Draft of an AI course policy

I’ve spent the summer futzing with an AI policy for my courses this semester. I based this on the few policies I found floating around online, including this one from Puget Sound. There was another one that I can’t find right now that had something like this set of bullet points. (There’s an example here from Michigan that’s close, but not the one I remember.) If I find it, I’ll link to it. And I got the idea to ask for what students put into the AI from our dean of online learning.

Here’s what I’ve got for the fall semester:

AI Policy
In this course, we value writing as a process. What does that mean? It means that this course is designed to help you learn to write by wrestling your ideas and the ideas of others into your own language. My goal for you as a writer isn’t to produce perfect pieces of writing, but to grow as a writer, thinker, and human being. That’s why I designed the writing activities in this course to focus on your thoughts, feelings, and experiences even when you are writing about what someone else thought or wrote.

For those reasons, you may not use AI to produce your writing submissions for this course. Written activities produced entirely (or mostly) by AI will receive no credit and I will ask you to submit a new piece.

However, you may use AI as a tool to aid you in the writing process, if you wish. The following uses of AI are acceptable in this course:
• To brainstorm ideas. AI might be able to help you think about different topics for an activity;
• To create outlines. AI might be able to help you think about how you might organize your ideas for an activity;
• To revise and/or proofread drafts. AI might be able to help you eliminate grammatical errors or alter the tone of your writing.
If you choose to use AI as a tool, you must include the queries you used for the AI as an appendix to your submission. Why? This allows me to understand how you used AI as part of your writing process.

Why write?

Grappling with the purpose of writing anything right now.

I got into cultural criticism because I wanted tools to demystify culture. You have to understand, the first part of my adult life was controlled by culture—not just the consumption of culture, but the production of culture. With Headboard, I spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out what other people wanted and how I could keep these others satisfied while also satisfying my own aesthetic interests. Those others included band leaders, audiences, and record labels. It was a complex mix of people and involved a lot of market analysis: what’s popular now, what does it sound like, what can we use, what should we avoid for its particular significations, and so on. I wouldn’t have put it in those terms, but that was what I was doing. When I went back to college and read Adorno, I was shocked to recognize his description of that work. People had thought about this problem! So even when I went back to playing in a band, I carried critical theory with me: Adorno, Gramsci, Jameson, and so on.

The problem is that demystification only gets you so far. It helped me exorcise some demons, especially once I had to give up music and focus on grad school. But it can only get you so far in analysis. The result can historicize and criticize a particular work or a drift of work. That’s effectively what the first book was. But it doesn’t tell us much about what those works do or how those works are made other than as part of a process of hegemony. So there’s a dead-end here. We can critique and show the limits, but we can’t build a positive project. Or I can’t, anyway.

Okay, so what could I do instead?

Well, a lot of people went in for surface reading, affect, and post-critique because then they could write about what a piece of culture does. That seemed important for conjuncture reasons: institutions post-2008 saw declining humanities enrollments and the center of hegemony in 21C culture decidedly left cultural production. We have intense direct oppression of the working class and very little in terms of culture attempting to explain or mitigate that in a way which has any effect. As a discipline, English had (and has) a very real need to defend the study of aesthetic objects as a unique form of knowledge production as defined by the 21C university, whether we agree that English does produce this knowledge.

Some people read this project of institutional defense as an attack on critique. It is and it isn’t. From a conjunctural perspective, it would be a sensible defense if it had focused on a different audience. Post-critique evangelizes other scholars in English, as though we would be institutionally safe if we all chose the same object and method of inquiry. This is why, I think, post-critique can offer useful insights and still cause such a ruckus. It makes my back go up at times, especially since the drift of the argument can often seem to be that acceding to the desires of the master will solve our problems. I’ve read enough psychoanalysis not to fall for that one.

Yet I think affect is useful in terms of directing us to what cultural objects can do. That’s why I used it for my second book, but always focused on its situatedness. Affect and conjunctural analysis should work hand-in-hand, a position that we can find in disparate thinkers from Stuart Hall to Felix Guattari. Or what used to be called cultural studies. Somehow, that’s fallen off the radar as the critique/post-critique divide hardens.

The reason why cultural studies has dwindled as a recognizable position in lit studies, at least as far as I can tell, is that culture is no longer the central site for the construction of hegemony. Economic forces are MUCH stronger operators of hegemony now than culture was thirty years ago. Part of this is the collapse of mass media, which means we have fewer mass cultural texts attempting to mediate the contradictions of capital across many audiences. The atomization of the audience means that one can play to audience desires in particular ways. What would we call this? Consumer hegemony, probably. It’s not that I don’t think culture doesn’t have hegemonic effects. It just isn’t where the action is anymore. Close reading particular cultural texts doesn’t make much sense when they have so little effect. It has a real “missing the forest for the trees” vibe.

All of which is to say, I’m at a point where I want to step back for a moment and ask why doing critical work is worthwhile in the first place. Why do critical work at all?

We could use a pedagogical frame, e.g., what is it that students need or wish they had which we can give them? Why: because it will help students.

We could use a disciplinary frame, e.g., what is missing in the discipline? Why: because it will help others in the discipline understand something.

We could use an institutional frame, e.g., what is missing in our field that the institution needs? Why: because the field will help the institution achieve something.

We could use a political frame, e.g., what values or issues would we wish to examine in order to change that issue in the world? Why: because we wish to change something in the world.

So far, so obvious.

There must be more, but I got stuck thinking about this one:

We could use an aesthetic frame, e.g., what should we understand better about how a cultural text is made? Why: because it will help audience and producers understand their productions more fully.

That one stands out to me because it’s an approach we don’t take, or which some people in post-critique approach peripherally. One could imagine working back from a theory of attachment to a cultural text. It also inflects genre theory and work on film genre, though again as a mostly peripheral concern.

Is this a better reason for the work? Not necessarily. Yet it interests me, even if it is one so readily given to political and economic cooptation that it is hard to follow. To do it properly, it would have to be couched in critique. And it also confronts a likely resistance for the simple reason that I would approach this from the perspective of a critic and a reader rather than a producer. Genre studies gets around this problem by foregrounding reading as prior to producing, but it is the kind of objection one can readily hear from OUTSIDE the discipline and that’s worth thinking about.

But again this takes us back to the problem of culture’s dwindling role in the production of hegemony. If culture is not the key site of hegemony, then we have to navigate the middle ground between critique and positive production. What can be made or should be made? What is worth doing or saving or achieving, if anything can be achieved? Perhaps this suggests a path for a positive project alongside a conjunctural critique. Perhaps not.

Notes on Boltanski and Esquerre’s Enrichment

Boltanski and Esquerre’s Enrichment is the first book that adequately describes the specific economic shifts I lived through in Northern California in the late 20C. It goes further than marking the rise of services as such, and that’s what interests me.

It’s easier to see this in their case study of the enrichment economy than in their categories: declining agricultural revenues, rise in tourism, heritage creation, high end gastronomy, new narratives about the past, and the creation of ancestral/local manufacturing.

All of these can be seen in different forms in Sonoma and Napa counties: agricultural production declines through 1970s, shifting toward wine in the 1980s and accelerating in the 1990s alongside the development of wine tourism and high-end restaurants (e.g., the French Laundry).

All of this gets ported through new narratives of the past. These are distinct from those in France but no less false in terms of their history. Sonoma remade itself as wine country by playing up its minor history as a wine producer and intensifying production in the present. The introduction of the language of terroir and of biodynamic techniques play into this ancient past/future narrative. Even the renovation of the built environment to elide any design elements of the recent past for those of an older history and a contemporary present nicely captures what happened to Sonoma during the 1990s.

