan Room coffee pot.’ Delivering grainy live footage from a Cambridge University laboratory, the webcam consisted of a unidirectional feed in which watchers were able to examine a fixed image from a distance in order to monitor the quantity of coffee remaining in a communal carafe.⁷ However, as Hille Koskela writes of the style that many webcams have begun to take in the contemporary era, objects ‘which we are used to calling surveillance cameras are at present times not only watching from above but can be hidden, miniaturised, crawling or flying’ (2004: 199). Bearing the hallmarks of clever marketing and futuristic design, home surveillance devices now range in shape and style from small cat-like objects with remote notification functionality to ‘pocket robots’ equipped with speech recognition, movable feet, and interactive LED eyes. In these objects, visual markers of cuteness are deliberately merged with the device’s practical surveillance function, creating a product in which ‘cuteness is inextricable from modern capitalism and consumer culture’—a ‘commodity par excellence, with its promise of eternal sameness of the pleasure of consumption’ (Kao and Boyle 2017: 15).

The Aqara Camera Hub G3 device, for instance, is designed to look like a friendly white kitten, featuring small erect ears and a wide, welcoming face with bowed, droopy eyes. The product’s marketing rhetoric openly invokes cuteness to appeal to a consumer’s assumed preferred aesthetic, stating: ‘The cute head cover is detachable and added as an accessory for free.’⁸ Common to all the anthropomorphised devices on the market are accentuated facial features, frequently organised around large, interactive eyes, the absence of a mouth, and small animalistic ears. Another device, developed by the designer Vivien Muller and released for a short period following a Kickstarter campaign in 2015, applies a similar visual aesthetic in the form of an owl. Given the name Ulo, the animated surveillance camera is designed to sit atop a table or be attached to the wall in the style of a decorative ornament. Like the cat-shaped Aqara Camera, Ulo’s selling-point is a cute-looking face, marked by ‘random animations’ that the product’s website suggests ‘add that extra spark of life which makes Ulo unique.’⁹ Users can also customise the device’s eye colour, shape and size to ‘match’ their home interior and personal decorative preferences.

In these products and their attendant marketing rhetoric, cuteness is envisaged as indexical to preference and personalisation, as if somehow the object itself has a stake in appealing to consumer’s emotional needs. Not unlike a pet, who follows its owner around the house, the anthropomorphised smart camera is promoted as an object that is not only cute to look at but is also motivated to appease its owner’s practical domestic requirements. As Joel Gn observes of the intricacies of machine cuteness, ‘the efficacy of cute design’ works to organize ‘perception within a nuanced social space’ (2016: 175). In this dynamic, ‘experiencing the cuteness of the social robot’ positions users to respond as if it ‘were a friend who understands their feelings and shares their interests’ (Gn 2016: 175). Situated in the quotidian household setting, on a kitchen bench or, in the case of Ulo affixed to the wall like a painting, the product’s visual presentation is thus insidiously abstracted from the data stream the smart device is ultimately designed to generate, store, analyse, and in many instances, sell on to third-party actors. Yet the aesthetic judgments at work in creating this abstraction are more complex than simply the fact that a surveillance camera has been made to look like an owl or resemble a small fluffy animal. Rather, cute surveillance turns not just on the exaggerated appearance of certain features (large eyes and diminutive ears), but also on subtle forms of bodily negation. Invoking the example of a ‘frog shaped bath sponge,’ in which visual aesthetic ‘depends on a softness that invites physical touching,’ Ngai explains the ironic reasoning behind styles of facial amplification that strive for cuteness:

Yet while the object has been given a face and exaggerated gaze, what is striking is how stylistically simplified and even unformed its face is, as if cuteness were a sort of primitivism in its own right … Realist verisimilitude and precision are excluded in the making of cute objects, which have simple contours and little or no ornamentation or detail. (2005: 815)

Applied to the cute-looking smart camera, Ngai’s theory explains at least in part the hazardous tendency to mistake facial simplicity for incorruptibility; a slippage created by the absence of realistic facial features, rather than the obvious presence of them. Here, the facial minimalism of cuteness extends to, or comes to stand in for the object, regardless of its intended utility beyond visual impression. Of this affective mapping and its relation to post-war consumer culture, Ngai posits how cuteness ‘speaks to our desire for a simpler relation to commodities’ (2010: 952). With simplicity and ‘babyfacedness’ comes not just comfort but also trust and other forms of ‘social approval’ (Jia, Park and Pol 2015: 171). Applied to home surveillance devices, this principle functions to obscure the possibility that voyeurism could be malicious insofar as the surveilling object’s cuteness provides a cover for the database that drives the device in the first place. The power relation evoked by the cute object is thus deceptively simple and benign, producing a feedback loop in which dataveillance can be enacted more freely because it is hiding in plain sight.

