I.i.Terminology of Emotion, and Writing as Medium ...
This current writing takes words like “emotion,”“passion,”“feeling,”“affect,”“sensibility,”“sympathy,”and “sentiment”as interchangeable with each other.This is done intentionally.Historically speaking, “the many names for emotion travel as freely as the emotions themselves”(Pinch 16) and these terms are almost interchangeable in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing.For a perceptual history of the modern selfhood, which is the purpose of this writing, that these terms have in common is much more significant than what differentiates them from each other.Rei Terada in Feeling in Theory writes:
Emotion ...is entangled in the mysteries of consciousness, its history locked inside the classical histories of mind and will ...[and] appears inseparable from expression and subjectivity in the first place, however, its capacity to criticize subjectivity is highly revealing.(Terada 6)[1]
This subtle distinction of “emotion”from other words is significant for this writing, in which emotion and sentiment are more about the configuration of subjectivity in a history of writing as a technology.What remains at stake in this project is more about configuring sensibility in relation to a new mode of inwardness than the difference between different sentiments themselves.In other words, it is about a political economy of emotions in what Clifford Siskin and William Warner recently captures as “a history of mediation”(Siskin and Warner 5) in Western Enlightenment, specifically in the eighteenth century’s investment in paper as the medium of circulation and sociality.Marshall McLuhan defines media as “extensions of man”and mediation as “the historically changing sensory and perceptual ‘ratios’ of human experience”(qtd.in Mitchell and Hansen xii).Following this metaphysical approach to studies of media and mediation, W.J.T.Mitchell and Mark B.N.Hansen recently calls a “techno-anthropological universal sense of media that allow us to range across divides(characteristically triangulated) that are normally left unbroached in media studies:societytechnology-aesthetics, empirical-formal-constitutive, social-historicalexperiential”(Mitchell and Hansen ix).The contribution of this current writing is to make an investigation upon the inward making of sentimental selfhood in the emergence of textual culture.Issues of sensibility, sentiment, emotion, feeling and affect are examined in their specific relations to a modern print media—what Raymond Williams shorthand as “writing,”which, as one of the technological media, is “an ontological condition of humanization—the constitutive operation of exteriorization and invention”(xiii).It is in this historical and theoretical sense that this current writing takes notice of the differences between these terms but do not emphasize them unless it comes under necessary conditions[2].
In what Michel Foucault calls the “Classical age,”he defines “natural history”as “nothing more than the nomination of the visible,”and during that historical period,
what came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre [of the Renaissance] and that of the catalogue [of the nineteenth century] was not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse.(Foucault 1970:131-132)
The eighteenth century begins to have a specifically emergent modality of the human body, which “serves as a sort of reservoir for models of visibility, and acts as a spontaneous link between what one can see and what one can say”(135).The knowledge of the human body and psyche is composed in a whole domain of empiricity, at the same time describable and orderable in a totality of representations.In such a historical period, the naturalist Linnaeus defines natural plants as being “a product of number, of form, of proportion, of situation”(qtd.in Foucault 1970:134).Naming and categorization of natural plants in this way is analogous to the abstract, serialized subject of the market place.In the same epistemological vein, human being also begins to assume a dimension of what Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer calls “impersonal personal”in Kant’s aesthetics[3], which is emotively and performatively articulated.This current writing identifies an inward, sensualized, individuated subjectivity coming to a kind of sensus communis in the emergence of modern aesthetics[4].This historical process could be examined in the theoretical light of what Samuel Weber sees in the theatrical “double, or dual, movement”in Martin Heidegger’s seminal essay “The Age of the World Picture”:“[T]hat of setting things out in front of oneself and at the same time bringing things toward oneself”(Weber 1996:78).For Heidegger, “what distinguishes the essence of modernity”(Heidegger 1977:68) is not merely a priority given to the sense of vision.Instead, it is an “interweaving”of two processes:“[T]hat the world becomes picture and man the subject—which is decisive for the essence of modernity”and that “illuminates the founding process of modern history, a process that, at first sight, seems almost nonsensical”(70).It is a process as follows:
Whereby the more completely and comprehensively the world, as conquered, stands at man’s disposal, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively(i.e.peremptorily) does the subiectum rise up, and all the more inexorably, too, do observations and teachings about the world transform themselves into a doctrine of man, into an anthropology.No wonder that humanism first arises where the world becomes picture.(70)
The increasing grid of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, sensual, affective and epistemological as well in this “humanism,”comes through the eighteenth century with the proliferation of a textual media culture.The technology of modern writing implements an inward as well as outward theatrical turn, a turn influencing what Foucault calls “technologies of self”when modern self co-evolves with commerce, aesthetics and nationalism.This chapter gives a historical context of the discourse of sentiment in the eighteenth century and how it complicates matters like(in)visibility, intelligibility, and forms of exchangeability in “the growing fluidity of social relations[5]”of the century.
