V.iv.Property and Propriety in Making Inferiority
This Smithian sympathetic sentiment is critical in the evolution of eighteenth-century management of “information overload”in the rise of a saturating textual media and acts of reading[48].For Smith, it is not merely sentimental, subjective or perceptive.It is also corporeal and physiological:“Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies”(Smith 1984:10).The exterior appearance here is easily projected into the interior of another and thereby puts in danger the latter’s physical health, owing to their weaker constitution that causes strong sensibility.Sympathy seems almost a telepathic correspondence.The pleasures of seeing and feeling become in effect a physiognomic metaphor for the mobile and polymorphous features of the society that depends on universally managed correspondence.“Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body”thus have chances of being exposed to specters of destitution and dearth, socially and economically.On the other hand, Smith’s sympathetic figure is detached and casual, unbound by ritual, communal, or tribal loyalties.It is free from social constraints and conventions.It is, indeed, a syndrome of Western modernity not irrelevant to the increasing flow of information, commerce and people of the eighteenth century, which requires a writing of a political economy of commodities as well as a moral philosophy of sympathy to regulate.Smith is quite certain, in fact, that sympathy withers in primitive and “barbarous”communities and thrives in “civilized”society, because it is only with man’s release from the immediate exigencies of survival that he becomes free to extend and expect sympathy:
Before we can feel much for others, we must in some measure be at ease ourselves.If our own misery pinches us very severely, we have no leisure to attend to that of our neighbour:and all savages are too much occupied with their own wants and necessities, to give much attention to those of another person.(Smith 1984:205)
In another place, he continues:“Our imagination which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined and cooped up within our own persons, in times of ease and prosperity expands itself to every thing around us”(183).By virtue of its opulence and its division of labor, a commodity economy would boost the supply of sympathy, that is.On the other hand, the sympathetic sentimental process, “a parallel with the sequence of surprise, wonder, and admiration that Smith discusses at length in his ‘History of Astronomy’”(Broadie 176), is mutual between the spectator and the agent.For Smith the spectator is able to affect a change upon the agent from whose situation he sympathizes, for the agent desires to be approved of and seeks “to see his own situation through the eyes of the spectator”(177-178).Then, he might for the first time “grasp the real significance of previously noted features of his situation”:
In light of these new perceptions, gained by an exercise of his creative imagination, his feelings will naturally change, probably toward conformity with the feelings of the spectator.Disagreementin feeling will be transformed into agreement, and in effect each will come to sympathize with the other.(Broadie 178)
The sentimental consensus thus achieved is analogous to Smith’s famous sequence of “truck, barter and exchange”as well as to the tripartite structure of reader-text-writer.A pleasurable agreeing relation is made through exchanging sentiments between the spectator and the agent, similar to the bartering business around the commodity that finalizes the deal[49].The text becomes pleasurable, and textuality permeates into everyday practice of representation and reading.
It takes something to build “a thoughtful, critical observer”that matters to Smith.The spectator-observer is “directed by virtuous considerations, whether of the intellectual sort or some other, and seeking to understand”(177).Indeed, for the eighteenth-century reader, propriety and property often resonate with each other.The long-standing association of honor and decorum with ancient and prescriptive rights in the land is being replaced by its much less aristocratic but more bourgeoisie-like capitalistic counterpart.As historian Jean-Christophe Agnew points out:“In drama as in life, honor was increasingly understood to be a particularly stable and solid form of credit, whereas land was coming to be seen as an especially illiquid form of capital”(175).Sympathy, in some sense, joins in the first of this pair, “a particularly stable and solid form of credit,”that is.Access to this agreement of sentiments is economic, through bodily management as well as social capital.Let’s take a look at another passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
...it is chiefly from [the] regard to the sentiments of mankind that we pursue riches and avoid poverty.For to what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world?What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power and preeminence?...From whence ...arises the emulation which runs through all the different ranks of men and what are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call better ourcondition?To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and appreciation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it.It is the vanity, not the ease or the pleasure, which interests us.But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation.(Smith 1984:50)
To be seen, to be sympathized with become a kind of competitive economy.Attention and sympathy turn into “a limited commodity for which isolated individuals competed”(Agnew 181).Individuals are portrayed as driven by the fear of possible indifference and mortification.Theatrical sentiment more notoriously turns into capitalization.“Nothing is so mortifying as to be obliged to expose our distress to the view of the public, and to feel, that though our situation is open to the eyes of all mankind, no mortal conceives for us the half of what we suffer”(Smith 1984:60) as Smith writes pages later.Sympathy here joins honor, virtue, and decorum to be part of a bottomless line of credit.It functions in an economy of scarcity rather than a natural or equal distribution.Those blessed with “ease and prosperity”are more sympathetically regarded by others, or more easily moved into the adverbial sympathetic positions.Their words, gestures, and actions are “observed by all the world,”in stark contrast to the poor, who come and go unnoticed, without visibility and deprived of theatrical presence[50].
