English 495b Journal

Rambling about Fragmentation...or Something

2005-10-10T23:52:00.000-07:00

I’d like to begin the show tonight with a quote from Lukacs’s Theory of the Novel: “The inner importance of the individual has reached its historical apogee: the individual is no longer significant as the carrier of transcendent worlds, as he was in abstract idealism, he now carries his value exclusively within himself” (117). Lukacs goes on to explain the validity of values subjectively according to their significance for the individual; the metaphysics of values, however, is only tangentially related to tonight’s skit. I think that in this quotation “value” also refers to a sort of moral worth, but since I do not necessarily intend tonight to pursue questions of morality in Middlemarch, I want to draw attention to the last bit of the Lukacs quotation, which locates the origin of the individual’s value entirely within himself. Here I want to say that if the individual no longer carries transcendent worlds, and his value he carries exclusively within himself, then he is necessarily detached from everyone else around him, at least in a moral or ethical sense.

This detachment seems rampant in Middlemarch. Perhaps detachment is the wrong word, since it implies that individuals were ever attached to one another, and I’m only somewhat inclined to believe that they were, though I suppose there may have been a time when a stronger morality or ethics connected them. Anyway, I will exchange it for “fragmentation,” which isn’t better in that sense but connotes a violence in the split that I feel is much more appropriate. The fragmentation seems directly connected to religious disorder, for in Middlemarch God, it seems, has fled the premises. Each character seems bow to a different god, no matter to which they seem outwardly to adhere. Dorothea’s god does not quite seem to be the Christian god—hers is perhaps most difficult to place. Caleb Garth clearly bows to business: “…it would be difficult to convey to those who never heard him utter the word ‘business,’ the peculiar tone of fervid veneration, of religious regard, in which he wrapped it, as a consecrated symbol is wrapped in its gold-fringed linen” (Eliot 221). Fred Vincy, with his gambling and hunting, seems governed by Bacchus or some other lesser god of pleasure. Mr. Casaubon bows to whom? The god of scholarship or himself? Sometimes it’s difficult to tell. His marrying Dorothea would seem to indicate the latter. The list could easily go on. The effect, however, is a sense that nobody has anything really to do with anyone else.

It is the habit of the gentry, at least in novels it seems, to be constantly in each other’s business. Even so, nobody in Middlemarch seems to know anything about anyone else, or, since their personal religions are all different and therefore their moral codes differ as well, they cannot translate their knowledge into a practical way of interacting with others. Take, for instance, Lydgate and Rosamond. The narrator explicitly remarks, “Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing” (155). This refers to Lydgate being so wrapped up in himself that he has no idea that Rosamond supposes he’ll propose to her, and to Rosamond’s being so wrapped up in her fantasy of him proposing that it never occurs to her that he might feel otherwise. One might also apply the narrator’s remark to Dorothea’s relationship to Casaubon.

Casaubon’s inability to truly connect to Dorothea is explicit in the diction of his letter of proposal: “I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you” (62). And so it goes on. His inability to maintain a real relationship with Dorothea is particularly evident when one juxtaposes the diction of the letter with Dorothea’s reaction to it: “Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her knees, buried her face, and sobbed” (63). How ever could a man with no passion possibly maintain a connection with such a passionate woman? He can’t: towards the end of Book IV, Dorothea wishes to go immediately to him in the garden, but she hesitates: “for her ardour, continually repulsed, served, with her intense memory, to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder” (349). And she goes, and he’s cold and mean.

The skit’s gone awry now. I’m not sure where I originally intended to go, but I think I wanted to talk about characters’ knowledge of others, and show that the fragmented world in which the characters operate actually prohibits the characters from having any knowledge of each other, and then I was going to wonder if that ignorance applies to characters and their relationships to things that are not human, and then, based on the answer to that question, wonder then what constitutes knowledge in such a fragmented world. I think I bit off more than I can chew in a journal entry.

The Lost Post: Informal, Short, and Disjointed

2005-09-29T03:08:00.000-07:00

Let me try to recreate this post. I began with some Heidegger, which I might have misinterpreted and over-simplified, but I hope not.