In Little Eyes, as the domestic contexts and idiosyncrasies of keepers and dwellers are established, we encounter numerous examples of unsettling, embodied cuteness where different characters begin to interact with the smart home devices they have purchased. When a lonely middle-aged woman named Emilia opts to purchase a kentuki code and become a dweller, she discovers that her keeper is a young Spanish-speaking girl named Eva. In a provocative moment of show-and-tell upon establishing their wireless connection, the girl asks Emilia to close her eyes before presenting the box in which the kentuki that Emilia dwells inside of was packaged: ‘She was holding a box at the level of the camera, a few centimetres away. The lid was open and the label on the box said kentuki’ (2020: 14). Tunnelling into the perspective of Emilia as she observes the kentuki’s box on her own screen, the narration then moves to a literary blazon, in which the speaking subject comes to understand the physical manifestation that her voyeurism has taken inside the girl’s home:

A pink-and-white rabbit that looked more like a watermelon than a rabbit. It had bulging eyes and two long ears attached to the top. A clip shaped like a bone held them together, keeping them upright for a few centimetres, after which they fell languidly to either side. “You’re a cute little bunny,” said the girl. “Do you like bunnies?” (2020: 14)

In scenes like the above, which invoke both dark comedy and the kinds of sci-fi dystopia popularised by the television show Black Mirror, human subjects become disturbingly implicated in the façade of cuteness instantiated by the surveillance device. However, what makes the scene so unnerving is not so much the fact that the surveillance camera is embodied inside a pink and white rabbit, but more the indeterminacy of whom the girl’s rhetorical questions are directed at—the anonymous human voyeur dwelling ‘inside’ the device or the cute, anthropomorphised object? As Alexandra Brown rightly points out in her examination of what she calls Schweblin’s ‘cyberpunk avatars,’ in addition to the ‘visual and auditory limitations that prevent dwellers and keepers from communicating freely, social relations between the two are further limited in the sense that neither keeper nor dweller appears to the other as human’ (2023: 267). Each human participating in the surveillance regime, therefore, ‘quite literally encounters the other as a thing’ in that the dweller embodied inside the kentuki device appears to the keeper as a cute toy rather than a person’ (Brown 2023: 267). In some scenarios, the dweller’s embodiment inside a toy renders them helpless and humiliated, rather than empowered. The anonymity and uselessness of their gaze thus leads to a paradoxically disempowering manifestation of cuteness.

In Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic, Daniel Harris (2001) articulates the mode of powerlessness that cute objects engender and which the character of Emilia subjectively encounters in Schweblin’s novel. For Harris, ‘the process of conveying cuteness to the viewer disempowers its objects, forcing them into ridiculous situations and making them appear more ignorant and vulnerable than they really are’ (5–6). In other words, even though Emilia has chosen to be a dweller, with a panoptic gaze at her disposal, the novel’s inversion of that gaze via the embodiment of surveillance as cute renders her uncomfortable and somewhat embarrassed, even though she cannot be seen or apprehended. What makes the scene unnerving, however, is not Emilia’s powerlessness as she peers out from the wireless screen of the kentuki, rather it is the somewhat menacing tone of the girl directing the camera. Asking her kentuki if she likes cute bunnies, Eva anthropomorphises the device (and by extension, Emilia), reflecting the ways in which ‘cute affect is triggered by’ a ‘desire to approach and engage with a cute object’ (Dale ‘Cute Studies’ 2016: 6). Unable to respond to the girl’s question as herself, Emilia is forced to play a paradoxically infantilising role as an all-seeing yet ultimately powerless cute object.

