II.vii.Emotional Immediacy:Its Fate
There is no significant critical attention from Burke on the necessity for a well-informed active citizen to retreat to internalized and solitary reading of the newspaper in order to participate in the larger, public group political process of modern society, nevertheless.It is not that modern newspaper did not appear during Burke’s time.As a matter of fact, two decades before Edmund Burke went to London, The Daily Advertiser, as the “first modern newspaper,”[115] already began publication.It included the following notice about its contents:
This paper will consist wholly of Advertisements, together with the Prices of Stocks, Course of Exchange, and Names and Descriptions of Persons becoming Bankrupts; as also in Alphabetical Manner a Daily Account of the Several Species and Quantities of Goods Imported into the Port of London ....(qtd.in Stephens 160)[116]
Its success inspired all of London’s growing number of morning dailies in the 1740s to feature such “commercial intelligence.”[117]Newspapers are believed to have encouraged the rise of public opinion and spheres of publicity in the modern sense.The public sphere this modern media helps form channeling of sympathy more conveniently transferred.An extreme case exists in an investigation upon reports of suicide in Sleepless Souls(1990), in which Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy argue that “the style and tone of newspaper stories about suicides promoted an increasingly secular and sympathetic attitude towards self-killing”(qtd.in Briggs and Burke 72) in eighteenth-century England.The impression was created through the frequency of the reports that suicide was a commonplace event.On the other hand, coffee houses and clubs offer an immediate space of local conversations[118].Conversation is a crucial term in the eighteenth century for illustrating “the flow across those newly reconstituted fields”of the private individual exchanges and the public ones, as Graham Burchell points out in the case of David Hume.It is “to describe the form ideally taken by the ‘commerce’ of … [the political culture] of opinion, the appropriate cultural form of exchanges between individuals of the ‘middling rank’ immersed in ‘common life’”(Burchell 1991:129), and “‘opinion’ became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence”(Habermas 33-34).Thus, there exists a heterogeneous system of media, which fosters different perceptual proclivities and spatialities.For instance, the dialogue form of the moral weeklies and essays published in such periodicals as Tatler and Spectator, “attested to their proximity to the spoken word”(34).Burke, with his emphasis on the oral aspect and affective message of the language, belongs to that category of the local, immediate, coffee house and personal.
What Burke’s invocation of orality and affection through his local empiricism achieves is what Niklas Luhmann describes as “the impression of … immediacy”(Luhmann 2000:8), which runs throughout Romantic poetry[119].The human sensorium of sound is taken as means to maintain presence and immanence.During the process, for Burke, sympathy registers and communicates “realities.”It is also used to identify with a sense of nationhood.At the end of his philosophical enquiry, Burke writes:“It may be observed that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength.The French language has that perfection, and that defect”(Burke 1958:176).Transparent mediation is taken as a polluting other, who, by executing the queen, just caused the collapse of “the unbought grace of life … the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise … that sensibility of principle, that charity of honor”(86).The era of sympathy, honor and chivalry is being succeeded by “that of sophisters, economists, and calculators,”and “the glory of Europe is extinguished forever”(86).It is no more that of an age when “ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult”(86).“A look”at “her”would incorporate “ten thousand swords,”establishing a “close-knit group”of sentiment, similar to that of the spoken word, as Walter J.Ong writes:“in its physical constitution as sound, the spoken word proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons”(Ong 1982:73).Burke’s aesthetic theory is an elegy of the oral rhetoric at the emergent stage of textuality.Sympathy from English thereby “good”Europeans produces immediate personal tactility, the possibility of which is canceled by abstractions from “sophisters, economists, and calculators[120]”—that kind of proliferation of signs included in what Coleridge denounces as merely the “verbal truth[121].”More significantly, abstraction as mediated through words and numbers is aligned with a venomous sight of a revolution spectacle.A relation, in which face-to-face contact and immediate somatic feedback are the conditions of knightly performance, is taken away through artifactualization of words and numbers.The previous(and bygone) helps stage his feelings as immediate, natural, human and of course English[122].“Oh! What a revolution! And what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!”(Burke 1958:85-86), as Burke imitates an oral act of shouting with onomatopoeic exclamations, not to mention the processing consciousness of “I thought.”In this act of creating an “illusion of oral mimesis,”[123] immediation is already embedded in mediation.No wonder Mary Wollstonecraft, in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men, finds Burke’s own feelings false when referring ironically to the “compassionate tears”he “elaborately laboured to excite.”She denounces his “sentimental exclamations,”his “pampered sensibility,”and the sentimental nostalgia of his political vision.His feelings are not only false and regressive.They also fail where real feeling is due:“Your tears,”Wollstonecraft admonishes, “are reserved … for the declamation of the theatre, or for the downfall of queens … whilst the distress of many … were vulgar sorrows that could not move your commiseration”(Wollstonecraft 2, 5, 6, 10, 27).