So, in “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger says something like this: literature or art in general, literature being a form of art, creates a space for being to reveal itself as what it is, and it does this through its createdness, it’s quality of being a work, the essence of which is the dialectic of the world and the earth. Now, it’s far too late in the day for me to begin to attempt a detailed analysis of what that means, especially in such a short forum, so bear with me please and take for granted that being reveals itself to us and that there actually is a conflict or dialectic in the work of art between the world, which is something like a perspective but not quite, and the earth which is the thingly quality of the work of art, the actual materials of it. Art, for Heidegger, is the becoming and happening of truth, where truth is understood as the unconcealedness of being. I think.

The point I think I was trying to make when the computer I was working on so suddenly decided to step out for some tea and crumpets was that I don’t think this is happening necessarily in the Lewes articles. I was specifically discussing “Studies in Animal Life.” Still more specifically, I was discussing the manner in which science, especially this article, impinges on the being of the creatures it discusses. I know it might sound like a lot of hooey to talk about impinging on beings, which are the essence of things, but hang in there; this is not meant to be an anti-science rant or a plug for some newly begun parasitic worm’s rights movement. That said, the content of this article is largely descriptive: “You are looking at the under side, and will observe six large suckers with their starlike clasps (e), and the horny instrument (f), with which the animal bores its way. At a there is another sucker, which serves also as a mouth; at b…” and so on (25-6). This is just one example; there are others, and other more eloquent ones. This can obviously be read as merely a report of the characteristics and workings of certain creatures, and it seems that’s all it is at some points (like this one). If this is the case and if we are accepting Heidegger’s bit about literature, then the article seems to go against what it is to be a work of art, for it serves more to conceal what-is, rather than create a space to reveal it. On the surface, it might not seem that way: Lewes is learning things about animals and reporting his findings. Surely this is revealing something right? Right, but not truth. The act of categorizing necessarily conceals what-is because of the narrow field of vision it creates: pieces must be cut off in order to cram something into so small a space. When one, for instance, describes the physical characteristics of Polystomum Integerrimum as Lewes does, one imposes numbers and values on the being of that creature, rather than allowing it to present itself as it is. Vague, eh? I think that’s okay: roll with it. While parts of the article border on poetic, that is not enough to classify it as literature, since, when read in this manner, it seems to go against what it is to be literature.

Now, another way to look at it has as the subject of the work the process of science. What previously followed my mentioning this was a series of questions regarding whether or not a process is a thing, and whether or not processes have beings that can reveal themselves through the work of art. I didn’t come to a conclusion then, and I don’t think I can now. I wonder, though, if a process doesn’t contain the beings of that with which it begins, passes through, and concludes. But that doesn’t seem right either, since if it is a process, it is always between two things; it never rests. The process of science keeps people suspended between knowledge and hypothesis. So really the process is nothing. Can nothing be the subject of the work of art? What is the being of nothing, and how would one go about allowing it to unconceal itself? Perhaps truth is nothing, and, if that is the case and this article does have the process as its subject rather than the creatures involved in the process, then one might consider it a piece of literature or a work of art after all. The jury’s still out, though.

Thank you all for your patience. I will now return us all to our regularly scheduled REM cycles.

Grrrrr...

2005-09-29T02:05:00.000-07:00

I just lost my post. It's two o'clock. Now I have to rewrite it. I suspect it will be significantly shorter than it was. Apologies.

Longing for Reflection: the Dialectical Form of the Commodity and the Victorian Narrative in Miller’s “Longing for Sleeve Buttons”

2005-09-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

In “Longing for Sleeve Buttons” Andrew Miller presents an argument which relies on a relationship between the form of the commodity, which he asserts is a dialectical form, and the form of narrative in Victorian novels. Miller examines the implications of such a form with respect to Thackeray’s own life and the larger economical structure of Victorian society. In the end, Miller concludes that, like the commodity which inspires both desire and disenchantment where the disenchantment wins out instead of coming together in some sort of synthesis, the narrative form of the Victorian novel is eventually overtaken by frustration and cannot reach any synthesis of its own. To better understand Miller’s argument, one might choose to examine the various contexts in which he places his dialectical relationships.

