V.ii.Visuality in a Distended Selfhood
Marshall McLuhan argues that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were crucial periods of adaptation to the “new model[s] of perception,”when “the initial shock gradually dissipates as the entire community absorbs the new habit of perception into all of its areas of work and association.”And this, for McLuhan, comes “[w]ith the advent of the printed word,”by which “the visual modalities of Western life increased beyond anything experienced in any previous society”(McLuhan 23).The printed word produces more information and disseminates to the far-away places.Indeed, it is clear that the eighteenth century was what Susan Crawford aptly calls an “information-conscious society”(qtd.in Ellison 17) with its changes of reading habits, the construction of new systems and offices of information management.Popular consciousness was adapting, to use Pocock’s phrase, “to a world of moving objects”(221) and to an increasingly detached and mobile population.It is in a congenial relation to this expansive British Empire building that Adam Smith advocates a theory of emotional impartiality, which is realized through sympathy.As that “amiable virtue of humanity,”it is the principle by which sentiments are communicated.The unfortunate, by
relating their misfortunes in some measure renew their relief.Their tears accordingly flow faster than before, and they are apt to abandon themselves to all the weakness of sorrow.They take pleasure, however, in all this, and, it is evident, are sensibly relieved by it; because the sweetness of his sympathy more than compensates the bitterness of their sorrow, which, in order to excite this sympathy, they had thus enlivened and renewed.(Smith 1984:15)
There forms a mutual relation between the spectator and the agents of feelings.Sense of the bitterness from misfortune has to be “enlivened and renewed”to achieve its communicating effect upon the spectator, and it produces a therapeutic side-effect to the tellers-agents.Sympathy thus achieved is highly mediated through representations:telling as well as tearing.It is not a simple process, and involves oral, aural as well as visual skills from the plural form of tellers-agents to the singular form of the spectator.More than this therapeutic function of healing consolation that the very articulation of misfortune brings forth by offering a sympathetic interlocutor, sympathy also creates the highest pleasure in observing “in other men of fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast”(13).Interiority in this affective transmission communicates through observation and creates a sense of benevolence to either the agent or the spectator.It is not achieved through immediate experience of what others feel, but “by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations”and
by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence from some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike him.(9)
Several decades before Smith’s treatise, Joseph Addison writes that the function of “imagination”“fills the Mind with the largest Variety of Ideas [, and] converses with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in Action without being tired or satiated with its proper Enjoyments[25].”It is interesting to see that imagination, as a principle of pleasure, is a function of writing on the tabula rasa of mind through an engagement with objects in a geographic sense.It establishes sympathetic affinities between things and the subjective agent through overcoming an objective distance by conversing, which is an impossible verbal activity with things, but may be carried out in the visual sense.Smith’s sympathetic figure, that of an observer, follows this vein “in producing and reproducing the feelings of others”(Festa 27) through a strategy of situational substitution.More in between subjective agents and a spectator, sympathy is “an intense labor”upon oneself, a construct of “a replica of another’s feeling from within the citadel of the self.”For Smith, “empathy is anything but spontaneous and natural”(27-28).It is specifically significant to see this point against a backdrop of the rise of individualism and the construction of the subject, both as central issues in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies[26].The practice and idea of modern personhood and personification is developed further than that by moral philosophers like David Hume, who writes in his A Treatise of Human Nature:
But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are 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.Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions.Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment.(252-253)(https://www.daowen.com)
In another place, Hume writes:“Nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties”(Hume 1978:262).For Hume, identity consists of “a succession of related objects”through an act of association because of their “resemblance, contiguity, or causation”“from daily experience and observation”(255).A subjective interiority is more contagious and of temporal continuity.Highly influenced by Hume, Smith also takes sympathy as a feeling “to which the mechanism of sympathetic communication has made an essential contribution”(Broadie 165).Nevertheless, in his moral philosophy of sympathy, there are two significant differences from that of Hume’s or Addison’s “imagination.”For Smith, sympathy seems more of a visual as well as situational sentimental substitution and exchange, which involves more an aesthetic sense of labor upon a sympathetic spectatorial self.Less philosophical and contemplating, a Smithian spectator makes efforts to modify his sentiments so they agree with the agent’s.He must “endeavor, as much as he can, to put himself in the situation of the other;”he must “strive to render as perfect as possible, that imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded”(Smith 1984:21).A person’s “natural feeling of his own distress, his own natural view of his own situation, presses hard upon him, and he cannot, without a great effort, fix his attention upon that of the impartial spectator”(148).Also, “[t]he compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment”(12)[27].The sentimental efforts are more of a visual mode of observation and identification of the situations of the agents, who are more of common life, as Burke already comments.It probably suggests that Smith situates himself more in a political economy of print, when the saturation of the technology of writing reaches a representational economy dovetailing with a mature commercial society.Sense of theatricality as spatial presence as we see in Hume is soon materialized in the form of monetary capital that can be achieved only from hard labour.At the same time, a rising transparent exchangeability brings with it an inscrutable deepness in a sentimental mode, which cannot be resolved through the visual form of money, but creates another form of writing technology about the psyche—psychoanalysis, that is—which is different from that of moral sentiment of sympathy.Interiority and exteriority co-exist and co-evolve in a splitting and complementary way to each other.