The myth of vocal and auditory immediacy conceals materiality of communication, such as the drop of ink, the line, the page, the brush of painting, the book, the print shop or the cognitive activities of the brain.Voice, as the vehicle of communication and expression, is
a medium which both preserves the presence of the object before intuition and self-presence, the absolute proximity of the [subjective]acts to themselves… The subject can hear or speak to himself and be affected by the signifier he produces, without passing through an external detour.(Derrida 1973:76)
Thus Derrida argues in his Speech and Phenomena.It belongs to what he names as a “white mythology[124].”It is a fiction of transparency and presence, and covers up an ideology of auto-affection that “has had a long, strange career in [Western] philosophy”(Terada 25).Its appearance of immediacy promises self-sufficiency and self-immediacy instead of self-difference and mediation.When “consciousness processes perception under the impression of their immediacy,”Niklas Luhmann writes, “… the brain is actually executing operations that are highly selective, quantitatively calculating, recursively operative”(Luhmann 2000:8).In Burke’s scenario of mediated sentiment of “immediacy,”sympathy functions with technologies of orality and aurality in communication, which itself is “nothing primordial, but an impression resulting from the differentiation of autopoietic systems of the brain and consciousness”(8).Burke’s aesthetics thus covers up the processing of materiality and labor by achieving the effects of tactile presence and somatic immanence in realities.It is part and parcel of Burke’s suspicion upon “the whole pictorial model of mind that dominated the empirical tradition”(Mitchell 1986:166), which comes to occupy a significant place in the political economy of sympathy in the philosophy of moral sentiments developed by Adam Smith, who differs from many British Romanticists[125].It seems that from Burke’s disavowal and vituperation of mediation to Smith’s welcoming embrace of it into one visual and theatrical mode there exists a transitional history of mediation.What a secret history of sentiment would this transition unfold?How does the moral sentiments taking on a putative life of its own help approach the so-called “Adam Smith problem,”an alleged biographical rupture from a moral philosopher to a political economist?How is it metonymical of emergent distinctions of class, culture, social status, and divisions of labor, which cohabit with the collapse of classical mode of vision and the occurrence of a specific mode of theatricality?What does it mean to our everyday mode of beings?These are the questions I try to address throughout this current writing, with detours and mediations.
【注释】
[1]Elements of Criticism, vol.1, p.343.
[2]Voltaire, in his Philosophical Dictionary, also wrote:“What is an idea?It is an image that paints itself in my brain ....The most abstract ideas are the consequences of all the objects I’ve perceived ....I’ve ideas only because I’ve images in my head”(Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, p.236).The Enlightenment’s debt to Descartes’s ocular-centric theory of knowledge and its distance from it is readily apparent here, as Martin Jay points out.See Jay, Downcast Eyes, pp.83-84.
[3]See McLuhan’s argument on “the make of typographic man”in his The Gutenberg Galaxy.Also see Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism, p.67.
[4]Quoted in Henry Home, Elements of Criticism, vol.1, p.343.