Little Eyes also takes embodied forms of surveillance to their most logical extreme in imagining a not-too-distant future where the digitally mediated relationships of watcher and watched transgress into the real world of bedrooms, backyards, and living rooms. Drawing attention to the inherently clumsy and vulnerable physical form of the kentuki, several scenes involve the devices falling, breaking, tipping over or getting unexpectedly stuck in places around their keeper’s households. This narrative strategy, which verges on comedic, reveals how surveillance technologies are not always at their most intrusive when they are invisible. Instead, as Wellendorf et al. (2022) write in their examination of people’s difficulty in noticing more insidious forms of domestic surveillance, ‘their noisiness, blatant clumsiness, and the fact that we need to move obstacles for them may cause us to see them as benign when perhaps we should not’ (45). In the novel’s opening scene, for instance, three young girls provocatively taunt the dweller inside a kentuki that we are told ‘looked like a simple and artless plush panda bear, though really it was more similar to a football with one end sliced off so that it stands upright’ (Schweblin 2020: 1). After taking turns removing items of clothing in front of the kentuki’s camera, one of the girls tires of the game. Placing the animal back on the floor, she ‘picked up the bucket she’d brought from the kitchen, and placed it upside down over the panda. The bucket moved nervously, blindly, around the room. It collided with notebooks, shoes, and clothing strewn on the floor, which seemed to make it grow more desperate’ (2020: 1). In a style evocative of slapstick, the dweller becomes not only helpless but overtly victimised as the kentuki is both digitally and physically cut off from interaction. Here, the same qualities that activate a subject’s feelings of fondness towards the cute object simultaneously predispose that object to exploitation. Or, to borrow again from Ngai: ‘For in its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is as often intended to excite a consumer’s sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle’ (2005: 816). As the scene unfolds, a series of disturbing interactions lead to a total breakdown of the rapport between the kentuki and the girls, before one of them restrains it completely:

She picked up the big wooden trunk where she stored her notes and textbooks and put it on top of the bucket, fully immobilizing it … Trapped under the bucket, the bear went on squealing for hours, banging against the plastic like an overgrown hornet, until, near dawn, the room was left in complete silence. (2020: 8)

At the scene’s end, the surveillant paradigm comes full circle. What began as an interaction characterised by entertainment and play unexpectedly turns into a perverted instance of bodily entrapment and domination. The cute surveillance camera, while initially an object that embodies the pleasures of consumption, inevitably becomes a site of perversion, reflecting the ‘critical and complex ways that surveillance and pleasure may entangle along surveillance’s continuum of care and control’ (Chan and McKnight 2024: 1). Extrapolating Schweblin’s speculative scenarios back out into the neoliberal marketplace in which cute surveillance cameras are currently sold, we can see how the aesthetics of cuteness are implicated not only in appealing to the affective registers triggered by regimes of the visual but also in the more insidious consequences that networked digital surveillance has on the body of the consumer, directly or indirectly and with or without their knowledge.

‘Who are you?’: Intersubjective Virtuality

Insofar as Little Eyes presents a speculative world where embodied cuteness intersects with intensifying forms of digital networked surveillance, it also provides an imaginative space through which the limits of surveillant subjectivity is tested out in different geographical and technological contexts. As Alexandra Brown observes, the novel ‘examines the extent to which cybernetworks can function as pay-to-play utopias wherein users purchase freedom from limitations associated with the physical body’ (2023: 262). Put another way, Schweblin presents fictional scenarios in which the voyeuristic subject’s embodied practices, although abstracted from their real-world settings, allow that individual to experience the world in another ‘local sense’ (Ball et al. 2016: 58). Moving between different cultural and social environments and their associated narrative perspectives, the novel thus accounts for the multitude of ways in which surveillance is experienced at the level of individual subjects and in the private relations between two or more individuals, each of which might be considered a form of ‘social surveillance’ or ‘interpersonal surveillance’ (Marwick 2012; Trottier 2012).