The area also sees a strange explosion of high/low commodification of the region. On the one hand, it gets attached to commodified food. “Sonoma” and “Napa” appear on a variety of commercially available foodstuffs, usually marketed as slightly more expensive, kinda-sorta-gourmet. It is used to sell kitsch housewares and so on. On the other hand, it becomes a byword marking a more expensive tourist experience, one that runs the gamut from bus trips and wine trains to high end hotels and private wine tastings.

I have a harder time connecting the area to what B&E describe as new traditions of regional production. People don’t go to Sonoma to buy knives. But the creation of regional food cultures is without a doubt part of this movement. Even the Healdsburg Guitar Festival could be folded into this kind of development.

Does this capture everything happening economically in the north bay? No. But it does describe a concerted shift in economic development in certain regions which coincides with the so-called neoliberal era.

What’s interesting is the focus that B&E place on patrimony’s role in this turn to enrichment. This builds from Piketty’s work and Boltanski’s earlier focus on the role managerial cadres as a new waged bourgeoisie. What’s unique in the enrichment turn is the relaunching of objects accrued over time as new commodities. The valorization of the past through material objects can only be accomplished by those who have had the means to accrue those past objects. Importantly, not just any objects can work in these forms of valorization. They must be objects that properly signify past-ness, which are capable of being valorized as heritage/traditional production.

People with access to these objects are not just the wealthy. The shift here that is of great importance is the rise of an upper middle-class of patrimonial capital. Managerial wages and wealth passes across generations and allows the accumulation of the right kind of objects for enrichment valorization.

Some might see this as the increased economic power of the PMC. That’s not entirely wrong, as the people that Ehrenreich wrote about as the PMC all those years ago would be the right generation of managerial workers who could accrue wages and turn them to this use. However, it would be worthless to attach the PMC to the enrichment economy as such because it does not adequately describe managerial class formation. (I think it might serve as a useful historically located term for a particular generational cohort of workers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but that’s a hunch, not a certainty.)

A better analysis would connect this to Erik Olin Wright’s analysis of class formation and organizational assets. Those workers with a high command of organizational assets receive the highest wages and are most likely to turn those wages into patrimonial capital.

What might that tell us about labor practices and enrichment economies? It suggests that we’re going to see the pervasive effect of particular managerial ideologies about work, labor, and self-realization. That we’re going to see an aversion to unionization and collective efforts. That we’re going to see an increased emphasis on project-based work. That all of this will be linked to our supposed care for 1) our work, 2) ourselves, 3) our community, and 4) our history.

It also tells us a great deal about how enrichment economies treat people who B&E describe as “losers” and “servants,” that is, people without access to valorizable objects or communities and narratives that are open to the kinds of valorization that enrichment economies privilege. It is a service economy that wishes to evacuate itself of self-knowledge. The work of service is of no interest to an enrichment economy because valorization focuses on secondary objects. Labor does not add value, or so it seems. B&E describe labor as preserving value, either by preserving the object or allowing its continued circulation.

I think their discussion vastly underplays the role of labor. If the value of an object cannot be realized without labor, then labor is intrinsic to its valorization. Their offhand suggestion that valorization is disproportionate to the amount of labor is also unpersuasive because it directly translates surplus value into profit. That’s not how it works in Marx. Profit is the irrational social division of surplus value by capitalists, not a direct correlation with the production of surplus value in the production process. My sense is that the enrichment economy allows capital to divide the social surplus in ways necessitated by the massive accumulation of capital and the continued fall in the rate of profit for standard commodities.

Nonetheless, what B&E describe is a recognizable part of the twenty-first century economy, and one that is vastly more complex in its effects and operation than I’ve found in other analyses of neoliberalism or late capitalism or whatever we are in now. They would say this is still capitalism, but it is clearly a capitalism undergoing significant changes. Bringing this analysis into contact with Wark’s discussion of the vectorialist class would suggest we’re seeing the emergence of a number of distinct modes of valorization and accumulation. Whatever we call it, we can be sure it isn’t nineteenth-century capitalism anymore.

Notes on re-reading Capital: On means of subsistence (after chapter thirteen)

One of the oddities of Marxism is a general sense that capitalism always works, even or especially when it doesn’t work for workers. There’s a sense that everything has been accounted for. Marx isn’t quite guilty of this but his use of means of subsistence to calculate surplus value comes close.

The gist of Marx’s argument, rhetorically, is that surplus value is value produced above value equal to a worker’s means of subsistence. The presentation focuses on daily wages to emphasize that employers purchase a day of labor from workers and try to get as much labor out of workers in that period of time. What Marx wants to show is that surplus cannot be created through circulation. Hence the worker’s day of labor exchanges for its full value—its means of subsistence as historically determined—and capital tries to get more out of that the worker’s day through the extension of the day, which is limited by the hours in a day and the worker’s ability to recuperate, or through the intensification of work via co-operation and technological innovation.

Marx here seems to be working from a concept in Adam Smith: “A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him” (book 1, chapter 8). For Smith, this sense of subsistence is bound up with a different mode of production—recall, Smith is writing not in the midst of developed capitalism but offering a dream of its possibility—and seems a version of “natural price” theory, which he uses elsewhere too (and in ways Marx will critique in subsequent volumes, if I recall correctly). We know both that commodities don’t have natural prices. We also know, through historical work, that commodities in the eighteenth century didn’t have natural prices so much as moral prices, prices which were set by feudal traditions and enforced by social action, as EP Thompson explains in his essay on the moral economy. Labor, to the extent it has a price during Smith’s time, would have a sort of moral price and be buoyed by other forms of production for its physical subsistence. Using it to analyze an economy premised on commodity exchange poses substantial difficulties.

Can we bracket this historical problem, though, and imagine means of subsistence as a concept that enters into the production of value? Perhaps. As a concept in Marx, it seems to bind the worker as a locus of physical and natural force to the larger natural metabolic process of life’s reproduction. In that sense, accounting for means of subsistence is necessary to imagine an economic organization that differs from capitalism because it distinguishes what is necessary from what is surplus. (This isn’t post-capitalism because it is still production for exchange, but that’s another problem.)

Capitalism as such doesn’t need the category of means of subsistence or care about it as a reality. This is why it is strange to see it built into the analysis of commodity production. Capitalism’s defining feature, its production of commodities for exchange to accumulate value, is indifferent to workers’ needs. What has been purchased as a day or an hour or a piece is all that matters. Hence Marx’s two categories of commodities in production already account for surplus value as simply the value produced in excess of the values consumed by production in terms of constant capital (e.g., means of production, raw materials, and so on) and variable capital (i.e., labor).

Why does this matter?

Means of subsistence suggests that capitalism cares about the ability of workers to reproduce their labor, that they must pay enough for workers to live. When one makes this central to the production of surplus value, then it seems that capitalism understands what is in its interest or its shared interests with workers. It doesn’t. Marx understands that, too. For the moment, I can only explain the retention of Smith’s concept of the means of subsistence something meant to look forward to an economy yet to come, an economy in which the despotism of production has shifted from individual capitalists and the impersonal market to planned political control.

More thoughts on emotional labor and capitalism

I’m reading Jaffe’s book Work Won’t Love You Back and re-reading volume one of Capital simultaneously (kinda) and just finished chapter ten in Marx. Marx insists that capital is indifferent to labor’s reproduction there, arguing that capital extends the working day to the furthest extent possible. This is a result of impersonal market forces as much as personal greed–in fact, more so, since Marx views this as the part of capital’s impersonal social domination. The argument there is predicated on a view of human life and human labor as a limited capacity; at one point, he discusses how a blacksmith has a limited number of physical movements within him which would get him to the age of fifty, but capital insists he work at such a pace that he dies at age thirty-seven.

One might view Hochschild’s discussion of emotional labor as one that examines capital’s steady draining of caring capacity. One begins in fusion and slowly moves toward “going robot.” Except that’s not what we see happening. When fusion fails, this certainly happens, and impersonal social domination makes this failure happen more often than not. Yet I think we miss something important if we treat the capacity to care as part of this energetics/hydrological metaphor. Work drains energy, true, and energy is necessary to care. That remains true. But one does not use up one’s emotional capacities in activity. They could be traumatized enough to not work, dulled through repetition, but it seems a mistake to imagine this can be “used up” like life force.

