Category: academic

New project: On character

I’m trying to think through ideas for a new project about Victorian character, economics, the professions, and war. To start, I want to focus on Mill and character. When it comes to literature and economics, critics often, rightly, treat character as a function of credit, and it is in many respects both the foundation of personal credit and a trope readily mapped to eighteenth-century texts like Defoe’s Roxana. As a Victorianist, I’ve long thought of character in this way while acknowledging that it is also part of a broader discourse of character that operates in tandem with notions like respectability and gentlemanliness. For this reason, JS Mill’s discussion of character in his Logic is far more pivotal than one might expect, both for what Mill has to say about individual and national characters and about the difference between his proposed science of character, what he calls Ethology, and political economy.

Here are the basics of character for Mill. Mill argues for character-based determinism: “our actions follow from our characters, and our characters follow from our organization, our education, and our circumstances” (26). Circumstances are crucial to Mill’s discussion of character throughout the final book of the Logic, since a science of character that encompasses an entire society finds itself hemmed in by the manifold nature of the circumstances that an analysis must take into account. Circumstances also provide the crux for Mill’s argument that his determinism, which he calls Necessitarianism, differs from fatalism. Mill’s basic point is that one can alter one’s character by altering one’s circumstances. One might call this Mill’s Victorian logic of self-improvement: I am who I am because of my circumstances but I can strive to alter my circumstances and thus myself. By contrast, fatalism sees no possibility for such alteration. (Hardy’s use of fatalism in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, for example, seems a rejoinder to Mill’s argument here.) One can intervene at the level of circumstance. Mill writes:

They made us what they did make us by willing not the end, but the requisite means; and we, when our habits are not too inveterate, can, by similarly willing the requisite means, make ourselves different. If they could place us under the influence of certain circumstances, we in like manner can place ourselves under the influence of other circumstances. We are exactly as capable of making our own character, if we will, as others are of making it for us. (26-7)

In other words, one may will a new set of circumstances or means, and these may shape character if the habits that make up that character “are not too inveterate.”

Mill’s approach indicates that character has to be shaped indirectly, but the process of character shaping relies on a purposeful remaking of means to achieve a particular end.

So far, so good—and about what one would expect to find in Mill given Stefan Collini’s account of character and Mill in Public Moralists. I’ll return to Collini in another entry. For the moment, three questions come to mind as I look at this material: 1) How can one tell if a habit is too inveterate? 2) If character must be reshaped indirectly, how successful can a purposeful (i.e., ends-focused) reshaping of circumstances be? and 3) What does Mill mean by “if we will”—including his emphasis of the phrase? The first question I can’t answer yet. I am tempted to believe Mill would call a habit inveterate if it were simply too appetitive, but the issue isn’t taken further in the Logic. The second and third, however, receive more explication. Mill’s insistence that one can alter one’s character seems to rely as much on a sense that one could alter one’s character as the reality that one does alter it. He continues:

this feeling of being able to modify our own character if we wish, is itself the feeling of moral freedom … A person feels morally free who feels that his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but he theirs; who even in yielding to them knows that he could resist; that were he desirous of altogether throwing them off, there would not be required for that purpose a stronger desire than he knows himself to be capable of feeling. (27)

What strikes me in this passage is Mill’s focus on the “feeling” of possible change, highlighted by the repetition of the emphatic “if.” Moral freedom is the experience of a virtual space in which one may alter “habits or … temptations”—an interesting combination of skill/repetition and desire—rather than the experience of alteration as such. The notion is reminiscent of the problem of impulse and character in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, in particular the apparent laxness of morals that Utterson finds acceptable for gentlemen in the opening chapters. Good character is the knowledge that one could resist habit or temptation, not that one does. This sounds like hypocrisy, and one can readily locate versions of Victorian hypocrisy that fit such a description, but I’d hazard that Mill wants to specify something quite different. There’s habit, temptation, and the space of feeling in which one can insert difference or unmoor what seems so stable. Is this related to James’s specious present or the problem of habit as the experience and elision of the present that Massumi locates in Ontopower? What is this feeling, and how does it work?

