Q minus A

Hi everyone;  I just finished The Jungle, and I know for a fact that Megan has already read this one.  Let's open a discussion!

My very very long synopses & a few thoughts are available here:

http://margaretfinkberman.blogspot.com/2010/12/jungle-part-1.html
http://margaretfinkberman.blogspot.com/2010/12/jungle-parts-2.html

The things that I'm thinking about (other than the HOLY YIKES of the book's expose-- I'm a nice tractable reader with appropriate responses) are the kind of socialism as a vision for political change or what-could-be-otherwise being presented by the book.  This imagining of what-could-be-otherwise is delivered mostly as dialogue speeches--but that kind of move is something I'm interested in in a more general way.  This one kind of didn't feel terribly effective; perhaps kind of like the dissatisfaction we felt with Eve Sedgwick's account of reparative reading-- paranoid reading sure isn't great, but what would be the other thing?

Darwinian thought is very very much present to me in this book, too, which would make sense for the period-- any thoughts there?    I'm curious to hear what you guys took away from this novel!

Posted by margaretlouise at 11:22 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 20th century American, capitalism, cities, modernity, novels

[this is from a while ago, and not quite finished, but I am posting anyway, just to move on]

In Sade’s Justine, the eponymous young heroine, known as Therese for most of the tale, suffers more or less creative moral and sexual depredations of an almost endless cast of highway robbers, perverted monks, thieves, landowners, counterfeiters, and officials, most of whom have enormous penises and a fondness for anal sex. Almost pathologically virtuous from birth, Therese/Justine refuses to stray from her attachment to Christian virtues, even as this attachment repeatedly leads her into the hands of depraved libertines (she rescues three or four of her tormentors from death, only to find herself imprisoned and abused by them). Her apparent virtue incites the libertines whom she serves not only to abuse her sexually, but also to lecture her on the vanity and uselessness of her attachment to virtue. Thus almost every episode includes a lengthy tract on the productive/creative nature of crime, the uselessness and inexistence of God, the state of nature and of natural desires, etc.

Most of the narration is framed as the story of her life told by Therese to two wealthy lovers, Madame de Larsange and Monsieur de Corville, as she stops at an inn on her way to her undeserved execution for murder, arson, and theft. In her narration, Therese does not spare the titillating and/or revolting details, though she asks her auditors several times if they wouldn’t rather avoid hearing them. Madame de Larsange is in fact Justine’s sister Juliette, who upon the death of their parents took the opposite course from Justine’s and went deliberately into prostitution, libertinage, and murder, earning riches and a title in the process. After Justine’s story is told, her sister’s influential lover secures her release; however, she dies after being struck by lightning in the abrupt finale, triggering Juliette’s complete repentance.

The point I’d like to pause over is the role of the conventional Sentimental scenarios and expectations in the novel. Justine is the victim of a natural piety and a belief in the universal sentimental foundation of human character which underlies and redeems even the most hardened criminal. The novel works explicitly against earlier notions of character, present in novels and philosophy alike, that asserted, for example, that even criminals recognize the necessity of justice to sociality by holding to an honor code among themselves.

In Justine, libertines claim to be driven and limited by nothing other than their self-interest, defined as the search for maximum pleasure. More often than not, they succeed not only in enjoying the bodies of others in arbitrary and harmful ways with total impunity, but also in attaining money, security, and status – that is, there is no separation necessary between long-term and short-term “pleasures” that define Weberian Protestant-capitalist “prudence” and Freud’s “reality principle”.

I would need to know much more to even try a hypothesis, but I would be interested in connecting this “imprudent,” unbound self-interest with the history of both capitalism and sentiment. A common view of the period (I think this is a common view. I might easily be wrong) sees the emergence of sentimentalist discourse as in part the creation of a new mode of public behavior amenable to the fluid exchanges and mutual dependencies of the market. For example, David Solkin, in Painting for Money, reads Shaftesbury’s praise of familial virtues as models for public behavior as the reconfiguration of the values guiding public life, from “republican” austerity and duty to familiarity and sociability. Now following this very tenuous thread, what Sade seems to be dramatizing is the untrammeled and terrifying desires unleashed upon the figure of the perfect, virtuous, high-bourgeois sentimentalist by a range of figures, most of whom are, or were once, titled noblemen. I may be exaggerating this trend, but if I remember correctly, even such third estate figures as the sadistic (!) doctor who kills his own daughter for the sake of science eventually rise to be doctors to the king, i.e. “transcend” their origins.

Posted by abradox at 2:13 PM 0 comments  

Labels: 18th century, bourgeois, democracy, determinism, discipline, economics, education, evil, novels, passion, philosophy, pleasure, politics, religion, science, sex, society, sovereignty, the body

...if the [theoretical] observation emboldens us to explore the world, cut it up in new and different ways, and learn what new and useful relationships can result, then the observation is of use and interest; but it is not interesting to the extent that it leads only to materially unattended theoretical restatements of itself. (Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 192-3)

from Samuel R. Delany's book on Times Square, which I liked so much I might write it up later, here, though it is not on my lists. The book is great for an exploration of a once-thriving and mundanely utopian urban culture, as well as for its forceful argument about the (material, socio-economic, cultural, political) conditions necessary for cities to live up to their potential for human flourishing. Incidentally, all the labels for this post apply to the book—that in itself seems like a good advert.