This suggests two things, one about Marx and the other about emotional labor. First, the idea in Marx of life force being consumed by capital is too linked to the understanding of capital as an ecological metabolism. That’s not because it’s NOT a metabolism, but because it uses the metabolic to analyze all relations. Everything is a result of metabolic rifts. Capital’s capture of labor, for instance, is compared to the greedy farmer’s soil depletion. When it comes to labor, we are always dealing with abstract labor time, a perspective that leads him to analyze all labor in capitalism as approximating West Indian slavery.

Again, West Indian slavery is his specific choice of comparison for the British labor market. West Indian slave markets and British labor markets are drawn into a direct equivalence: “For slave-trade read labour-market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural districts of England, Scotland, and Wales, for Africa, Germany” (ch. 10). Marx understands slavery as an institution in the West Indies, correctly, as focused on the destruction of enslaved labor in production.

The argument is that capital will extend the working day to extract as much labor from a worker as possible, pushing the worker past the limit of physical endurance in order to extract as much surplus value as possible. We can narrate West Indian slavery using Marx’s distinction between living labor as variable capital and dead labor as constant capital. In effect, it was a system, and capital as such is a system, which treats the enslaved as almost-dead labor. Hence Marx’s continued evocation of vampires and werewolves. Its treatment of the enslaved put them on par with constant capital: they were investments meant to be destroyed in the production process, their cost amortized over an understood period of time. Yet they must also retain their ability to create more value by adding labor-power to raw materials–that is, their status as living labor/variable capital. Without that, there is no surplus-value. Workers are caught in this gap between between labor-power which is sold as a commodity and labor-power as it is lived and exploited in production. Capital lives by exploiting this gap, extracting greater lived time from its workers than the commodity bargain claimed to value.

From this perspective, capitalism can be understood as purposefully destructive or simply indifferent to labor and the environment. It certainly destroys its raw materials in production to create new values and lives by extracting labor. It will take as much as it can get and then more. But while we can point to its most aggressive proponents of destruction, it is perhaps better to understand them as extracting a surplus-code of sadism from the indifferent destruction of capitalism’s impersonal structure.

What’s the point of all this rambling, though? What does it have to do with emotional labor? The problem is whether there is anything in the production process, in terms of emotional labor, which addresses that labor’s reproduction. Marx’s analysis suggests that the production process is essentially indifferent to labor’s reproduction. The reasoning here again mirrors the British labor market with West Indian slavery: capitalism can push past the limits of what labor can do, physiologically, because it can replenish its workforce without difficulty. This is not the surplus army of the unemployed, not yet. This is not a question of wages. It is simply that workers can be easily replaced. Labor here is understood as without qualities rather than unskilled. Any laborer whatsoever can replace any other. Constant inflows of labor (or raw materials) are what makes capital so rapacious and destructive. It cares only for the production of exchange-values, and will enfold whatever is available to it as part of the production process.

Is emotional labor so easily replaced, so lacking in qualities?

Paolo Virno has approached this idea through the general intellect, arguing that general human qualities have become key instruments in the production process. Does that make it easily replaced through constant inflows?

Perhaps in some forms, e.g., retail, food service, some elder care, but not in others, especially those regulated, e.g., nursing, teaching, and child care. In unregulated areas, where labor is readily replaced, emotional labor seems to be exploited to the limit as Marx would imagine. In regulated areas, however, labor inflows are limited. Nurses, teachers, and child care workers, for instance, need training and credentials now. They cannot be easily replaced by capital through new inflows (without waivers to the credentials, of course, which is one way that capital deals with this).

The question is whether the production process shifts in some way to address reproduction when it comes to emotional labor? Marx really doesn’t have any interest in the management of reproduction. That’s ideological window-dressing to the destructiveness of capital. If we put this alongside the changes in managerial thinking during the 1980s and 1990s mapped by Boltanski and Chiapello, we would expect to see some shift in ideas about work which would gesture toward changes or ideas that workers wanted. Freedom and creativity, for instance, were the pieces most discussed by Boltanski and Chiapello, but the overarching sense was that one could use or free up one’s capacities to do something important, valuable, or meaningful. (A bad gloss, I’m sure, but it’s one I’ll use for now.)

Labor that produces emotions is one that will, invariably, experience emotions in return. Such emotions will not necessarily by specifically prescribed emotions by the workplace so much as affective experience. What matters is that the experience is regulated in the production process by the workplace through explicit codes or implicit norms, what Hochschild calls feeling rules. A set of feeling rules could make the production process of emotional labor, itself potentially traumatizing, more or less so. The regulation of feeling for worker and client operates simultaneously and is a necessary part of production, even if it means simply “keeping emotions in check” through the process.

An insistence that a kind of emotional labor bears its own compensation–through the feelings it creates in the worker–is not just ideological, I don’t think. It seems an extension of managerial ideology and of feeling rules. To love one’s work becomes part of a set of feeling rules, a form of emotional regulation demanded by the work. It also serves a useful disciplinary function by creating a position of imagined fusion between self and work which the worker must project in the doing of that work.

None of this means that loving one’s work isn’t real. Fusion is real. And here’s where it gets even harder to discuss. It may not even be bad, necessarily, as long as fusion is fusion between a process that aims toward, in Marx’s words, use-values. What am I producing that does not tend toward exchange but toward use, in other words? This is often how workers experience this labor, as the evocation of emotion in a person for their use. The problem, as Hochschild shows in The Managed Heart, is when this work speeds up or is put into a position when it cannot be done well. Fusion fails and the use or care which the worker really does create cannot be created by the worker for the client or the worker as such.

Notes on literature and emotional labor

What is the nature of the demand to love literature as part of the profession?

Let’s take it as a form of emotional labor first.

Here’s the basics of Arlie Hochschild’s discussion in Managed Heart: the emotional laborer must evoke a set of feelings—typically temporally bound with the presence of a customer—which serves the needs of a company/institution. Emotional labor is managed. Workers regulate their feelings using a set of feeling rules. Management operates through these feeling rules and through direct intervention when feeling rules are not being followed.

Self-management may be possible but is not central to Hochschild’s discussion here. That’s because the separation of interests becomes clearer the further one moves down the hierarchy. Upper management is here more directly aligned with the desire to evoke particular feelings in customers than workers, even if upper management is not engaged in the evocation of those feelings.

At first glance, then, the performance of emotional labor seems fully alienated. Yet the worker is not simply alienated in the production process. We see something distinct.

The central portion of Hochschild’s discussion focuses on the problem that emotional laborers confront in terms of their lived authenticity. Emotional laborers often begin from a place of fusion, in which their sense of self, emotional life, and work life, and neatly fused. This is something which production based on emotional labor encourages. Yet it is not easy to maintain and often fails. When it does, the worker confronts a question: Am I faking it all the time?

Phoniness would seem to be the price of all emotional labor, but it is one that appears when fusion fails, when the reproduction of emotions and self reveal themselves as separate for the worker. As Hochschild emphasizes, the discover of phoniness attacks the emotional laborer’s capacity for work. How? It affects a person’s self-esteem. This is a problem of emotional labor’s reproduction: an emotional laborer caught in this spiral will not be able to reproduce their capacity to labor. For this reason, emotional laborers work quite hard to figure out how to deal with this problem.