The dialectical relationship, or its exposition, rather, can largely be attributed to Hegel for whom the world was fundamentally rational. He lays out the dialectic as a thesis and antithesis coming together in a synthesis, which is not so much a separate product of the thesis and antithesis as it is something which contains both of those components and so rises above them. The synthesis becomes a new thesis to which an antithesis is generated, and the dialectic goes on ad infinitum. Miller takes this relationship as the form behind the narrative of Thackeray’s novels: “Thackeray’s texts derive from that desire [of servants for their masters’ stuff] a propulsive narrative energy” (16). Desire, of course, is the thesis. Opposing desire is death: “Thackeray represents this opposed motion as death: no object can be owned which does not suggest to his imagination sometimes distantly but more often quite immediately, the ruin and death of those who own it” (18). One might question death being the antithesis of desire, since one ordinarily considers death the antithesis of life, and, in order to accept this system, one must be willing to equate life with desire. The questionable equivalence of life and desire is perhaps a topic for another time, and also perhaps the reason Miller later downgrades the dialectic from the dynamic of desire and death to “the dynamic of desire and disenchantment” (22). One more readily accepts disenchantment, a much broader category to which death might conceivably belong, as the antithesis of desire than one accepts that desire is the equivalent of life.

Miller has it that desire, that is, the desire for commodities, is driven sexually, and so variations of the words “libido” and “phallus” arise here and there, a bit awkwardly sometimes, in accordance with that. He develops this idea through two biographical events which are meant to expose the sense of alienation that Thackeray allegedly possessed, and through the larger economical system in the Victorian era. “Thackeray’s separation from his mother and the loss of his patrimony … [become] the media for his exploration of certain kinds of content...and of certain kinds of form—in particular the form taken by the commodity,” Miller explains after a psychoanalytic discussion of Thackeray’s life (30) and before he summons Marx to explain Victorian economy as a function of money instead of goods. Commodities are not acquired based on need in such an economy, but are acquired simply because they are emblematic of financial progress and status (33). Because particular commodities are not themselves important and only the status for which they stand is, they “gain [a] lonely meaning for characters…through an allegorical process in which they seem to prefigure a distant realm of satisfaction” (35). Miller now calls on Walter Benjamin to explain that allegorical significance is the only significance that objects have, since they are “’quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of [their] own’” (qtd in Miller 36). Benjamin claims “‘all of the things which are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which…raises them onto a higher plane, and which can, indeed, sanctify them’” (qtd in Miller 36). Miller asserts that, since Vanity Fair is devoid of religion, the significance of objects is of libidinal content. That is, their significance derives from being desired in a sexual manner. “Significance and desire are produced by the dialectical relationship between objects and the ‘higher plane’ of libidinal fulfillment that the objects anticipate,” Miller explains, further complicating the dialectical relationship that he originally set out (36).

Let us examine now the dialectical system or hierarchy Miller has here established. At the bottom is the relationship between objects and the plane of libidinal fulfillment the objects anticipate. Let us, at least for the moment, grant that what the objects anticipate is indeed a plane of libidinal fulfillment, and let us also grant that such a plane is indeed elevated. This part of the system, then, looks like this: thesis—there are objects; antithesis—plane of libidinal fulfillment. How, one might ask, can libidinal fulfillment be the antithesis of objects, when it seems that no objects is the more accurate antithesis? Well, according to Miller, “objects…anticipate for Thackeray the death of their owners…primarily understood as simply the loss of things owned, an ontological bankruptcy: it is usually observed as an estate sale” (36). This implication of objects reconstructs the dialectic with the thesis as “objects” (understood as “loss of objects”) and the antithesis as “libidinal fulfillment.” Now, in order for this relationship to hold up appropriately, “objects,” which is understood as the loss of objects, must be understood further understood as “libidinal unfulfillment,” or, sexual frustration, as it will be called.