Posted by abradox at 8:47 PM 0 comments  

Labels: 20th century American, affect, cities, contagion, democracy, determinism, economics, grad school, life, passion, pleasure, politics, postmodernism, sex, society, the body, the polis, theory

"...man comprehends not in his knowledge or power all past or future things: his thoughts are but of yesterday, and he knows not what tomorrow will bring forth. What is once past he can never recall; and what is yet to come he cannot make present" (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 139).

Posted by abradox at 6:27 PM 0 comments  

Labels: 18th century, human finitude, life, Locke, philosophy

[apologies that this is rough & tumble & hardly refined.  still getting started.  : )]
I've finally gotten through Emerson's "Self-Reliance."  The familiar messages are against conformity, against imitation, anti-society but pro-Man.  cf "Self-reliance is [conformity's] aversion.  It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs." [I'm including this quote because it's explicitly anti-label/type/"identity"] The lecture is largely in the imperative and kind of jumps around to the same message (variations on a theme).  It was an essay that turned me off on a number of fronts but also really intrigued me as being sort of a kindred spirit to certain thoughts that I'm having.  Namely, he is so aphoristic and despite his claims that class and societal virtues like a continental education and travel arent' worth a sniff, he's so so so elitist.  So it's really soaring language about destinies and being true-- but there's this (obvi) radical individualism and political libertarianism that is quite frankly really off-putting ("are these my poor?").  He critiques society as being a "joint-stock company" in which everyone puts aside his own interests for the collective one-- so what seems to be a critique of capitalist-style publicness is SO darn capitalist (every man for himself)-- neoliberallike, even.  So okay, having the "do I like him or not?" stuff out of the way, he is making a lot of interesting claims for what makes one who one is, and how that "identity" interfaces with societal categories or "communities of opinion"; part of his commitment to radical individualism is a rejection of the notion that one must decide or act consistently over time (i.e. that one's actions/decisions would fit into a coherent pattern or type).  Rather, he says, we should aspire to "neutrality,"confronting the situation anew each time and frankly think, intuit, and perceive, making the "necessary" choice without any external influence shaping our action/decision (it's a fantasy, oh yes).  So rules, duty, custom, precedence, etc. are all enemies to the man who wants to be a man.  Temporally, this is a modus operandi that is located firmly in the present: something like "take every moment as it comes"-- he likens memory to a dead corpse we carry around with us, yeesh.  He's saying this about memory insofar as it encumbers our present conduct. [note: his account is self-consciously shocking, I think, in asking us to sever all ties that may encumber our being ourself-- including familial ties.  kind of buddhist this way]

But okay, right, the desire to cast off behavior that is performed according to a template, by saying we must be radically what we are (and we are what we are), his thought has a special affinity to attempts to get away from personhood understood through identity categories.  The transcendentalism comes in with the paradoxical belief that in being radically myself, I am like everyone--in that everyone enacts and is the presence of the divine on earth.  Secularized, one might liken this to a conceptualization of everyone as life worth protecting (one of the axioms of, say, human rights).  [there are a lot of problems with the human rights paradigm but that's another post].

So yeah, this vision of idiosyncratic "identity" is what I want to add to my repertoire of ways to think about people.  One of the metaphors he uses is the rose-- a rose is a rose, and another rose isn't better at being a rose than the first.  It's a desire to evacuate value from being oneself.  And for humans, it actually, I would argue, wants to close the gap between being and potentiality; it is very much possible to be all that you can be by being WHAT you are; that is, it's not a beyond-one's-reach telos where you need to "live up to" your "best" self.  It's about immanence, ironically enough, rather than striving/self-cultivation, as a lot of the classical ethics are.  Be true ("authentic"), not good.  This is of course a singularly American desire, esp when he's scorning European aesthetic judgments-- don't try to be as refined as Europe, America.  Be America.  Do you.

Or something.

Posted by margaretlouise at 9:46 AM 1 comments  

Labels: 19th century, american renaissance, democracy, education, life, society, transcendentalism

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)

[synopsis]

In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to fill in a gap between Foucault’s twin analyses of the large-scale modern “political techniques” and “technologies of the self”, which create both subjectivity and subjection at the level of the individual body-minds. He traces the origin of the distinction between individual life and the political to the originary difference between two Ancient Greek words for life: zoe, which connotes life common to all living beings, and bios, which is the properly human form of life capable of striving for the good life in the community. Agamben argues that this distinction, crucial, for example, to Aristotle’s theory of politics, is in fact never complete; “animal” or “bare” life is always already included in the polis by virtue of its exclusion. Simultaneously, in theories of sovereignty since Hobbes (i.e. in modern ones), the legal order of the polis is itself conditioned by the sovereign exception, the ability of the sovereign to suspend existing laws, thereby exposing the bare life of the citizens to his arbitrary action.

The twin logics of exception and exclusion find their respective expressions in the figures of the sovereign and of the homo sacer: a man who, in archaic Roman law, could legally be killed, yet who could not be used in human sacrifice. Agamben’s argument develops around the interrelation between these two figures, which codifies the inclusion of bare (neither political nor spiritual) life in the political as a matter of the Sovereign’s decision. “[T]he sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (53).