Hochschild offers us three ways workers typically deal with the split between real and fake emotion:

  1. Depersonalize the situation by dividing oneself between a true work self and a true personal self. In this instance, both are real but their separation allows the emotional laborer to navigate problems in production without it attacking self-esteem.
  2. Yet the work persona can come to seem less real than the private self. Treat the job as not serious. This causes a problem, though. If phoniness is the job, then self-esteem is attacked and anyone who allows this to become their lives will seem smaller to themselves.
  3. Resist all encouragement to act and “go robot.” In this situation, a laborer takes emotion and self out of the performance. All that is left is the act without feeling. It is unable to evoke the emotions required by the job.
    In essence, the good emotional laborer is skilled at separating public and private selves without losing sight of a certain truth within BOTH selves. The feelings they enact and evoke in work are real, but separate from their private selves.

How does one produce a true public self without making one’s private self vulnerable? Hochschild argues that emotional laborers use a similar set of techniques as found in Stanislavsky’s idea of deep acting. In deep acting, the emotional laborer draws on personal memories of feeling to act them out in a new context. The feeling is real, the context new. Hochschild contrasts deep acting with “surface acting,” which simply goes through the motions—a version of “going robot”

Is deep acting fake? No. Hochschild makes an important claim here: it is debilitating for emotional laborers to feel the constant difference between their internal feeling states and their external performances. Hochschild doesn’t see deep acting as bad or fake. It is necessary.

Deep acting shows us something important, I think, about emotional labor. The wage, in a classically Marxian sense, is not enough to reproduce it. One might equivocate and say that the emotional laborer slowly loses his or her capacity to labor emotionally and that this capacity must be reproduced outside the production process. They receive love and affection elsewhere and bring it to work. That is in part true. But there is a limit to this ability to import that capacity into the production process. The more that the work self seems fake to the worker, the harder the work becomes. Eventually, it becomes untenable. Positive emotions are needed within the production process to allow the work to continue.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying emotional labor is always happy and good and so on. It’s that intermittent positive emotional experiences are built into the production process as part of the laborer’s reproduction. Capital might hope to siphon an emotional laborer’s capacity for emotional labor drop by drop as though we are pieces of fixed capital, but this burns through emotional laborers quite quickly. The reproduction of the worker demands certain conditions within the production process, though they don’t always get it. A certain sense of fusion or positive deep acting not only allows this work to reproduce itself, it makes the production process possible. Without it, the whole system goes into crisis.

And that takes me to a later essay by Hochschild, “Can Emotional Labor Be Fun?” Hochschild asks the question because it should be clear to everyone that IT CAN BE. Of course. Much of this kind of work is work that people value and thus feel is important and rewarding—in other words, the stuff of fusion, as Hochschild puts it in Managed Heart. What throws people out of fusion and forces them to confront the alienation of their emotional work is when something goes wrong in the production process, here specifically low wages and low respect. For Hochschild, this appears when the care system itself has broken down in some way.

The result is a new set of problems for the emotional laborer. Hochschild writes, “When a care system breaks down one sign is that the three-way relationship between the manger, the emotional laborer, and the client becomes frayed. […] Either way, the broken system has prevented her from feeling proud of her work. It has forced her to manage her feelings about doing her job in a broken care system.” The focus of emotional labor becomes the management of the worker’s feelings toward the job itself.

So we have:

  1. Emotional laborer performing emotion using private experience in public on behalf of the company to affect a client in ways that are more or less authentically felt and hence reproducible for the laborer.
  2. Emotional laborer managing personal feelings toward the client within the production process (e.g., when client rejects labor and so on) through management’s set of feeling rules.
  3. Emotional laborer managing personal feelings toward the production process itself.

What does all this have to do with literature and love?

If we take the love of literature seriously as a demand, where would we find it? It would be within the production process. What is that? I suppose teaching. It would be the most obvious situation in which the construction of emotion to a particular end between two human beings would be possible. It would be the situation in which a teacher would draw on their emotional experience to enact in the classroom a performance of this love and to evoke it in the client(s).

Is this really a demand we confront on the institutional level? I mean… I don’t know about that. Other kinds of emotional labor, yes, but the love of literature…?

It may be at the level of the discipline, department, or program, I suppose. It would still place the demand within the production process but in a way that is so distinct from management/labor that it is hard to apply the ideas clearly.

I think what we see is more akin to Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument in the culture industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the selection of people already attuned to a particular ideology. The work selects for people predisposed to a particular set of feelings and beliefs (or easily trained to hold them).

Loving literature and inculcating that love, then, isn’t a task with a particular monetary compensation. It is part of a performance to be understood as a member of a class with its own set of interests and ideas. Yet again, though, who makes this demand? Whose interests does it serve? When did it appear? Has the practice of this feeling changed over time?

I have theories about the emergence of this demand within the profession as something that occurs alongside the rise of theory. It’s the affective contrary of critique. I doubt anyone felt called to love literature until then.

Of course, this turn co-occurs with a number of other cultural events, including the expansion of emotional labor as a result of the post-industrial economic turn and the increased prominence of women in English departments, not to mention the coincidence of colleges focusing on student satisfaction as consumers.

This is a perfect storm for English as a discipline. The gendering of care and the expansion of emotional labor makes the love of literature a happy ideological fit for the times. It seems a counterpart to the feeling airlines wanted to encourage in Hochschild, the feeling of domesticity. Isn’t the love of literature also a cognate for the canon wars? The love of literature can suggest to people in a similar idea: make me feel at home in literature. What feeling could be more raced, classed, and gendered than that?

None of this is to suggest that it is impossible to love or value literature—however defined—on the personal level. But it is to see the idea of this demand as embedded in a particular moment in time for the profession and its ideological understanding of itself. We may use our emotional lives in teaching literature—I suspect we all do—but the nature of the feeling rules and emotional management operative in higher education is, I suspect, more complex and less interested in our encouragement of someone else’s love. Perhaps one might understand it as the performance of our interest or love to evoke a particular affective response in students. Perhaps. Even then, though, it seems that the feeling work here is different, less about a relation to an object than a particular set of affective relations within a classroom or an institution. And that seems a more complex problem which lacks the formal management systems we see in managed emotional labor.

Joseph Conrad’s Hope in Lord Jim and Nostromo

To approach hope in Conrad is to understand why French philosopher Gabriel Marcel claims “the conditions that make it possible to hope are strictly the same as those that make it possible to despair” (qtd in Anderson). This is not to say that Conrad’s hope is Marcel’s. For Marcel, hope describes a particular experience of theological transcendence, one that reveals a world of mysteries that demand an exterior space of possibility, something that takes the place of our humdrum instrumentalized world in which everything is merely a problem to be solved and thus a source of existential despair. Conrad’s hope might be glimpsed here not in Marcel’s suggestion of Catholic certainty but in the structural argument that Marcel makes about hope: hope is an experience of multiplicity and potentiality. Subsequent theorists of hope, from Ernest Bloch to Ben Anderson, emphasize precisely this implicit plurality of conditions, a plurality that can be inflected as either hope or despair.As Terry Eagleton puts it, “Potentiality … lays down the material infrastructure of hope” (52). Hope is sometimes treated as an affect, but it is perhaps more proper to understand it as a being-towardthat may raise a variety of affects, whether excitement, expectation, dread, anger, and so on. In other words, hope is less an affect than a relation with potential-laden conditions.

We are closer, here, I think, to Conrad’s hope, but the word “relation” poses another problem. Relation does not mean disposition, something grounded in character. One of the problems that confronts any examination of hope is our readiness to collapse one’s relation to conditions with one’s general disposition toward the world. We might recognize this better, as Conrad did, in questions of character—though as we will see that has its own discourse as well. For now, I want to note that hope is not the equivalent of an optimistic character. In particular, Eagleton offers a useful distinction, one that separates his perspective from that of Marcel, between groundless optimism and a hope premised on reason. After all, if I ask, “Is there any hope?” it is because I need a reason to hope, however remote. By contrast, Marcel’s religion allows him to hope by focusing on reason beyond reason. In what follows, then, I take hope as a particular relation informed by reason about the potentiality of a situation, and that this potentiality includes hope’s contrary, despair. In essence, hope sifts its despair-laden conditions for another route, another possibility. The hope that one may find in Conrad’s work, then, does not operate in spite of his pessimism but as a result thereof. It is a persistent examination of the reasons within despair, and the possibilities therein. In what follows, I have chosen to focus my discussion around the uses of the word “hope” as such in Lord Jim and to connect its usage there to the later text Nostromo.