[5]Sympathy, indeed, is an endemic trope in the eighteenth century, which will be elaborated more into details below.See, for instance, Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy.For an analysis of Congreve’s, also see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, pp.5-6.
[6]At least before he changed the spelling of his family name from “Home”into “Hume.”See chapter 3 of this dissertation.
[7]See D.D.Raphael and A.L.Macfie, “Introduction,”pp.1-3.
[8]Henry Home, Elements of Criticism, vol.1, pp.307-308.
[9]Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity.”
[10]See for instance, McLuhan “Visual and Acoustic Space”in The Global Village:Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, pp.35-47, and Ong “The Shifting Sensorium,”in The Varieties of Sensory Experience:A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, pp.25-30.
[11]The Question Concerning Technology, p.58.Also see Lydia H.Liu, The Freudian Robot:Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious, p.28.
[12]For a theological genealogy of “economy”and how it evolves into Hegelian “positivity”and Foucauldian “apparatus,”see “What is an Apparatus?”by Giorgio Agamben.
[13]This phrase is appropriated from the book title of Flesh in the Age of Reason(Penguin, 2005) by Roy Porter, the historian of medicine.
[14]W.J.Bate, J.M.Bullitt, and L.F.Powell(eds.), Samuel Johnson:The Idler and Adventurer, p.457.
[15]See Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, p.4.
[16]For instance, see the works by Water J.Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Jack Goody, Eric A.Havelock, Régis Debray, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elizabeth L.Eisenstein, Benedict Anderson and Erich Neumann.The most recent critical essay on this topic with a historical emphasis is “Genesis of the Media Concept”by John Guillory.
[17]For how the periodical newspaper press replaced the pulpit in early modern society as a medium for disseminating news and information, as well as providing psychological reinforcement, also see Elizabeth L.Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, pp.553-554.
[18]Here I follow Foucault’s definition of episteme as “a specifically discursive apparatus”or “the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within”(Foucault 1980:197).As to “apparatus,”the definition closest to completion Foucault gives is in an interview from 1977:“What I’m trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid.Such are the elements of the apparatus.The apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements… I understand by the term ‘apparatus’ a sort of—shall we say—formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need”(Foucault 1980:194-195, emphasis original).Also see Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?.”
[19]See Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti”in Critical Inquiry, p.844.Also see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, p.35.
[20]See Samuel H.Monk, The Sublime, p.87.
[21]See J.T.Boulton, “Introduction”to A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, pp.xv-xvi.
[22]As Foucault writes:“I don’t believe the problem can be solved by historicizing the subject as posited by the phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through the course of history.One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework.And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledge, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to a field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history”(Foucault 1980:117).
[23]See Dixon Wecter, “Burke’s Theory concerning Words, Images, and Emotion,”p.179.
[24]His early mentor W.G.Hamilton once remarked, “Burke understands everything but gaming and music,”as mentioned by Dixon Wecter, “Burke’s Theory concerning Words, Images, and Emotion,”p.179, note 43.
[25]Dixon Wecter argues that “Burke’s stress upon the sublime arising from the sonority of poetry and rhetoric, as well as his theory which disparages clear visualization as an aid to aesthetic emotion, sprang in part from the peculiarities of his own sensory equipment”(180).And at the end of the essay, Wecter quotes observation from Tom Paine:“Mr.Burke has two or three times, in his parliamentary speeches, and in his publications, made use of a jingle of words that convey no ideas”(qtd.in Wecter 1940:181).
[26]Here I refer to the mode of “sentimentalization”as that of melodramatic excess, which is the theme of Peter Brooks’ The Melodramatic Imagination:Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess.
[27]It becomes critical cliché that this process comes along with a rising bourgeoisie.As Louis Althusser writes in For Marx in 1969:“It could not be more bluntly put that it was the bourgeoisie itself that invented for the people the popular myth of the melodrama ...serials in the popular press, cheap ‘novels’”(p.139).
[28]Quoted in Friedrich A.Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, pp.37-38.
[29]Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations:Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman, p.63.