Having analyzed the linked paradoxes of sovereignty and bare life in the first two parts of the book, Agamben addresses the Nazi death camps, an ultimate example of biopolitics, as the product of a long history of the nation-state, biopolitics, and liberalism. He argues that “Fascism and Nazism are, above all, redefinitions of the relations between man and citizen, and become fully intelligible only when situated – no matter how paradoxical it may seem – in the biopolitical context inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of rights” (76-7). His analysis of continuities between contract theories of sovereignty, the habeas corpus writ of 1679, declarations of rights (such as the French revolutionary “Rights of Man and Citizen”), Nazi policies, and contemporary crises of migrant populations, aims at debunking the myth of Nazism’s uniqueness and disconnection from the Western liberal tradition which culminates with the enshrinement of universal human rights.

Following Hannah Arendt, Agamben argues that “rights” as such depend on the link of the nation-state with the biological body, i.e. the bare life, of its natural-born citizens. They are thus necessarily biopolitical. As the state loses power and validity in a period of globalization, the rights which we have come to call universal progressively lose all protection. Convinced of the inevitable failure of any “humanitarianism separated from politics,” (78) Agamben calls for the abandonment of the language of rights, and for a rethinking of bare life and the body in order to confront the exigencies of the contemporary biopolitical moment.

[corpus]

Tracing the evolution of modern liberal democracy from the writ of habeas corpus, Agamben underlines the often occluded significance of the body as both origin and object of national and personal sovereignty. Contrasting habeas corpus with its earlier analogues deriving from the Magna Carta, he writes:

Nothing allows one to measure the difference between ancient and medieval freedom and the freedom at the basis of modern democracy better than this formula. It is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the new subject of politics. (73)

The body emerges as the guarantee of the “sovereign subject’s” legal rights, even though it is thereby subjected to “isolation” as bare life within the subject as a whole (73). Simultaneously, with the rise of theories of national sovereignty (crystallized in the French Revolution), both citizenship (the conferral of rights) and sovereignty (as the source of power) become localized in the moment/fact of birth. The “sovereign subject’s” body unites “the principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty” which earlier periods kept distinct (76). Since sovereignty comes from the people, and “the people” are those who are born citizens, the body of the citizen at the moment of birth combines rights, sovereignty, and law, in a single biopolitical unit. However, the real significance of the body is occluded by the fiction of citizenship.

This part of Agamben’s analysis is a necessary step in his demonstration of the continuity of Nazism with the liberal consensus which preceded and followed it. Simultaneously, it sheds light on the contemporary “fetal politics” analyzed by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman. The intimate relation (not to say confusion or indistinction) between nationhood, personal and national sovereignty, rights, nativity, and “life,” so pervasive in the abortion debates in the contemporary United States, emerges as the symptomatic manifestation of biopolitics inherent in the foundations of the liberal nation-state. The figure of the child, and of the fetus, derives a part of its power from this underlying theoretical presupposition of the unity of nativity, rights, and sovereignty.

[the contemporary moment]

Throughout, Agamben refers occasionally to the contemporary, late capitalist consumerist Western society as the current, and insidious stage in the development of biopolitics. Yet, while calling consumerism an empty and unsustainable alternative to fascism, he never comes to analyze it in any detail. He chooses to address even the question of the decision on the comatose patients' death as a "sovereign" decision seemingly non-conditioned by the multi-layered market structures and rhetorics which pervade the contemporary medical world in fact (the family's "choice" of treatment/services, organs as commodities, commercialization of research, and so on).

[the project]

One of Agamben’s most intriguing suggestions regarding Nazi biopolitics is what he calls its assumption of bare life “as a task” (88). On a basic level, this means the active production of two opposing forms of bare life: the “valid,” protected German and the condemned denationalized Jew. However, in a dense paragraph devoted to the relation of Nazism and Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, Agamben further suggests the possibility of a politics that would similarly embrace bare life as a project, with opposite, i.e. liberating, effects.

Turning to contemporary biopolitical realities, Agamben argues that the zone of indistinction located in the life capable of being killed is in fact the only “sphere of human action” available, (52) the only space for true politics outside of the limitations of law, rights, and nation-states. It is, therefore, the space of his intervention. But while he wants to mobilize bare life, make it into a project, his mode of thought repeatedly seems to entify, ossify the conditions he analyses, by means of his powerfully suggestive figures.

A case in point is one of the few positive models offered toward the end of the work: the gesturalization (and thus a kind of transcendence, for lack of a better word) of bare life in the form of the Roman priest Flamen Diale, whose every move followed rigidly prescribed rules and conveyed meaning, remains a figure, never becoming a project or a praxis to be mobilized (102-3).

[encore un effort (the body)]

Returning in conclusion to the problem of the body, Agamben warns against embracing it wholeheartedly as the space of potential freedom from the law. “Like the concepts of sex and sexuality, the concept of the “body” too is always already caught in a deployment of power” (105). Rather than a vehicle of escape from the biopolitics of modernity, the body is for him the site of a project that could be termed becoming-biopolitical, the work of building a new politics:

Just as the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be overcome in a passage to a new body – a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body – in which a different economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for all resolve the interlacement of zoē and bios that seems to define the political destiny of the West. (105)

The questions and aporias of bare life and sovereignty of the body must, for Agamben, be addressed head-on. There is no technological, archaizing, self-actualizing, or hybridizing escape.