This paradigm is cleverly dramatized, however, in the novel’s depiction of surveillance as a cluster of behaviours and affects that are surprisingly different to that which readers might expect to encounter in relation to the standard smart home device or camera. By splitting surveillant subjectivity across kentuki and dweller, subject and object, Schweblin deliberately confuses the normative power dynamics through which modes of watching tend to operate. Like the robot vacuum cleaner or smart home voice assistant, the kentuki is neither device nor fully human—‘part-benign pet whose sensory capabilities are regarded as inferior in comparison with that of its owner, part surveillant intruder that sees more than its keeper’ (Wellendorf et al. 2022: 43) Intensifying this already fraught dual perspective, the affective pull of cuteness in both the physical and mental states of keepers and dwellers further complicates the co-constitution of digital surveillance in the novel’s human subjects.

As different characters either purchase their own kentuki or opt to become a dweller, we encounter a series of consumerist logics that cleverly double as a critique of the surveillance subjectivity matrix: who watches, how they watch, and why they do it. Or, to borrow Albrechtslund’s terms, the novel’s varying subjective insights into the motivations different characters have for engaging with a kentuki offer an ‘idea of participatory surveillance with regards to user empowerment, subjectivity building and information sharing’ (2008: 5). These insights are especially incisive when we encounter a character based in Zagreb named Grigor, who has set up a home laboratory out of which he administers dozens of ‘pre-established kentuki connections’ to prospective dwellers who want to guarantee a voyeuristic experience in a specific location. Putting himself in the position of the customers to whom he sells kentuki codes out of his black-market home business, Grigor contemplates the mindset of both watcher and watched:

Weighing the pros and cons of being a keeper or a dweller never left either side a clear winner. On one hand, few people were willing to expose their private lives to a stranger, and everyone loves to watch, to be a voyeur into someone else’s life. But then, buying a device meant obtaining something tangible that occupied a real place in the house; a kentuki was the closest thing on the market to having a household robot (2020: 100).

Here, Schweblin paints a deceptively simple paradigm of consumer decision making in Grigor’s equivalence of a kentuki with the kinds of household robots now available on the commercial market. Yet this moment of introspection also belies the somewhat graver reality of what it means to want to be watched in one’s private sphere. As Koskela writes of the concept of ‘empowered exhibitionism,’ a mode that aptly applies to Schweblin’s novel: ‘While … in the televisualisation of human lives individuals increasingly disappear, the home webcam can be interpreted as a form of bringing back the subject’ (2004: 206). In this participatory regime, Koskela goes on to argue, unlike ‘being targets of the ever-increasing surveillance, people seek to play an active role in the endless production of visual representations’ (2004: 206). Little Eyes narrates the intersubjective relations between surveillant subjects in large part through the private deliberations of respective keepers who, despite willingly entering into a contract of unidirectional surveillance, nevertheless begin to become interested in the life of the person who dwells inside their device.

In one of these moments of introspection a young woman named Alina buys a crow kentuki in downtown Oaxaca, Mexico and brings it back to her small apartment. After excitedly unboxing the toy and reading the manual, she becomes intensely invested in the personal details of the person dwelling inside: ‘She needed to know if the person was a man or a woman, how old they were, where they lived, what they did for a living, what they liked to do for fun. She needed to judge, urgently needed to decide for herself what kind of dweller she’d gotten’ (2020: 22–23). While this response could be attributable to the ‘subjective feelings called up by’ cute objects, as Ngai puts it, there is another dimension to the intersubjective influence of the device that Alina finds herself suddenly alone with (2010: 952). Without the cues of traditional panoptic surveillance in view (a CCTV camera lens or security guard watching from above), the unknowability of the watcher concealed inside the kentuki comes to preoccupy the internal thoughts of the keeper, creating a different kind of proximity between the surveilled subject, the surveillance technology being used, and the data that connects the two. Such a matrix has more in common, it would seem, with the forms of participatory surveillance that characterise social media interaction, in which subjects voluntarily disclose private information to a usually known—though increasingly unknown—and unquantifiable public ‘other.’ In other words, to use the terms that Ball et al. apply to the abstracted and scaled dataveillance in which the contemporary body-subject now participates, Schweblin’s novel works to reveal the ‘implications of big data practices for theories about the surveilled subject who, analysed from afar, is still gazed upon, although not directly watched as with previous surveillance systems’ (2016: 58). Thus, in the literary representation of the kentuki as a digital surveillance device, the novel folds together surveillant subjectivity and cute-looking technology—neither fully human nor wholly mechanical.

