III.ii.Theatrical Presence in Print Medium and Mas...
In this sense, “sympathy,”for Hume, refers to a feeling as well as a principle of communication of opinions.It correlates to issues of the emergence of modern subjectivity, individualism, and literary character through a history of mediation upon the body.In a phenomenological perspective upon the coming of modernity from the medieval to early modern theater, William Egginton argues that examining relations of space is more significant for investigating a historical origin of modern “subjectivity.”He details the notion of “presence.”—For Egginton, the medieval spatial conception that was “full”:
Rather than taking place in an empty, geometrically determined space in which stories can be played out in relative independence of the reality of the audience’s world, the hyperbolic solidity of the space of medieval drama reflected the instability of the distinction between the reality being represented and the reality of the representation.(Egginton 55)
The Spanish sixteenth century, as Egginton suggests, begins to witness a flattened space designating “the border between the real and the imaginary.”Thus it becomes a “screen”(108), along which exists the “empty space”of modern theater.This “theatrical space”“is constituted by the presence of bodies in it, as opposed to the place where bodies may be shown”(56).In regard to the relation between subjectivity and theatricality, Egginton writes:
This telescoping of separable spaces requires audiences to negotiate different levels of reality, which they do by means of characters or avatars, virtual selves that become conditioned to this new, fundamentally scopic organization of space, in which they watch and are watched watching; they become bodies saturated by the gaze.(121)
Egginton’s suggestion of theatricality as a term of media analysis[14] is helpful for our historical investigation of the print medium in the eighteenth century.This new form of theatricality is manifested through an obsession of spatial presence, and also exists in the print medium, which offers a culture of abstraction in the “empty space”to be filled by iterable performative identities through the work of writing.Identity becomes a spatial presence, the absence of which is darkness and means non-identity.Modern subjectivity comes through this act of filling, which is realized in Hume as writing and communicating through sympathy.It is analogous to the ad infinitum shifting visual perspectives of watching and being watched through the audience.Charles Taylor suggests that modernity can be read as that experience whose leitmotif is of inwardness and detachment from self, which allows the emergence of both the themes of self-control and of self-exploration.For him, this self is put into a visually “separate, autonomous sphere of inwardness, capable of being separated from itself—as agent and object—and acting upon, manipulating, or exploring itself in a state of disengagement”:
What one finds running through all the aspects of this constellation—the new philosophy,the methods of administration and military organization, the new spirit of government, and methods of discipline—is a growing ideal of a human agent who is able to remake himself by methodological and disciplined action.What this calls for is the ability to take an instrumental stance to one’s given properties, desires, inclinations, tendencies, habits of thought, and feelings so that they can be worked on, doing away with some and strengthening others, until one meets the desired specifications[15].
While the concept of “agency”may be alien to the eighteenth century, this observation and discipline of a modern “self”through engaging and disengaging is reflected in Hume’s writing as periodic melancholy—a phobia of solitary being, away from the communicating space of writing, a lack of media sociality where the productivity of self is, that is.This phobia itself, in a way, is productive of a subjective self.It is a moment of producing an inward self that was not normal, but still gothic in the middle of the eighteenth century, several decades before the coming of modern mass media.
Contemporary moral philosopher Charles Taylor puts this into a philosophical language of reflexivity:“What we turn to in radical reflexivity seems to demand description as something ‘inner.’This spatial metaphor is irresistible to describe the ‘space’ opened by selfscrutiny[16].”The moment of producing an inward interiority, a spatial self-scrutiny that takes enormous labor and sentimentality, produces gothic melancholy.This reflexivity—the “Inner Eye,”according to Richard Rorty, is not new but an invention of the seventeenth century[17].Prior to Descartes and Locke, Rorty explains, there was no
conception of the human mind as an inner space in which both pains and clear and distinct ideas passed in review before a single Inner Eye ...The novelty was the notion of a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations(‘confused ideas of sense and imagination’ in Descartes’s phrase), mathematical truths, moral rules, the idea of God, moods of depression, and all the rest of what we now call ‘mental’ were objects of quasi-observation.(Rorty 50)
Egginton takes a less intellectual, more materialistic approach to this serious problematic of the seventeenth century.He suggests that this was “a theatrical experience of spatiality, one in which viewers had learned to become disembodied spectators of an action that only involved them as characters, as virtual rather than actual participants”(Egginton 138).It is a historical case that this “inner eye”is emblematic of a modern reflexive subjectivity, which originates from the seventeenth century.Along with it comes a shifting concept and practice of theatrical spatiality of presence.In the eighteenth century this presence proliferated, and this theatrical space expands with the coming of the modern print medium.Philosophically, this needs an association with the notion of disengagement, as Taylor puts it:
Reason and human excellence requires a stance of disengagement.‘Disengagement’ here is a term of art, meaning a stance toward something which might otherwise serve to define our identity or purposes, whereby we separate ourselves from it by defining it as at best of instrumental significance[18].(https://www.daowen.com)
On a societal scale, Habermas calls this the public sphere.This subjectivity, “as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented to an audience”(Habermas 49).The eighteenth-century Britain debated about taste and began to take disinterestedness as among its tradition of aesthetics.David Hume takes this as a device for disengaging, philosophically and experientially[19].This very sense of disinterestedness is specifically suggested by David Home’s change of his own family name.Considering Hume was the youngest son of a distinguished Scottish family in the system of primogeniture, he would not inherit his father’s estate and must leave Home behind[20].This change of family name is not merely about a new identity obtained, but also, more significantly, about a voluntary creation of identitarian spatial crevices between “home”and “not-home,”the filling of which requires a mediation of sympathetic sociality as presence and thus literary property.This is fulfilled through a theatrical performance of the pen apparatus in the modern print medium, which establishes an exchangeable space for the eighteenth-century men of letters.Hume deviates or departs from a monolithic and normalized “I”so as to be productive of himself as a literary character and a literary career—“a versatile middleman”(Christensen 1987:151).
In “Of Essay-Writing,”Hume defines his identity as an “ambassador”between “the learned and conversable”:“I shall give Intelligence to the Learned of whatever passes in Company, and shall endeavor to import into Company whatever Commodities I find in my native Country proper for their Use and Entertainment”(Hume 1985:535).A role of the middle print medium is structurally possible out of its relation with the other two media:the scribal and learned usually taken as masculine, the oral and conversable as feminine[21].It is suggested by his turn from a not successful moral philosopher—“the least entertaining and least political of all eighteenth-century genres”of knowledge producers(Poovey 146)—to an essay writer[22].Essay writing is a new form of relationship and affiliation deploying the publicity of reason and emotion.In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume makes this point:
A gloomy, hair-brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in the calendar; but will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society, except by those who are as delirious and dismal as himself[23].
This suggests a strong sense of dependence regarding exertions and relations of co-workers in the social labor of writing.The dependence expresses an anxiety over the rising public:“The Public is the most capricious Mistress we can court[24].”In a strong repentant passage upon authorship, Hume writes:
But I am so sick of all those Disputes and so full of Contempt towards all factious Judgments and indeed towards the Prejudices of what is call’d the Public, that I repent heartily my ever having committed any thing to Print.Had I a Son I shou’d warn him as carefully against the dangerous Allurements of Literature as James did his Son against those of Women; tho if his Inclination was as strong as mine in my Youth, it is likely, that the warning would be to as little Purpose in the one Case as it usually is in the other[25].
Interestingly, the public medium is portrayed as feminine, that is, “the most capricious Mistress,”“dangerous Allurements of Literature”as analogous to “those of Women.”The dangerous and consumptive public is represented as a feminine sphere, which creates a career for him and makes work of writing a property for him, and it replaces the son that he never had.Thus Hume expresses a strong sense of castration in his work.The development of a literary career is an articulated anxiety over the absence of an authentic masculinity that demands a constant work of writing to meet its requirements.As Jerome Christensen writes:“Hume not only did not father a son, but the enabling condition of his career is to respond to the allure of the feminine public by a castration that makes authorship a necessarily barren romance”(1987:96).As a matter of fact, Hume establishes “the imagery of mutilation and references to various texts as children”or as a corpulent body[26].In a letter to David Mallet, he writes:
The Truth is, I am entirely idle at present so far as regards writing; and I am very happy in that indolent State.My Friends tell me, that I will not continue long so, and that I will tire of having nothing to do but read and converse; but I am resolved to resist, as a Temptation of the Devil, any Impulse towards writing, and I am really so much ashamed of myself when I see my Bulk on a Shelf, as well as when I see it in a Glass, that I would fain revent my growing more corpulent either way[27].
The accumulative quantity of work of writing is made analogous to the economy of the writer’s body.It communicates a sense of boredom and tedium upon literary labor, as well as a desire to be abstinent from an addiction to performative theatricality in the print medium.Hume seems to suggest that writing too much—production and reproduction in work, that is—would cause corpulence upon the body, and thus emaciate the body into that lacking sympathetic sentiments and virility.Mary Poovey argues that A Treatise of Human Nature, as Hume’s first publication, was already intended
to the marketplace of ideas, where writers competed for readers and respect.Without a university position and acutely aware of the rewards and punishments meted out to writers in the burgeoning age of print, Hume increasingly sought to turn what might have seemed like an unfortunate necessity—the imperative to please his audience—into a stylistic practice infused with philosophical and moral import.(Poovey 204)
This audience imagined as feminine might reflect “a pervasive cultural ambivalence repeatedly expressed toward women by would-be arbiters of culture and morality in this period.”It “expressed a mixture of loathing and admiration for the women whose consumption and production so indelibly marked the emergent consumer society”(Poovey 212).This is also suggested by recent feminist criticism of the work of Swift, Pope, and Richardson[28].In the way that “money functions as the standard of value,”“she functions strictly as the standard of taste”(Christensen 1987:99).Before this standard, Hume is obsessed with his fertility, health, and offspring.In this sense, he provides a case, in which masculinity is a defense strategy adopted in the coming of the print and literary modernity.