[discussion question]

How can we understand the analysis of the paradigmatic progressive biopoliticisation of the Western democracies, which A. describes as the erasure of hitherto-stable categories, in relation to the broad crisis of distinct categories produced by the counter- or a-modernity in Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern?

Posted by abradox at 9:00 PM 2 comments  

Labels: biopolitics, biopower, democracy, life, modernity, philosophy, politics, sovereignty, the body, the polis, theory

Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, Part I
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1971)

In the first part of the Observations on Man, Hartley formulates a human physiology that follows (and repeatedly cites) the method of Newton’s physics. Human bodily experience is shaped by the principle of “vibration” (which is a physical account of the work of nerves in sensation and movement) and by the concurrent principle of “association,” whereby all vibrations, internal and external and corresponding to sense impressions, thoughts, feelings, motions, and actions can potentially come to be associated and repeated together. Armed with these two principles, Hartley explains sensations, ideas (understanding, affection, memory, imagination), muscular motion, and “intellectual” as well as sensual pains and pleasures.

In many respects, Hartley’s theory and attitude resembles the Descartes of The Passions of the Soul; the difference comes from a radically simplified and unified conception of internal anatomy (no more humours or pressures, just vibration as principle of all actions and processes), which also allows for a materialist (brain-based) conception of association (where in Descartes, the soul had to mediate between the current bodily state and a similar one in the past).

[nervous system] The nervous system consists of vessels or tubes filled with a uniform substance whose essential characteristic is its sensitivity to and continuation of all vibrations. Vibrations permeate the air in the forms of light, sound, smells, and pervade solid bodies. Everything that the body thus senses is a vibration registered by the nerves and relayed to the brain. The brain in turn issues its commands in a similar form of vibrations, which trigger vibrations in motor nerves.

[pleasure-unpleasure] A peculiar consequence of Hartley’s unified principle of brain and nervous functions is his understanding of pleasure and unpleasure as a continuum with a shifting crossover point [I need to go back through some Freud to remember if his conception is similar]. Unpleasure is a difference in the volume of vibrations, not in kind or location; furthermore, since all repeated sensations diminish in their effect on the organism, borderline unpleasurable sensations tend to fade into pleasure of the highest sort.

[association theorem] If any Sensation A, Idea B, or muscular Motion C, be associated for a sufficient number of times with any other Sensation D, Idea E, or muscular Motion F, it will at last excite d, the simple Idea belonging to the Sensation D, the very Idea E, or the very muscular Motion F. (102)

[habit, automatism] “After the Actions, which are most perfectly voluntary, have been rendered so by one Set of Associations, they may, by another, be made to depend upon the most diminutive Sensations, Ideas, and Motions, such as the Mind scarce regards, or is conscious of; and which therefore it can scarce recollect the Moment after the Action is over. (104) These “automatic Motions of the secondary Kind” are “rather to be ascribed to the Body than the Mind”. Motions thus regularly pass from involuntary to greater and greater control and volition and back into semiconsciousness.

[curio; animal cruelty] “…whipping a Dog, after he has taken the Nux Vomica [strychnine], contributes to obviate its ill effects” (51).

[digestion and objects] The “very considerable, and frequently repeated” pleasures of the alimentary duct are “one chief Means, by which pleasurable States are introduced into the Brain, and nervous System. . . . one principal Cause of the Greatness and constant Recurrency of [alimentary] Pleasures, ...is to introduce and keep up pleasurable States in the Brain, and to connect them with foreign objects” (166).

[determinism] “...every semivoluntary, voluntary, and secondarily automatic Action, should be excited by an associated circumstance...” (235)

[sexuality] Of the Desires of the Sexes towards each other (239)
sex organs "sympathise" with the rest of the body i.e. become titillated when the body feels pleasure. The list of original reasons is worth quoting: "from Youth, Health, grateful Aliment, the Pleasures of Imagination, Ambition, and Sympathy, ..." (239), the latter being especially salient for later periods. Sex organs' sensitivity makes pleasure in them more acute than elsewhere.
"Young Persons hear and read numberless Things, in this degenerate and corrupt State of human Life, which carry nervous influences of the pleasurable Kind (be they Vibrations, or any other Species of Motion) to the Organs of Generation" (240).
Shame, diminished as other pains, adds to the pleasure. All of this explains desires common in the young, which are not without virtue if they are not indulged. Sim., once these desires focus on an object, this could be of the highest virtue if it is not indulged. H. expects animal passion to be brief, and quickly satisfied. Through association, all actions of the lustful become tinged with lust; this will not be abandoned until the painful consequences match and outweigh the associated pleasures.
....notwithstanding the great and public Mischiefs, which arise from the ungovernable Desires of the Vicious, there is great Reason, even from this Theory, to apprehend, that, if this Sourse of the benevolent Affections was cut off, all other Circumstances remaining the same, Mankind would become much more selfish and malicious, much more wicked and miserable, upon the Whole, than they now are. (242)
...The Theory here proposed for explaining the Nature and Growth of these Desires shews in every Step, how watchful every Person, who desires true Chastity and Purity of Heart, ought to be over his Thoughts, his Discourses, his Studies, and his Intercourses with the Word in general, and with the other Sex in particular. There is no Security but in Flight, in turning our Minds from all the associated Circumstances, and begetting a new train of Thoughts and Desires, by an honest, virtuous, religious Attention to the Duty of the Time and Place. to which must be added great Abstinence in Diet, and bodily Labor, if required. (242)
this brief (3 pages!) section on sex seems to be torn between seeing both the natural and the benevolent aspect of sexual passion and wholeheartedly embracing a conventional moralism. It doesn’t attempt to explain the way in which sexual desire becomes associated with a particular object or a class of objects; desire stems naturally from perceived beauty, mental perfection, etc. it also completely ignores sexual difference in anatomy, making no apparent distinctions between the operation of desire in women and men; the prescription in the last paragraph, however, seems to be aimed only at males.