Sentimentality is often entangled with the emergence of a modern psychological self.In channeling a circulation of feelings among subjects and objects, brotherhood and otherhood[6], sentiment helps to clarify the liquidity and promiscuity of what is acknowledged as human subjects endowed with increasing inward interiority in the eighteenth century.In that century, sentiments are not yet always lodged within the private, inner lives of individual persons[7].Rather, they often circulate among persons as somewhat autonomous substances, more as impersonal forces, sometimes contagious, and other times beneficial[8].Therefore, it comes as no surprise that eighteenth-century accounts of subjectivity, for the concept of which emotion and sentiment occupy an integral part, take subjective events as particularized and observable as phenomenal events.This empirical emphasis upon observation is among what Richard Rorty describes as the rise of epistemology in the seventeenth century.For Rorty, John Locke finds that an analogue of Newton’s particle mechanics for “inner space”would somehow be “of great advantage in directing our Thoughts in the search of other Things”and would somehow let us “see, what Objects our Understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with[9].”Regarding this epistemological shift, Mary Poovey observes “that the moral philosopher assumed he could conduct ‘experiments’ on subjectivity and that the results would simultaneously describe particular events and contribute to systematic knowledge”(Poovey 148) of universal human nature and a philosophy of government[10].Arguing out of this affective and epistemological reference, this current writing situates an economy of sympathy moving from “(real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence each other(esp.in some occult way), or attract or tend toward each other”to that of being more on “relation between two bodily organs or parts such that disorder, or any condition, of the one induces a corresponding condition in the other[11]”in the middle of the eighteenth century.This genealogy of the emotional “technologies of self”is eventually to be individuated and inscribed upon an inward “psychosis[12]”in the end of the century.That economy of emotionality and interiority, in turn, pre-mediates the rise of psychoanalysis as a rigorous human science in the end of the nineteenth century as if out of historical necessity[13].At the same time, like two sides of the same coin, this highly emotionalized individuality requires an exchangeable political economy to maintain a new form of sociality, which includes “the nature of social identity, intentionality, accountability, transparency and reciprocity—the who, what, when, where, and why of exchange”(Agnew 9-10), as historian Jean-Christophe Agnew puts it[14].This current writing historicizes how writing as a communicative technology occupies a very significant position in this shift of interiorizing emotionalism and increasing exchangeability[15].Whereas voice, as part of the oral culture, makes the members of the audience into a unity, silent reading—as consequential to a proliferating print media culture—makes each reader enter his or her own private inner world.As a result, it shatters the unity of the audience[16].Modern print media helps to textualize perceptions more into a visual sub-class of representations.Heidegger, Foucault, Hacking and Wellbery take representation as a fundamental category of thought in the eighteenth century[17].Following this critical literature, this current writing historicizes a new form of self, performance, and subjectivity in mediation as an emergent notion and a matrix of practices made possible through modern textual culture.This modern theatricalized selfhood ascends up several layers of artification, partakes of the systems of nature and culture, thereby brings a crucible wherein new social and cultural forms of exchange could be tested and tempered, specifically the marketplace questions of identity, transparency, and accountability.This gives rise to a modern economy of the perceptual and sensorial in what Jonathan Crary historicizes as “the progressive parcelization and division of the body into separate and specific systems and functions”(Crary 1990:79) in the first half of the nineteenth century.