One way to think about this issue is to look at how Mill describes habits. Temptations aren’t suitable for discussion, apparently. Habits, he writes, are formed through acts of will that anticipate pleasure or pain, but that “we at last continue to will it without any reference to it being pleasurable” (29). Habit dislocates will from utilitarian considerations and their repetitions become what Mill calls “purpose” (ibid.) before insisting that “only when our purposes have become independent of the feelings of pain or pleasure from which they originally took their rise that we are said to have a confirmed character” (ibid.). In sum, from habit to habitus. A feeling of potential difference in respect to habit, then, offers a way to trouble the habitus, to render one’s character unconfirmed.

Next: How this dislocated feeling relates to political economy and Ethology as a search for a study of feelings than the greed via a surfeit of circumstances.

Works Cited

Mill, John Stuart. The Logic of the Moral Sciences. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1988.

The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy

I wrote a book. Like most scholarly books, its argument is meant to be multifaceted and to speak to a variety of audiences, but I will try to reduce those to an extremely limited set of claims here. With that in mind, here’s what the book is about:

  • The service sector begins to emerge clearly as a separate sector in the mid-Victorian period.
  • Political economy, due to its focus on productive labor, has difficulty theorizing the “immaterial” production of service workers.
  • Victorian novels, as cultural texts, provide a clearer view of the ways in which class, gender, and race differentiated modes of service work.
  • In other words, novels allow us to see the mechanisms available in the period to discipline service workers, including the wage, discourses of respectability and gender, and violence.
  • For Victorian studies, this focus on service work reframes our understanding of mid-Victorian novels that take on themes of finance and financialization as more broadly novels about different modes of immaterial work and their social value.

In terms of theory, my argument applies to Victorian novels about finance what might be most widely understood as a post-work political lens—that is, I take work to be the fundamental mechanism of social discipline in capitalist societies. This perspective effectively brackets issues of work’s productive role in the social metabolism a la Marx to examine instead the forms of domination that work creates at particular historical moments. That is, it means to offer a conjunctural analysis of Victorian novels about finance from a post-work perspective.

I think one of the benefits of this theoretical approach is that it helps show how the instrumentalization of social relations that we often trace in Victorian texts is in fact part of a process of proletarianization in the services. One might object that we already have reification for these issues—that’s true!—but discussions of reification in literary studies tend to privilege objects and commodification and to lose sight of human interaction. When work and workers drop out of sight, we’re left with Marx’s talking table at best, Aristotlean analysis of objects at worst. So one of the underlying arguments in the book is that literary criticism is more meaningful when we reflect on how literature captures the affects and percepts of large-scale historical change than by attempting to craft history or philosophy from literature.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t engage with big questions, but that the kinds of big questions that we can engage are going to—and should—be different than the kinds of questions raised by scholars in other disciplines. This is especially important when we think about how new economic criticism and the like, which has led some of us to believe we can effectively respond to economists because we read in the history of political economy. In a way, we can… but we will never really be talking to economists. Even if some scholars believe that can point to flaws in current models or problematic assumptions within economic theory, the audience for any work that comes from the intersection of literature and economics will be one engaged with the humanities first. As literature scholars, we are unlikely to affect economic debates.

What can we do? We can examine people think about economic life and represent changing economic experiences, and we can use those examinations to reflect on our culture as such. That’s a different, though related, project than carving out space for discursive examinations of political economic texts. It is a project about the political, economic, and emotional experience of abstract social forces. Hence my last point, which covers too many chapters:

  • The novels that I examine reveal the changing experiential contours of service work, focusing in particular on questions of discourse and affect.
    1. Silas Marner reveals discursive fractures in discussions of productive and unproductive labor in the early 1860s.
    2. Our Mutual Friend takes on the proliferation of services in the period, and how to discursively discipline its improvisational work.
    3. The Moonstone reveals how financial networks solicit invisible affect economies in the domestic sphere.
    4. The Way We Live Now showcases the role of violence as the coercive background to the use of discursive work discipline in services.