[affect] affect and thought are not to be distinguished, except by degree. No affect w/o thought, no thought w/o affect.

Posted by abradox at 6:03 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 18th century, affect, anatomy, associationism, automatism, determinism, digestion, medicine, nervous system, pleasure, sex, the body

When a Person applies himself to any particular Study, so as to fix his Attention deeply on the Ideas and Terms belonging to it, and to be very little conversant in those of other Branches of Knowledge, it is commonly observed, that he becomes narrow-minded, strongly persuaded of the Truth and Value of many Things in his own particular Study, which others think doubtful or false, or of little Importance, and after some time subject to low Spirits, and the Hypochondriacal Distemper.

—David Hartley, 1747
(Observations on Man..., Part I, 397)

more soon!

Posted by abradox at 3:58 PM 0 comments  

Labels: 18th century, grad school

White Noise is Don DeLillo’s “postmodern” story of how “networks” and systems, such as the sensorium, academia, everyday life, popular culture, consumerism, and environmental hazards impact the psyches of the citizens of the contemporary US. The novel takes place in a middle-American town that is home to a liberal arts college. Its protagonist is Jack Gladney and his fourth wife Babette; he a professor of Hitler studies (in fact, its founder) and she a teacher of the gestures of modernity like walking. They live with their four children (they both have others living variously overseas and in the US) who are responsive, like them, to the vibrating networks that surround them. The world of the family is changed by the appearance of a cloud of a substance known as Nyoprene D, a byproduct of an insecticide to which Jack is exposed. He is told that he has the contaminant in his bloodstream and that he will die at some point in the future – no one knows when. Simultaneously, Babette answers an ad for a study that promises to cure people of their fears of death and volunteers to be an experimental subject for the drug, known as Dylar. The companies abruptly stops the study, but Babette continues to get the drug through her contact, Willie Mink, known at this point in the text as Mr. Gray. It becomes clear that the drug doesn’t work, Jack confronts his wife about her using it, and she confesses the circumstances of her affair with Mr. Gray and his giving her the drug. Jack reveals to Babette that he is scheduled to die. In the last chapters of the book Jack finally finds Mink and shoots (but doesn’t kill) him. Babette and Jack’s youngest son taunts the systems of modernity by driving his tricycle into traffic and surviving.

Points to revisit: themes, problems raised, etc.
-popular cultural flotsam and how it serves the novel
-the book’s time: does it hold up, etc.
-the million possible literary references that appear briefly and then slide out from under you: Brave New World, Cat’s Cradle, Crying of Lot 49, etc.
-the idea of the “real simulation” of the real (SIMUVAC)
-Hitler studies?
-surplus data, a bombardment of information

Posted by Megan at 8:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 20th century American, major lists, novels, postmodernism

(New York: Penguin Books, 2003)

In his third novel, A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe does not follow a tight plotline, preferring the route of multiple digressions, prolepses, and repetitions, with the levelheaded shopkeeper narrator’s numerous “observations” grouped, without chapter headings, by associations: the suffering of households with children, the effect of the plague on trade, the role and conduct of professional doctors, quacks, parish officers, burial teams, the clergy, and others addressed in turn. The loose arc of the ever-increasing disease itself, conveyed through repeated citations from the parish “Bills of Mortality” for 1665 provides the basic ground for the narrative.

Along the way, in addition to documenting and describing the progression of the disease and the actions of individual people in response to it, H.F. (as he signs the “document”) has a good deal to say about his society, its classes (especially “the Poor”), the policies and conduct of the local and national government, religion, superstition, science, commerce and economics. He includes mini-dramas relating an experiment in communal living in the countryside, episodes of sympathetic exchange of money, tears, and blessings, accounts of economic structure of businesses and trade, and a great deal of morbid detail.

[“the Poor”]

The poor occupy a special place of fascination, sympathy, and horror for H.F., who seems ultimately to make little distinction between the laboring poor tradesmen, servants, and shiftless vagrants. “[A]s thoughtless for to Morrow as ever,” (202) and “madly careless of themselves, Fool-hardy and obstinate,” the poor jump at the chance to get even the most dangerous jobs in order to feed themselves and their families. (201) They are repeatedly described as “miserable,” but just as often as dangerous, contagious, and difficult to control. While he appears sympathetic, he repeatedly says that their deaths en masse were the only thing that prevented riots.

