V.v.Sentimental Humanity and a Stadial European Hi...
Writing on structural transformation of the public sphere as a category of bourgeois society, Jürgen Habermas explains rather cryptically that [i]ncluded in the private realm was the authentic “public sphere,”for it was a public sphere constituted by private people(Habermas 30).This quite dialectical dynamics between the public and the private is further elucidated by Clifford Siskin in his analysis of the social role of writing in that differentiation.Siskin quotes Anne Dutton’s defense of “PRINTING any Thing written by a Woman”(1743), more than a decade before the first publication of Smith’s work:
Communicating one Mind in Print, is as private, with respect to particular Persons, as if one did it particularly unto every one by himself in one’s own House.There is only this Difference:The one is communicating one’s Mind by Speech, in one’s own private House:The other is doing it by Writing, in the private house of another Person.Both are still private.(qtd.in Siskin 164)
For Siskin, in Dutton’s reading, it is print that “overwrites the category of public-as-state, by instituting, within the private realm of society, a new kind of publicness—one that is accessed and thus produced in private terms”(Siskin 164).In other words, print, as a technology and an art of transmission, enhances a world of moving objects, images and other means of representations.It would be technologically determinist to claim print as the incubator of social mobility.What interests this current writing more is the social increase of this “new kind of publicness”that “is accessed and thus produced in private terms”around the middle of the eighteenth century.Dutton’s quite functionalist acknowledgement of the difference between the oral(speech) and the tactile(writing), without substantiating the effects of this difference, exactly suggests her ignorance of the modality of impersonality, transparency, and mediated exchangeability created by the social and public properties of writing.Spontaneous, communal speech and its audile mechanism begin to co-exist with an emergent mode of communication and its visual mechanism.One even can detect a transition from orality to literacy, to use a simplified model of communication theory by Walter J.Ong.The sense of immediacy—“as if one did it particularly unto every one by himself in one’s own House”—from which Dutton tries to salvage a sense of security—“in one’s own House,”thereby safe—turns out exactly to be what writers must find ways to achieve as a memorable quality of writing owing to words’ separation from their “living present”(Ong 82).The world is becoming larger than that of the village midwife of Laurence Sterne’s.Habermas, in his influential study with this point, describes the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries of commerce of communication and the way in which the press was a major factor in the emergence of the public sphere:
The great trade cities became at the same time centers for the traffic in news; the organization of this traffic on a continuous basis became imperative to the degree to which the exchange of commodities and of securities became continuous.(Habermas 16)
This sense of imperative traffic and commerce displays itself also immaterially, which is the way a neutralizing strategy of excessive emotions works.It throws a significant historical light upon the theatrical and collusive set of relations between the sufferer and his audience in the sentimental economy.The way Adam Smith, as a would-be political economist then, designates emotions to be regulated, disciplined and transferred as evidences and testimonies for communicative sympathy correlates with these crucial periods of adaptation to an increasing commerce and mobility.This also explains that David Hume fixes on conversation as an antipode to “that forelorn(sic) solitude”mentioned above.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 generated out of their multiplicity(Siskin 164).Graham Burchell points out that Hume “describe[s] 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 129).This necessity of interchangeability between things, perceptions and feelings require all of them to develop neutralized and welldisciplined platforms for the other, whether in the forms of commodities(and its exchange value), the visually demanding literacy, or sympathy.
Of course, labors are involved in translating different visual positionalities and making them “in the evidentiary”to the collective editorial “we”that Smith uses through his system.This ability to liquidate suffering and pain to make emotions transparent and translatable enough to be exchangeable, analogous to money as embodiment of exchange values of different commodities from different worlds, is rather theatrical and self-reflexive in Smith’s theatre of sympathy.It seems unevenly distributed and much less accessible, in Smith’s system, to the poor in the midst of the crowd, the street beggar with sores and ulcers, and the fair sex:
The reserve which the laws of society impose upon the fair sex, with regard to this weakness [i.e., passionate love], renders it more particularly distressful in them, and, upon that very account, more deeply interesting.We are charmed with the love of Phaedra, as it is expressed in the French tragedy of that name, notwithstanding all the extravagance and guilt which attend it.That very extravagance and guilt may be said, in some measure, to recommend it to us.Her fear, her shame, her remorse, her horror, her despair, become thereby more natural and interesting.(Smith 1984:3)
“Natural and interesting”here applies not to a set of proper emotions already tailored to circumstances, but to extravagant emotions such as Phaedra’s fear, shame, remorse, horror, and despair “rendered(and thereby appropriate) by the art of the dramatist”(Gross 174).Here exists a touch of what Michel de Certeau calls “the ethnographic operation”(78).It is the epistemological-technical process, through which the emotions of “primitive”others become visually archivable, are brought into representations and translations, and are transcribed by social researchers or political economist of emotions.It is a hermeneutics of the emotionally other inscribed by and through certain forms of intelligibility, visuality and civility, as we already see in the literary media strategy of William Wordsworth.It may not be a ethnographic writing per se, as it is in the original de Certeau scheme, but the strategy remains the same.The editorial “we”that Smith used throughout the work is to “invoke the presumptive authority of common experience, thereby denying or, again, dissembling the emotional isolation that lay at the heart of his system”(Agnew 185-186).The common experience offers as the site of exchange and the nodal point of transference and translation.It remains categorically analogous to some other peculiar forms of modern abstractions, which are variously designated as the commodity, reification, and the fetish.The increasing problems of the production and administration of this sort of abstract space closely dovetail with the history of Western modernity.Smith weaves all social relations into versions of measurable exchange, and individuals as instantiations of the same abstract entity, whether it is sympathy, the moralizing impartial spectator or the “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.”He designates this as a way to deal with the informational mobility in an increasingly globalized and capitalized world—“a world of moving objects.”(https://www.daowen.com)