[30]For an investigation of Herder’s establishment of a hierarchy of sensorial perceptions(the hearing, the senses of touch and sight, that is), see von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion, pp.170-173.
[31]See Dixon Wecter, “Burke’s Theory concerning Words, Images, and Emotion,”p.167, note 2.
[32]See Daniel M.Gross’s discussion in The Secret History of Emotion:From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science, pp.113-156.See chapter 3 of the dissertation for a discussion of Hume’s economy of emotions through print media.
[33]Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality.
[34]Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, p.98.
[35]For an intellectual-history aspect upon how it was through Addison the essayist that the sublime became an important idea in the philosophy of taste and in an investigation of the pleasures of imagination, not of rhetoric, see Samuel H.Monk, The Sublime, pp.58-60.
[36]See Josiah Royce, “Psychological Reasons for Lessing’s Attitude toward Descriptive Poetry.”
[37]See John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,”p.338-339.
[38]See R.Jones, “Science and Language in England of the Mid-Seventeenth Century.”Francis Bacon once pointed that Chinese has “direct correspondence between things and words”(Porter 2001:43).Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language also remains relevant.
[39]For a more elaborated gender reading of Burke’s aesthetic division, see W.J.T.Mitchell’s “Eye and Ear:Edmund Burke and the Politics of Sensibility”in his Iconology:Image, Text, Ideology, pp.116-150.
[40]He makes four direct references to John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.See Dixon Wecter, “Burke’s Theory concerning Words, Images, and Emotion,”p.170.
[41]For the correlation between the visual and the phonetic alphabet, see Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, p.39.
[42]J.F.Suter points out that Burke’s critique of Rousseau is situated “in the spirit of the British moral tradition, in particular of Shaftesbury and Adam Smith,”and Burke “believes that passions can be useful to society if they are suitably educated and tempered by laws and manners”(Suter 52).Indeed, Burke might be arguing in this British tradition of moral philosophy, but there surely exists a large difference between the ways of how passions should be “suitably educated and tempered by laws and manners”in Burke and Smith, the latter of whom is more of a commodity culture, as will be suggested in the Adam Smith chapter of this writing.
[43]Jon P.Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790—1832, p.103.
[44]More on Burke’s revolutionary theatre, see Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, chapter 2.
[45]This point is suggested by Jon P.Klancher in his The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790—1832, pp.103-108.
[46]This, of course, alludes to his masterpiece work The Great Chain of Being:A Study of the History of an Idea.Nevertheless, here it is more than an intellectual history of an idea.
[47]For an excellent rhetoric analysis of this passage, see Jon P.Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790—1832, p.105.
[48]In this sense, Burke is even different from other significant English authors around that historical period, including Hobbes, Locke.See J.F.Suter, “Burke, Hegel, and the French Revolution,”p.58, note 52.
[49]See Jon P.Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790—1832, pp.107-108.
[50]See Jon P.Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790—1832, p.105.
[51]Burke remakes that the best of the French National Assembly were merely “men of theory”(qtd.in Suter 62).For a similar attitude regarding the sense politics in Hegel’s response to the French Revolution, see J.F.Suter, “Burke, Hegel, and the French Revolution,”in Hegel’s Political Philosophy—Problems and Perspectives.
[52]Walter Scott, in a sense, embraces this gesture.In the poem “The Bard’s Incantation”(written under the threat of invasion in the autumn of 1804), a response to British fears of post-Revolutionary France, “Minstrels and bards of other days”are invited to defend Albion from a Revolutionary “Specter with his Bloody Hand”—The Bard’s voice is, “almost literally, the voice of nature as it mingles with the groaning oak, the stormy breeze, and the waves on the lake to proclaim ‘the joys of Liberty.’The purity of the voice from an oral past promises concomitant freedom in the form of anti-Jacobin politics”(46), as Penny Fielding points out.See Fielding, Writing and Orality.
[53]Also see Olivia Smith, Politics of Language, 1790—1819, chapter 3.Also see Hazlitt’s report of the difference on how Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine writes, in “On the Difference between Writing and Speaking,”in Collected Works of William Hazlitt, 12:275.