HF in part attributes the easy spread of the plague to the great numbers of the poor crowding London’s streets after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Indirectly, he indicts the extravagant court of Charles II, whose demand for finery has brought them there. HF cites an opinion of another writer that at the time of the plague, there were 100,000 ribbon workers living in London, as an explanation for overcrowding and mass unemployment which immediately followed the news of the plague: all the workers in luxury goods, as well as many domestic servants were dismissed early on, as the nobility fled the city, dramatically increasing the indigent population with no settlement rights, which relied on voluntary (as opposed to established parish) charity.

[science and religion]

This desperate (or, at any rate, precariously employed) population also provides the main source of income for various quacks and fodder for HF’s discussion of superstitiousness, to which he is sympathetic in spite of having a clear “scientific” bias. For HF, true religion is perfectly compatible with action in the world and with attempts to understand it scientifically; while he does assume that the plague is a form of divine punishment, he assumes that it proceeds by natural means.

[city government and disciplinary power]

A continued topic of discussion is the role and actions of the city government, based on the Jacobean plague law, which demands the locking-up of houses or businesses in which diseased people are found. HF criticizes this practice as ineffectual, both because it was not rigorously implemented, and because of the nature of the disease, which often makes it impossible to distinguish between the infected and the well.

This inability to make a distinction leads Defoe to one of his most interesting formulations: “...it was to very small Purpose, to call them infected Houses and shut them up; the Infection having ravaged, and taken its Leave of the House, before it was really known, that the Family was in any way touch’d” (160). The “body” of the house that is distinct from that of the Family (untouched), perhaps an arbitrary distinction that could nonetheless be pursued further and related to the body of the city as separate but related to the bodies of its inhabitants. The plague is here a conceptual mechanism for thinking through the “fuzzy” concepts of society, family, and relation, made unstable by the great and varied population of the city.

[early sentimental scenes] especially around the theme of child victims, Defoe creates several highly wrought sentimental tableaux, with the water-man keeping away from his infected family, which he sustains through his work, and a grieving father holding the bodies of his dead wife and child all night, then dying in the morning seemingly made for tear-jerking paintings.

[curio] A man “had a Wound in his Leg, and whenever he came among any People that were not sound, and the Infection began to affect him, he said he could know it by that Signal...”, detecting even those who had no visible signs of infection on them (184).

Posted by abradox at 11:55 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 18th century, bourgeois, cities, contagion, discipline, economics, illness, medicine, religion, science, society, the body

(New York: Penguin Books, 1998)

It is hard to speak of first impressions of The Monk without falling into the usual embarrassed chuckles. Lewis wrote this sensational novel at the tender age of nineteen, filling the racier scenes with interjections such as: “The weapon’s point rested against her left breast: and, oh! that was such a breast!” (60). Obviously, this makes for a good read; even the overwhelming ridiculousness and awkwardness of some plot turns and phrases does not entirely destroy the power of suspense.

Resembling and repeatedly alluding to Shakespearian plays (more on the order of Romeo and Juliet and the “problem” plays than the “serious” tragedies) the novel itself interweaves the stories of the innocent and poor Antonia and her mother Elvira, their relative Marquis de las Cisternas, his nephew and heir Raymond, his beloved, Agnes (who is forced into a convent), whose brother (and Raymond’s friend) Lorenzo is in love with Antonia. Ambrosio, the eponymous Monk, both unifies and disrupts these circuits of love and property relations, which gravitate around a standard marriage plot.

A “brief” plot summary (sorry): the novel opens on Antonia and her garrulous aunt making their way through a crowded Madrid cathedral in which Ambrosio, a universally respected and apparently holy man, is about to preach; they converse with two gentlemen, one of whom is Lorenzo. He is impressed by Antonia, and offers her assistance in securing the support of her rich relation, Marquis de Cisternas. After the sermon, Lorenzo accidentally sees a man leaving a letter under a statue, and later recognizes his sister, who is a nun, as its recipient. He challenges the man to a duel, only to find that it is his best friend, Raymond de Cisternas, the Marquis’ nephew. Raymond persuades Lorenzo to listen to the story of his unsuccessful attempts to marry Agnes. A very long travel-adventure-and-intrigue narrative ensues, with an elopement attempt finally foiled by the intervention of a ghost; Agnes agrees to join a monastery, convinced that Raymond does not love her. Later on, they meet clandestinely on the monastery grounds and she becomes pregnant. Upon the conclusion of this story, the two friends agree to rescue her (still on this first night of the novel’s action), but the plan miscarries because Ambrosio, Agnes’ confessor, sees the letter, which told her of the escape, and turns her in. Unknown to Lorenzo or Raymond, Agnes is locked up in a dungeon; her death is announced. Meanwhile, Abrosio is seduced by Matilda, a woman who joined his monastery in drag, and has become his close friend. He comes to hate her and wants someone else, when he meets Antonia, who has come to ask for a confessor for her ill and apparently dying mother. He becomes infatuated with the girl, and decides to be the confessor himself, in order to obtain his desires. He eventually uses demonic help from Matilda, who is a sorceress (and, we later find, a demon herself) to obtain access to Antonia by sedating her, but the plan goes awry when he is surprised by Elvira; terrified of exposure, he kills her and runs away. Matilda now invents a scheme, which involves drugging Antonia to make her appear dead, and burying her in the vault of the monastery, which is shared by the convent in which Agnes is confined. In a final night of action, Lorenzo seizes the mother superior of the convent to charge her with the murder of Agnes; the story of Agnes’ apparent murder is told on the street, causing a riot in which the mother superior dies, and in which the convent is destroyed. Fleeing from the mob, Lorenzo wonders into the crypt, where he discovers his emaciated sister, and frightens Ambrosio, who has just raped Antonia, into killing her. He also meets a young noblewoman, Virginia, whom his relatives have meant to be his bride all along. Eventually, he and Virginia, as well as Raymond and Agnes, get married. Discovered and imprisoned by the Inquisition, Ambrosio sells his soul to the devil for freedom; taking him to a precipice, the devil discovers to him that he was Elvira’s son and Antonia’s brother before killing him.