In an etymological study, Rafael Capurro suggests that information became an entity to be regarded objectively as “something to be stored and processed”(qtd.in Ellison 8) between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Katherine Ellison contextualizes Capurro’s definition of information as “a kind of abstract stuff present in the world, disconnected from the situations that it is about”(qtd.in Ellison 9), which is “physically and spatially associated with surface, depth, and meaninglessness”(Ellison 9).In Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the impartiality of the sympathetic remains historically coincident with and logically analogous to the overloading information age of the eighteenth century, with its establishment of public post office, the publication of books[59], the “moving objects”(Pocock again), and the moving people.It even “began to flow out along the arteries of European commerce in search of its victims”(229) as Peter Hulme writes.Antonio Damasio, one of the contemporary brain scientists of emotion, muses that the history of civilization is, to some extent, “the history of a persuasive effort to extend the best of ‘moral sentiments’ to wider and wider circles of humanity”(qtd.in Gross 170).Talal Asad refers this kind of civilizing moral sentiment as “the desire to impose what they [the European rulers] considered civilized standards of justice and humanity on a subject population—that is, the desire to create new human subjects,”which is “humanizing the world”(Asad 110).This imperialist humanitarian effort of sentiment and sympathy aims to create a new sense of humanity and imperial subject.It has its historical predecessors.For instance, Lord Milner, undersecretary for finance during the British occupation of Egypt that began in 1882, describes Britain’s imperial task in that country as follows:
This then, and no less than this, was meant by ‘restoring order.’It meant reforming the Egyptian administration root and branch.Nay, it meant more.For what was the good of recasting the system, if it were left to be worked by officials of the old type, animated by the old spirit?‘Men, not measures,’ is a good watchword anywhere, but to no country is it more profoundly applicable than to Egypt.Our task, therefore, included something more than new principles and new methods.It ultimately involved new men.It involved ‘the education of the people to know,’ and therefore to expect, orderly and honest government—the education of a body of rulers capable of supplying it.(qtd.in Asad 110)
The imperialist reformation involves not merely the bureaucratic administration, but more essentially, the essence of a new humanity.It necessarily takes coercion and violence to eradicate traditional practices, and more so to establish a new affective mode of humanity.In this pedagogical process of learning to be “fully human,”as Asad points out, “only some kinds of suffering were seen as an affront to humanity, and their elimination sought”(Asad 111).It remains integrated to the imperialist reform project to retain “suffering that was necessary to the process of realizing one’s humanity—that is, pain that was adequate to its end, not wasteful pain”(111).For Eric Hayot, it is an end of taking the body as an imperialist “epistemological heuristic, as, that is, a way of knowing the world and a way of grasping the body’s relation to it,”and
an understanding of suffering, its recognition and its classification, as epistemological processes, as mechanisms for the production of social truth and for the location of self in relation to world, and thus an awareness of the body’s paradoxical status as both ‘mode and object of knowing.’(Hayot 18)
The necessity of the existence of some pain, some suffering is to establish an epistemology of affect, which manifests itself as a condescending sympathy towards “traditional practices”that brings forth pain, misery and suffering.It therefore justifies Western modernity to affirm the development of a Western sense of self as modern, to take the body as site of anthropological observation, and to eliminate those “now branded as ‘repugnant to justice and morality’ or as ‘opposed to natural morality and humanity,’ or even sometimes as ‘backward and childish’”(Asad 110-111).This Western liberalistic discourse of emotions and sentiments accords very well with the orthodoxy story of capital in Karl Marx—how it travels from the west to the east, that is—along with its ideology of the “Asiatic mode of production”in various forms[60].It is interesting to note that etymologically, the word “Mandarin”is defined through the OED as “any obscurantist, esoteric, or exclusive variety of a language[61]”that remains outside of circulation and exchangeability.Eric Hayot suggests that this probably “borrows from the mandarin’s economic and governmental stereotype the sense of mobility without movement, or activity without change”(Hayot 33), to which Adam Smith also makes a discursive contribution[62].It is no surprise that Adam Smith could be cited as an intellectual antecedent of this imperialist project of global sentiment[63].There is also a historical heritage from the “conjectural,”“hypothetical,”“natural”history constructed by the Scottish Enlightenment that was popular and characteristic of eighteenth-century empiricist discursive genres [64].Dugald Stewart(1753—1828), in his discussion of Adam Smith’s Dissertation on the Origin of Languages, summarizes in this way:
When, in such a period of society as that in which we live, we compare our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, manners, and institutions, with those which prevail among rude tribes, it cannot fail to occur to us as an interesting question, by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated[65].
Smith’s contribution to the four-stage theory helps to give rise to “an account of the progress of civil society which reinterpreted European history at the expense of non-European cultures.It made the extension of the concept ‘history’ to these difficult and even deniable”(Pocock 280)[66].For him, the man of middling rank can afford to cultivate those bourgeois sensibilities—compassion first among them—that constitutes a civilized nation.Living in such a flux of mobility, one has to “flatten”(to use Smith’s word) a little bit, and has to manage to remain connected, to be wired into medial possibilities.Otherwise, one would be “sunk in obscurity and darkness.”This flattening or abstracting theatrically alternates between embodiment and disembodiment.Thus, Smith’s sympathetic subject creates an example of what Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle examine as a creative process of information, and an instance of the convergence of individualism with capitalism in an early part of Western modernity.Significantly, such a story of information flow and convergence concerning emotions is class, gender and region based, as analyzed above.