Hope pervades the first half of Lord Jim as a continually thwarted if not fundamentally misguided relation to possibility. This seems in part a result of the continued link Marlow draws between the words hopeand faith: Jim’s hopes for the future, the hope of the pilgrims, Jim’s desire to remake himself. These hopes express a faith in potential, and it is as faith that the narrative approaches the question of hope, underscoring in the process its emptiness. Marlow frames his hope that Jim’s actions could be understood as not merely dispelled but a desire for “a miracle” (37). He writes:

Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse. I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible–for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man’s creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death–the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct. It is the hardest thing to stumble against; it is the thing that breeds yelling panics and good little quiet villainies; it’s the true shadow of calamity. Did I believe in a miracle? and why did I desire it so ardently? Was it for my own sake that I wished to find some shadow of an excuse for that young fellow whom I had never seen before, but whose appearance alone added a touch of personal concern to the thoughts suggested by the knowledge of his weakness–made it a thing of mystery and terror–like a hint of a destructive fate ready for us all whose youth–in its day–had resembled his youth? I fear that such was the secret motive of my prying. I was, and no mistake, looking for a miracle. (LJ 5:37)

If hope is bound to reason, its deployment in Lord Jim maps something hazier, torn between reason and optimism. The hoped for miracle would dispel the mist that envelops and obscures what Marlow calls a “fixed standard of conduct.” It is here that hope’s centrality for the text comes into focus as a collapse of character-based disposition and a reasoned relation to a situation’s potentiality. What Marlow extolls as a standard of conduct is “that inborn power to look temptations straight in the face… a power of resistance” (32). Such a view is of a piece with Conrad’s insistences throughout his work that imperialism reveals fundamental dispositions held in check by European culture. His hope for Jim is one for a standard of conduct based in reason that could obviate this problem of disposition. What Jim threatens to reveal is that his standard is a mere accident of disposition.

The affective—or emotional relation?—here takes seriously what Fredric Jameson dismisses as a mere symbolic ruse, honor. Yet honor, as a word, misses the mark. It is a loss of hope, the revelation of a standard that is no standard. It is this that afflicts Captain Brierly. His final words to Marlow indicate that the degree to which dispositionis in tension with a reasoned hope, and direct us to another relation often mistaken for affect, trust. First and foremost, trust guarantees that the self one presents coincides with the kinds of actions one is likely to undertake. Yet trust is as much about the ability to act in the present moment as it is the predictability of future actions. In his analysis, Niklas Luhmann explains that trust matters precisely because it authorizes action in the present. For Brierly, what is so distressing about Jim’s betrayal is that it cuts at this possibility of present action:

We’ve got all kinds amongst us–some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose. We are trusted. Do you understand?–trusted! Frankly, I don’t care a snap for all the pilgrims that ever came out of Asia, but a decent man would not have behaved like this to a full cargo of old rags in bales. We aren’t an organised body of men, and the only thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency. (LJ 49)

What we see here in Brierly’s concerns are that they are not so much about honor as the broader late Victorian discourse of character. As Stefan Collini shows, character served as the disciplinary code for a disorganized liberal imperialism—in short, as the code for the trustworthiness of imperial action. Imperial administrators’ need to take decisions when necessary led to a reliance on a particular understanding of good character. Such character regulates personal conduct through social pressure and intermittent checks on action—the certification that Jim needs to act as an officer marks him as part of this order that demands a series of initial checks but then releases him unchecked into the world. This may suggest Foucauldian discipline; however, as we see in Lord Jim, character operates through intermittent checks quite distinct from what one would find in a disciplinary structure. In effect, the sea of Lord Jim is one of the earliest forms of what Marc Augé terms a non-place, a space of passage in which identity is suspended and checked only sporadically. Indeed, Augé discusses the role of sea travel in the 19C when explicating the term. For subsequent theorists, the non-place helpfully tracks the displacement of disciplinary societies by societies of control, where the individual is replaced by the persistent subdivision of the person into the multiplicity of the dividiual. For late Victorians, character seems to have suggested the certainty of a disciplinary code. What Jim reveals, though, is that it is a more supple—and at this stage of technology, fallible—system of discontinuous checks. The guarantee of character, which unifies disposition via a specific relation to reality, only guarantees a fragment, a splinter that may not be recomposed as a whole.

In a fully developed control society, this fragmentation can become a source of profit and multiplied control through the proliferation of checks. This is not yet the case for the world of Lord Jim.Instead, trust and hope confront each other as antagonistic relations to temporality. Action in the present against a Benjaminian sifting of possibilities in the present—activity against a passive messianism. This conflict is not an abstract one. As Adam Seligman argues, trust is predicated on the rise of modernity and market society. It is a specific, historic relation. In this sense, the conflicting temporalities of hope and trust reveal an ambivalence in the text toward the imperial project, one situated in the subjective constitution of those who undertook it: a passive hope for the future that inhibits trust’s ability to act in the present. For Conrad, a positive imperial project is based in doing. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow describes the British territories marked in red on King Leopold’s map as “good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there” (32), and he emphasizes earlier that “what saves [the British imperial project] is efficiency” (21). An acceptable imperialism is a project of continual present-tense mediation, of doing to be done. Yet what Jim wishes to avoid more than anything is the reality of his present. Jim’s passive hopefulness threatens to reveal the trust of imperialism as mere disposition. His leap from the foundered boat is a leap over the present, an elision of trust’s temporal focus. Hence Marlow emphasizes that Jim

was not afraid of death perhaps, but I’ll tell you what, he was afraid of the emergency. His confounded imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams, boats swamped–all the appalling incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever heard of. He might have been resigned to die but I suspect he wanted to die without added terrors, quietly, in a sort of peaceful trance. (63)

Jim’s hope and despair are bound to his projections of what may come, to potentiality as such, and not to what is. His redemptive second leap, then, is not so much an embrace of his existential condition as an insistent staying in the present that the text makes central to imperial trust.

To a degree, this alignment of hope with an idealism and temporality that undermines trust in the imperial project also marks Nostromo. Conrad’s account in his 1917 preface of the biographical model for Antonia certainly carries more than a whiff of the Intended’s idealism: “how we used to look up to that girl,” he writes, “…  as the standard-bearer of a faith to which we all were born but which she alone knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching hope!” (453). In the text proper, hope is a leitmotif for a more impersonal sense of the imperial social revolution led by the American mining interests in Sulaco. The San Tome mine enchants Charles Gould with a  “magic formula … [of] hope, vigour, and self-confidence, instead of weary indignation and despair” (6:48). Gould subsequently demands capital-first reform in Sulaco as the only possible “ray of hope” (7:68) because it brings “security” to an “oppressed people” (7:68), and the color of the mine, “green,” is called “the colour of hope, being also the colour of the mine” (8:79). Hope again seems a drive to passivity, and the text’s search for reasons to inform hope become increasingly strained. The Excellentisimo who is to defend the interests of the mine is “the hope of honest men”; and the people of Sulaco hide their fears of Sotillo’s army behind “imbecile hope.” Hope’s potential malevolence, however, most clearly appears with its association with Gould’s last load of silver: “the remnants of our hopes.” Nostromo says in the novel’s final pages that “there is something accursed in [this] wealth” (442), and this seems a fitting description for what is a material store of congealed labor, a hoard of potentiality in itself. Indeed, if one considers the silver as a surplus of potential, the suicidal turn of Martin Decoud, Nostromo’s accomplice in protecting this last remnant of hope, becomes a result of his altered relation to this potential. Indeed, the novel’s persistent narration of revolution in the pseudo-iterative, the narrative strategy of presenting the punctual as the habitual, similarly suggests a problem moving between temporal registers, as though the potentiality of hope and despair have infected the present.