[54]See Dixon Wecter, “Burke’s Theory concerning Words, Images, and Emotion,”p.172.
[55]This antagonism, as a matter of fact, is also recognizable in Henry Home’s theory of criticism quoted in the epigraph of this chapter.
[56]Also see Water J.Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp.27-28, 79.
[57]Also see John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,”p.325.
[58]I am aware that the use of such terms as “medium”and “technology”might make anachronistic mistakes.Nevertheless, on the other hand, we are all already always anachronistic, since history is a lost myth and historicism is a modernity’s mistake we should all avoid.For a historical investigation upon the emergence of the media concept in the late nineteenth century as a response to the proliferation of new technical media, such as the telegraph and phonograph, see John Guillory’s essay “Genesis of the Media Concept.”
[59]See von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion, p.37.(https://www.daowen.com)
[60]See Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium:Materialism and Modern Lyric for a detailed exploration of “poetic substances”and iconologies of matter.
[61]For a case study on Denis Diderot, on how he assumes the role of the universal philosopher and participates in the Encyclopedié with a contemplating attitude—a noble defender of humanity, truth, equality, and reason—and how he holds hostility to the partiality of the journalists and the printed media in general(newspapers, periodicals, and newsletters), see Anne Fastrup, “Mediating le philosophe:Diderot’s Strategic Self-Representations,”in This Is Enlightenment, pp.265-283.
[62]Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,”in Limited INC, p.4.
[63]See OED online, under the entry of “abstraction.”
[64]In a way, the history of language and writing outlined by the Enlightenment thinkers is that of separation and gradation, the kind of theoretical foundation for the German comparatist philological studies in the nineteenth century—as identified by Derrida in “Signature Event Context”:“Describing the history of the types of writing, their continuous derivation from a common root that is never displaced and which establishes a sort of community of analogical participation among all the species of writing, Condillac concludes(in what is virtually a citation of Warburton, as is most of this chapter):‘Thus, the general history of writing proceeds by simple gradation from the state of painting to that of the letter; for letters are the final steps that are left to be taken after the Chinese marks which, on the one hand, participate in that of letters just as the hieroglyphs participate both in Mexican paintings and Chinese characters.These characters are so close to our writing that an alphabet simply diminishes the inconvenience of their great number and is their succinct abbreviation’”(Derrida 1988:5).
[65]The great medieval thinker William of Ockham articulated the problem also with considerable sensory acuity:“To abstract is to understand one thing without understanding another at the same time even though in reality the one is not separated from the other, e.g., sometimes the intellect understands the whiteness which is in milk and does not understand the sweetness of milk.Abstraction in this sense can belong even to a sense, for a sense can apprehend one sensible without apprehending another”(qtd.in Jones, 93).
[66]See Caroline Jones, “Senses,”p.93.
[67]“The first person to compare painting with poetry was a man of fine feeling who observed that both arts produced a similar effect upon him ....A second observer, in attempting to get at the nature of this pleasure, discovered that both proceed from the same source.Beauty ....A third, who examined the value and distribution of these general rules, observed that some of them are more predominant in painting, others in poetry ....The first was the amateur, the second the philosopher, and the third the critic”(Lessing, Laocoön:an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, p.3).
[68]See G.S.Rousseau, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres,”pp.139-140.
[69]See Raymond Williams, “From Medium to Social Practice,”in his Marxism and Literature, pp.158-164.
[70]See von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion, p.46, note 25.
[71]See von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion, p.46.
[72]Also see Water J.Ong, Orality and Literacy, p.46.
[73]See Arthur O.Lovejoy’s classic essay, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.”
[74]See Samuel H.Monk, The Sublime, p.28.Also see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, pp.1-16.
[75]Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, pp.12, 16.Quoted in James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, p.134.
[76]For a genealogical history of the rise of visuality in the West, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer.
[77]See Jon P.Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790—1832.
