Coda

Coda

In a history of the body as it is realized through photography, detectives and early cinemas, Tom Gunning tells a case of female paranoia analyzed by Freud.A young woman was obsessed of being photographed, because she heard a knock or click that she believed came from the snapping of a camera shutter.Freud identifies the source of this “aural hallucination”(Gunning 37) as the woman’s body, and the click being an aural displacement of the throb of her excited clitoris^[67].In the long history given by Gunning on the pre-history of cinema, this is one of the places he reads “the conflation of the body with the processes of the camera”(37).What remains of interest here is this turn of the mechanic machine as part of the female body.A somatic interiority becomes externalized as the apparatus, which functions as an observing and diagnosing machine or mechanism.The deep female psyche is presentable through the snapping of a camera shutter, which comes from the body itself.This turning the body inside out as observable, exchangeable, and alienable is throughout Western modernity.It starts from the period of history we investigated, if not earlier, in the rise of the print medium, and various social practices this technology has brought forth.An affective maintenance of a selfhood is a social practice of fellow-feeling, the realization of which is made possible through a print logic enhanced through the daily saturation of textually based cultural practice of representation.This leads to the economy of sympathy increasingly visual and abstract, as our history from Edmund Burke to Adam Smith suggests.

In the mid-nineteenth century, photography, as relevant to the Freudian story here, accompanied the “autonomization of sight,”by which, Jonathan Crary argues, the sense of sight becomes dissociated from touch, and thereby detaches “the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space.”As a result, according to Crary, “The new objects of vision ...assume a mystified and abstract identity.”And it is because the imagery has been cut off from any relation to the observer’s position in space.In the century, like “older types of images,”photography unifies “all subjects within a single global network of valuation and desire,”and could be located as “an element of a new and homogeneous terrain of consumption and circulation in which an observer becomes lodged^[68].”The paranoia of being photographed from the young woman is suggestive of an obsession of the proliferation of the photography technology in everyday life.Probably it is also an anxiety of being watched and scrutinized by this “element of a new and homogeneous terrain of consumption and circulation,”whether manifested through photography, cinema or print.It is a human sensitivity against a culture of abstraction promoted through the saturation of different mass media in modernity, which produces a communication and reproduction “from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space.”In a rough way, this is referred to as “alienation”in various Marxist traditions.More of significance to our history of emotion—specifically “sympathy”—is the fact that the “aural hallucination”of the young woman is identified by Sigmund Freud the psychoanalyst as a part of the activity of the female body itself.It is not about any general part, but the throb of her excited clitoris, which is a most private and inscrutable part of a female body.The Freudian penetrating power of the masculine visuality is parallel with the panopticon mode of scrutiny, whether it is from the mass media of print, photography and cinema, medical treatises, or moral philosophy et cetera.All of them can be labeled as the apparatuses of modernity in a general way.They turn the female body as hypersexual or hypersentimental, just abnormal enough to be in the necessary need of being normalized.The female body becomes a harbinger to the “mass”as Benjamin sees in one of the notes published later as “Central Park”:that “mass of organs”on which the surgeon—and the political economist, the psychoanalyst, and the cameraman—“operate.”It is an allegory of “the transformation of the body from an organic form into an allegorical ‘mass’ that the apparition of the passerby both announces and conceals”(Weber 1996:96) as Samuel Weber points out.In this process of the discipline or penetration of the female comes masculinity in various modern technologies.This is what is usually called the process of “modernity.”It is at the expense of the aurality psychoanalyzed as female in the Freudian way.Of course, this is an allegory, and the sacrificed aurality of the young woman in the science of psychoanalysis is referred to as the “Unconscious,”which occurs to places, classes and genders identified as the other in the story of Western modernity.

【注释】

[1]As Dixon Wecter pointed out, from biographies of Edmund Burke by Robert Bisset and James Prior, we hear that Burke had made his careful study of George Berkeley in hope of being appointed circa 1752 to the chair of logic at Glasgow, a position eventually vacated by Adam Smith.This could be another reason for Burke’s attention upon Smith’s work.See Dixon Wecter, “Burke’s Theory concerning Words, Images, and Emotion,”p.176, note 30.Also see Dixon Wecter’s essay “The Missing Years in Burke’s Biography,”p.1109.

[2]Dated 10th September, 1759.See D.D.Raphael and A.L.Macfie, “Introduction,”pp.27-28.