Now recall that, for Miller, this dialectic produces desire which is opposed by disenchantment, which drives the narrative. Desire does seem to be the logical synthesis of struggle between libidinal fulfillment and sexual frustration, whether or not losing one’s possessions is actually sexually frustrating, and disenchantment is the logical antisynthesis. What, then, is the neosynthesis? According to Miller, “Vanity Fair achieves no dialectical whole, makes no unified understanding of the world; desire and frustration remain unsynthesized. And finally, as we will see, the latter overwhelms the former” (38). One might now wonder where the narrative has got to, since originally Miller had claimed that desire produced the “propulsive narrative energy” of Thackeray’s texts (16). Are not desire and disenchantment synthesized in the narrative?

Desire and disenchantment only serve to propel the narrative, which has nothing to say about anything outside of that higher plane of libidinal fulfillment. While a character desires, the narrator remains interested; once the fantasy has decayed and the character becomes disenchanted, the narrator must move on to another’s fantasy (42). Thus the opposition between desire and disenchantment drives and is reflected by the narration, particularly at the end of Vanity Fair where it appears that disenchantment wins out, the narrator bitterly cuts off the story, and the puppets are shut up in the box (49). The dialectic appears to be unsatisfactorily concluded.

Setting aside that which appears problematic in the construction of Miller’s dialectical relationships and that which seems inherently problematic in approaching anything at all in terms of dialectical relationships, one might consider that the narrator of Vanity Fair gives away the synthesis, disguising it as a victory for disenchantment. Recall that the synthesis of the dialectic contains both the thesis and the antithesis. One might consider reading the narrator’s bitterness itself as the synthesis of desire and disenchantment. Bitterness, after all, certainly includes the element of disenchantment. However, for disenchantment to achieve a complete victory, as Miller suggests it has done in Vanity Fair, one would have to be resigned to that disenchantment; the abruptness and force that characterize the narrator’s final outburst suggest no such acceptance. If one refuses to accept an event, then one still wishes—desires— that circumstances be otherwise. Inherent in bitterness, then, is both desire and disenchantment, which would, by containing the thesis and antithesis and thus becoming a higher third, seem to meet the requirements of a synthesis. This casts doubt on Miller’s reading of the narrative in Vanity Fair as a reflection of the incomplete dialectic of the commodity, since the dialectic now appears complete, having culminated in the narrator’s bitterness.

Allegorizing Tendencies and Some Pop Culture

2005-09-08T01:21:00.000-07:00

I thought Horton’s “Were They Having Fun Yet” took a long time to just to say that we allegorize everything and that optical gadgetry is partially responsible for that; I felt a little let down. But a question: if our allegorizing everything is a sanctioning construction, then who is the new god and who are its priests? Priests and priest-like people of the Christian god previously sanctioned spectacles, according to Horton, followed by scientists on behalf of the science-god. Surely science isn’t responsible for allegory, right? Who is the new god? Anyway...

On finishing Horton’s essay, I find myself thinking of two things: Maverick from Top Gun and Pink Floyd’s “On the Turning Away.” Horton, after a long discourse on optical gadgetry and its effects on Victorian culture, makes her way around to mentioning that the Dickens character Davy sees himself as a spectator in his own life (12). She then proceeds to explain Metz’s sanctioning construction theory to support her assertion that “no spectators are entirely comfortable…seeing themselves as spectators” (13), and so they need the sanctioning construction. Sanctioning constructions have allowed spectators to become comfortable in that role (15ish), and now we all behave as spectators in life rather than participants (15), using allegory to sanction the spectacles that make us uncomfortable (16). This seems generally to be Horton’s argument in the last several pages.