[78]For a puritanical tradition of the anti-theatrical prejudice, see Jonas Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice, especially chapters IV, V and VI.
[79]See OED online, under the entry of “intermediate,”A1b.
[80]These are the forms, identified by Terry Eagleton, in which the aesthetic becomes a weapon in the hands of political reactionaries, a pattern recognizable through Burke and Coleridge to Matthew Arnold and T.S.Eliot, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp.16, 60.
[81]This follows a methodology of recent media studies, as outlined by W.J.T.Mitchell and Mark Hansen in their “Introduction”to Critical Terms for Media Studies(2010).
[82]See Roy Park, “Ut Pictura Poesis,”p.155.
[83]See W.J.T.Mitchell, “Word and Image,”pp.49.
[84]See W.J.T.Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other.”Also see James Heffernan’s article, “Ekphrasis and Representation,”and Heffernan’s The Museum of Words.
[85]See John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,”pp.327; also see Alan G.Gross and William M.Keith, Rhetorical Hermeneutics:Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science; and Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric.
[86]Also see Walter J.Ong’s book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue:From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason.
[87]See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetic:The Distribution of the Sensible.
[88]See Foucault, The Order of Things, pp.17-44.
[89]See Wordsworth, “A slumber did my spirit seal,”in Romanticism:An Anthology, p.478.
[90]See Northrop Frye “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility.”Also see R.F.Brissenden, Virtue in Distress:Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade.
[91]See OED online, under the entry of “sympathy.”
[92]For a brief cultural history of English account of Campanella’s discoveries and its relation to Bacon, Hobbes, John Bulwer and the arch-enemy of the English stage, William Prynne, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart, pp.95-96.
[93]And “this process of internalization fabricates the distinction between interior and exterior life, offering us a distinction between the psychic and the social that differs significantly from an account of the psychic internalization of norms”(Butler 19), as Judith Butler suggests in The Psychic Life of Power:Theories in Subjection.
[94]Which was popular in nineteenth-century psychology(as adopted by Stanislavski’s dramaturgical theory)—part of what the writing presented as work, as institution and practice, pre-mediates through the long eighteenth century, as I would argue through the current writing.In the 1920s Soviet Union, the popularity of the Stanislavski system was challenged by Vsevolod Meyerhold, who developed biomechanical acting as an actor’s training techniques by synthesizing behaviorist psychology, Taylorist motion economy, and Soviet theories of kinetics to treat the external gestures, movements, and expressions as stimuli to induce certain feelings and emotions—thus emotion is an effect of physical actions to be experienced externally.See Alma Law and Mel Gordon, Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics:Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia, pp.33-43.This came to me through an excellent study by Bao Weihong on the application of Meyerhold’s theory by Tsai Ming-liang in his films, see Bao Weihong, “Biomechanics of Love:Reinventing the Avant-garde in Tsai Ming-liang’s Wayward ‘Pornographic Musical.’”
[95]Also see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart, pp.94-95.
[96]I don’t invoke a strict distinction between words like emotion, feeling, passion, a thorough discussion of which can be found in Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions:The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category.
[97]See Nicholas Rogers, “Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century London:The Vagrancy Laws and Their Administration.”
[98]See Daniel M.Gross, The Secret History of Emotion, pp.39-43.
[99]See Samuel H.Monk, The Sublime, pp.43-83.
[100]For instance, see The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom by Tobias George Smollett, part 1.
[101]Also see Amit S.Rai, Rule of Sympathy, p.73.
[102]Also see Paul Gilroy, “Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism.”
[103]E.J.Clery, “Introduction,”in Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story, pp.xxxi-xxxii.
[104]See Samuel H.Monk, The Sublime, p.85.
[105]Also see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability:The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century.
[106]Also see Marshall McLuhan in his The Gutenberg Galaxy, pp.265-266.
[107]See John Gage, “Synaesthesia.”
[108]See W.J.T.Mitchell, “Visible Language:Blake’s Art of Writing,”in his Picture Theory, pp.111-150.