Of course, there’s much more than that in each chapter, and more in the book besides—from an examination of political economy’s notion of unproductive labor to a reading of Dracula as the affective meditation of service work—but that’s why it’s a book, not a blogpost.

 

On Massumi’s The Power at the End of the Economy

Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015).

Given the amount of self-citation in this slim volume, it is clear that Massumi wants the economic to bridge key interests in his recent and forthcoming work, most importantly questions of the ecology, the non-human, and war. Such interests, of course, lead Massumi inexorably toward a confrontation with Deleuze and Guattari’s other major disciples, Hardt and Negri. One of the difficulties that I have with this book is that it tries to bury this confrontation rather than subjecting it to rigorous interrogation. Perhaps this will appear in a later work. In any case, the crucial argument with Hardt and Negri appears toward the end when Massumi insists that that the figure of the activist should supplant that of the militant. The activist, he argues, conditions the situation in which events may arise, seeding the world with radical potential; by contrast, militants try to discipline events, in effect subjecting them to a rationalization that cuts off the proliferation of potential. It should be no surprise that Massumi turns this discussion back to the divide between anarchists and Marxists, an argument that we can date to back to the 1860s with the argument between Marx and Bakunin. More on that historical period and this book in a moment. What we should note here first is that his turn to the activist fits his argument overall in that its focus falls on what Massumi calls the “churning” of “infra-individual” “bare activity”—that is, the constant internal cycling of affects within an individual that do not rise to the level of consciousness. In an excellent discussion of this non-conscious affective activity, Massumi describes a human reacting to an unexpected encounter with a bull (a choice that one would assume is meant to recall the Spanish Indignacios and the horror of the 21st century capitalism’s bull market ideology). To my mind, this portion of the book can be read as a brilliant explication of Deleuze’s passing reference to Sartre in his final essay “Immanence: A Life…” The churn of affect, movement, and potential in the encounter with the bull captures what it means to constitute a plane of immanence. Indeed, anyone familiar with Deleuze’s oeuvre will find the book a fascinating reworking of key texts, including a lengthy engagement with Hume and sympathy.

My problems with the book, then, are not with its dazzling discussions of affective emergences and inventions, but rather with its analyses of the economic and of neoliberalism—a term that seems to hold talismanic rather than explanatory qualities here. Massumi begins with Foucault’s explication of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics, a fascinating seminar held in nearly forty years ago. As insightful as Foucault’s reflections may be for their time, they do not seem an adequate basis for an analysis of the contemporary economic moment in a historical sense. That said, such an analysis does not seem to be of much interest for Massumi. This book is largely a philosophical reflection on… one model of economic thought? A political regime (which one)? An individual experience of a political economic moment in a broader cultural context? It is unclear. The discussion of economic thought often turns to Jocelyn Pixely’s Emotions in Finance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), which is never explicated or situated in terms of its ideas but rather dropped in the text aphoristically, as though it represents all economic thought rather than a particular set of developments in the economic analysis of finance. There’s a general suspicion of market rationality—fair enough!—but in a way that is so broad that it is effectively meaningless. Who defends market rationality and how they defend it, however, is not here a subject of analysis.