Representational theatricality is built into a modern selfhood.In a sympathetic economy, sentimental subjectivity relates to the physical circumstances of the impartial spectator.John B.Bender identifies this blurring line between “fiction and reality”as a problematic in “the predicament of a culture”(35), which exists through the English philosophical tradition from Locke, through Hume, to Bentham[28].This fictionalizing and theatrical labor upon self-making is more of a visual process.It involves an apparatus towards others, and takes interiority as a work towards a split self through that of visuality.Smith writes in this way:
We must look at ourselves with the same eyes with which we look atothers:we must imagine ourselves not the actors, but the spectators of our own character and conduct, and consider how these would affect us when viewed from this new station, in which their excellencies and imperfections can alone be discovered.(Smith 1984:111)
David Marshall argues that, for Smith, one “becomes a spectator to oneself in order to determine if one can enter into one’s own feelings … Smith seems to separate the self from the one self it could reasonably claim to know:itself”(Marshall 175-176).Smith’s theory of sympathy thus relies “upon an eclipsing of identity, a transfer of persons in which one leaves oneself behind and tries to take someone else’s part[29].”In this process, “this relation to emotion as one’s own becomes more and more distended”(Festa 28).A self is increasingly further away from itself, which is realized through visual mediation.This gesture of distension runs analogous to but seems more psychoanalytical than what “the Sense of Feeling”evoked by “Sight”produces as reflected in Joseph Addison essay-writing—“a Notion of Extension, Shape, and all other Ideas that enter at the Eye.”It is further away from what Shaftesbury defines as the aesthetic type of “divine example”—“a Platonic abstraction, defined in mathematical terms of balance and harmony”(Paulson 1996:3)[30].Shaftesbury writes in his Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit(1699, 1711):“This … is certain that the admiration and love of order, harmony, and proportion, in whatever kind, is naturally improving to the temper, advantageous to social affection, and highly assistant to virtue, which is itself no other than the love of order and beauty in society”(qtd.in Paulson 1996:3).This Shaftesburian divine creation is “figured as order(beauty is to deformity as regularity is to irregularity) of both the world and of man’s individual mind, which as an example can improve the already benevolent man”(Paulson 1996:3).Instead, for Smith, a selfhood of fragmentation comes into its place.It displays as uniform exchange means of the capital, on the one hand.On the other hand, it is realized as deeply subjective psyches, to which the clues are hard to recognize and analyze[31].
Addison’s series of essays came out around four decades previous to Smith’s treatise[32].His visual act of “Sight”seems designed to supply all these Defects, and may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of Touch, that spreads it self over an infinite Multitude of Bodies, comprehends the largest Figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote Parts of the Universe[33].
With conceptualization of the cultural location “that would be occupied by print-media culture and the elevated novels of Richardson and Fielding”(Warner 233), Addison takes that the cultivation of a disinterested spectator is through the abstracting power of sight’s operation at a distance so as to “[consider] the world as a theater, and [desire] to form a right judgment of those who are the actors on it[34]”.David Wellbery argues that in the eighteenth century, representation, as “the essential activity of the soul,”is “a fundamental category of thought …, a governing notion, or rather a matrix of notions, that prestructures the fields in which thought and inquiry move[35].”For Addison as well as Adam Smith, sight serves as a significant means of collecting data and representing the objective world objects all over[36].It offers an extended selfhood, and reflects its relation with the subject, and realizes the soul and its mediate or immediate objects.In Addison’s world at the beginning of the eighteenth century, this visuality is very tactile, embedded within the skin and the flesh, and assimilated to the body—“as a more delicate and diffusive kind of Touch,”that is.Thus, the sense of corporeal “touch”as such—as the longest entry in the OED dictionary[37]— involutes with “Sight.”Imagination in Addisonian sense remains as what Aristotle proclaims in De Anima as the “medium of the tangible[38],”maintaining a classic unity of the entire psychological sphere.If we understand the historical process of modernity and modern media—following arguments from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Georg Lukács, Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard—as one of abstraction, Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments remains very significant in this genealogy.It imbricates with his theories on rhetoric and language, and on political economy as well, all three of which add up to his sense of the Enlightenment system[39].Reading it with a postcolonial historical hindsight would enhance our understanding of globality as an affective issue of sensorial organization of a selfhood.