[109]See Walter J.Ong, Orality and Literacy, p.120.This is something impossible to realize for Henry Home as suggested in the epigraph of this chapter.
[110]Gerard Genette, “The Frontiers of Narrative.”
[111]See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, in particular Part IV, section 6, “Science and Knowledge,”with its elucidation of several thresholds of emergence of a “discursive formation”:the thresholds of positivity, epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization(186-187).For Foucault, these are events whose dispersion is anything but evolutive, which is where his archaeological spirit lies.
[112]Different from Burke, Paine, in a very straightforward way, transforms America into an observable beginning for all governments:“The case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of a world; and our enquiry into the origin of government is shortened, by referring to the facts that have arisen in our own day.We have no occasion to roam for information into the obscure field of antiquity, nor hazard ourselves unto conjecture.We are brought at once to the point of seeing government begin, as if we had lived in the beginning of time.The real volume, not of history, but of facts, is directly before us, unmutilated by contrivance, or the errors of tradition”(Rights of Man, p.185).
[113]McLuhan, “Notes on the Media as Art Forms”(1954), quoted in Paul Barker, “Medium Rare:With Big Brother Bestriding the Global Village, a Chance to Read What McLuhan Really Wrote,”Times Literary Supplement, March 17, 2006, p.3.
[114]Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp.25, 34, 36, 39.
[115]See Stanley Morison, The English Newspaper, 1622—1932, pp.123-151.
[116]Daily Advertiser, Feb.26, 1730.
[117]Again see Stanley Morison, The English Newspaper, 1622—1932, pp.123-151.
[118]The coffee houses were in their golden age between 1680 and 1730.Not only coffee, but also tea and chocolate became the common beverages of at least the well-to-do strata of the population around the middle of the seventeenth century.Specifically, by the first decade of the eighteenth century London had already 3,000 coffee houses, each with a core group of regulars.See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p.32.
[119]See Celeste Langan and Maureen N.McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry,”pp.244-245.
[120]Interestingly, Thomas Paine seizes upon a metaphor of Burke’s—the nation as organic body—and superimposes upon it a characteristic geometric figure:“A nation is not a body, the figure of which is to be represented by the human body, but is like a body contained within a circle, having a common center in which every radius meets; and that center is formed by representation.To connect representation with what is called Monarchy is eccentric Government.”(Rights of Man, p.178)
[121]Coleridge makes a distinction between “verbal truth”and “moral truth”:“By verbal truth we mean no more than the correspondence of a given fact to given words.In moral truth, we moreover involve the intention of the speaker, that his words should correspond to this thought in the sense in which he expects them to be understood by others.”Coleridge, The Friend, 2:42.On the relations between Burke’s historicism and Coleridge’s, see James K.Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, pp.237-238.
[122]It is also worthy of noting that Thomas Paine appeals to the same economy of sympathy in his political language, as Jon P.Klancher points out:“Absorbing Burke’s language of ‘veils,’ ‘mystery,’ or ‘pantomimical contrivance’ into the symbolic surplus of monarchy, the radical writer [Thomas Paine, that is] claims for his own language a firm representative order that ‘exists not by fraud and mystery; it deals not in cant and sophistry; but in spires a language that, passing from heart to heart, is felt and understood”(Klancher 110).
[123]A phrase used by Maureen N.McLane in her discussion on how James Beattie’s The Minstrel published in 1771 offers a case of “print culture’s solicitation and transmediation of oral materials”(McLane 2008:32).
[124]See Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology:Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.”
[125]For the antipictorial and antivisual attitudes as characteristic of Romantic criticism, see a brilliant study by Roy Park.Also see W.J.T.Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, pp.14-39.For a critique of the phonocentric tendency from a deconstructionist stance, see Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology(1976) and Writing and Difference(1978).For the function of the pictorial mode of mind and how the British Romanticists treat it as a national difference between the English and the French, see W.J.T.Mitchell, Iconography:Image, Text, Ideology, pp.131-149, and 164-167.We will return to this topic.