One example that illustrates the relation between language and emotional subjectivity addressed here comes at hand from a politically feminist history of the British novel.According to Nancy Armstrong, the modern female subject is engendered by the male.In her political history of the novel, the relation between the sentimental affect and the social template for the human is configured in a visual sense.She reads the rape of Pamela by Mr.B in Richardson’s novel Pamela, which was published almost two decades before Burke and Smith, as a male attempt to penetrate a servant girl’s body that “magically transforms that body into one of language and emotion, into a metaphysical object that can be acquired only through her consent and his willingness to adhere to the procedures of modern love”(Armstrong 1987:6).When Mr.B forcibly takes possession of Pamela’s letters, we see the reappearance of erotic desire transferring from Pamela’s body to her words:(https://www.daowen.com)
Artful slut! Said he—What’s this to my question?—Are they [the letters] not about you?—If, said I, I must pluck them out of my hiding-place behind the wainscot, won’t you see me?—Still more and more artful! Said he—Is this an answer to my question?—I have searched every place above, and in your closet, for them, and cannot find them; so I will know where they are.Now, said he, it is my opinion they are about you; and I never undressed a girl in my life; but I will now begin to strip my pretty Pamela.(Richardson 245)
As he proceeds, Pamela capitulates and delivers up what he desires.Richardson thus displaces the conventionally desirable woman onto a written one, and infuses the new body with erotic appeal.“The pleasure she now offers is the pleasure of the text rather than those forms of pleasure that derive from mastering her body”(6), Armstrong writes.For her, sentimentality(here of love and sexual desire) is textualized into a web of productions, which explains why “at the inception of modern culture, the literate classes in England suddenly developed an unprecedented state for writing for, about, and by women”(Armstrong 1987:7).In turn, the proliferation of sentiment promoted by “writing for, about, and by women,”the “first and foremost”modern individual, is responsible for “the majority of eighteenth-century novels”(7-8).Mr.B.is configured into a reformed novel reader of sentimental novels.He learns to love Pamela not as an “object of desire”but for her “female sentimentality”(117).Thus, a linguistic and emotional text pushed into being through physical violence has generated a specter-like gendered life of its own that started from the emergence of modern mass media, specifically print media of the novel[18].William Warner states the case more schematically:
It is at this point that English readers start engaging in the sort of sympathetic identification with and critical judgment of fictional characters that will lie at the center of novel reading from Richardson, Fielding, and Frances Burney through Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James.(Warner 223)[19]
Such spectrality of subjectivity in “mediatic articulation”(to use Samuel Weber’s phrase) comes to host female “individuals”as dividuals, making female subjectivity as mediated in between the screens of writing[20].Nancy Armstrong argues:
It was first only women who were defined in terms of their emotional natures.Men generally retained their political identity in writing that developed the qualities of female subjectivity and made subjectivity a female domain.(Armstrong 1987:4)[21]
Following this point, it is significant to take this first developed female subjectivity as what Samuel Weber defines as the first case where we see a loss of individuality consequential upon modern modes of inscription from modern media such as television, radio, film, and writing:
As a ‘host of spirits,’ individuals do not merely cease to exist:they persist, but as dividuals, divided between life and death, spectator and actor, strange and familiar, entering an alien body and soul on the one hand, while on the other remaining sufficiently detached to see themselves taking leave of their selves(rather than of their ‘senses’).The individual thus altered is here and there at once, and consequently can be neither exclusively here nor there, neither simply itself or simply other.This impossible ‘situation’ splits the site itself, rendering it something like a ghost of itself, lacking an authentic place or a proper body.(Weber 2004:42)
The coming of modern mass media culture, of which writing and literature is their first case, enhances inscriptions between different media, establishes spaces for crossing boundaries, and thus conflates concatenations of situations engendering spectrality of selfhood.This current writing tries to give a social history of textual media culture, and to suggest how a self-willing discipline and regulation of the spectrality and theatricality of modern selfhood is made possible because of this culture.
Specifically, in this historical period of media transition from an oral and scribal to a print society in Europe[22], a textual economy of feelings, emotions and sensibilities come to occupy a more prominent position.This change remains coterminous if not directly caused by the rise of a textual media culture and the profound changes in modes of visuality that come along with it.Excessive(re)productions of words, images, sounds and the easily wide dissemination of the media system ferment “strange fits of passion”—to use half a line from one of William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems,”which invites anatomies of passions and physiognomies[23].This current writing situates Adam Smith’s political economy of moral sentiments through sympathy as a later part of the textual and literary taming technology[24] to neutralize these “passions”and make them representable.Issues of otherness to lived experience, authenticity and insincerity of selfhood are thus interwoven with “the nature of social identity, intentionality, accountability, transparency and reciprocity.”This transparent exchangeability remains analogous to properties of commodities in modern society.