As can be seen from the above, this is very much a plot-driven novel; yet it is composed of a large number of sources or influences, which necessarily occasion sub-plots and episodes, and is periodically interrupted by poems, which are written into the fabric of the text, but are also separately pointed out in the table of contents.

Some remarks:

The origin of evil in the novel is mysterious if not mystified, as can be seen from the example of Matilda, the temptress. She starts out as merely a woman who gave in to weakness, proceeds to being a manipulative sorceress, and turns out in the end to have been a demon. Similarly, remarks on the evils of monastic upbringing (204-6), which have corrupted the naturally good man Ambrosio and which clearly can be related to Rousseau (and seen echoed in the story of Frankenstein’s monster’s education), do not occupy the forefront of narrative/authorial attention for long. More and more, Ambrosio becomes merely the puppet of his infernal passions. As an initial guess, I am tempted to say that these two figures of progressively de-humanized evil, as well as the stern mother superior, exist as natural opposite numbers to the young het-lovers; not simply as villains, but as containers of queer excitement which needs to be conquered in order for the novel’s conservative plot conclusion to take place. (Or, of course, vice versa: the abruptly conventional conclusion is necessary to permit the horror and weirdness in the middle run wild).

The pseudo-Oedipal situation revealed by the devil in the conclusion has little dramatic power; instead, it seems merely to be the reason why Antonia and Ambrosio may not be allowed to survive the end of the novel, which also provides an additional source of titillation (if you get the hints along the way). Its plot explanation, though, is interesting enough in itself. Seen in the longer-term perspective of the class and marriage plot, the novel’s problem lies in the existence of a naturally timid but sexy, ideal and noble in other words, young girl who comes from a tainted bloodline. Her mother, while acting the part of a noblewoman very well, is in fact a bourgeois, whom a nobleman secretly married for love. This family history is wrapped up with the possibilities produced by the fantasy “new worlds” of colonialism, which promise an escape from the strict demands of class endogamy. Escape, however, is futile; alternatives to the traditional family (and poss. the bourgeois public) space are revealed to be tainted and untenable: monastery, old castles, the colonies are all abandoned as possibilities.

In a way, the people who die must die so that the illusion of prosperity and regular inheritance of property may go on as before. In different ways, Ambrosio, Elvira, and Antonia transcend their space in society as subjects/objects of value, and are therefore “unprotected” by family; they are also not integrated into social circles in any conventional or stable way.

With more time on my hands, I would like to think of this as a novel of education on the order of Frankenstein.

Posted by abradox at 6:57 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 1790s, education, evil, Gothic, novels, passion, sex

(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989)

The following is the first item on my list on the body in the (very-long-)Eighteenth Century Novels and Philosophy.

In this text, published shortly before his death, Descartes develops what could be called an elaborate physiology of emotions, based on his knowledge of anatomy and his fundamental assumption of the duality between mind and body. Necessarily, in working out the idea of the passions, body and mind are brought extremely close together; anyone who has read this work would not blame Descartes personally for ignoring the human flesh and embodied experience. Without attempting to summarize the thickly detailed (and truly bizarre) physiological descriptions, I’ll focus on the main conceptual tangles.

[passion=action] For starters, “passions of the soul” are strictly equivalent to “actions of the body”; they are the opposite of will, which is an action of the soul upon the “passive” body: “...we notice no subject that acts more immediately upon our soul than the body it is joined to, and that consequently we ought to think that what is a Passion in the former is commonly an Action in the latter” (19). Passions are experiences in which the soul is passive, i.e. acted upon by the body.

[anatomy] The body, treated as an object of “physics,” (7) is possessed of a complicated anatomy which works according to several physical principles at once, mainly heat and pressure/hydraulics, using multiple materials: humors (hot and cold), blood (hot and cold, more or less refined), and animal spirits (as in, highly refined blood which imparts motion to the body through the nerves, not little furry animals as Tristram Shandy seems to think. “For what I name spirits here are nothing but bodies; their only property is that they are bodies which are very small and which move very rapidly—just like the parts of the flame which emanate from the torch” (24)).

[pineal gland] The essentially Cartesian weirdness of this account of the passions comes from having to read emotions, conceived as mental states including judgment in regard to an object, back into a body constructed out of disparate (discursive and physical) materials and forces, and connected to the soul in one essential location: the pineal gland, the apparent center of the network of nerves and of the flows of animal spirits (the distinction between the two provides the distinction betw. Perception (nerves) and imagination (animal spirits).