As the scene comes to an end, Alina becomes increasingly paranoid about the extent of the kentuki’s observational capacities, realising that it ‘would see her whole body, get to know the tone of her voice, her clothes, her schedules’ (2020: 24). To reconcile her decision to be watched with her growing feeling of intrusion, she resolves to constrain the intersubjective relations by (re)reducing the kentuki to nothing more than a cute object: ‘She understood now: it was a trap. Connecting with that other user, finding out who this other person was, also meant saying a lot about oneself. In the long run, the kentuki would always end up knowing more about her than she knew about it, that was true; but she was its keeper, and she wouldn’t allow the crow to be anything more than a pet’ (2020: 35). This internal tension, with its emphasis on the owner-owned relationship between keeper and dweller, hinges once again on the maternal feelings evoked by cute device. However, in her vacillations between casting the kentuki as first, a complex human subject whom she wants to understand, before reducing it to a pet to whom she will not disclose anything nonessential, Alina exemplifies the human subject’s desire for complete affective and aesthetic control over objects perceived as cute. In such a formulation, Ngai writes, the cute object is ‘not only formed but all too easily de-formed under the pressure of the subject’s feeling or attitude towards it’ (2005: 816). To that end, speculative fiction functions to envision the myriad subjective responses to the duplicity of cute surveillance in registering characters’ personal hesitations, vacillations, and the rationalities of their decision-making processes when it comes to how they choose to relate to kentuki-like devices. The contemporary novel thus becomes a layered and reflexive medium through which the ambiguities of contemporary digital media—its affective interfaces, opaque networked agency, and entanglement with intimate life—are narratively staged and critically examined.

Intimacy, Cuteness and Desire

When the concept of intimacy is invoked in relation to surveillance, it is often with reference to intrusive and underhand forms of spying in personal relationships. In the practice of ‘spousebusting,’ for example, surveillance is used to provide the ‘means for “making sure”’ a suspicion of some kind is either justified or undeserved (Gregg 2013: 301). As Adam Philips observes, this kind of surveillant intimacy is merely a continuation of the investigative work inaugurated by the normative ‘love plot’ where ‘lovers are like detectives: they are trying to find something out that will make all the difference’ (1994: 40). Other theorizations of intimacy surveillance increasingly refer to the closeness and emotional connection implicit in algorithmic advertising, social media, and other forms of datafied corporate information gathering. Minna Ruckenstein and Julia Granroth, for instance, use ‘intimacy of surveillance’ to describe ‘a characteristic of contemporary corporate marketing and dataveillance fuelled by the accumulation of consumers’ economically valuable digital traces’ (2020: 12). In this system, intimacy arises out of the ways in which algorithms are becoming increasingly adept at anticipating people’s desires, plans and daily habits. The manufacturing of intimate-seeming personalisation at scale—as ironic as it is manipulative—is thus now the intended business objective of countless data gathering corporations.

In Little Eyes, intimacy takes on a somewhat different register insofar as the boundaries between subject and object, human and kentuki, cyberspace and body, begin to trouble the sense of intimacy felt by different characters. The effect of this tension, to borrow from Brown, is ‘a network that appears extremely social even as it takes on an appearance of a relation between things: a stuffed animal and a video game meeting each other in a sort of market’ (2023: 267). Adding to this already confused relation is the extent to which the cute object (dweller) seems to compel an innate intimacy in the human subject (keeper) even though many of the normative requirements for intimacy (communication, understanding, mutual self-disclosure, trust etc.) are lacking. Moreover, the novel’s dual-perspective structure, in which the subjective experiences of both keepers and dwellers are alternately narrated in third-person omniscient, further complicates the dynamics of surveillant intimacy by showing how those in the position of ostensible panoptic power can sometimes be more emotionally vulnerable than the subject under inspection. Reflecting this, as Gavin Smith points out of the strategies and tactics between watchers and watched in ‘control(led)’ surveillance systems, ‘CCTV monitoring is not all about control and domination. Due to the virtual intimacy operators experience with the action and people observed, some develop an almost extended obligation of care for those watched’ (2007: 301). And yet the concept of care, as it manifests in Schweblin’s novel, comes to have troubling and indeterminate consequences. While many of the kentuki keepers begin their engagement with the device in a caring and even affectionate mode, the cute object’s innate vulnerability and dependence upon its owner inevitably becomes a burden, leading to abandonment and, in several cases, acts of violence.