In a passage on the influence of fortune upon merit and demerit, Smith writes:
If, between the friend who fails and the friend who succeeds, all other circumstances are equal, there will, even in the noblest mind, be some little difference of affection in favour of him who succeeds.(Smith 1984:183)
Which is also why Adam Smith argues that a “wild child”—one recurrent figure of the marginal people in the anthropological discourse of the British Enlightenment[51]—also lacks an idea of self.It is because he lacks the “mirror”provided by others that he could ever afford to entertain:
Were it possible that a human creature could group up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face.All these objects which he cannot easily see, which naturally he does not look at, and with regard to which he is provided with no mirror which can present them to his view.Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before.(Smith 1984:110)
“Who we are,”as well as “who we think we are,”depends on our ability to see ourselves reflected in the actions and eyes of others.The “solitary place”represents a strong sense of death drive, sentimental dearth, social impropriety and propertied poverty.Others provide us with the means of seeing ourselves, which we “cannot easily see”or which we “naturally”do “not look at.”Conscience is also a product of our identification with what we imagine to be the sentiments of the spectators of our actions[52].Smith observes:
We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us.This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct.(112)(https://www.daowen.com)
This property of interiority is necessary to maintain a bourgeoisie autonomous individual selfhood, and manifested in the figure of the impartial spectator.Smith calls this “the man within the breast”in his account of the faculty of conscience:
The all-wise Author of Nature has, in this manner, taught man to respect the sentiments and judgments of his brethren ....But though man has, in this manner, been rendered the immediate judge of mankind, he has been rendered so only in the first instance; and an appeal lies from his sentence to a much higher tribunal, to the tribunal of their own consciences, to that of the supposed impartial and well-informed spectator, to that of the man within the breast, the great judge and arbiter of their conduct.The jurisdictions of those two tribunals are founded upon principles which, though in some respects resembling and akin, are, however, in reality different and distinct.The jurisdiction of the man without, is founded altogether in the desire of actual praise, and in the aversion to actual blame.The jurisdiction of the man within, is founded altogether in the desire of praise-worthiness, and in the aversion to blameworthiness; in the desire of possessing those qualities, and performing those actions, which we love and admire in other people; and in the dread of possessing those qualities, and performing those actions, which we hate and despise in other people.(Smith 1984:128-131)
Thus, the formation of a subjective interiority is a social act of communication and reflection.Interiority and exteriority correspond to each other in a sympathetic way of correspondence.The “supposed impartial and well-informed spectator,”not the ideal observer, cannot dispense with “the man without,”whose “desire of actual praise”and “aversion to actual blame”result from a socializing process.It relates to an approximation to propriety that could be attained:
There exists in the mind of every man, an idea of this kind, gradually formed from his observations upon the character and conduct both of himself and of other people.It is the slow, gradual, and progressive work of the great demigod within the breast, the great judge and arbiter of conduct.This idea is in every man moreor less accurately drawn, its colouring is more or less just, its outlines are more or less exactly designed, according to the delicacy and acuteness of that sensibility, with which those observations were made, and according to the care and attention employed in making them ....Every day some feature is improved; every day some blemish is corrected.(247)
It is noteworthy that the impartial spectator, “the judgment of the ideal man within the breast”(147), is not a version of the “ideal observer theory”that has been on the agenda of moral philosophers at least since the work of Roderick Firth[53].It is simply a demigod—as Smith repeatedly uses this term—not God at all.Sympathy, as a “primal human form of imitation”(Bewell 77), becomes possible with a strong dependence upon a socialized domestic imagination, which produce resemblance under certain social conditions.Otherwise, it becomes not possible for sympathy to register encounters with difference, and thereby a self would be stranded in a situation of affective poverty.