For this reason, I want to close by raising two final models of hope. In his account of hope, Brian Massumi similarly emphasizes its engagement with potentiality. However, where most theorists describe hope as future-oriented, Massumi insists that it is best conceived as a relation to the present. A present-tense hope, he argues, is one bound up with the uncertainty and potentiality of a given situation. Hope is thus not a passive waiting for someone else’s intervention in the future but rather what Massumi calls “a margin of maneuverability” (2), a margin that is effectively our sense of freedom. This view of hope insists that one is not inscribed in a situation but rather embodied within that situation in such a way that its manifold potentials for connection are present and available. Hope is the insistence that the world, such as it is, is internally different from itself. It is this agential version of hope that Conrad approaches in Nostromo,a cross-pollination of the action-oriented trust of Lord Jim and its idealist hope, but one that increasingly becomes indifferent to its status as either hope or despair. With the ascendency of Gould and the mining interests, the conclusion of Nostromo seems to suggest hope for a particular form of seemingly beneficent liberal imperialism against Nostromo’s more hopeless and romantic imperial adventuring. This hopelessness extends lexically beyond Nostromo, the “hopeless slave of the San Tomé mine,” to include “the hopeless blackness of the clouds” above the island where he has secreted his treasure and his two competing love interests. The conclusion of the novel thus suggests a feminizing of hope, a framing of the congealed potentiality of wealth as a female fecundity that threats a masculine demand to act, whether Nostromo’s decisive military actions or Decoud’s decisive political intervention. It is this final gendered shift of hope that indicates the one model of hope that remains inaccessible to Conrad, a hope grounded in the past, one that Sara Ahmed argues is central to living a feminist life (see introduction and 46-47. This concluding gendered turn of hope thus suggests an implacable drift in the novel’s understanding of hope and despair toward a masculinized sense of potential’s sheer contingency, encapsulated by Nostromo’s accidental shooting by his aged friend. In this way, the hope of Nostromo suggests a particularly masculine subjective struggle to orient oneself in an imperial surfeit of possibility.

 

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke UP, 2017.

Anderson, Ben. “Becoming and Being Hopeful: Towards a Theory of Affect.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 24, 2006, pp. 733-752, DOI: 10.1068/d393t.

Augé, Marc. Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. 2ndedition. London: Verso, 2008.

Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists. Oxford UP, 1991.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Bedford/St Martins, 2010.

—. Lord Jim, edited by Jacques Berthoud.Oxford World’s Classics, 2002.

—. Nostromo. Penguin Classics, 2007.

Eagleton, Terry. Hope without Optimism. U of Virginia P, 2015.

Luhmann, Niklas. Trust and Power. Polity, 2017.

Marcel, Gabriel. The Gabriel Marcel Reader, edited by Brendan Sweetman. St. Augustine Press, 2011.

Massumi, Brian. The Politics of Affect. London: Polity, 2012.

Seligman, Adam B. The Problem of Trust. Princeton University Press, 1997.

Association, Sentiment, and Becoming-Animal: Dickens’s Feral Children

In 1848, Dickens published the last of his Christmas books, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. Much as in A Christmas Carol, the protagonist of The Haunted Man, a chemist named Mr. Redlaw, finds himself confronted by a ghostly figure on Christmas Eve. Here, however, the similarities end. Where Marley encourages Scrooge to reflect upon his life and live for the better, the Phantom of The Haunted Man offers Redlaw a reprieve from such reflections. Redlaw has long been haunted by grief and anger: his best friend had led his beloved sister to believe he intended to marry her; instead, he married Redlaw’s intended, and Redlaw’s sister dies soon after. “I bear within me a Sorrow and a Wrong,” Redlaw tells the Phantom, and continues, “Thus, memory is my curse; and if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!” (342). What the Phantom offers to “cancel” (Christmas 343) are his memories of sorrow and wrong; “to leave,” he explains, “but very faint, confused traces of them, that will die out soon” (343). Redlaw knows enough of sentimental philosophy to object that he “would not deprive myself of any kindly recollection, or any sympathy that is good for me, or others” (343). The Phantom assures him that he will lose “no knowledge; no result of study; nothing but the intertwisted chain of feelings and associations, each in its turn dependent on, and nourished by, the banished recollections” (343). This phrase, later repurposed in Great Expectations to describe Pip’s more problematic emotional and subjective development, indicates the tale’s narrative trajectory. In The Haunted Man, the Phantom has trapped Redlaw in a kind of Faustian bargain: the elimination of the felt chain of associations with sorrow and wrong quickly empties Redlaw of anything approaching human sympathy. However, because he can still recall the existence of sympathy, he knows enough to mourn its loss, and, as one of the conditions of his bargain was that he would communicate his loss of memory to anyone he encounters, he quickly retreats from human contact. The one exception is that of a street urchin, described as “a creature more like a young wild beast than a young child, shivering upon a door-step” (338). Only the child can withstand Redlaw’s presence, the Phantom explains, because he is barely a person at all; he

is the last, completest illustration of a human creature, utterly bereft of such remembrances as you have yielded up.  No softening memory of sorrow, wrong, or trouble enters here, because this wretched mortal from his birth has been abandoned to a worse condition than the beasts, and has, within his knowledge, no one contrast, no humanising touch, to make a grain of such a memory spring up in his hardened breast.  All within this desolate creature is barren wilderness.  All within the man bereft of what you have resigned, is the same barren wilderness.  Woe to such a man!  Woe, tenfold, to the nation that shall count its monsters such as this, lying here, by hundreds and by thousands! (387)

To some degree, one might interpret the child here as the human reduced to the animal. Yet this is not quite right. The absence of softening memories does not render the child an animal but rather, in the Phantom’s words, abandons him “to a worsecondition than the beasts.” Indeed, tropes of animality attach themselves to the child and to Redlaw to demarcate a monstrosity produced by a particular kind of hedonic neglect. This feral child, then, is another of Dickens’s critiques of the Benthamite understanding of humanity as driven wholly by self-interest. Without humanizing memories, the child and Redlaw are always, as Fagin would put it, looking out for “object number one” (43:348). The tale’s goal is to confront Redlaw with such an emotionally impoverished humanity that he accepts the necessity of his sorrows and wrongs as opportunities, the saintly figure of Milly informs us, to “forgive” (Christmas404). It is this Christian sentiment that gives the tale its moral unity, one that Dickens encapsulates with the recurrent phrase “Lord, keep my memory green” (408).

To my mind, the tale’s loosely Christian moral is not so much suggestive of a particular religious key in Dickens’s work—Dickens was certainly loose in his religious thinking, frequenting Unitarian churches but baptizing his children in the Church of England—than of a way of thinking about what it means to be human, in particular how memory and emotion interact to produce the contrasts and humanizing touches of individual character. In what follows, I explore the ways in which the feral child of The Haunted Man reveals a fracture in Dickens’s thought of what it means to be human. This is a consequence of the way in which the becoming-animal that both the child and Redlaw experience includes and excludes them from the human and the animal, and of Dickens’s entwining of sentimentality and analytic psychology. I would suggest that the ways in which Dickens describes this loss of memory and feeling, in particular the metaphoric entanglements of the animal and wilderness, indicates the extent to which Dickens’s work gestures toward the human as constructed, while nonetheless warding off the ramifications of such a view by creating a sentimentality of mental association.