It sounds to me like Horton wants to pin all this on optical gadgetry, because the spectacles that create an uncomfortable environment for spectators would not be possible without the continuous evolution of optical gadgets. Tonight, however, I’m thinking about pop culture, and when I read Horton on people being spectators in their lives I immediately hear Maverick’s navigator at the end of Top Gun shouting, “Come on, man, engage!” at Maverick as he backs out of the dogfight. Now, Maverick doesn’t just step outside his own experience to watch it through the window where he’s having lunch on patio on the other side, he steps out and grabs lunch on the other end of town, leaving his experience to fend for itself for a while. Horton says of Dickens readers that “his pictures were being read by an audience identifying themselves increasingly—in part because of their experience with optical gadgetry—as spectators, ever more comfortably experiencing themselves as simultaneously “inside” and “outside” sympathy” (15). Now, Maverick’s being outside of the events occurring around him is not the effect of optical gadgetry, but the effect of something like post-traumatic stress disorder. However, the effect is the same. The excitment and danger around him have no effect on Maverick. The excitement and danger might push him out the door of his experience, but once he’s gone, he’s unaffected. He cannot sympathize with those around him until he steps back in. similarly, the Dickens readers are less likely to sympathize with his images because they can willingly step in and out of experiences, and have become increasingly comfortable being outside of them.

Suppose Maverick did not have the willpower to engage. Suppose he just stayed in his own world, outside of experience. An actual person with that problem, we’d lock away. But this, it seems, is what Horton is arguing is the case with people today. She uses the Victorians’ increasing comfort with spectacle to justify contemporary people converting in their own minds actual horrors (the slave’s abuse, for instance) to mere spectacles, such as those that would have been artificially composed in Victorian times, as a mechanism for coping with the horror. Horton:

If the medieval viewer’s sanctioning construction, making comfortable spectatorship possible, was the edification and moral instruction provided by the phantasmagorical spectacle of God or the Devil, and a Victorian viewer’s was the edification of science and technology, the unwary modern viewer can now be comforted by the late-twentieth century sanctioning construction: the allegorizing tendency…that enables us as spectators to avoid, as far as possible, both discomfort and guilt…(16)

The allegorizing tendency, as Horton calls it, seems further to remove the spectator from experience than any of the previous sanctioning constructions, since it not only warps, misrepresents, or generally distorts the meaning of the spectacle, but it denies completely the experience of the image as what it is. That is, the allegorizing tendency allows people to bypass the actual images presented to them in a spectacle to “’see’ in the slaveowner’s cutlass a phallic symbol” (16), for instance. The same technique allows people right now to carry on with their lives while, for another instance, New Orleans is up to its ears in dead bodies and sewage water. Allegorizing in these instances is nothing but a way of putting distance between oneself and what one finds unpleasant. It allows one to be outside sympathy.

Pink Floyd (forgive me for writing seriously about it) recognizes this tendency and preaches against it in “On the Turning Away.” They sing in the last stanza:

No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away from the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare

Here they have labeled people as spectators watching others suffer. The speaker in this song is preaching to those who make their way outside sympathy. “It’s not enough just to stand and stare.” The Dickens readers just stand and stare. He, according to Horton, “wanted to make poverty, the confusing city, and its masses of homeless wanderers visible to Victorian readers” (15). Why did he do this? Presumably to initiate change, to inspire some sympathy in these increasingly distant people. It’s not enough to be a spectator, the speaker in “On the Turning Away” says. Why? Because turning away will not change anything. Why must Maverick engage? Because if he doesn’t, nothing will change—people will continue to be killed. What will happen if people continue to rely on this sanctioning contruction, allegorizing everything they see? Absolutely nothing. And I think that's Horton's point.

Yeehaw.

Windows and Mirrors

2005-09-05T16:45:00.000-07:00

I. Definitions (All from American Heritage College Dictionary)

Glass, n.: 1. Any of a large class of materials that are typically made by silicates fusing with boric oxide, aluminum oxide, or phosphorus pentoxide, are generally hard, brittle, and transparent or translucent, and are considered to be supercooled liquids that form noncrystalline solids.

Looking-Glass, n.: see mirror

Mirror, n.: 1. A surface capable of reflecting sufficient undiffused light to form an image of an object placed in front of it

Transparent, adj.: 1. Capable of transmitting light so that objects or images can be seen as if there were no intervening material. 2. Permeable to electromagnetic radiation of specified frequencies, as to visible light waves.