For a recently divorced father named Enzo, cute surveillance becomes so integrated into everyday life that it begins to dominate the conditions of his relationship with his ex-wife and son, Luca. We learn that the kentuki in his home, in the variety of a mole, was initially imposed upon Enzo by his son’s psychologist as ‘an intervention’ designed to assist in the development of the boy’s social skills and capacity for responsibility and care. When Luca comes to despise the kentuki, the dweller develops an attachment to Enzo, who feels obligated to care for the kentuki despite his total disinterest in the regime of participatory surveillance: ‘The mole always found a way to get his attention. And Enzo (if he didn’t want another intervention) had to keep it alive. Because although they shared custody of Luca, his ex-wife had won all the psychologist’s sympathy, so it was best that nothing bad happen to the damned kentuki’ (2020: 39). Despite his frustration with the situation in which he finds himself, Enzo gradually develops feelings of intimacy and affection towards the object as he attempts, and continually fails, to establish an emotional connection with the dweller. In a moment of contemplation, he imagines his interactions with the dweller from their perspective: ‘How could he be so annoyed at a simple attempt to converse as equals? Would he really rather crawl around the house as a mole than strike up some kind of friendship with Enzo?’ (2020: 130)

In his attempt to understand his private feelings about the kentuki, Enzo’s characterising of the device moves fluidly between human and non-human, from gadget to ‘guy.’ Clearly conflicted about how he positions himself in relation to the object, he nevertheless seeks a form of intersubjective engagement that can only be described as that of human friendship (‘sharing a few beers’). Yet the governing condition upon which the smart device/human friendship depends is still somehow indexical to the object’s cute appearance and diminutive size, even though the affinity described is fundamentally to do with personal character. This subject relation, in which Enzo comes to desire closeness to the kentuki, reflects the findings of several scholars who have articulated the link between cuteness, size, and feelings of vulnerability. In this formulation, ‘infantile features elicit nurturing responses in adults,’ via a response that is ‘an evolutionary adaptation to secure the survival of the species’ (Li and Eastman 2023: 1308; Lorenz 1970). Put another way, ‘vulnerability is an antecedent of cuteness perception’ (Li and Eastman 2023: 1308). Enzo’s self-reflective bewilderment at his affective attachment, in which he is simultaneously repelled by the kentuki but also wants to care for it, invokes a longstanding connection between cuteness and the problematics of childhood. In other words, as Kao and Boyle argue:

Faced with the cute object, the subject makes a simultaneous move: the subject regresses to the time-space of childhood and projects the child into the future. The cute is always already the child, the childlike, and the childish across species and animacy lines. (2017: 13)

This tension is also reflected by Ngai’s more general claims about the complexity of aesthetic categories when she writes that as ‘sites where ways of speaking or aspects of human intersubjectivity routinely intersect with qualities or aspects of the thing world, aesthetic categories are thus challengingly double-sided in more ways than one: objective and subjective, descriptive and evaluative, conceptual and sensuous’ (2010: 952). These tensions seem to both prevent a normative relationship between Enzo and the kentuki while at the same time contribute to his growing obsession with winning the object’s affections.

However, when the intimacy of Enzo’s relationship with the mole begins to constitute its total personification, the machinations of traditional surveillance begin to disappear entirely. While at first uncomfortable with the fact that the kentuki can observe the intimate details of his everyday domestic life, Enzo gradually comes to enjoy the practice of self-disclosure, so much so that he starts to treat the device as if it were his own son, even ascribing it the name ‘Mister.’ Taking the mole on his daily errands around Umbertide, he enthusiastically ensures that the dweller inside can observe as much of his personal life as possible. Showing off the historical downtown where he lives, Enzo sets the kentuki on the ‘passenger seat on a stack of cushions’ instead ‘of putting him in the back window ledge of the car’ (2020: 90). Caring for the kentuki as if the physical object were a living thing, he ‘buckled the seat belt and cleaned the mole’s eyes with the cloth he used for the windshield, to be sure Mister’s sight was perfectly clear. As they drove, he pointed out the Torre della Rocca and the Collegiata di Santa Maria della Reggia’ (2020: 90).