For instance, in the midst of a crowd, the pauper finds himself “in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel”:
The poor man ...is ashamed of his poverty.He feels that it either places him out of the sight of mankind, or, that if they take notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers.He is mortified upon both accounts.(Smith 1984:51)
This shame economy of affective dearth(no attention, no fellowfeeling), this overriding compulsion to become or to remain “the object of attention and approbation,”serves as a goad to industry, like the same “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”(Smith 2000:14), the latter of which is the same abstract entity driving the competing individuals “the butcher, the brewer, or the baker”in The Wealth of Nations.In Smith’s description, this affective economy is so imperative that the isolated murderer, like Peter’s education in Wordsworth’s poem Peter Bell[54], is compelled to return to society to face the judgment of others.It is because his “exposure,”as David Marshall has noted, “before the imagined spectators the man must personate in his solitude,”is more frightening than a real court of justice[55].It is similar to what William Warner sees in William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the Comic Writers regarding a classic history of the rise of the novel in figures like Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne of the period of George II(1727—1760).Hazlitt correlates this with the rise of the middle class, whose political demands for representation are manifested through selfexpressing “in books as well as Parliament.”It is a turn-away from the “vices, miseries, and frivolities of the great”as expressed in the continental romance and novella, toward “an account of themselves”as winning for themselves “a security of person and property, and freedom of opinion.”This, according to Warner’s analysis, makes a more popular and “domestic”culture in that the English reader of the novel thereby wins a certain “life”and “liberty,”and becomes propertied—“each individual had a certain ground-plot of his own to cultivate his particular humours in.”Thereby, according to Warner’s analysis on Hazlitt, the English novel “allows every English citizen to realize a claim to the Lockean trinity of life, liberty, and property(Locke, Second Treatise of Government, VII:87)”(Warner 25)[56].
For Smith, sympathetic sentiment’s correlation with an attentional and visual economy is set to exclude some individuals from the “moralizing gaze of others”(Poovey 33), who “sunk in obscurity and darkness”:“His conduct is observed and attended to by nobody, and he is therefore very likely to neglect it himself, and to abandon himself to every sort of low prodigality and vice”(Smith 1984:134).The natural impulse to keep oneself from moral and visual oblivion, and mankind’s “dull insensibility to the afflictions of others,”compel the sufferer to take the part of his spectators toward himself, since it is only by such measures that the sufferer could discover at what level he needs to cast the expression of his own feelings to win their sympathy.Though such sympathy offers him “his sole consolation,”the sufferer could “only hope to obtain this by lowering his passion to that pitch”which his spectator finds tolerable.He has to “flatten,”in Smith’s words, “the sharpness of its natural tone, in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him”(22).Only certain kinds and degrees of emotions can be counted as evidence, as testimony.The person in question is addressed with these enunciative and signifying rules in mind.In order to reach that momentary imaginary change of situations, upon which sympathy is founded, the sufferer turns instead to a more deeply theatrical and collusive set of relations with his audience:
As they [the audience / spectators] are continually placing themselves in his situation, thence conceiving emotions similar to what he feels; so he is as constantly placing himself in theirs, and thence conceiving some degree of that coolness about his own fortune, with which he is sensible that they will view it.(19)
In this mutual process between the spectators and the agent of feelings, “strange fits of passion”—to use half a line from William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Pomes”—need be reducible to be observable so as to be sympathized with.It takes efforts from both sides to establish a communicative process of analysis and imitation.Emotions should be tailored so as to enter into equilibrium and to be exchangeable.In this realm of emotional production and communication, what remains of interest is not what is “in the true”or “in the private,”but what is “in the evidentiary”or what could be made “in the circulatory”—the aspect of “exchange value”if we use Karl Marx’s formula of “commodity.”It reminds of what Samuel T.Coleridge takes as “man of letters”:“He imagines a man of type capable of being indefinitely reset[57].”Jerome Christensen argues that as consequence of commercialization of the print, the Romantic authorship becomes “no longer figured as an instrument for spreading light,”but along with the print machine, “churned out ephemeral commodities, exacted soul-destroying labor, and chained genius to the caprices of a debased reading public”(Christensen 1987:9).For Coleridge, whose two therapeutic substitutes for the man of letters are the individual poet and the corporate clerisy[58],
with the greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship.Too early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty; even were there not other worse consequences.A person, who reads only to print in all probability reads amiss; and he, who sends away through the pen and the press every thought, the moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all away, and will become a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor.(qtd.in Christensen 1987:8)
Adam Smith’s “flattening”strategy in representing emotions reads akin to the necessity of production and reproduction of the authorship:merely becoming “a journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor,”that is.Both are manufactured into anonymous commodities in a logic analogous to the permeation of print and reading.