[3]Dated 12 April, 1759, a letter from London by Hume, who sent copies of Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments to the Duke of Argyll, Lord Lyttelton, Horace Walpole, Soame Jenyns, and Edmund Burke.See D.D.Raphael and A.L.Macfie, “Introduction,”pp.25-26.

[4]Year 1759.See D.D.Raphael and A.L.Macfie, “Introduction,”p.28.

[5]See Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”p.160.

[6]See J.C.Stewart-Robertson and David F.Norton, “Thomas Reid on Adam Smith’s Theory of Morals.”Also see Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”p.163.

[7]Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”p.165.

[8]See TMS, editors’ Introduction, pp.20-24; Laurence Dickey, “Historicizing the ‘Adam Smith Problem’:Conceptual, Historiographical, and Textual Issues;”Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”pp.164-165.

[9]In the sense Agamben uses this word, see Agamben, “What Is Apparatus?”

[10]See J.C.Bryce, “Introduction,”pp.34-37.For how “the system”not only works as an idea, but as a genre in the British Enlightenment, and how it originates through Newton’s Opticks and Principia, see Clifford Siskin, “Mediated Enlightenment:The System of the World,”in This Is Enlightenment, pp.164-172.

[11]Edward Gibbon, The Letters of Edward Gibbon, vol.2, pp.166, 335.

[12]The mind works after the eye, that is.A process inverse to what is defined as impossible by Lord Kames in his Elements of Criticism.

[13]In early natural philosophy, bodies classed as heavy were said to gravitate, and bodies classed as light to levitate, in consequence of their tendency to ‘seek their own place’.See OED online, under the entry of “gravitate.”

[14]In his letter to the Earl of Buchan.Quoted in J.C.Bryce, “Introduction,”pp.34-35.

[15]As illustrated by George Berkeley several decades before Smith.See David E.Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon,”p.27.

[16]The entire section “Of the Influence and Authority of Conscience”appeared only for the first time in the second edition of 1760, which substantially revised the text of the first 1759 edition.Smith’s book remained more or less unchanged until its sixth edition, printed in 1790.See Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, p.3.Also see D.D.Raphael and A.L.Macfie, “Introduction.”

[17]This was discussed by Carlo Ginzburg in his “To Kill a Chinese Mandarin:The Moral Implications of Distance,”in Wooden Eyes, Nine Reflections on Distance.This essay was also published in Critical Inquiry, 1994, 21(1), pp.46-60.

[18]See Ginzburg’s essay “Killing a Chinese Mandarin:The Moral Implications of Distance.”

[19]See David Porter, “A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation:China and the Discourse of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England.”

[20]Regarding the Anglo-American sympathetic economy to Chinese, Gertrude Stein was asked a similar question by the philosopher Hutchins Hapgood.As Stein writes in her Everybody’s Autobiography, Hapgood “liked to think of the number of angels on the point of a needle ...and ...always complained of me that I had too good a time for anybody who was so virtuous.”One day, frustrated by Stein’s “virtue,”Hapgood asked her a “test question.Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from anything.Well I was very fond of my brother and I could completely imagine his suffering and I replied that five thousand Chinamen were something I could not imagine and so it was not interesting”(qtd.in Hayot 205).In a sense, this impossibility of sympathizing with Chinese is an integrated part of Western modernity and modernism, as Eric Hayot argues throughout The Hypothetical Mandarin.

[21]For an analysis about this specific passage of Hume’s, see Carlo Ginzburg, “To Kill a Chinese Mandarin:The Moral Implications of Distance,”pp.56-59.In a relevant passage that might be an influence upon Adam Smith, Hume writes:“Accordingly we find in common life, that men are principally concern'd about those objects, which are not much remov'd either in space or time, enjoying the present, and leaving what is afar off to the care of chance and fortune.Talk to a man of his condition thirty years hence, and he will not regard you.Speak of what is to happen tomorrow, and he will lend you attention.The breaking of a mirror gives us more concern when at home, than the burning of a house, when abroad, and some hundred leagues distant.”(Hume 1978:428-429).

[22]David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy, p.5.Also see Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, p.263.

[23]Janet Todd, Sensibility:An Introduction, p.27.Todd identifies sentimental literature’s heyday as the period from 1740 to 1770, tracing its decline through adjectives applied to the term “sensibility”(pp.7-8).

[24]For the concept of “mediality,”see David E.Wellbery, ‘Foreword’ to Fredrich A.Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900.

[25]See The Specator, Saturday, June 21, 1712, “Addison on the Pleasures of the Imagination.”Quoted in Erin Mackie, The Commerce of Everyday Life, p.387.

[26]See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.13.Also see Niklas Luhmann, “The Individuality of the Individual:Historical Meanings and Contemporary Problems;”C.B.Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism.

[27]Also see Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”pp.170-171.

[28]The blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction is also one of the commonplace strategies of the early realist novel.For an application of Foucault’s work to the novel and to take the genre as a discursive practice in this regard, see Lennard J.Davis, Factual Fictions:The Origins of the English Novel.

[29]See David Marshall, “Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments,”p.599.Also see Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, p.28.

[30]Ronald Paulson, The Beautiful Novel, and Strange:Aesthetics and Heterodoxy.

[31]For a similar historical argument, see Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity.Trilling’s approach is more of close reading of literary texts and intellectual thoughts.He never, as could be imagined from such a conservative literary critic, takes a point out of historical materialism.

[32]See Erin Mackie, The Commerce of Everyday Life, pp.387-396.

[33]See Note 130.(https://www.daowen.com)

[34]The Spectator, Monday, March 12, 1711.In Erin Mackie, The Commerce of Everyday Life, p.90.

[35]See David E.Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon,”p.9.

[36]Of course, one can relate this to the popular argument of the rise of the visual in the modern Western society.See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes:The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought; Hal Foster, Vision and Visuality.For a useful historical analysis about the literature of this argument and how it can be used in the Chinese situation, see Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity:Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, especially “Introduction,”pp.1-39.

[37]See Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p.13.

[38]Aristotle, De Anima(On the Soul), p.423.

[39]See J.C.Bryce’s “Introduction”to Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, specifically part 5, “System and Aesthetics,”pp.34-37.

[40]This, as a footnote, was added to the second edition of TMS.An earlier draft of it was enclosed by Smith with letter 40 addressed to Sir Gilbert Elliot, dated 10 October 1759.See the editorial note by D.D.Raphael and A.L.Macfie on p.46 of TMS.

[41]See Abrams’ discussion of the Aeolian lyre and the imagery of inspiration in “The Correspondent Breeze:A Romantic Metaphor.”

[42]See Daniel M.Gross, The Secret History of Emotion, p.173.

[43]See J.C.Stewart-Robertson and David F.Norton, “Thomas Reid on Adam Smith’s Theory of Morals.”Also see Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”p.163.

[44]See Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”p.169.

[45]See Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”pp.169-170.

[46]Also see Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”p.164.

[47]Quoted in J.C.Bryce, “Introduction,”p.35.

[48]See Katherine Ellison’s recent study on reading and information overload in early eighteenth-century literature, The Fatal News:Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature.

[49]See Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”pp.177-178.

[50]To use a concept that we discussed in the chapter on David Hume.

[51]See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, pp.50-71.

[52]Also see Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.77.

[53]See Roderick Firth, “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer.”Also see Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,”p.184.

[54]See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.103.

[55]David Marshall, “Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments,”p.603.

[56]William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684—1750.This, of course, as Warner makes it clear, is a very “Whiggish interpretation of the free golden age of the Whig mid-eighteenth century, written from the vantage point of Hazlitt’s conception of English democratic identity”(Warner 25).

[57]Jerome Christensen, Praising Enlightenment, p.8.Also see Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language, pp.163-167, and “The Impropriety of Coleridge’s Literary Life,”pp.156-167.

[58]Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language, p.9, note 12.

[59]The word “publish”appears in Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary of 1755:“To put forth a book into the world”—suggestive of the expansive nature of book publishing, which is at once an act of production and dissemination.

[60]See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, pp.462-550.

[61]See OED online, under the entry of “mandarin,”definition 2b.

[62]See David Porter, “A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation:China and the Discourse of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England.”

[63]See Daniel M.Gross, The Secret History of Emotion, p.170.

[64]See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p.59.

[65]“Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.,”in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, p.292-293.

[66]J.G.A.Pocock, “Adam Smith and History,”p.280.

[67]Sigmund Freud, “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytic Theory of the Disease.”See Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body:Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,”p.37.

[68]Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp.13, 19.