[pleasure principle?] Passions are commonly excited by perceived objects, insofar as they are either harmful or beneficial to the human subject: “the use of all the passions consists in this alone: they dispose the soul to will the things nature tells us are useful and to persist in this volition ...” (51-2); the passions are (ideally) subjugated to something like Freud's pleasure principle. Later in the text, D. identifies this future-oriented principle with desire (53).

[Base Affect] Since passions are thus oriented, the initial affect in encountering any object is wonder (52) -- it registers that an encounter has taken place without assigning a positive or a negative significance, and thus affective charge, to the object. All objects regarded without wonder are simply undetected.

[Principle of Association] the six primary affects: Wonder, Love, Hatred, Desire, Sadness, Joy, originate in the infantile body's interaction with its environment through food and muscle activity; physiological experiences which caused these basic emotional states become associated with them. This principle holds for later life, as well.

[moral philosophy] near the end of the treatise, D. dispenses moral advice on how to deal with one’s passions, and namely with one’s desire which is the passions’ only actualizer. Articles 144 and 145, which posit that the fundamental moral/ethical question is the distinction between desires that do and that do not depend on our actions, could conceivably be brought into conversation with Freud’s discussion of the nature of drives in "Drives and their Fates"; Descartes’ distinction between desires for attainable/actionable objects and desires for the unattainable (which is best left to providence or forgotten through generosity) parallels in a strange way the difference between external stimuli which can be discharged by action in the world and internal stimuli, i.e. drives, which no amount of external/physical action can avoid. For D., knowing what can and what cannot be controlled and acting accordingly is Generosity (104).

Significantly for ,addressing later periods, D. criticizes those who are easily moved to pity as selfish weak, and moved by self-love. Essentially, he seems to cultivate an aristocratic model of detached and reasonable action, which is condescending to, though not entirely dismissive of, emotional weakness.

[Curio: savages & modernity]
Now it is easy to prove that the excessive respect maintained for antiquity is an error which is extremely prejudicial to the advancement of the sciences. For we see that the savage peoples of America--and many others as well who inhabit places not so far away---have a lot fewer of the comforts of life than we do, and yet have an origin as ancient as ours, so that they have as much cause as we to say that they are content with the wisdom of their forefathers, and believe no one can teach them anything better than what's been known and practiced among them from the most ancient times. (Preface, Letter 1. p.6)

Posted by abradox at 10:02 PM 0 comments  

Labels: affect, anatomy, philosophy, psychosomatics, the body

In introduction, my three lists are American 20th century fiction and nonfiction and the city (major), American 19th century fiction and nonfiction and the problems of sovereignty and nation, and American film and photography and society. Junky (1953) is one of the first novels that I read, suggested by my husband as a good example of a city novel from the 1950s.

Junky is William Burroughs’s 1953 novel/memoir originally published under the name William Lee. Written during Burroughs’s tenure in Mexico about his time in New York, New Orleans, and Mexico City, it tracks a junk habit that dogs Bill Lee the entire way. It ends with Bill searching for Yage in South America, a journey that Burroughs in fact undertook in an effort to escape Mexico after (accidentally?) shooting his wife Joan in the head. In Junky, in the second to last paragraph, Bill Lee explains tersely that “My wife and I are separated” (152).
Of Junky, Burroughs’s biographer Graham Caveney states that “in its detached understatement the narrative enacts its own autism” (77). Caveney finds that Junky serves as a satire of 1950s affluence with heroin being the “ultimate merchandise” (78). What Caveney finds to be “detached understatement” is the low-affect style in which the text is written, a style that I find less “detached” than in some sense dismembered, like the subject is still bound to his lost body part, still finds himself to have phantom pains, but is nonetheless without the limb. Detachment may seem to be not necessarily terribly original; Junky, indeed, is not the most-read of Burroughs’s texts, so the uniqueness of style can be called into question. What I find fascinating about the style is the way that the affect is so low as not to care about dynamics of the social as well as the internal life that seem ingrained: there is a moment in which the narrator observes that a psychiatrist who comes to visit him when he is taking “the cure,” “was not effeminate. He simply had none of whatever it is that makes a man a man” (98). Burroughs’s narrative voice is so incapable or unwilling to designate positives, to evaluate, that what makes a man a man is “whatever”: the narrator does not care even about gender, about any positive demarcation of gender lines. Caveney and other critics seem to find that this affectlessness, this sludginess, intends to match with the numbing experience of being a junky, but it also seems unique to this narrator, who is perhaps unusually well-suited to heroin and morphine. It is not, then, just that the narrative enacts junkiness in its tone but also that the affectlessness of the narrative voice demands an encounter with an ideal junky on the part of the reader.

Here are some of my things to consider, and disconnected thoughts:
-The city’s role here- NY vs. New Orleans, etc.
-the “horrors”: see also Naked Lunch; what do these do for the narrative?
-“middle class negatives”? ~41 -the problem of the middle class; also the problems of decorum
-“measured out my life in eyedroppers” ~xvi - what do these literary allusions do for WB?

Posted by Megan at 2:57 PM 0 comments  

Labels: 20th century American, beats, major lists, novels