Crucially, however, the personifying impulse never comes to complete realization in Enzo’s relation to the kentuki. Stopping by the local pharmacy to say hello to a friend, he carries the mole ‘under his left arm, against his chest, the way he sometimes carried his groceries’ (2020: 90). Two months later, by which point ‘Mister had perfectly assimilated into his role as co-parent,’ Enzo remains caught in an affective relation to the kentuki that is a ‘mixture of pity and gratitude’ (2020: 93, 94). As the intimacy of the relationship between the two intensifies, Enzo’s frustration with the hybridity of the device (both human and toy, both active but distant) becomes uncontrollable and he begins to imagine ways to restore the hierarchal power dynamic between keeper and dweller: ‘He felt an urge to kick the mole, lock it in a closet, hide its charger the way his son kept doing. Then Mister would have no one to wake in the middle of the night, no one who would search for the charger and save him’ (2020: 162). The relation encountered here, between a frustrated subject and the harmless cute object, borders on what some scholars have called ‘cute aggression’—the paradoxical ‘urge some people get to squeeze, crush, or bite cute things, albeit without any desire to cause harm’ to them (Stavropoulos and Alba 2018: 2). Discussed as an example, of ‘dimorphous expression of emotions,’ cute aggression also encompasses the phenomenon of experiencing one kind of strong emotion (e.g. happy, sad, or angry) but expressing an opposite emotion (Stavropoulos and Alba 2018: 2; Aragòn et al. 2015). Caught between feelings of intimacy, attachment, and aggression, Enzo’s relation to the kentuki nevertheless represents a more immediate correlation to human-to-human affiliation.

As the complexity of Enzo’s feelings take centre stage, the surveillant dynamic is far less apparent. Narrative tension, in other words, focalises around Enzo’s tumultuous relationship with the mole itself, rendering the camera technology at the centre of their connection secondary to the affective relation the cute object engenders in the human subject. What this uncomfortable though perhaps not surprising dynamic ultimately reveals is the extent to which cuteness generates an irresolvable rift in human subjectivity; one that stimulates feelings of intimacy yet denies equal humanly identification. Here, the ‘striking incompleteness of the cute visage implies that while the object must be given just enough face to enable it to return our gaze, a fuller personification becomes impossible because it would symbolically render that object our equal, erasing the power differential on which the aesthetic depends’ (Ngai 2005: 833). While Enzo seeks to personify the kentuki as his equal and intimate ‘other,’ the relationship can only ever exist as a rhetorical form of closeness, one which affords cute surveillance enough submission into the domestic realm so as to fly under the radar of critique and accountability, but not enough to appreciate the voyeur on the other side of the camera as fully human. In staging this asymmetrical dynamic, the contemporary novel functions as a crucial site for negotiating such rhetorical intimacies, exposing how narrative itself can simulate emotional reciprocity while structurally preserving the hierarchies and affective asymmetries embedded in technologically mediated encounters.

Enzo’s troubled and eventually tragic relationship with the kentuki is just one of several interactions in the novel in which cute surveillance begins as an intimate dynamic between watched and watcher before turning unexpectedly dystopian. As a networked narrative that moves across a disparate set of temporal and spatial locations and individual character perspectives, Little Eyes offers up a space in which the outcomes of invasive, participatory surveillance can be imagined in discrete social, economic, and domestic contexts. While the overall experiences of keepers and dwellers are thematically interconnected, the novel ultimately reveals how surveillance is felt and understood differently, according to a range of bodily, subjective and cultural factors. The literary text, then, functions to challenge a tendency within studies of surveillance which treats various forms of observation as a singular gaze defined by discipline and control. Instead, the relationships that Schweblin develops between watched and watcher present an alternative range of experiences of surveillance that are neither wholly utopian nor dystopian but rather influenced by a complex set of situational factors not ordinarily taken up in studies of the technological gaze—inflected and reconfigured as they are, by the affective power and persuasion of cuteness.

Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests