III.v.Affective Property and Literary Copyright in...
A “physicist of emotions[47],”Hume puts his economy of identities in the light of the correspondence of feelings.Passions “are so contagious, that they pass with the greatest facility from one person to another, and produce correspondent movements in all human breasts,”(Hume 1978:605) Hume writes.Affective interiority is rather in a very flat situation, and exists in an epidemic syndrome.Passions come from without and subordinate individuals:“Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition”(317).Exchangeable communication through sympathy, rather than solipsist solitude, is the means, form and content of affective labor.Transfer of feelings is similar to the very act of writing that composes “little less[48]”than a life for Hume.It is very constitutive of a personhood susceptible of darkness and skepticism, which could be the form of literary laziness and lack of sympathetic communication:
Where am I, or what?From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread?What beings surround me?And on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me?I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty.(269)
Hume also writes this in a less autobiographic way:
Man is altogether insufficient to support himself; ...when you loosen all the holds, which he has of external objects, he immediately drops down into the deepest melancholy and despair ....Hence company is naturally so rejoicing, as presenting the liveliest of all objects, viz.a rational and thinking Being like ourselves, who communicates to us all the actions of his mind; makes us privy to his inmost sentiments and affections; and lets us see, in the very instant of their production, all the emotions, which are caus’d by any object.Every lively idea is agreeable, but especially that of a passion, because such an idea becomes a kind of passion, and gives a more sensible agitation to the mind, than any other image or conception.(352-353)
Passion communicates a sense of agreement between man and “all the holds”external to him.“Sentiments,”“affections,”“actions”and “emotions”become communicable in the sense of production, which keeps one away from “the deepest melancholy and despair.”The point is not whether these passages of this kind are Hume “not on his best behavior,”in “youthful indiscretion,”in “a philosophical and emotional extravaganza,”“melodrama,”and “a kind of schizophrenia,”as many times identified by modern critics[49].Nor is it about whether Hume presents himself as a true skeptic or not.Rather, it is about the emotionality involved in the production of ideas and the communication of literary labor.Emotion has to be extravagant and excessive so as to appear authentically Humean, and to be of a productive literary identity and career.Literary labor is “nothing other than the technique for matching indirect passions with satisfaction indirectly acquired,”and “the career of the man of letters is the most abstract labor of all”(Christensen 1987:155).The trope of sympathy, more than images or conceptions and “nothing but the conversion of an idea into an impression by the force of imagination”(Hume 1978:427), turns individuals into communicating bodies.In the public sphere of the coffee houses, “their public was recruited from private people engaged in productive work”(Habermas 34).The publicness of a writing career entails a necessity of self-fashioning for the sake of public secrecy.Emotionality has to be sincere in this production process.Similar to the independence of the male property owner in the market as complemented by the dependence of the wife and children[50], the personal and emotional makes possible a public and philosophical Hume.It produces the “firmness, or solidity, or force, or vivacity”of an impression, which “did once exist”“from the present idea”(Hume 1978:106):
For as this idea is not here consider’d, as the representation of any absent object, but as a real perception in the mind, of which we are intimately conscious, it must be able to bestow on whatever is related to it the same quality ...with which the mind reflects upon it, and is assur’d of its present existence.The idea here supplies the place of an impression, and is entirely the same, so far as regards our present purpose.(106)
“The present idea,”“especially that of a passion,”operates like a physical property, and to be measurable as such, as Adela Pinch points out[51].It is that “little more than”in between “Hume and “Home,”which is a theatrical space of the mind.“[The theater,] like sympathy at large, works as an implicit guarantor of property rights because appropriation conventionalized is not the theft of property but its transfer”(Christensen 1987:72).Jerome Christensen argues that “Post-Cartesian representation of the passions contributed both to the stability of their possession and to the facility of their transfer in an exchange with another passion owner”(72).This, nevertheless, is not merely about ideas or Enlightenment thinking as Christensen proposes.It has a material base.The sense of “totalitarianism”in the empiricist epistemology presents the writing of a Humean self as a medium, a process of abstraction and generality, and a seemingly transparent sociality of sympathy that produces by leaving the “firmness, or solidity, or force, or vivacity”of an impression or transferring it to another mind.It is a new form of materiality, virtual and immaterial, which presents a human beingfigure in a bourgeois public sphere of the literary.It embodies an act of composition that
unlike oratory, is a labor of conversion—the writer copying down his ideas(themselves copies of his impressions) and thus, whether we have reference to letter, fair copy, or published text, converting ideas into graphic, communicating impressions so that the reader can repeat the process in reverse, performing the same sort of labor.(106)
As communication, sympathy is established between the spectator and reader, who observe, and the agent and writer, who produce.The reader-like psychological interiority and subjectivity in modern literature and Romantic poetry as communication and imitation originates in Hume’s moral philosophy of experience:
When any affection is infused by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of it.This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection.However instantaneous this change of the idea into an impression may be, it proceeds from certain views and reflections, which will not escape the strict scrutiny of a philosopher, though they may the person himself, who makes them.(Hume 1978:317)
It is a process of observing, being impressed, internalizing, and expressing.The philosopher—a position close to Smith’s impartial spectator[52]—holds a position of a strict observer.This reminds of the role of natural philosopher upon objects and things as well as suggestive of the role of a supposedly transparent communicant medium of the print.The visual scrutiny could penetrate into the most obscure and private part of a self.Textuality becomes a process of emotional impression and evocation, which is materialized through a transmission relay in the exchange of ideas.It is
stimulated by the luxury status of the impressions that an author makes(refining them from the truth that one already has) and that a reader receives(the new impressions are fundamentally a surplus version of that idea of herself that she already has.(Christensen 1987:106)[53]
It necessarily involves production and reproduction of class, as Jürgen Habermas writes:
The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on the fictitious identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public:the role of property owners and the role of human beings pure and simple.(Habermas 56)
The places where we see a gothic and gloomy Hume are exactly the self-reflexive places of the writing medium, through which Hume confirms his job of writing as literary market labor, rather than any noble activity that Hannah Arendt calls “work[54].”Work of writing unfolds itself in the literary laborer’s subjectivity, which presents a case of virtualization through the writing medium used Hume and about Humean identities.No wonder we have a scene of this kind in Richard Ellman’s biographic James Joyce:“Joyce suddenly asked some such question as, ‘How could the idealist Hume write a history?’Beckett replied, ‘A history of representations’”(qtd.in Christensen 1987:3).
In 1695, the Licensing Act[55], which had legalized censorship, was allowed to lapse.So did the monopoly rights it conferred on certain powerful printers and booksellers.In 1710, the English Copyright Act[56], though “in effect a qualified response to the Stationers’ pleas for the protection hitherto provided under the licensing regime”(Johns 234), was passed to provide statutory protection for what was increasingly called “the property in the copy[57].”It was the first legal endorsement of what was to become copyright, whose intent is made clear through the statute’s full title:“An Act for the Encouragement of Learning by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Such Copies[58].”This legalized system of patenting of inventions or the copyrighting of literary compositions was impossible in a scribal culture, which worked against the concept of intellectual property rights[59].Only the proliferation of a print culture would encourage publishers to advertise authors to advertise themselves.For Samuel Johnson, who lived through such an age and made a career similar to that of Hume, “Written work might be quite different from the products of a laborer worthy of his hire, or even, perhaps, the lands that a gentleman purchased or inherited”(Kernan 101), as Alvin Kernan points out in his thoroughly investigated history of Johnson’s literary life in the age of print.The writer “created,”not just made, bought, or received his property.Thus, “authors,”as Johnson writes, had “a stronger right of property than that by occupancy; a metaphysical right, a right, as it were, of creation, which should from its nature be perpetual[60].”This birth of modern author [61] and intellectual copyright are described by Lionel Gossman as
the identification of works with individual graphically recorded utterances [that] led to a conception of literary creation as absolutely original production, arising out of and in some way embodying a unique, substantial and autonomous self[62].
This “unique, substantial and autonomous self”was legalized and therefore objectified by the 1710 English copyright Act as “an invention distinctive enough to be patented[63],”to use a phrase from Northrop Frye.Mark Rose shows in his important book Authors and Owners:The Invention of Copyright that legal theorists such as Blackstone defined a literary work as consisting solely of its “style and sentiment.”“These alone constitute its identity,”Blackstone wrote, “The paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance.”It was on the material “accidents”of “the paper and print”that the concept of literary property was formulated on the model of the landed estate by the eighteenth-century jurists of Blackstone’s kind[64].“Copyright as an absolute right of property, a freehold ‘grounded on labour and invention’”(Rose 8) that is.Thus in this blending of literary and legal discourses in the context of the contest over perpetual copyright, “the literary-property struggle generated a body of texts—parliamentary records, pamphlets, and legal reports—in which aesthetic and legal questions are often indistinguishable”(Rose 6).The legal history of copyright, indeed,
had important consequences for literature that went beyond purely legal considerations, for it helped to solidify the literary author as a man of original genius(the author’s assumed gender in these discourses was invariably male) who created literary property by mixing his intellectual labor with the materials afforded him by nature—much as Locke had argued men created private property by mixing their labor with the land.(Hayles 31)[65]
Thus, the modern sense of literary labor and property comes from an older sense of legal and theological definition of physical property.For Locke, it is through labor that an individual might convert the raw materials of nature into private property, whose familiar passage from the Two Treatises of Government(1690) is worth quoting:
Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person.This no Body has any Right to but himself.The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.(305-306)
If the private property in the physical sense derives from a literal labor with physical hands, the literary and intellectual property is from an affective communication of a spatial theatricality of presence through the print medium as in the case of Hume.The physical body through the aesthetic labor becomes virtualized, expanded, theatricalized, and emotionalized.Jerome Christensen writes:
If ...there are three discrete features of text production that the invention of the printing press highlighted—uniform replication, infinite reproduction, and indefinite dispersion—the lastremained in potentia until the eighteenth century, when, in England at least, a distribution that could rapidly saturate a market came for the first time a real possibility.(Christensen 1987:184)
Textualized presence thus becomes a communicable transparency of modernity.Circulation enhances the neutrality and objectivity of the print medium, which is analogous to qualities of commodities that began to pervade in the eighteenth century[66].At the same time it creates a possible being of gloomy and gothic consciousness that remains absent from the theatrical space of the print medium.Thus we could locate the Humean self and its theatrically staged sympathetic sentimentality into the problematic of personal and literary identity that was being legalized and virtualized through the rise of a print media[67].If, as Pierre Levy puts it, “virtualization”distinguishes itself above all through its tendency towards “deterritorialization”and through “a movement of becoming-other or heterogenesis[68],”Hume’s self presents an early case of “virtualization”in print culture through deterritorializing identities from moment to moment in the form of his work of writing.Out of that he obviously made a good fortune, as stated in “My Own Life”:
But, notwithstanding this variety of winds and seasons, to which my writings had been exposed, they had still been making such advances, that the copy-money given me by the booksellers, much exceeded any thing formerly known in England; I has become not only independent, but opulent.I retired to my native country of Scotland, determined never more to set my foot out of it; andretaining the satisfaction of never having preferred a request to one great man, or even making advances of friendship to any of them.(Hume 1985:xxxviii)
This “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement”(Hume 1978:252), as Hume puts it, is performed in his work of writing and is a theatricality realized in the print media.Sympathetic sentiment materialized through the pen offers him a financial opulence instead of a corpulence of the body, and thus secures a cozy solitude from any friendship.It is only in this sense we can see the significance of Hume’s declaration that “the passions are so contagious, that they pass with greatest facility from one person to another, and produce correspondent movements in all human breasts.”In this light, a media history of emergent interiority in the inter-subjective correspondence of sentiments is realized in transferring between “Home”and “Hume.”Jerome Christensen writes:
Although inexperienced in the trade, Hume pursued his interests with considerable acumen.And from the very first those interests were understood in terms of future, successive, and altered editions of the Treatise ...Hume managed the Treatise not as a child, attached to him by bonds of nature, but as his property, which, as we have seen, subsists not in simple possession but in a mode of possession.(Christensen 1987:123)
This “mode of possession,”nevertheless, not merely consists of specific work, not even specific modes of work[69].More significantly, it is a mode of experience taken as part of the empiricist philosophy upon identities as an issue of representation.Work of writing shapes a literary career not only in the materialistic sense, but also in the ontological sense.A deterritorialized crevice between “Home”and “Hume”makes possible a mode of emotional identity as mediated in this emergent textual media culture.
【注释】
[1]See Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”p.163.
[2]Also see Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.71.
[3]Also see Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.151, note 44.
[4]See Katherine E.Ellison, The Fatal News and Daniel R.Headrick, When Information Came of Age.
[5]For an elaboration on this observation in David Hume, William Wordsworth and Henry Kames, see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, pp.114-116.
[6]See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.40, note 25.
[7]See Clifford Siskin and William Warner, This Is Enlightenment, pp.1-36, especially p.11.
[8]David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,”in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, p.239.
[9]See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, pp.2-3.
[10]Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.118, note 24.
[11]See Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”p.161.
[12]James Crawford, “Practical Remarks on the Sympathy of the Parts of the Body by the Late Dr.James Crawford Professor of Medicine in the Universe of Edinburgh,”article XV, in Medical Essays and Observations, Revised and Published by a Society in Edinburgh, 1744, vol.5, part 2; quoted in Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”p.161.
[13]As Jacques Derrida traces the Greek word “pharmakon.”See his “Plato’s Pharmacy”in Dissemination, pp.61-171.
[14]See especially William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, chapter 5.
[15]Charles Taylor, “Inwardness and the Culture of Modernity,”in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, p.99.Quoted in William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, pp.128-129.
[16]Charles Taylor, “Inwardness and the Culture of Modernity,”in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, p.103.Quoted in William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, p.196, note 48.
[17]See William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, p.138.
[18]Charles Taylor, “Inwardness and the Culture of Modernity,”in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, p.103.Quoted in William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, p.137.
[19]Though in Britain the word “aesthetics”did not achieve a triumph comparable to the Wolffian tradition in Germany until the end of the nineteenth century.See Marc Redfield Phantom Formations, pp.6-7 and Jerome Stolnitz “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic disinterestedness’”in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1961, 20(2), pp.131-143.In a sense, it is that out of moral philosophy were developed aesthetics and economics, with economics probably originating from aesthetics.See Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment and John Guillory Cultural Capital, pp.269-340.We will come back to this point while addressing Adam Smith.
[20]See Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.57, note 14, and Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, pp.27-28.(https://www.daowen.com)
[21]It is noteworthy that this is defined in a commercial terminology, which was anticipated by Joseph Addison in Spectator no.69, indicating that “factors in the trading world are what ambassadors are in the polite world”(qtd.in Christensen 151).
[22]In the eighteenth century, “because it both sought to generate knowledge—in the form of a conversation—and elicited identification with a more or less particularized speaker, the essay constituted the generic bridge between experimental moral philosophy and the novel, where yet another mode of knowledge production was being codified”(Poovey 198).For this turn and its relation to an epistemological shift regarding an emergent problem of liberal governmentality, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, chapter 4, pp.144-213.
[23]Quoted in Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.17.
[24]David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, vol.1, p.222.
[25]David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, vol.1, p.461
[26]Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.197, note 12.
[27]David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, vol.1, p.369.
[28]See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, p.212, note 78.
[29]Here is an opening paragraph of Hume’s “My Own Life”:“I was born on the 26th of April 1711, old style, at Edinburgh.I was of a good family, both by father and mother:my father’s family is a branch of the Earl of Home’s, or Hume’s; and my ancestors had been proprietors of the estate, which my brother possesses, for several generations.My mother was daughter of Sir David Falconer, President of the College of Justice:the title of Lord Halkerton came by succession to her brother.”
[30]David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, 1:7.
[31]David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, vol.1, p.1.
[32]Roy Pascal.Design and Truth in Autobiography.Quoted in Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, pp.45-46, note 2.
[33]R.H.Campbell, Scotland since 1707:The Rise of an Industrial Society, p.7.Quoted in Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.40.
[34]Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p.28.
[35]Quoted in Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.12.
[36]Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.12.
[37]David Hume, Essays:Moral, Political and Literary.
[38]Regarding the relation between the emergence of modern laboratory science and representation, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump, and John B.Bender, “Novel Knowledge:Judgment, Experience, Experiment.”
[39]Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.19.
[40]The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 4:64, my emphasis.The practice of experimental moral philosophy in the eighteenth century is devised in the image of natural philosophy, as suggested in this passage.In Scottish universities, natural and moral philosophies not only coexisted but overlapped.See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, pp.175-176.
[41]Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol.1, part 1, section 1.
[42]See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, pp.33-39.
[43]Quoted in Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.126.
[44]William James, The Principles of Psychology, p.291.Quoted in Daniel M.Gross, The Secret History of Emotion, p.120.
[45]See Arthur Lovejoy’s classic study The Great Chain of Being:A Study of the History of an Idea.
[46]See Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.148.
[47]Jerome Neu, Emotion, Thought, Therapy:A Study of Hume and Spinoza and the Relationship of Philosophical Theories of the Emotions to Psychological Theories of Therapy, p.1.Quoted in Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.80.
[48]See an analysis of that “little more”above.
[49]See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.40.
[50]Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p.47.
[51]Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.33.
[52]For the difference regarding economies of sympathy between Hume and Smith, see Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator.”
[53]Also see Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, p.112.
[54]Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, chapter 3 “Labor,”pp.79-135.
[55]See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p.120.Also see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, p.130.
[56]See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, pp.215, 233-234, 353, 454-455, 620.Also see Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, pp.556-567.
[57]John Feather, “Book Trade in Politics,”in his Publishing, Piracy and Politics, pp.51-63.
[58]Also see Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, pp.91-117.
[59]See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p.229.
[60]Quoted in Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, p.101.
[61]Also see, of course, the classic essays by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes:“What Is an Author?”and “Death of the Author.”
[62]Lionel Gossman, “Literary Education and Democracy,”in Modern Language Notes, 1971, 86, pp.761-789.Quoted in Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, p.102.
[63]Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism:Four Essays, p.90.“Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.All this was much clearer before the assimilation of literature to private enterprise concealed so many of the facts of criticism”(pp.96-97), as Frye writes pages later.
[64]See Mark Rose, Authors and Owners, p.7.
[65]As N.Katherine Hayles argues in her Writing Machines.
[66]See the collection of essays in The Consumption of Culture 1600—1800:Image, Object, Text.
[67]For an intellectual history of this problematic as it had distressed British thinkers ever since John Locke in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding(1690) challenged tradition and located personal identity in consciousness, see Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians:Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain.
[68]Quoted in Samuel Weber, “The Virtuality of the Media,”p.297.
[69]Like that of correction, as illustrated by Christensen’s argument.See Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, chapter 5 “The Commerce of Letters,”pp.120-200.