The associationist bent of Victorian analytic psychology offers a point of entry for this view of the human as constructed through the ramification of one’s experiences and their resulting associations. Nicholas Dames has demonstrated analytic psychology’s influence Dickens’s David Copperfield, just two years later, and again with an emphasis on mental representation. For Dames, the midcentury saw “a sustained cultural interest in autobiographical memory” (127); psychological notions of association gave novelists the tools, in Dames’s words, “to plot the mind, and to plot memory, in such a way as to ensure a newly coherent, newly organized psyche” that would create a “cleansed, organized mind free of … uncategorizable detail” (128). For Dames, this is a result of the threat of delirium that the association of images raises and that modernism will later indulge. From that perspective, one might argue that in The Haunted Man, the need to retain memories of sorrow and wrong reflects this urgent desire to narrate the self as a set of sensible and connected associations.

Yet I think that such a reading would miss the moral of the tale. On its face, Dickens becomes Nietzschean here, and Nietzsche comes to seem more Victorian than he would like. More than that, however, it is clear from the tale that Redlaw and those he infects remain coherent as individuals even without these chains of association. In fact, rather than losing their senses of self, they become unshakablyfocused on the self. Association here is not about making or maintaining a coherent self so much as it is about the creation of an affective landscape for the human, an escape from that artificially produced “wilderness” in the boy and in Redlaw. Rooting out one’s sorrows and wrongs encourages either what the Phantom calls the boy, “the growth of man’s indifference”, or what he calls Redlaw, “the growth of man’s presumption” (Christmas 388). These vegetal metaphors leave one with the sense of the self as a kind of cottage garden. One tends not by weeding but through interplanting, since without these memories, one presumes that one needs no one else, and others merely induce indifference.

In effect, by privileging these notions of sense and affect, the tale follows their centrality in eighteenth-century moral philosophy but makes the case that such experiences reinforce or refine that inborn moral sense.In this respect, Dickens differs from moral sentiments philosophers such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume. For them, the judgments of moral sense may be led astray by ignorance, but reasoned debate and reflection may correct them.[i]Dickens, by contrast, makes this correction one of feeling rather than reason. Moreover, the terrain of Dickens’s argument offers some key distinctions from the moral sentiments. Redlaw’s situation recalls the scene at the heart of moral sentiments philosophy, a spectator confronted by a sufferer. The best instance of this approach appears in Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments, and Smith argues there that the situation demands affective regulation on the part of both spectator and sufferer (see Smith 1.4.7:26-7). Redlaw experiences a problem of self-regulation. In Smith’s theory, he should spectate his own suffering, and regulate it according to the reactions of his imagined impersonal spectator. Dickens seems well in on this idea: after all, he gives Redlaw a Phantom in his own image in order to comment on his experience of suffering. Yet it is the Phantom who offers him false absolution in his forgetfulness. Self-regulation, it seems, is not enough.

Here it may be useful to reframe the problem in terms of literary sentimentality and dramatic spectatorship. One of the distinct shifts in sentimental literature of the Victorian period, as scholars such as Miriam Bailin, Michael Bell, and Audrey Jaffe note, is that the role of the spectator has been pushed outside the diegesis. Readers, who before were asked to align themselves with an embedded spectator, take on the spectatorial role directly. Dickens is in part using this shift in literary form with this tale. After all, like all the Christmas tale, it too was effectively shaped around a series of scenes made for the mid-Victorian stage, a result of Dickens’s desire to control stage adaptations of his Christmas books beginning with The Chimes. The Haunted Man perhaps bears more markers of Dickens’s focus on the stage than any of the other books, however. Chapters rarely shift locations, and characters move within these limited spaces in melodramatic ways, from the overly talkative servants bringing in their family members for exposition to Redlaw hiding in a closet so that he—and the audience—may overhear the conversation. Dickens licensed the story to the Adelphi Theatre in 1848, and the playbill neatly encapsulates each of these locales: The Chemist’s Chamber, Tetteryby’s Palour, A Room in Tetterby’s, Outside of Redlaw’s Dwelling, A Ruinous Street, A Room in an Old House, The Ruinous Street (again), and so on. From a theatrical perspective, the stage makes spectatorship a directly embodied question. It also, I would suggest, pushes Dickens’s presentation of sentimentality outside the bounds of the individual.

For this reason, I want to return to analytic psychology, not as an answer to the problem but as a deepening of it. Popularizations of analytic psychology at this time raised two issues that inflect Dickens’s tale, the importance of emotion to association and of associational contrasts. In John Abercrombie’s popular work on the subject, first published in 1830 and running through nineteen subsequent editions, Abercrombie emphasized that “the strength of the association is generally in proportion to the intensity of the mental emotion; and is likewise in a great measure regulated by the length of time, or the number of times in which the facts have been contemplated in this connexion” (emphasis added; 77). For Abercrombie, associations transpire between “facts or thoughts” (ibid.), that is between what philosophy would term images or representations. Subsequent work in analytic psychology will focus on associations as part of organic processes, but that turn comes after Dickens’s engagement here. (Hartley’s discussion of mental vibrations and connections between the nerves and the brain notwithstanding, or rather, perhaps avoided for the reasons that Coleridge raises against him.) Abercrombie also notes that associations also operate by suggested contrasts: “the sight of a remarkably fat man may recall to us the thought of another man we had lately seen, who was equally remarkable for his leanness” (77).

One might understand Dickens’s deployment of both analytic psychology and the moral sentiments as producing a kind of sentimentality of mental association. Associations in and of themselves are not enough to make the self but need a particular set of contrasts to produce the “humanizing touch” that the Phantom says the feral child lacks. This understanding of the mind and memory leaps between discourses: we begin in analytic psychology with the notion of contrast raising the possibility of an internal division within mental associations but then shift to the moral sentiments as this divisions seems to allow for a more properly Smithian spectator to issue judgments. Sorrows and happiness produce an imagined internal distancing for the individual: hence Redlaw can realize his mistake because he can recall happiness, not because he understands the loss of his sorrows (and only transcends his mistake and regains his memory with the further step of forgiveness).

What might this say about other feral children in Dickens? I am thinking in particular of his two most famous vagabonds, Oliver Twist and Jo the crossing sweeper of Bleak House. Of all the qualities that make them distinct, the one that stands out to me is that one knows how to pray and one does not. Prayer is an odd problem in Oliver Twist. Initially, the narrator tells us “It would have been very like a Christian, and a marvelously good Christian too, if Oliver had prayed for the people who fed and took care of him. But he hadn’t, because nobody had taught him” (2:10). Yet once he’s taken into Mr Brownlow’s house, we are told “The darkness and the deep stillness of [his] room were very solemn; as they brought into the boy’s mind the thought that death had been hovering there, for many days and nights, and might yet fill it with the gloom and dread of his awful presence, he turned his face upon the pillow, and fervently prayed to Heaven” (12:85). Did he learn this from the prayer book that Mrs Bedwin takes in with her when she sits with him? It is unclear. Yet from this point on, Oliver prays, and, specifically, he prays for others: for his benefactors (31:247), for Rose when she is sick the Maylies (33:262), and for a condemned Fagin: “Let me say one prayer. Say only one, upon your knees, with me” (52:435). Jo, by contrast, remains in the state in which we initially discovered Oliver, oblivious to prayer, a turn that the narrator puts to most effective use in the scene of his death. It is useful to see, however, that this lack of knowledge seems inextricable with the narrator’s representation of Jo as a kind of beast, in particular a dog. Wandering through London, the narrator describes how “Jo and the other lower animals get on in the unintelligible mess as they can” (16:237). In effect, Jo is the child of The Haunted Man given more depth of characterization and narrative meaning, yet with much the same substantive view of the human. When Allan asks Jo “Did you ever know a prayer?”, their conversation reveals something about the direction of prayer and its relation to emotion, association, memory, and the self:

“Never knowd nothink, sir.”

“Not so much as one short prayer?”