Instead, the jumping off point is Foucault’s notion of an entrepreneurial subject. Such is certainly an aspect of “the neoliberal subject,” but it represents a particular view of that subject, one that has been crafted and constructed for us to take in. This issue generates the book’s most interesting discussion in terms of its economic content, an analysis of how neoliberalism pushes discipline beyond the individual subject to construct new forms of control. Massumi’s term for this is ‘priming,’ which ‘[implants] certain presuppositions in the situation … and [activates] certain tendencies in the participants’ (28). In my book, I’ve reflected on this issue a great deal—albeit in a different historical moment—but I tried to continually return these questions to the interaction of subjective experience and work-discipline. In other words, I tried to highlight the ways that economic relations affect one’s experience. One might see this, following Massumi’s account of the bull, as trying to describe how authors create a plane of consistency in which these subjective potentials of a new set of economic relations open up. I fell back upon the language of ‘discipline’ in an attempt to reimagine a much more loose, non-institutional experience of discipline by focusing on the construction of particular kinds of discourses—i.e., ‘presuppositions in the situation’—to which plots and characters respond, most especially in the subjective construction of various characters—i.e., ‘tendencies in participants’. Thus one of the useful aspects of his reframing neoliberal discipline as priming is that it opens up space for deviance. What remains unclear, however, is how multivocal this openness to deviance may be. It seems historically as useful for reinforcing certain tendencies as it does for the construction of resistance.

But let’s bracket that question for the moment to examine two other fundamental notions here that could also use a little more historical reflection: pain/pleasure, and human capital. Massumi’s account of pain and pleasure builds from Hume and his understanding of the passions, and then leaps to the contemporary moment. His term for the comparison of the two is ‘hedonic,’ which is understandable if also curious since the notion of utilitarian calculus never appears once. Given the centrality of this hedonic comparison to political economy, it is difficult to see how or why we must jump from Hume in the mid-eighteenth century to the twenty-first. It is also surprising that, given the competition between passions mapped within the discussion of Hume, that there is no mention of Albert O. Hirschman’s classic The Passions and the Interest, which details the rise of interest as a concept through the notion of the combat between passions. Curious too is the lack of connection of the pain/pleasure contrast to the rise of marginalism, where these tradeoffs were first rationalized using price mechanisms and generated the prevailing theory of employment that gave us the Great Depression and that Keynes dismantled in his General Theory.

And this takes me back to the activist/militant question. In some ways, Massumi’s account here is very ‘60s—that is, very 1860s. His essential response to these issues is what he calls “a politics of the dividualism”:

It would find ways of tending tendencies, in order to navigate the zone of indistinction between choice and nonchoice in such a way as to effect modulations of becoming that producing self-justifying surplus values of life: pulses of life experienced as worth the living by virtue of the event they are, immanent to the event, as a function of its immediate experiential quality, without any tribunal of judgment hanging over them, sovereignly purporting to justify them extrinsically. (35)

With such an agenda, one can see here why the activist would outweigh the militant (and again, why he includes a running comment on the competition between anarchism and Marxism). I appreciate these ideas, but they too need some additional reflection to expose points of difference from this twenty-first century moment and the closing paragraphs of Walter Pater’s 1869 The Renaissance. This is not necessarily a critique, I suppose, especially as Pater’s ideas here grew out of his reflections on William Morris—and, beyond that, it is difficult not to be moved in some very Deleuzian ways when reading the Pater of the Conclusion—but Pater’s ideas and the rise of marginalism are also deeply intertwined. This is the argument of Regenia Gagnier’s excellent The Insatiability of Human Wants, and Gagnier’s book kept coming to mind as I read, both because Massumi’s political/aesthetic project so insistently recalls both Pater’s insistence that we should “get as many pulsations into the given time” through aesthetic discrimination and because his general notion of the economic seems as applicable to British marginalism as to twenty-first century notions of market rationality.

The key distinction may be that contemporary economic thought accords much more importance to questions of finance than nineteenth-century political economy ever did. The introduction of the dividual in Deleuze and in Massumi is certainly of a piece of the random walk and such, but the outcome of this piece returns us to Paterian aesthetics with an emphasis on depersonalization. So we no longer try to ‘get’ pulsations as allow them to happen. But that takes us into questions of the event and decision that I’ll defer for another day.