II. Glass Windows

The purpose of a glass window is to allow a person to see through but be unaffected by what is on the other side. The characteristic of glass being hard provides a barrier between the people inside and that which is outside—rain, insects, heat (to an extent), wind (also to an extent)—and between those outside and that which is inside. The window is framed, making a picture of the scene outside, and so putting it on display, “objectifying” it, since the glass barrier prevents it from affecting the person on the other side. Whatever is being watched in this way loses its power to affect the spectator, who believes, in a way, that the other side of the window is merely a possession, like a picture, framed and set in wall. Because, to the spectator, the outside world is just a possession, it seems less real, in a sense, than that which lies on the spectator’s side of the glass, and therefore seems like a separate world entirely. The same thing happens to people outside looking in: the people and things inside seem to be part of some kind of picture or show rather than part of their reality. These things might be true of any transparent barrier.

The characteristic of glass which separates it from other transparent barriers is its brittleness. While glass might seem to isolate one world from another, its brittleness makes that isolation unstable. The spectator might take comfort in his own “real” world because glass lies between that and that which he begins to perceive as the surreal world outside his own. However, because of the frailty of the glass window, that comfort is tentative. A strong enough force can snap that barrier, causing both worlds to collide. A rock hurled through a window or a particularly strong gust of wind exposes the comfortable world inside to the surreality of the world outside. Suddenly, that which was under the control of the spectator seems to gain a will of its own; the world inside becomes part of the show outside, and the spectator must become a player.

III. The Looking Glass

The line between the spectator and the show blurs in the looking glass. A looking glass, or glass mirror, is little more than a piece of glass, polished to reflect enough light to form an image of the object placed in front of it (American Heritage Dictionary) and then set against a solid background to prevent any further light from passing through. The looking glass is frequently framed, creating the same sort of mood as the framed window. However, because the looking glass is reflective, when one looks into it, the show or spectacle is not a wholly separate scene, but the image of oneself. In the mirror, the subject and the object are the same; when one looks into the mirror, one sees oneself framed like a picture, objectified in the same manner as the scene through the window, and yet not entirely under control of the one looking in, except insofar as the one looking in is in control of himself or herself. The strange world seen through the glass takes on hints of familiarity.

And yet because the glass window is somewhat reflective and yet one can see through it, one might wonder what could be seen if it were possible to penetrate the reflection in the looking glass, as Alice wonders in Through the Looking Glass, and reach the other side. Regarding the Crystal Palace, Thomas Richards notices that “unless you got very close[…], you could not seen in […] It seemed to say that you had to enter it in order to be initiated into its mysteries” (23). The other side of the looking glass, like the glass walls of the Crystal Palace, invites questions about the secret ways of those on the other side. On the other side of the Crystal Palace walls is a multitude of mere objects (which infiltrate and begin to rule the lives of the Victorians), just as on the other side of a window one finds a multitude of apparently mere objects (some of which have the capacity to infiltrate the life of the spectator). Perhaps since the spectator is exposed to new ways on the other side of the glass window, which is transparent, even more interesting and new ways exist on the other side of the totally reflective looking glass.

However, when Alice passes through the looking glass, she finds the state of affairs in that world just an exaggerated version of those created simply by looking into the looking glass: the world on the other side is similar to her usual world, and yet strangely different; she is still both the subject and the object in that world, although that duality seems to have more physical manifestations on the new side than it did looking in from the other. She has not become solely the object of forces exerted by things, as happens with people who visit the Crystal Palace and to those who break a window, even though she is subjected to various unfamiliar rules and behaviors throughout her adventure. Alice still has the power to make it all stop in the end, and she does so by shaking the queen into a kitten.

Although that world seems significantly different from her usual world, what with the flowers talking and chess pieces running around as people, Alice never actually passes through the reflection into something else; she merely enters the reflection. The world Alice enters is the same as the one which she supposedly left, as it is still governed by the mirror, which creates both a subject and an object of Alice. Even in her usual world, Alice is subject, for instance, to the rules of her society (thus making her an object), and yet has the power to exert her will over other things. Her preoccupation with pretending is a manifestation of that will, and a successful attempt to control her environment. Although people through the looking glass have different customs, Alice still exists as both a subject and an object.

Crary Workbook

2005-09-01T00:49:00.000-07:00

Forgive me while I try to slog through the Crary bit, and please also pardon the weird characters that appear here and there. I can't seem to get rid of them, but they're supposed to be apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, and quotation marks:

Jonathan Crary, in the first chapter of Techniques of the Observer, would like repeatedly to insist that the break in classical models of vision, which took place early sometime in the Nineteenth Century, directly corresponds to a shift in or reorganization of social and economic structures, and that this shift constitutes a problem with the nature of the observer, not just a change in the manner in which the observed is represented. Vision is located in the observer, and the observer may be considered, he says, Â“as a distribution of events.Â” The observer is a product of the shift, Crary seems to say, and is no longer an entity unto its own. The development of new technologies that allow people to see beyond the range/wavelengths of normal unaided human eyesight are, in Crary's words, "relocating vision to a plane severed from a human observer" (1).

Consider this: a human observer, Marcellus, sees a tree; Marcellus, his vision, and the tree exist on the same plane. He turns his eyes, unaided, towards the tree and perceives it. Marcellus needs nothing else to boost, enhance, or modify his vision in order to perceive the tree. Now, suppose Marcellus puts on a virtual reality helmet and sees a tree. Crary wants to say that Marcellus, in the helmet, is merely exposed to the product of some moving electrons; he does not actually perceive anything because that which can be seen here has been moved to a different plane. In order for Marcellus's vision to work, he needs something from outside of himself to come in. Essentially, he must outsource his vision to a machine, which perceives the electrons, translates it into a picture of a tree, and presents it to Marcellus.

What does this mean? Well, it seems to suggest that people as individual beings, have little to do anymore with vision. The observer, one might go so far as to say, must set aside its humanity to operate on a non-human plane of vision. Crary asserts, "The notion of a modernist visual revolution depends on the presence of a subject with a detached viewpoint..." (4). That is, that which is observed is not subject to the observer's thoughts, opinions, ideas; to detach one's viewpoint, one must detach oneself, what one thinks, believes, feels--what one is--from that which is observed or perceived. In this way, that which defines humanity--the subjective element that makes people people--is removed from the plane altogether. In the modern world, Crary seems to imply, vision has almost achieved a life of its own in that it necessarily requires something non-human since its subjects exist on a plane that is inaccessible to humans. This seems to be further supported by Crary's asserting that people are merely products of events and also by Nietzsche, whom Crary quotes as saying: "...men unlearn spontaneous action, they merely react to stimuli from the outside" (qtd. in Crary 23). But this seems to suggest that that which was essentially human--action, as Nietzsche would have it at least in the Genealogy of Morals--has been suppressed by the removal of vision from the plane of human senses. Outsourcing vision has also apparently outsourced action, which seems to imply that what it is to be human is dependent on vision. Furthermore, it means, since the shift in social norms has induced the outsourcing of vision, that the shift is responsible somehow for the downfall of humanity (to be melodramatic about it), or at least for the dehumanization of humans. One might perhaps say that this dehumanization of humans accounts for the melancholy tone or mood in, for instance, many of WordsworthÂ’s poems.

Wordsworth seems almost to attack scientific progress and thought. Looking, as a follow-up on last week's entry, at two of his poems, "Star Gazers" and "The Tables Turned," in context with Crary's book, one might better understand his vitriol as a response to the consequences of his changing social environment, instead of viewing his bitterness as merely an unprovoked and unwarranted lesson on the effects of scientific meddling in the affairs of nature. One might be more sympathetic to the figure who has watched his world change in a way that has removed an element of humanity from the people around him, than one would be to the figure who merely misses the daffodils by the sea and wants to see them again. The speakers in "Star Gazers" and "The Tables Turned," who have noticed the effect the change has had on people around them, perhaps fear that as society progresses they, too, will be stripped of something essential to their humanity; perhaps they have already lost that something and feel that they must save the ones who have not yet been stripped of their vision. One can see the effect that such outsourced or dissociated vision has on the people who experience it:

Whatever be the cause, tis sure that they who pry and pore
Seem to meet with little gain, seem less happy than before:
One after One they take their turns, nor have I one espied
That doth not slackly go away, as if dissatisfied. ("Star
Gazers" 29-32)

The speaker has watched each person lose something who, via the telescope, experiences this dissociated sort of vision, even if that something is just a little happiness. Before they looked they were all impatient and eager, they all left dissatisfied. The speaker in "The Tables Turned" seems to be responding to a similar observation when he commands:

Enough of science and of art;

Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Here, the speaker explicitly demands action: he demands that his audience put aside science, which has created an environment in which people can lose themselves, and also that they come and watch. Since watching (vision) is directly connected to action, as Crary has implied in his book, and, as Nietzsche says, action is the essence of humanity, the speaker seems to be bidding his audience to reclaim their humanity by acting and watching. Why? He is trying to mitigate his own fear that he cannot reclaim his lost humanity.

The Effect of Humans on Humans

2005-08-25T00:04:00.000-07:00

In “Star Gazers” and “The Tables Turned” human intervention with nature directly affects the humans themselves. In “Star Gazers,” the speaker comes upon a crowd surrounding a telescope, a man-made device designed, as the speaker says at the end, to allow people to “pry and pore” (29). Each person approaches the telescope eagerly: “Calm though impatient is the Crowd; each is ready with the fee, / And envies him that’s looking—what an insight must it be!” (“Star Gazers” 7-8). They all anticipate some great personal gain from looking through the telescope. After they look, having placed a human creation between themselves and nature, they find themselves disturbed:

Whatever be the cause, ‘tis sure that they who pry and pore
Seem to meet with little gain, seem less happy than before:
One after One they take their turns, nor have I one espied
That doth not slackly go away, as if dissatisfied. (“Star Gazers” 29-32)

The intervention of human tools has irreversibly altered the people in the crowd; those who were just moments ago eager now “slackly go away.” What they have seen through the telescope has changed them, and they cannot un-see it. Whether they saw something other than what they had wanted, or whether what they saw simply “took away the magic,” as it were, they were all let down. Had they listened to the speaker in “The Tables Turned,” who says, “Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things; / —We murder to dissect” (26-28), they could perhaps have been spared the loss. “Let Nature be your teacher,” that same speaker advises (“The Tables Turned” 16). This poem suggests that the source of the crowd’s dissatisfaction in “Star Gazers” is the looking itself, not necessarily the results of that looking. For while one looks actively for one thing, instead of allowing oneself to be shown, one necessarily exclude other things.

When one’s goal is to gain “power and majesty” (“Star Gazers” 24), as seems to be the case with the crowd, one inevitably loses something with every search, even if the search produces results. Again, “Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things”—the results of the search only reveal a part or a version of things, not what things actually are, and so the search mis-shapes those things, forces them to appear as something else. The implementation of a tool—a telescope in “Star Gazers”—further limits that vision by allowing people to create an ever-narrower perspective. “Come forth,” the speaker in “The Tables Turned” encourages, “and bring with you a heart / That watches and receives” (31-32). Similarly in “Tintern Abbey,” the speaker notes, “…with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (47-49). In order to gain knowledge or peace or whatever it is that the crowd in “Star Gazers” finds lacking, one must allow things to take shape as they will, to present themselves instead of being forced to fit a pattern or a criterion created by a human. It is the search and the subsequent distortion of things that creates in people, at least in these few Wordsworth poems, a sense of desolation.

Wordsworth Poems

2005-08-24T21:26:00.000-07:00

I have to say that I’m pretty intimidated by the thought of having my thinking abilities judged based on a five hundred word essay about a rather large number of poems that I’ve had only a night to think about. Maybe that’s in itself a reflection on my thinking abilities. Interesting.