“No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr. Chadbands he wos a-prayin wunst at Mr. Sangsby’s and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-speakin to hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but I couldn’t make out nothink on it. Different times there was other genlmen come down Tom-all-Alone’s a-prayin, but they all mostly sed as the t’other ‘wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talking to theirselves, or a-passing blame on the t’others, and not a-talkin to us. WE never knowd nothink. I never knowd what it wos all about.” (47:676)

The Christian moral of The Haunted Man and the role of prayer in Oliver Twist and Bleak House operate as enthymemes: the audience supplies the premise “forgiveness is good” or “children should know how to pray.” Yet these unstated but culturally necessary premises obscure formal connections. Prayer is an appeal to the transcendent, a plea directed to a big Other and beyond the self. Dickens offers a view of the human throughout these texts not merely as constructed through emotionally differentiated mental associations, and as potentially deformed by active forgetting, excision, and social indifference. He also suggests that those constructions and distinctions are a result of encounters with something outside the self. Sentimentality’s displacement of the spectator into the reader or spectator becomes something else again here, an off-loading of sympathetic identification into others more generally in order to create internally coherent and emotionally-aware human beings, and, to a degree, of language as a technology for creating those being. What these feral children reveal in Dickens, then, is a strain of thinking of the creation of the human beyond the human.

Works Cited

Abercrombie, John. “Philosophical, Local, and Arbitrary Association.” Embodied Selves, edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth. Oxford UP, 1998, pp. 76-79.

Bailin, Miriam. “Dismal Pleasure”: Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu,” ELH 66, no. 4 (Winter 1999), 1015-1032.

Bell, Michael. Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2000.

Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Dames, Nicholas. Amnesiac Selves. Oxford UP, 2003.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books, edited by Robert Douglas Fairhurst.Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.

—. Bleak House, edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford World’s Classics, 2008

—. Oliver Twist, edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford World’s Classics, 2008

Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knut Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Notes

[i]See Bell 11-46, Boltanski 77-95, Eagleton 31-69.

On resonance and strategic presentism

Reading the V21 forum in the recent Victorian Studies and thinking about resonance. Or, rather, I’ve been thinking about resonance a lot lately, and saw it deployed as part of strategic presentism. That seems right, in part, but it doesn’t answer the question that Andrew Miller raises—in essence, why study the past at all if we’re so interested in the present? And I think that resonance can offer some answers, not for strategic presentism so much as for how we articulate our relationship to the past without becoming captured by our interests in the present.
To get at this point, we need to think about one of the potential problems with a theory of resonance, its physicality. As much as resonance suggests, it also threatens to overcode with an implicit Platonism that privileges presence. That a sound can extend beyond itself through the transmission of vibration and via either shared or complementary qualities in objects, is, of course, what makes resonance suggestive. It captures the sense of affective bloom, or affecting and being affected, in the transmission and feedback of vibration. Yet its attachment to the sense of hearing, which like touch, taste, and smell is physical, cannot help but conjure presence.
This is pressing because so much of the theory around resonance can be folded into contemporary work on affect, and, to a degree, the Latourian turn, and critics are thus likely to confront the same objections that deconstruction raised against Deleuze and Foucault forty years ago. That is, in essence, what about what doesn’t resonate? I think this can be more concretely easily understood as a question for Latour: what about what doesn’t register as an actor in a network? The answer is fairly simple: it isn’t part of the network. Here’s the rub, though. Latour’s argument is sociological. It doesn’t to render what doesn’t act ontologically null; instead, it means to trace how a system works—or at least how it thinks that it works. And, operating via another sociological imperative, an investigator moving from one network to another can begin to locate exclusions from networks. It’s hard to know what doesn’t register if one isn’t sure about what does. As Latour makes clear in Reassembling the Social, the politics of redressing exclusions needs to be separated from the methodological analysis of how networks function so that one can see what happens, and, by implication, what doesn’t.
In this sense, then, resonance’s saving grace may be that it suggests both sound fields that extend beyond the resonating objects, and the possibility of resonant failure, of silence, of difference. As scholars, as critics, as readers, we must enter into these fields of resonance and silence carefully. For this reason, we may also wish to consider resonance not just as a form of affects between objects but also as a form of auto-affection, of self-forming. This has the merit of creating another register, another network of operations. In terms of sound, one might think of an amplified chord from an electric guitar extended, shifted, or distorted through the uptake of the amplified sound by the instrument itself to create a new field. In this sense, then, resonance can suggest transversal relations that are not so much articulations of past and present but of durative affective fields. One might say that resonance, then, can offer a way to think through the articulations of past and present that we undertake as critics, not as teleological but rather as indeterminate within a text, and that it also allows us to consider divergent resonances, points of disjunction that may create silences or unexpected feedback loops between textual auto-affections and contrary lines of flight from the present.
Why study the present through the past? Why study the past at all? The answer, I would argue, lies in these baroque affective enfoldings, what can show us not only what resonates with the present but what escapes such resonances entirely.

On McQueen and abjection

An interesting piece today in the Guardian by Carole Boyce Davies titled “12 Years a Slave fails to represent black resistance to enslavement.” Davies’s argument speaks in part to questions I raised in “Militants and Cinema” about McQueen’s decision to engage with resistance through abjection. Davies nicely describes how  McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s text chooses scenes of physical abjection while eliding instances and spaces of resistance:

Northup indicates that not a day passed without him contemplating escape. References to the Great Pine woods are a constant symbolic evocation of the possibilities for living elsewhere than on the plantation. The journey between that “free” space and the plantation marks the boundaries between being free and being enslaved. […]

But in focusing so much on the plantation, the film misses the Great Pine woods, as free space symbolically and literally.

Further, she notes, McQueen’s film omits Celeste, a slave who lived for months in the Great Pine woods and instead focuses on the awful abuse dealt to Patsy:

Patsy is seen with her back flayed and her skin lacerated in a horrible scene depicting the degradation of the black female body. Northup may leave the plantation in the end, but there is no chance of any positive outcome for her. Rather the gratuitous display of the black woman’s raped and flayed body is chosen to represent the horror of slavery. The film’s overwhelming graphic presentation of these scenes – minus the other resistance stories – presents largely complicit black women, singing and picking cotton or cowering in fear.

Davies pinpoints what I think is a central problem when it comes to McQueen’s work, both here and in Hunger: the display of bodies undergoing violence as the means of representing a political resistance, in large part by soliciting a sense of horror, and, in what seems an increasingly important term for McQueen’s work, shame. It is not that his films are not moving and powerful, but that they use narrative and film conventions that limit their ability to engage with their social, political, and historical contexts.

Perhaps chief among these are the conventions of art cinema: it’s important that Northup is not an action hero for McQueen to achieve the affects he desires. One drawn out sequence in which Northup almost dies as a result of an arrested lynching highlights the degree to which McQueen wishes us to experience the injustices of slavery through a character’s inability to act or control his life. The film thus seems to me, in retrospect, as a series of sequences in which Northup experiences slavery’s dehumanizing attempts to exert total control over a person. The one exception–when he beats an overseer–generate such dire consequences that its inclusion emphasizes the same point, that such catharses are useless given the realities of slavery, and, most especially, for a film that means to engage with those realities.

But this attempt to undermine the potential drive toward the narrative conventions of the action film–i.e., Django Unchained–with those of art cinema means putting narrating and reflecting on resistance off-limits. For me, to learn of these omissions from Northup’s text is far from surprising. McQueen’s films are physically focused, body focused, and the physicality of 12 Years a Slave tries to communicate the incommunicable horrors of slavery.  But these omissions also indicate that the body remains a continuing limit for McQueen’s attempts to engage with history and politics. In some senses, this is, of course, true: individuals have often been reduced to bare life over the course of human history. But bare life is not the entirety of the story, nor the entirety of the stories that McQueen has chosen to tell. That was the point I tried to get at in my essay, and it is the point that Davies makes so well here.